On Friday at Half Price Books I came across Wisdom from the Monastery, edited by Peter Sewald. I bought this book a year ago and lost it.Yesterday, after meditation, I gave a dharma talk on the five training precepts in Buddhist practice. Giving a talk about some aspect of Buddhism I review for myself again what initially inspired me about practice. I add to what I used to know what I have since known, updating outdated memories with newer ones.
That moment on April 17, 1986 waiting in line to query Ruth about some trivial aspect of the guided meditation she just gave us remains iconic to my search and discovery in spiritual life. Those nine days there in Barre themselves have become a template on which I depend all these years since then. Even as the memory has become vestigial and dim, periodically I feel the light again that touched not my eyes' retina but something deeper inside me, something that came out like a newborn baby that minute, that week, in Barre.
Towards the end of that retreat in 1986 I approached the retreat manager about ordaining. I ended up backing away and returning to civilian (meaning, civilized, ordinary life). I think that was the right decision then. I needed more experience in the "real" world and needed to work in that world to prepare the resources I would need that now I can access to live the life I dreamt then of living but couldn't do back then.
After Barre and working with Jean Alice at Carmel I spent more and more time at St. Meinrad in southern Indiana. For years I entertained the fantasy of joining the Catholic order although I didn't subscribe anymore to the key beliefs of Christianity. What attracted me was the lifestyle and the atmosphere of the monastery community. Half an hour away, even as I approached what looked from a distance like a medieval European town on a hill, my spirit and mood changed. Away from work, away from home, away from the familiar things and people of my familiar life, staying at St. Meinrad gave me more of that taste I first had at Barre.
Now I long for those days again. I've gained weight in the last five years. I couldn't do my favorite yoga asanas that I used to do. They require a slimmer waist. I have not checked my cholesterol and sugar but suspect the former at least must be close to risky. (For years I thought I preferred to die a sudden death from cardiac arrest rather than a lingering one from cancer.) Physical health was always a major factor in my excursion into spiritual life. Now more than ever it is a major instigator.
Life at Barre was stripped-down simple. I had a cold, drafty room at the end of the hallway at the former Christian Brothers' school dormitory (Caskills, IMS called it). The bed was lumpy, the sheets thin and old. The food was all vegetarian which back then had scared me with the restriction in choice. Lunch was the main meal. For supper we had miso soup or tea. I had no access to the Internet, to TV or to movies although I did smuggle in a book on Hindu myths. Snow covered the empty fields around the center but walking at midday after lunch on that white landscape to a pond where one day I espied a snake sunning himself on a rock was my chief form of entertainment.
Not having the options I had in civilian life was a deprivation that I believe contributed hugely to the happiness I discovered there at IMS. It was the first time I knew happiness like that, soft, gentle, pervasive without being invasive.
Later that year I started working at CMHS and by the following year the stress caused me to develop ulcers. I took high doses of Cimetidine and bit by bit gave up a healthy diet, immersing myself with richer and richer, starchier and fatter foods. Two years ago Kevin helped me get off the antacid. Now I can fast again but don't.
Sewald's book is about fasting in the North German Christian monasteries as part of going into retreat. The "desert" experience has always attracted me. Back in Manila before I was able to find my way to the States, Lent was a powerful experience with the tropical heat accompanied by fasting. Back then I felt God truly died on Good Friday. That belief made the days leading up to Good Friday rock-hard and crystalline. The clarity was deeply affecting.
The conditions are right again for entering that desert. In the preface to Sewald's book, Bernhard Müller quoted the friend who first suggested he try a retreat at a monastery: "Fasting gives you renewed strength and confidence. Everything looks different. What was blurred and insoluble becomes transparent and clear. You feel optimistic again. Often it feels as if you only have to wish something for it to come to pass. You are filled with a feeling of happiness. You feel so light, so free. And this lightness is not just a product of your imagination. After you fast, you are truly lighter, both physically and mentally."
His four-year old asked him one day, "How can angels fly?" The child answered himself. "I know, it is because they are so light."
