Benedict, Gregory, and we

View from a Hermitage

There is one word omitted from a sentence in “Learning to pray while cloistered: Benedict, Gregory, and me” by M. Craig Barnes (Christian Century, June 3, 2020, 13). The sentence reads: “We join 1,500 years of cloistered monks who brought the world’s laments before God in search of a vision of salvation.” The missing word is “have” - have brought. 

Don’t count us out! A few years ago the Camaldolese community celebrated our first thousand years since the founding of the original monastery in Italy. (The American first foundation was in 1958.)

Benedict, Gregory, and we, contemporary contemplatives, carry on the monastic contemplative prayers begun over 1500 years ago with Anthony in the Desert, Benedict in Nursia, … in Tours, Enda in Ireland, Columba in Scotland, and so many more. 

What is different today is that the cloistered monks are joined by hundreds of friends, associates, and Oblates, in a rhythm of daily prayer and practice, including witness, hospitality, and contemplation. 

Before reading the article I had been in a monthly call with fellow Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates. After the call I received an invitation to the annual gathering of oblates, this year to talk about “new wineskins” - how we were part of a new monastic adventure outside the walls, or as Suzanne Guthrie has put it, “at the edge of enclosure.” 

Some years ago, before that thousand-year mark, my wife and I were on retreat at Incarnation Monastery in the Berkeley hills. After a week or so, she remarked that the psalms were chanted particularly slowly. Fr Thomas replied, “Yes, someone else mentioned that - in the 13th Century.”  Each. word. carried. weight. “By the end of the retreat,” my wife observed, “I could hear the prayer running constantly in my heart.”

Now, in the current situation, she and I are in a community of two: contemplative continuity helps us turn enforced isolation into elected solitude.

The Rev. John R. Leech, Oblate OSB Cam.

June 13th 2020.

William Temple

William Temple (15 October 1881 - 26 October 1944)

“Christian charity manifests itself in the temporal order as a supra-natural discernment of, and adhesion to, justice in relation to the equilibrium of power.”

—William Temple, writing in the Christian News-Letter of 29 December 1943, on ’What Christians Stand For in the Secular World’, quoted on page 536 of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, His Life and Letters, by F. A. Iremonger, (Oxford, 1948) in the chapter by Dorothy Emmet, “The Philosopher”.


Dry as dust, you would think, a biography read now of a mid-twentieth century Anglican divine and prelate. William Temple began as a junior teacher of philosophy at an Oxford college - well actually as a son of a bishop who became Archbishop of Canterbury - then sought holy orders, after seeking understanding of his own faith, became deacon, priest, bishop, and archbishop in due order. He was known in his time as a preeminent ecclesiastical thinker, able to lead his church, the established church in England, in war-time, and into new visions of ecumenical community and the pursuit of justice in relation to society. His belief was that the Christian held an ultimate allegiance not to any party or nation but to God. So that turns out to be very relevant today. We cannot abandon hope for a Christian activity in pursuit of justice, certainly not now, and we are compelled to seek a means for serving the ultimate end of our ultimate allegiance through the present catastrophe. The catastrophe I mean is that of the continued abandonment of right relations between peoples, and that means justice, exhibited by too many of our secular politicians. “If you want peace, work for justice”—Paul VI.