Inside Mount Melleray (2014): ‘The World As You Know It is Passing Away’
'The point of the words is to go beyond words into a formless, imageless, wordless prayer. Prayer is a form of watching, waiting, listening, more than an act of saying, asking or singing.'
Lament for a Cenobium
Prologue, December 2024:
January 26th, 2025 will be a key staging-post in the plummeting of my country towards the godless rocks beneath the cliff it is currently tumbling over. That will be the day that Mount Melleray abbey in County Waterford, one of most famous monasteries in a country once most famous for monasteries, will close its doors for good, an event I’ve been anticipating since I visited there in 2014, at the invitation of the then abbot, Brother Augustine. Once there had been 150 monks in Mount Melleray; by 2014 there were 19 — mostly aged over eighty — and now, coming to the end, just seven remain.
In the early autumn of 2014, I found myself spending a week at Mount Melleray conducting the annual retreat of the monks — the first time in the history of the abbey for this role to be filled by a layperson. Though flabbergasted and intimidated, I had accepted the challenge.
The decision of the Cistercian order, a decade later, to close this and two other monasteries — Mellifont and Mount St Joseph — comes as part of a ‘consolidation effort ‘to ensure a future for Cistercian life in Ireland’. The remaining monks from all three monasteries will be united for the time being in Roscrea, County Tipperary.
This is a signal moment in nearly nine hundred years of Irish sacred history. The Cistercians first established in Ireland in 1142, initially at Mellifont Abbey through the efforts of St Malachy. Mount Melleray was founded on May 30th, 1832, at Scrahan, Cappoquin, by a colony of Irish and English monks expelled from the abbey of Melleray, France, after the French Revolution.
What follows is the complete version of an account of that 2014 experience, which was published in partial form at the time. I publish it now, in its entirety, as a mark of respect to the thousands of monks who have graced that ancient monastery — and the others — as part of a tradition that has been central to Irish life and history for nearly two centuries, and to the centuries of work, prayer and affection gifted to our nation by countless men possessed by a conviction that there might be more to life than humanity in general or its secular spokespersons had decided.
The Prayer of Stupidity
(2014, unpublished in this form)
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I can’t seem to get the rhythm right. Counting doesn’t quite do it. Leaving the timing to instinct might be better, but it’s a little risky to try that just yet. Maybe it’s the earliness of the hour, but even some of the monks seem to be having similar trouble. One or two of them always hit the second line of the Psalm response too early, or a little late, as if waiting for another voice to come in before committing.
‘Will the evil doers not understand?’ . . . Chuka-chucka-chiiii . . . ‘They eat up my people?’ The line comes in raggedly. It seems not to be a counting thing. I miss the beat by a millisecond, but luckily on the late side. Another song enters my head and takes up residence: ‘It’s four in the morning, and once more the dawning has woke up the wanting in me.’
You would think that after five or six decades singing the same liturgy, the monks would have it down to pacemaker precision. But some of them sound as inexpert as I do. It is like each of them is lost in his own rhythm, and joins with the others by way of an afterthought. ‘See how they tremble with fear’. . . Chuka-chucka-chiiii . . . ‘Without cause for fear’. I hit the line at the same instant as the abbot. Progress.
The Cistercians are an enclosed order of strict observance, which means that they observe the Rule of St. Benedict as laid down in a little red book, which includes rules concerning obedience, poverty, work, study, humility and silence. Sometimes called Trappists, they live together in community and have no outside pastoral responsibilities. The point of the contemplative life they lead is straightforward: prayer.
The monks pray together seven times a day, in addition to Mass at 7.45am. These seven ‘hours’ are: Vigils at 4am; Lauds at 7am; Terce at 9.30am; Sext at 12,15; None at 14.15; Vespers at 17.45; and Compline at 20.00. The hours are intended as a support for the monks in their personal prayer life, rather than as something that exist for their own sake.
