Summer
Books On
the open road, all sorts of monks search for God
A MONK IN THE
WORLD By Wayne Teasdale New World Library, 224 pages,
$22.95 |
REVIEWED By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
During my seven years in the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit
in Georgia it was not uncommon to find myself engaged in a conversation with
the other monks about just what constitutes a monk? I was intrigued
by the wide range of interpretations the monks embodied.
I felt at home with the more generous variations of their
interpretations. Some of the monks found something of themselves in a world
shared by many artists, writers and common folk. They sensed something monastic
shared well beyond the confines of a cloistered, Catholic and traditional
expression of monastic life. Others were deeply convinced that being a monk had
very definite parameters, boundaries so defining that the conversation quickly
reached a dead end. Enough said.
Wayne Teasdales A Monk in the World was a delight,
like an open road. The book came to me at just the right time in my life. In
fact, it was on the car seat next to me as I drove through the South after I
left Conyers, Ga., and moved here to Louisiana. I read it as I settled into a
new place.
I am more convinced than ever that the call to be a monk can be
heard and responded to anywhere and anytime. The essence of being a monk
is a search, not the external form of looking like a monk, Teasdale
writes. The search for God transcends the monastic state; its what
we should all be doing.
This book is Teasdales testament to his life as a monk. He
now lives in an apartment in Chicago. He is familiar with the more contemporary
themes of monasticism as these have found a fresh and much-needed application
to the world through the writings of Thomas Keating, Raimon Panikkar, Thomas
Merton, Ammachi, Bede Griffiths and others. What I find to be a singular joy in
A Monk in the World is how Teasdale brings the wisdom, compassion and
love usually associated with a life behind walls or high on a hill down to a
life lived in a busy city like Chicago.
Teasdale offers the reader a generous share of his own lifes
joys and struggles. The chapter on his suffering through a terrible time with
cancer I found particularly moving. It was a dark night of the soul for him but
a time in when he later knew that God was drawing him closer to the meaning of
life that is love. He also writes of the homeless he has come to know over the
years in Chicago and how these men and women have as well shown him something
of God.
A sense of the eternal is never far from Teasdales vision of
life. The more he has given himself to the monastic disciplines of
contemplation, a simple lifestyle and what I would call an obedience (or
listening) to the Spirit, the more the eternal has offered its presence through
the ordinary events and people of his life. The pages of the book brim and
shine with awareness.
There is an expansiveness to his vision. He devotes large portions
of the book to what he calls interspirituality. Teasdale is aware
of the increasingly pluralistic age in which we live and that this new
interreligious age makes demands on us all. While painfully cognizant of the
devastating events of Sept. 11 and similar terrorist attacks in much of the
world, he looks to all religious traditions as sources of renewal through which
the Spirit will lead people. It is obvious that he has appropriated to himself
a wealth from the religious traditions of humanity. God has been, for Teasdale,
an active and faithful conversationalist. He has heard God in a lot of places
and through a lot of people.
Early in the book he quotes Thomas Keating: Silence is
Gods language, and it is a very difficult language to learn.
Teasdale seems to favor this sense of divine silence and writes, The
Divine Reality itself is actually silence or stillness. Well, this is
something I have struggled with for a long time. There may be something to it,
but I tend to lean in the direction of in the Beginning was the
Word. God is some sort of language, a meta-type of communication. I am
grateful that Teasdale shares more than silence.
I am heartened that he calls us all through his words to better
grasp the nature of who we truly are but which can so easily be forgotten in
our fast-paced culture.
Universal mysticism belongs to us all, he writes.
We are now more firmly in the Interspiritual Age; its development is
irreversible. ... It will become more deeply imbedded in culture, society and
the future of civilization. This is the challenge of my life. I find it both
fascinating and exciting, but also at times a bit confusing, since there is so
much to process and integrate. ... I am committed to the interspiritual life
and I welcome it completely.
Little did I know the invitation and challenge that lay in the
pages next to me in my car on that long ride from an old life to a new one. Are
there all sorts of monks out here? There are. I am sure there are. Maybe I
never really left the monastery at all. Perhaps I have only just arrived.
Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives and writes in Covington,
La.
National Catholic Reporter, May 17,
2002
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