Into the Silence
Cont. (Page 2 of 2)
As Pawson and I tour Novy Dvur, and explore the 100 acres surrounding it, he constantly snaps pictures with a digital camera, a form of note-taking. I trail behind him, taking my own notes on a legal pad. We do this for two days—days during which we live as shadow monks, welcome everywhere at monastery. This access, I quickly learn, is without precedent, because Trappist monks are cloistered. Our world is not theirs; their world is not ours. But, for forty-eight extraordinary hours, the architect, who is needed by the brothers for the completion of their home, and I, as a friend of his, are allowed total freedom to go where ever we choose, and to participate in all of the rituals of monastic life. (Trappists traditionally open their monasteries to outsiders only on the day of its consecration. Thereafter is closed forever to the world.)
One of the first stops we make on our first day, is at the office of Dom Samuel, the abbot. The meeting is somewhat rushed. It is late afternoon, before the start of Compline, the second-to-last office—or service--of the day. Dom Samuel, serious and French, does quite a bit of talking. In general, the monks speak only when outside the cloister (for example, in the fields), and then only when they have something complex to get across. There is a lot of nodding and pointing. (Trappists, in days past, used their own form of sign language, now largely vanished.) The abbot is the exception. He may speak inside, as he must council the monks—and, in this case, instruct the architect. His office is soundproof, with a double door, like a psychiatrist’s.
Just before the bell tolls for Compline, Dom Samuel pulls a copy of a book from his shelf. “This is best description of the Trappist life—in English,” he says, handing me Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiographical account of a worldly young man’s quest for inner peace which led him to what Merton calls “the four walls of a new freedom,” a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.
In a few minutes, at Compline, I am going to encounter the 21 brothers of Novy Dvur, and I will begin to comprehend what might be called the essential contradiction of monastic life. Though the brothers are all but locked in their abbey, they are, from their perspective, free men. Pawson and I, the interlopers from secular society, are the prisoners. This notion is well explored in The Seven Storey Mountain. It is, I realize, after having read it, why Dom Samuel gives it to me.
Spoken words, perhaps, can not serve to brief a stranger on the world I am about to see close up.
*****
Compline is a short office, held largely in the dark. Pawson and I enter the church after the monks have taken their places in the choir. We use the monks’ door from the cloister, which would normally be a forbidden entrance. On the rare occasions when outsiders (priests, visiting family members, lay people) attend church here, they enter through a door at the rear of the nave (off center, Pawson points out, because a monasteries and monastic churches should not have a grand public doorways. “No visitors are expected,” he says.) We take our seats on a bench against the back wall. There are no others joining us in the narthex of the church. The monks, who stand 30 feet away, bow deeply from the waist. Their heads are covered by pointed white cowls. They appear in silhouette, because the church is illuminated only by a twilight-blue glow, coming from large light boxes, three on either side of church, shaded by hanging screens. These huge screens, the way they hang, Pawson says, remind him of hemline of the monks’ robes. A candle is lit. Chanting begins. There is more deep bowing, and reading of what bible passage in Czech.
Pawson and I are the only ones in the pews. Perhaps this makes it particularly moving. The exquisite singing is only for the monks. For each other. That outsiders here to observe them at one of seven offices they perform seven days a week, is irrelevant. At 7:50, they end with the solemn chant of Salve Regina. Then the monks walk in procession from the church to their dormitory, where Dom Samuel blesses each of them, and, at 8:00, begins what the order refers to as “the great silence of the night.”
Because we will have to get up at 3:15 AM for Matins, the night office, Pawson and I also go to bed. I am put up in part of Dom Patrick’s chambers, on the second floor of the baroque manor house. My room has a restored mural on the ceiling, and white-washed walls. It reminds me of a $2,000-a-night hotel suite I stayed in on the Amalfi coast—except the bed here is an infirmary cot with wheels.
Before turning off the lights, I open The Seven Storey Mountain, and read, on page 361, the passage in which Merton describes his first days in the monastery: “The thing that was most impressive was [the monks’] absolute simplicity,” he wrote. “They were concerned with one thing only: doing the things they had to do, singing what they had to sing, bowing and kneeling and so on when it was prescribed, and doing it as well as they could without fuss or flourish or display. It was all utterly simple and unvarnished and straightforward, and I don’t think I had seen anything, anywhere, so unaffected, so unself-conscious….There was not a shadow of anything that could be called parade or display. They did not seem to realize that they were being watched—and, as a matter of fact, I can say from experience that they did not know it at all. In choir, it is very rare that you even realize that there are any, or many, or few seculars in the house….The presence of other people becomes something that has absolutely no significance to the monk when he is at prayer. It is something null, neutral, like the air, like the atmosphere, like the weather.”
*****
My alarm on my Blackberry wakes me at 3:15 AM. From my window, in the abbot’s chambers, I look down on the monks, already in their cowls, moving behind the sheets of glass in the dim light of the cloister. There is a full moon and a midnight blue sky. Pawson knocks on my door. Together, we stand in the window and watch the scene of the monks heading in procession to the church. “Looks very Dan Brown,” he says.