The life of a monk revolves around prayer, but as a different and far deeper experience than our conventional word-centred concept of praying proposes. The point of the words is to go beyond words into a formless, imageless, wordless prayer. Prayer is a form of watching, waiting, listening, more than an act of saying, asking or singing. In prayer, the monk watches for God. It is an act of both service and love, which happens internally to each heart. It should involve no excesses of concentration or application, but be an effortless seeking for God’s grace and face. In a booklet on the subject, Personal Prayer, Columban Heaney OCSO, one of the monks of Mount Melleray, recalls that the theologian Ronald Knox called it ‘the prayer of stupidity’, because ‘there is nothing to show for it and it all seems a waste of time’.
The reason I’m here is to give two talks a day for the duration of the monks’ six-day annual retreat. Canon Law requires that all religious do a six or seven day retreat annually. Traditionally a retreat is given by a priest, very occasionally by a nun, but this is the first time the Mount Melleray retreat has been given by a layperson. My directions are vague: to talk about the drift of events on the outside and address ‘some aspect of Christian spirituality in the modern world’. They’re interested to hear from someone who lives as a Christian in a world that seems more and more hostile to Christianity.
The retreat is an opportunity for the monks to take stock and put their spiritual lives in order. For the week of the retreat, they reduce their work commitments to a minimum and devote themselves with renewed vigour to prayer and contemplation.
The abbot has informed me that the monks are a little cut off from the mainstream and to some extent cosseted from the challenges that ordinary Christians have to face in today’s society. This is true, but only half the truth. The other half is that the monks are also far more exposed to the world than at any time in the past — most of them have radio sets and laptops, and several seem to read a newspaper almost every day.
I have to fight the feeling that I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation. The idea that someone like me, who has lived a largely secular life, who has been at best a dilettante in matters concerning the deep practice of faith and religion, should presume to have anything to say to men who have devoted their lives to an absolute idea, staking everything they are, possess and might acquire or become, strikes me as inappropriate and absurd. And yet, I have been invited. Clearly, the abbot at least believed I had something to say to them. Moreover, I tell myself, I am here not so much to address religious questions as to talk about what is happening in this connection out there in the world.
Over the past few years, having written two books on related subjects, Lapsed Agnostic (2007) and Beyond Consolation (2010), I have received many invitations to speak at parish gatherings, and sometimes even church services like novenas, about both my personal journey and the broader cultural context in which religious faith occurs. I have developed a palette of themes and concepts which I explore and elaborate, starting with my own experience of recovering from alcohol addiction, and then going into the very nature of faith, the changing climate of public reason and other cultural obstacles, to the personal attempt to open up a relationship with transcendent reality, and the ways in which the human person can adapt to these changing circumstances and find ways around them.
In recent years, the Cistercians in Ireland have taken a battering and all of the order’s five abbeys are in a very precarious state with decreasing numbers, an aged profile and few vocations. At one time Mount Melleray had 150 monks; today there are 19. Two-thirds of them are over 80, and just four under what the world knows as retirement age. The youngest man, who has yet to take his final vows, is in his mid-40s. The monks are about evenly divided between brothers and priests, though no hierarchy is observed between the ordained and the others. A few men, some young, some not so young, have expressed an interest in joining, but the novitiate at Mount Melleray is currently closed pending the outcome of deliberations concerning the future of the order.
Usually, the priest who gives the retreat sees the monks for confessions in the afternoons. Since this will not be a feature of the retreat this year, some of the monks indicate that they would like to meet me for informal chats, which, having agreed, I have come to feel are also of their nature governed by a secret seal of some kind. I’m not sure why, but it seems right. Several of the monks told me their life stories, over several hours, sometimes replete with deeply personal details, which must and shall remain classified to the highest degree.
At first I found myself a bit scared of the monks, both of their aura of holiness and perhaps a little due to what I have imputed to them as suspicion of my qualifications to speak to them at all. This turns out to be — broadly, at least — groundless. On Monday, one of them intercepts me in the refectory to assure me, as though reading my mind, that they are all ‘ordinary people’. I thank him but remain unconvinced. There is something forbidding about their sense of isolationism. They do not observe a total silence but their exchanges are for the most part perfunctory and business-related. They do not engage much in casual greetings, rarely going beyond a nod. There’s a paradoxical sense of individualism in the community, each man cast into himself.
