home and court in summertime retreat.
The man went there with other burning souls
Who built a school and torched the place with prayer.
How strange that one man’s blazing should ignite
A thousand matches striking pagan lands
With silent flint and scores of kindled monks
Who stoked this ember red in Caesar’s house.
The thought of you praying in Nero’s estate still captivates me, reverend father. A singular grace is available to those privileged to tread where saints have walked, built, and prayed, and I am particularly fascinated by the fact that you appropriated the relics of a pagan emperor for your own use. Were you aware that the previous tenant of those walled rooms was a martyr-maker of your fellow Christians? Did you ponder the beautiful irony of occupying his territory for the noble purposes of Christian prayer, long after he had gone violently to his grave? But you soon outgrew that space as well, due to the number of monks entrusting themselves to your care, and you migrated south to Monte Cassino, the hill that would henceforth be the heart of Benedictine life.
Your presence in Nero’s house, dear abbot, is a timely image for me to ponder as I survey the society around me today. An eerily similar sort of occupation is occurring in many parts of the previously Christian world. I have heard in recent years of glorious churches, built with the intent of magnifying the Lord and housing the presence of the bread of life, being sold on account of the shrinking number of parishioners engaged in the liturgy and Christian way of life. On your own European continent, the citizens of old Christian strongholds such as England, Germany, and the Netherlands have yielded, rapidly and shockingly, to a worldview that has absolutely no interest in matters supernatural. On the contrary, opportunists have seized upon the idea of purchasing empty churches and transforming them into everyday enterprises: from pizzerias with the main oven strategically placed on the very spot where the altar once stood, to discotheques, cafés, and bookstores, many ornate cathedrals have been reformatted to promote brazenly secular ends.
The fate of these churches linked up in my mind with your requisition of Nero’s ruins, and the contrast between them provided me with inspiration for the second part of my poem:
A nameless girl is whirled and tossed across
The space which once held pews for kneeling prayer.
As smoke and lusty steam like incense rise
Above the mass to stain the Gothic stone,
Orgasmic bombs are dropped from organ pipes
While stain’d glass sleeps amid the darkened din.
A pizzeria down the street now stands
Where schoolboys used to serve at morning Mass;
Upon the spot where bread was once made flesh
A forno sits and heats the pizza pies;
These feed the hungry mouths who like the charm
Of feasting in the empty space of faith.
The baker raises dough above his head
And winks at Jesus, statued in the niche.
The renovation of sacred places is simply a symptom of a sobering fact: the Christian faith, and the vestiges reminding us of a past rooted in it, are disappearing at an alarming rate. That Jesus himself foresaw such a situation is hardly consoling; his question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8), does not receive an answer.
What is a Christian to do in the face of such spite against the Spirit and anything associated with it, whether unconscious or aggressive? Just as you escaped the worldly snares of Rome and found refuge in a secluded life of prayer, St. Benedict, many Christians today are advocating a similar retreat from a post-Christian society, whether in Europe or the United States. Your life is hailed as an example to be imitated, but now by entire families and parishes. Just as your monastic revolution saved Western civilization during a time of crisis, so today many are crying out for a “Benedict option” of withdrawal from the world. The phrase has received a variety of interpretations. Some claim that small but creative pockets of Christians must break away from public society and move underground, in order to prevent the flame of the Christian faith from being extinguished by rampaging secular winds.
The comparison, dear abbot, is both apt and tempting. The very expression used to describe the retreat of the first desert hermits from the world, fuga mundi (flight from the world), springs naturally to mind in this context. Some people might even assert that monks such as myself have already abandoned the world to its own devices by taking refuge inside a monastery, safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous indifference and even vicious ideologies. Enflamed by Maccabean-style zeal for our traditions, we would be idealists bent on saving our precious pearls from the trampling of secular swine!
Yet I do not regard my own vocation in those terms, and I would urge caution on those who think that a mass exodus of Christians from public life is necessary to safeguard the faith for future generations. In appealing to your own withdrawal from the world as inspiration during this present crisis, many fail to understand that you did not intend to save Western civilization by living in a cave and forming monastic communities. You simply responded to an alluring call from God to dwell with yourself and by yourself in solitude, and in so doing you created a new form of life which became the bastion of Western civilization. I might call your withdrawal a happenstance event were it not clearly impressed by the fingerprints of providence. Rather than regard your move to the cave as a template for modern-day Christians, I would highlight how your way of life subtly traced out a solution to the pressing needs of your time. It is in this sense, I believe, that a philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, wrote of the urgency of a new St. Benedict for our day.6
My hunch, holy abbot, is that a widespread running for the hills is not a prudent move for most followers of Christ. It risks quieting the voice that people in the world, ignorant but still human and therefore open to the divine, desperately need to hear. While cold ignorance or open hostility can easily dismay even the most courageous of Christians, the words of the ancient “Letter to Diognetus” are resoundingly clear regarding the necessity of the Christian presence in the world: “What the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world . . . The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world.”7
Am I thereby condemning monastic life, or claiming that monks and nuns have abdicated their responsibility to be the animating principle of a society ignorant of God? I don’t believe so, and I think you would agree with me. In my view, abbot Benedict, monasteries have a definite and essential role to play in the life not only of the church, but also of those Christians living and praying in this post-Christian world.
In chapter 53 of your Rule, you instruct your monks to regard guests arriving at the monastery as Christ himself.8 Most translations state that all “hospitality” or “goodness” should be shown to visitors; the actual Latin word you employ, however, is humanitas. The humanitas we monks must display to our guests startles me in connection with the topic I have been writing about. I regard my monastery, and ideally all monasteries, as refreshing oases of culture, where a weary soul may be rejuvenated by the quiet spaces, liturgical
