Farewell, beloved Snowmass

Snowmass

If I have not yet publicly commented on the apparently now-imminent closing of St. Benedict’s Monastery, it is not because I have no feelings on the matter. Quite the contrary, it’s because my heart is so flooded with feelings that I find myself really, for once, at loss for words. What can be said, except in the language of tears? Reticence prevails as well; having journeyed so closely with this community for more than thirty years now, much of what I understand is private in nature, growing out of an all-too human play of strengths, weaknesses, and personalities that cannot be reduced to public utterance without betrayal of compassion.

But how can it be—less than five years after the passing of abbots Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle—that the whole flourishing “Magic Monastery” should come so sweepingly to a halt, that this Camelot (or Mecca) of Christian contemplative renewal should simply give up the ghost? How can it have happened so quickly? How can it be that these splendid retreat center buildings are soon to become empty and dark, so lately having been lit by the spiritual light of so many awakening souls? How can this betrayal have taken place— and so noiselessly, without a whisper, like an oak tree falling alone in a forest?

It is not the time for finger pointing. As far as I can see (perhaps naively) there have been no obvious betrayals beyond merely the inevitable weaknesses of people suddenly placed in boots too large to fill, inheriting a Prospero’s castle they never quite comfortably inhabited. As I have watched this unfolding from a long ways off, I have seen no dramatic change of course, simply the inevitable playing out of the Law of Seven, where taking step after step in what seems be a continuous line one comes round in frighteningly short order to find oneself facing in completely the opposite direction.

I know that I was actually seeing the seeds of this demise thirty years ago, in some of those early “Law of Seven” steps never really addressed because at the time it all seemed so glowing and kindly and psychologically contemporary and pastoral. But there it was, beneath the respective velvet gloves of Joseph and Thomas: some mysterious iron fist of call-it-whatever (entrenchment, passivity, spiritual timidity?) that gradually dampened and finally extinguished altogether the fires of many a burning new vocation. During these thirty years I can count at least a dozen good vocations lost—not simply wannabes and dabblers, but serious committed men who lasted all the way through junior profession and in some cases even solemn profession before throwing in the towel. My young friend Erik Keeney was the last in a series of these passionately ardent vocations that chafed and finally choked on the prevailing monastic placebo, “You keep the rule and the rule will keep you.”

Each story is individual, of course, and Joseph—consummate pastor that he was—cut each man the slack as a monk to explore his heart, to grow not simply as a monk but as a human being. But steadily, step by step (law of seven-wise) the drift widened between St Benedict’s original vision of transformed personhood (and the infrastructure that implemented it) and the more psychologically attuned and personally individuated ambience of this new “gentler and kinder” version of monasticism in play at the Magic Monastery.

I can take it no further than that. I only know that those dozen lost vocations, if they were still in community, would have delivered a new generation to carry the work forward. And those that failed mostly failed in the same place, foundering on the rocks of a well-entrenched power structure that had grown quite comfortable with the new state of affairs and would simply brook no challenges.

I know as well that no one was really willing to seriously take up the invitation that seemed to me was being consistently proffered by the Holy Spirit— and this is not simply at St. Benedict’s Monastery, but across the entire Trappist Order. As Christian monasticism enters its third millennium, it is clear that two tendencies are powerfully in the air. First, people are no longer so interested in lifelong commitments. What they are seeking is instead a period of very intense formation—say, five years—before heading back into the world to take up their secular and often married vocations. Second, they are interested, universally, in a more balanced representation of the genders: men and women working more closely together, each gender contributing the subtle energy it authentically bears to offer spiritual procreativity at a much more vitalized “kesdjan” level. These tendencies are knocking at the doors of virtually every Trappist monastic community I know and have been openly discussed in general chapter meetings. But the doors remain firmly shut, with a lifelong celibate vocation remaining not only the gold standard, but the only option. I queried Joseph frequently about this issue, but he remained absolutely unbudgeable.

And so, irony of ironies, for thirty years there came to St Benedict’s Monastery a whole “feeder line” of potential new vocations—people from Contemplative Outreach retreats, men and women (like myself) intentionally moving into the area to “hang close” with the monastery and walk alongside the brothers as nearly as possible. Beautiful, integrated men; strong, spiritual-warrior women, asking only to be taken seriously, to be formed, to collectively break with tradition and respond directly to what seemed so clearly a prompting of the Holy Spirit in our own times for a world starving for this living water But no, nada. Not up for discussion. “It’s my enneagram six nature,” Joseph would protest gently as I floated blue-sky possibilities that scared the pants off him. Meanwhile, somewhere deep within the Trappist Order it had already been decided (with all attendant rhetorical emotional pathos) that the most faithful living out of the Cistercian vocation would be to die willingly. To simply let go of the facilities, the identity, a thousand-year-old lived transformative lineage….as a sign of what? Christ-like kenosis???? How is this not a fatal loss of nerve and vision masquerading as an illumined state?

Sometimes kenosis does indeed mean to die willingly. But sometimes it calls us to live bravely in uncharted seas, and it is this sort of prophetic kenosis that I have found so gravely lacking in the present unraveling, and would in fact identify as its most important component.

So yes, for me, sadly, Camelot…a beautiful, passing era in which, under the twin helixes of Joseph and Thomas, a shimmering prism of love, transformation, kindliness, arose and glowed for a few blessed decades, but without establishing a deeper rootedness in the new soil of our own times. And so, in the end, the old soil will reclaim and bury its own. I have noticed throughout this transitional time that wider coalition building does not seem to have been encouraged. The monks of Snowmass moved swiftly and quietly to turn control back over to a “monastic commissary” appointed by the Trappist Order, and the Trappist Order is now managing the affairs of Snowmass and seems intent on making decisions without the input of a wider community of contemplative practitioners and friends of the monastery who could, in a heartbeat, put together a coalition that would keep at least the retreat house (and the Thomas Keating legacy) alive and growing. But no partnering has been requested, and in fact seems to have been gently rebuffed. I am unclear where things stand in the legal process to maintain the conservation easements that Joseph placed on the property as one of the capstone achievements of his thirty-year tenure as abbot. But I swear I can hear behind the closing doors of St. Benedict’s the “ka-chink, ka-chink” of larger institutional cash registers (surely not in the Vatican!!!) quickly computing that the value of a decommissioned monastery sitting on a real estate goldmine far outweighs the value of a small living incubator of the spirit—not only those six remaining monks trying to be faithful to their vocation to the end, but the hundreds or even thousands more of us who would no doubt be standing alongside those monks right now if along the way, somehow, somehow, that third force could have entered. Sometimes, alas, when spirit dies, a monastery is more valuable dead than alive.

So I weep, but it is not with anger so much as with terrible sadness that this is the way the world is, even in Camelots, even in what look to be spiritually inviolable sanctuaries. Unless that “first conscious shock” is navigated, the do-re-me of this world blindly repeats itself, undeterred by spiritual rhetoric. And so I simply remember, as I stand on Rafe’s grave (for the moment still nestled serenely toward the end of the row that also holds Thomas, Joseph, Bernie O’Shea, and some of the other valiant spiritual warriors) his hard but liberating teaching that all these sacred “watering holes” are connecting by an underground river. The watering holes themselves all eventually dry up. You have to jump into river and keep on swimming.