As the week progresses, many of the impressions of the monks I have formed from a distance turn out to be wholly misplaced. A handful, while attending all my talks, otherwise continue to keep their distance. But over the week, about two-thirds of them come down to see me, and in all cases I am overwhelmed by their grace and gentleness. I find them, without exception, extraordinarily warm men, utterly welcoming and appreciative of the things I’ve been saying to them. They are, in a certain sense, ‘ordinary’ — in that, a very long time ago, they emerged from ‘ordinary’ families and backgrounds. Some of them were farmers, others had shops or other businesses. Several of them told me of coming on a day trip to Mount Melleray out of curiosity, and returning later on having divested themselves of all their earthly belongings. Most of them have been here longer than I’ve been alive. One brother responded to my inquiry by informing me that he was a late vocation and had been here ‘only’ 45 years. Some of the men have had full lives before they came in — including love affairs which they left behind. Some still have occasional contact with the women they left on the outside.
One monk told me he fell in love at 17, and was still in love with the woman, who was now 70, having married another man who subsequently died. After her husband’s death, several decades ago, he had belatedly asked her to marry him. She declined, saying that she did not think it would be the right thing for him. Secretly, he realised, he was relieved. They remained in touch. He believes there is a part of each of us that is solitary, that cannot be opened to anyone but the Lord.
Another monk I spoke to has been here since the early 1960s, when he was in his early 20s. He came from a big family and his mother sent him to live with an aunt who was unmarried. He had seven brothers and two sisters. The last of his brothers had been buried just the day before, though the two sisters, both a great deal younger than him, are still alive. One of them is a nun. His aunt had a shop, which he inherited, along with a fair bit of money. He also had a car, which was unusual at that time. Then, one day, he came by the monastery and was so impressed by the monks he met that he resolved on the spot to join. He gave everything away to his siblings, and came in. He has been here ever since. What struck him, he remembered, was the authenticity of the men he met. They were searching for God and took the world lightly. He cannot say the same for the way things are now, he says. He doesn’t think he would stay if he were to come in today. Everyone has wirelesses now, and is thinking of hurling matches, instead of saying their prayers. They might be saying an office and half of them are rushing to get to listen to a match. He doesn’t like that. He went to Rome in the 1970s to study theology and fell in love with a nun. He met her every day and she was beautiful, he says. It wasn’t a matter of lust. He never had much of a sex drive and has never had sex in his life. She was prepared to leave her order and marry him, he says, but he decided not to. It was very painful. He remains in love with her, and they are still in contact. Some years afterwards, the sister of the nun he was in love with became pregnant and was about to have an abortion. He wrote to her and told her why she should not have an abortion. The daughter that was born as a result of her decision to take his advice now also corresponds with him.
One of the younger monks, a Tipperary man, told me he has been here four and a half years and is one year away from his final vows. As a young boy, he felt the call to become a priest. He was encouraged by the local parish priest, who in his teens urged him to avoid socialising on the grounds that he might meet a girl and lose his vocation. He spent his teens in his room reading the Bible and praying. In due course he entered a seminary and did a number of years there, but was weak academically and had a hearing problem. He was shocked to see some of the things that went on in the seminary. There were gay men who had other seminarians visit them in their rooms. Others went out at night and met women. He didn’t know what to make of this. His superiors identified him among those who were perceived as unsuited, which he found devastating. He left the seminary and stayed at home for a while, but after a few years got an invitation from some relatives to come to the US, which he decided to accept. When he was there he had the time of his life, going out, girlfriends and whatnot, and stayed nearly ten years. But he continued to feel the call and in 2003 he decided to come home and try the monastic life. He went into Mount Melleray and spent several months there. He found it difficult — the routine, the monotony and above all the lack of freedom, being unable to even go and have a cup of coffee. He couldn’t stand it and decided to leave. The abbot and others tried to dissuade him, but he stuck to his guns. His brother came to get him and he asked him what he would like to do. ‘Take me to a hotel,’ he said. He wanted to live in a place where there were no bells, where he could do as he pleased. His brother took him to a hotel in Nenagh and he stayed there for a week. He went back home and started to have a normal life, going out and meeting women. He got a job in a factory in Galway and was making good money. Still the sense of a calling nagged at him. ‘The life I was living didn’t seem to be me. It made no sense to me.’ He took advice from a nun who told him to go back in, but this time to tell no one. He prayed about it and became more certain. One day he prayed to God saying that he was 99 per cent certain but asking for a sign to make him 100 per cent. As he prayed, a text came through on his mobile phone from one of the monks at Mount Melleray, whom he hadn’t seen for six years. It told him that one of the monks whom he had known had died. The text also said that, if ever he had a change of heart, the door would be open. He decided to go back in and has been here since then.
