Going on retreat…
I’m not really going any place, I’m just taking a few days of retreat. I will continue to post, but it will most likely be light. I will not answer the phone or respond to emails for a few days…although, it’s not as if that is so strange for me.
I’m reading “An Infinity of Little Hours” once again, which neatly dispels any romantic notions about Carthusian life for readers not familiar with the life. The book aptly depicts life in a Charterhouse, with all of it’s peculiarities, and peculiar people.
“Monasteries attract many of the same type of men the Marines do,” as Fr. Thomas at New Melleray once told me. In a Trappist monastery, there are a fair share of eccentric personalities to rub shoulders with. Just so in a Charterhouse, albeit eremetic in nature, and much more “silent” as it were, the idiosyncratic eccentricities emerge nonetheless.
The difference in monastic life, as opposed to regular secular life, seems to me to be that personal facades are more or less dismantled, and there seems to be an equal playing field, devoid of worldly notions of status and vain pretensions. As the life progresses, the man is exposed.
Perhaps it is akin to Spencer Tunick’s ‘installations’ of thousands of people gathered together naked. A man who participated told me in an email that there was a remarkable naturalness amongst the participants, a sense of community and equality with one another, that disappeared when everyone was once again clothed. Back in their clothes, the partcipants assumed their prior roles in society, and social convention once again seemed to dictate their behavior.
Of course, the rule, the enclosure, the horarium, as well as the habit, all come together to equalize a monk on some level, which helps to constitute a conventional life - if you will. Yet in a certain sense the man is stripped of every worldly pretense when clothed in the habit - hence on some level, he is naked, as it were. Thus, the authentic person eventually comes to light, with all of his eccentricities. Things we often do not readily notice in secular society, unless one happens to be extremely eccentric or neurotic.
Anyway, Carthusians are weird - to the secular eye that is - and often to one another. But they are much more weird to secular culture. It’s a tough life. It’s certainly a supernatural life - which may be why the eccentricities of individuals seem all the more strange. Indeed, sometimes the life breaks people - they break down and have to leave.
It’s odd isn’t it? One guy breaks, has to leave, and yet life continues on, as if that person never existed. People can just disappear.
“This desire for God is what compels men to enter the Charterhouse. Monks, like mountaineers, feel a compelling attraction for the extremes of human experience. They want to push the limits in their search for God.” - An Infinity of Little Hours
So I’m making a little retreat…maybe I’ll disappear.