Now, we hurry down a pine staircase—done in Pawson’s minimalist style—and rush along the left side of cloister. When we enter the church, it is nearly black with one candle lit on the alter. A bell is ringing. The scene is chiaroscuro; the monks barely visible in their choir. At a moment of silence, someone blows his nose. The sound, due to carefully planned acoustics, is deafening. Matins is long. The church is very cold, and it is meant to be. “They told me exactly what temperature each part of the building had to be in an exquisite, detailed brief—the best I ever got from a client,” Pawson says. According to the brief, under the section labeled HEATING: “The church, cloister and dormitory must be heated to 14 degrees [Celsius]; the scriptorium, the offices, the infirmary and the classrooms to 19 degrees; everything else to 18 degrees.” Other highlights from the brief--under the section labeled PARLOR OF THE COWLS: “One takes a cowl before each office and takes it off afterwards in this room. It is a solemn place, and must have a crucifix and a Virgin. A sort of hook, with a number, (changeable) for each Brother. There must be an interior bell, operated by hand…this bell must be well heard in the far reaches of the monastery, especially in the dormitory.” According to the brief, under the section labeled DORMITORY: “A cubicle for each brother, closed by a curtain. No individual lighting for each cubicle. …In each cubicle: a bed, a few coat pegs, two open lockers for a little clothing. Reserve one area as a special ‘snorers sections’ for about a quarter of the total number of cubicles. These cubicles to be enclosed by glass.”
After Matins, the monks kneel in the choir for silent prayer, and then, before the start of a daily lecture in the chapter house by Dom Samuel (6:15 AM), they have time for rest or reading. There will be three more offices--Mass, Terce and Sext--before lunch, at 12:15 PM, when the brothers walk in procession to the refectory for day’s main meal, which is prepared by the monks themselves.
In a certain way, I find the ritual of eating with the monks even more moving than church. Everyone can identify with someone else having a meal. We are outside of the ethereal setting of church. I was at table with the monks. I was not in the choir, and could never imagine being in the choir.
The monks eat with their backs to the refectory walls, four monks to a table, side-by-side, all four monks to one side of the table only. A table for the abbot and two other superiors is at the front of the room. There is a small cabinet behind each monk for his bowl, tableware, and some personal objects such as vitamins or pictures of Christ or saints.
All meals are in silence. The lunch (heavy on cabbage and potatoes; very little meat, and no dessert, unless you put honey in your yogurt) is served by two brothers. A third monk pours good Pilsner beer into my earthenware bowl, which doubles as a water bowl. (After each meal, the monks wash their eating utensils in the dregs of their beer, using their thumb and forefingers to scrub them clean, before rolling them up neatly in their napkin to put away in the cubby.) I watch the young man to my left, who dines with his cowl on. He is about 24-years-old, thin, rosy-cheeked and handsome. Before he begins to eat, he takes a picture of St. Benedict from the cubby hole, kisses it, and places it on the table to the right of his plate. He unfurls his napkin, and tucks in into the front of his robe. Then, he spreads the napkin over the table in front of him, placing his bowls and utensils on top of it. I notice all of the monks do this because it make for an easy clean up (their crumbs are theirs to clean up), and protects their robes.
The monk to my left eats two mountains of mashed potatoes, and scrapes his plate carefully with his fork. I begin to tear up as I watch him. In fact, I feel my heart break for him. I can not help but wonder who he is and what his story is and how he got the calling to become a monk. I will not be able to ask him. At the same time, I realize my reaction is the wrong one. I am certain he looks at me, with my Blackberry and my legal pad, wearing my overcoat inside to fight the cold, and feels sorrow for me--someone who does not know what is to love God, and, to quote Merton, “know the innocence and liberty of soul that come to those who have thrown away all preoccupation with themselves and their own ideas and judgments and opinions and desires, and are perfectly content to take things as they come to them from the hands of God and through the wishes and commands of their superiors.”
*****
After lunch, Pawson and I go back to the church to look at it in daylight. The cloister, at this hour is vibrant, the glass panels having caught the sun, casting a runway of light down the center of the passage. While the cloister is a “container for light,” says Pawson, “light in the church is experienced as a part of the fabric of the space”--inseparable from the planes of the limewahsed plaster walls and the granite floor. The light boxes and shields which define the church’s walls, create dramatic compositions of indirect light—white or blue, according to the angle of the sun and the clearness of the sky. At certain times of day, shafts of light fall across the nave and sanctuary (the alter), while mobile patterns of sunshine play on the curved wall of the apse.
It is the apse that Pawson is most proud of in the church. He created a plunging staircase at the rear of the sanctuary, which leads to a door at the base of the apse. This door leads to the cemetery, and is covered over by planks of pine, which are only to be removed when it is time to carry a monk outside on his bier. They pine planks have, so far, never been removed.
The rules of St. Benedict, the founder of western monastic life, lay down the precise order of the rituals of death as well as those of life.
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