When most of the monks who are here now first entered Mount Melleray, the monastery was in effect hermetically sealed. Now it is relatively open to the winds of the culture, which I suggest to a few of the monks must put increased pressure on their prayer life. There is a range of opinion, with some monks thinking this a necessary bracing circumstance, and others regretting the effects it may be having on resolve and morale. They are acutely aware of their decreasing numbers and ageing profile, and what all this may come to mean for them. They sense, too, that the world’s view of their way of life is not what it once was. I ask some of them if they remain here out of fear, and they appear genuinely perplexed by the question. One brother drily reminds me that it might seem tempting to run away from the world to a monastery, but that such a ‘vocation’ would be unlikely to last 60 or 70 years. But they are not in the business of justifying themselves, and anyway have no language to explain why they exist, or at least no words that will penetrate the secular shell of the new Ireland. They can pray and meditate, but they are not given to self-analysis.
It became clear to me as the days of the week crept by — it’s obvious, really — that life in this place might be a different thing than we are conventionally led to believe. At first, the ways of the monks appeared strange, almost comical. But then something happened — the logic of the world began to dissolve in me, and what the monks did, how they passed their days, seemed more and more sensible . . . and then essential. I ceased to be an objective outsider, here to do a job for a few days, becoming instead an observer of something fundamental, primal, vital, something that related profoundly to myself, to the way I am really, to the questions I’d been grappling with in my own life. Here was to be found a witness to something that had to be located within myself before I could begin to consider it in the world of men and women.
But I sense from most of them a degree of confusion about the great changes going down on the outside, and in particular a great hurt about the happenings within their Church, for which they, above anyone, must be regarded as blameless. Some believe that the time may be coming when they must engage in more pastoral work on the outside. Some of the monks are on antidepressants and under the care of a doctor who visits regularly. While I was in the monastery, I spoke to a male nurse who takes care of the monks and talks to them a fair bit. He agrees they are isolated in themselves. Close friendships are not encouraged — never have been. Most of the monks die in their 80s, rarely any younger, occasionally making it into their 90s. Nobody I spoke had ever heard of a monk killing himself. But despondency, it seems, can strike at any time, and I sense it in the atmosphere of the place almost from the time I arrive. There is a sense of a community that has become increasingly aware that the external world has changed, that its view of reality is no longer shared by most of those on the outside, and that this has caused a buildup of anxiety in some of the monks. I detect in some of their questions a desire for reassurance. ‘I don’t know if what we have been living here is the true Christian life’, one monk said to me. I asked him what he meant but he lapsed into silence.
On the Wednesday, as though pointedly, one of the readings at Mass is from St Paul to the Corinthians:
Brothers, our time is growing short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none, and those who mourn should live as though they had nothing to mourn for; those who are enjoying life should live as though there was nothing to laugh about; those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own; and those who have to deal with the world should not become engrossed in it. I say this because the world as we know it is passing away.
