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.