The monks have guests to stay all year round, except for the week of the retreat. Perhaps up to a dozen guests will come for a few days at a time to contemplate, pray and, if they wish, take part in the communal prayer rituals of the monks. In the guest dining room, there is a ‘silent table’ at which a guest can eat without speaking to the other guests. The monks make themselves available to meet and speak to the guests on request.
On Sundays, local people come here for Mass or Benediction, or to visit the graves of relatives in the graveyard, or just to walk about or have a cup of tea in the Cloisters Teashop. On Sunday afternoons, the church outside has a steady flow of visitors who come to walk around, to visit graves in the cemetery, to pray for their hopes and the intentions of themselves and their families. On the Sunday I was there, a balmy day in early September — the day before the retreat began — there was a steady flow all day long. I met one elderly woman who, stopping to talk without invitation or prompting from me, told me she had come to pray for release from various ailments she suffered from. She's had cancer and is now clear. Without her faith she doubted if she could have managed to overcome her illness. Then she went on to tell me about her family and her difficulties with them. Suddenly, again without provocation, she told me her son was gay. She had only recently found out. She sought to reconcile herself to the discovery, her principal preoccupation being that her son be happy in his life. ‘I don't know what happened. I thought first it was that we mollycoddled him after his dad died. But now I think it must be genetic. I wish it wasn't happening. I want him to be happy. I don't care so long as he's happy.’ She gestured to several younger women standing near a car in the car park. They were her daughters and she had had to persuade them to come here. Her children have no faith, she said, and she has no words to tell them why it has meant so much to her.
The monks appear to only recently have become aware that the world outside has begun to be quite radically changed — as opposed to the merely osmotic change of the earlier years of their confinement. They sense, too, that the world’s view of their way of life cannot be as it was. I find them at a loss when I try to talk them into reflection on their place in the world as it is now. They have no language to explain themselves, or at least none they feel confident about using to me. It is as if their world is the main world and they wish they could have remained unaware of the ‘smaller’ world outside. Yet, they appear to be drawn to that external world, as though no longer convinced by their own past certainties. I asked one of the monks if he felt a pull from the world that he had to resist. He agreed that he did so. ‘There is an element of “What am I doing here?” And you have to be able to answer that question.’ From the beginning he had realised that the life the monks live in Mount Melleray is the life God wants for them. This monk is aware that they seem increasingly comical to the world, but he believes they were engaged in something the world — the country — needed to know and think about. He is especially interested in the question of freedom, which he says has a particular relevance here. The whole tradition of the order is steeped in a rule of obedience, and yet there must remain an element of choice, of freedom. He would like me to explore this further. He thinks the other monks feel somewhat beleaguered in the present climate, especially as there is nothing ‘practical’ they can do. They can pray and meditate, but they cannot intervene to defend the Church.
Although the novitiate was not working at the time I was there, I spoke to a man who came into the monastery every day and described himself as a prospective monk. He had spent a time as a novice in the monastery before, but had decided to leave. Now, having put his external affairs in some kind of order, he wanted to return and try again.
He asked me to direct him by making any observations that occurred to me concerning himself and his contemplating joining the monastery. I said that the only things that struck me so far related to myself — although they might also relate to him. I said that a part of me was attracted to this life, but another part of me would be appalled by it. He agreed that there was a romance about the life, but this he said would not enable someone to stay more than six months. He agreed also that there is a danger that men might in the past have seen this life as a refuge, but he feels that acting on these fears would result in a weak vocation and not last long. You could only arrive at a willingness to give your life in this way by accepting that you are created by God, one with God and destined to return to God.
There are some aspects of the life which disquiet him: the lack of a manifest joyfulness, although he insists that the monks possess an interior joy that you have to watch for. He had often remarked, though, that the monks didn’t appear to make the most use out of what was available to them. The weather in recent days had been beautiful, but most of the monks preferred to stay indoors. He had puzzled on this before, the pasty faces of them, even after a long period of sunshine.
He agreed with my observation about the apparent isolationism of some of the monks. He told me a story about a monk falling on the ice and splitting his skull. He and one other monk ran to his aid — the rest remained eating their dinners. It wasn’t so much a selfishness, he said, as an avoidance of any involvement that was not useful. Once the injured monk was seen to be looked after, the other monks continued as normal.
We talked about the fears that hit you out there in the world which might cause you to run here for refuge — the increasing power of the State, the menace of the new totalitarianisms running riot in public, the responsibility to work in a society which reserves the right to plunder your resources to sustain institutions that appear to offer little but menace and stress. I said that if these men weren’t here they'd be in old people's homes. Here the men have a wonderful life by comparison with laypeople of their age in the modern Ireland we've given ourselves.
This man also told me a great deal about his life, which he described as sinful. ‘But remember’, he added, ‘the early church was a broken church. The apostles were broken people. Jesus was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, disbelieved by Thomas. And yet it grew out of this brokenness to become what it became. I would see the same possibilities in a place like Mount Melleray. You need to have a peculiar kind of outlook and physicality to remain here. But if you can, it can become the happiest of lives.’
Delivering ten half-hour talks is much harder than giving five hour-long talks. I have lots of ideas about things I need to say to them, but I need to suss them out as I go along so as to be sure about what to tell them and what not to. I don’t want to deliver hard or dark messages without any balm of comfort. In the first couple of days, I feel an intense sadness for the monks and the lives they have spent here and the way the world has turned its back on them and made no great secret of its condescension. From a distance, I sense no outward joy from any of them, but this impression dissipates when I begin to know some of them better. Up closer, it is possible to see an interior joy through the windows of their eyes. They are innocent men, in a way frozen in a moment that still exists only here. All week I am visited by great surges of sorrow.
The monks eat their breakfasts and suppers at times to please themselves, but have one communal meal, which they call dinner, which happens every day at 12.30pm. They have beautiful hot soup and main courses like shepherd’s pie and fish and, on Sundays, a roast. For dessert they might have stewed apple and custard, or ice cream, or semolina pudding. They eat in silence, in the huge refectory, built for ten times their number, sitting about six feet apart along the tables that extend the length of the room. On Sundays they have music while they eat — something not too solemn, like Schubert. The silence they observe is not total, and appears to be quite voluntary. The monks don’t actually feel impelled to converse. If the music hadn’t been playing at lunch, one of them told me after dinner on Sunday afternoon, none of them would have wanted to talk. Even on Christmas Day, he said, they prefer silence. They have no desire for chit-chat. Sometimes they have longer or deeper conversations — if two of them have to make a journey together, for example — but usually they don’t.
On weekdays there is no music at dinnertime. The monks eat their dinners and listen to Brother Seamus reading to them for the 20 minutes or so it takes to finish their meal. At the moment, they are in the middle of This is Charlie Bird, the life story of the intrepid RTÉ reporter [who died on March 11th 2024, RIP]. On Monday, Seamus reads for us about Charlie’s time covering the second Gulf war of 2003 and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004. For the rest of the week, we hear about Charlie’s valiant exposure of the evil-doers in National Irish Bank. I have been honoured with a place at the top table, in the abbot’s chair. I’m not sure if this is a standard courtesy for the retreat preacher, or if it is because the former abbot, Father Augustine, has retired since inviting me, leaving the chair temporarily vacant. Brother Boniface is the acting abbot and sits on my immediate left, six feet away. The prior, Father Donal, sits on my right. Each of us has a bell in front of us, but Brother Boniface is the only one who gets to use it. When the monks have all finished eating, Brother Boniface rings to signal the end of the reading. He has a finely-tuned sense of the cliffhanging moment, and waits until the optimum moment to ring his bell. ‘It was an act of theft’, Brother Seamus intones. ‘The bank was stealing from its customers’. With surgical precision, Brother Boniface rings the bell. Find out in tomorrow’s startling episode. The monks stand, Brother Seamus recites a prayer, and everyone disperses.
Thursday, the penultimate day of the retreat, is the day I nominate to get up at 4am for Vigils. There’s no compulsion on me to do so, but I think I should show my face one morning anyway. I’ve done Compline every evening, and am becoming familiar with the singing style, but things seem just that little more ragged in the morning. There is something slightly more bracing about the 4am experience: the church empty but for about a dozen monks (the very old ones are excused the early session if they choose) and the inescapable sense of night over everything. I look around the faces of the monks and count roughly how many mornings like this they will each have put in — up to 25,000 in more than a couple of instances. For a moment I feel myself staggered by the enormity of this commitment, and the wager with life and reality that it represents. I again think of Ronald Knox’s observation, in Father Columban Heaney’s booklet, on the ‘prayer of stupidity’: ‘Spending time in this kind of prayer appears to be so stupid. There is nothing to show for it, and it all seems to be a sheer waste of time’.
At Mass, later in the morning, Father Denis Luke leads a prayer for the progress of the meeting of the General Chapter of the Cistercians, which begins today in Assisi. The purpose is to consider the future of the order worldwide, in the light of declining vocations. This uncertainty is affecting them badly: where will they go, what will happen, et cetera. There are five monasteries in Ireland and the discussion occurring is about amalgamating two or more of these. The decision will be made by the General Chapter. It may be that several of the Irish monasteries will be amalgamated into this one. I ask Brother Boniface what is likely to happen. God, he says, will decide that, but his own preference would be for things to stay as they are. The idea of amalgamation doesn’t make sense, because then they’d just end up with more old men in one place. Far better to have several places bearing witness in different locations. ‘To continue until we all die off’.
When you are very young, you think old people must feel inside as old as they appear on the outside. But as you move towards agedness yourself, you realise that this is entirely wrong. People remain young on the inside, no matter how old they appear. The idea of ‘old’ people is therefore a misapprehension of our culture, which sees the split instant of a human lifetime as something elongated, divided into decades and years, persistently defined by a number. But there are no ‘old people’. Everyone is young. The only clue you have about this is your own journey as a subjective intelligence looking out. You wait for a change to descend, some radical shift of thinking which will fit with your balding head or wrinkling face. But it doesn’t come: you get giddier and more childish. I had this insight very strongly at Mount Melleray, when I realised that all these people, like myself, were teenagers in their heads.
These men, I find myself thinking, are at the opposite point of human possibility to everything we take for granted as being true and real. They bear witness to the strangeness of being, reminding us of this without any hint of moralism or rancour. They seem to say: ‘Look how strange the world really is! Don’t become too distracted by anything, for then you will miss this strangeness!’ Doggedly they stand in silence, in contemplation, impassively, as the world beckons them, mocks them, stares at them in puzzlement. They smile, or look away in shyness. But they remain. They know why they are here. But do we know why they are here? Do we know why we ourselves are here?
More than once, I found myself wondering how it would feel, to be here on, say, my 12,367th morning. Having come from the world outside, it seems unconscionable: in all truthfulness, I cannot conceive of a degree of certitude that would enable me to do it. Even from the little I have learned about the lives of these men, I understand but vaguely what their lives have come to mean to them. I know I am imposing my own ideas on a reality I can but look into as though into a passing train. And what they have staked is way too much of a wager for me to contemplate.
Don’t get me wrong: there are aspects of the monkish life that recommend themselves to me: the predictability and weightlessness in particular. But I am old enough to know that this is just a part of my psyche crying out for things no longer accessible in the great outdoors. I see through myself and know that I want these things in addition to the life I now have, which is not quite the deal the monk is required to sign up to.
In my closing talk, I suggest that they need to find a way of processing the stuff coming in from outside, lest it bottle up and fester in their private hearts. I tell them I believe they had a vital role to play in Ireland’s future, for two reasons: First, because of the interventions they make in reality at the level of the fourth dimension, through their prayer life. Second, the witness they provide that the contemplative life is not a theory but something that works and can be accessed by anyone needing it. Without such a witness, it is by no means certain that such understandings will survive.
I look around the faces of these good men. I wonder if they ever have such thoughts. Does the trickle of newses from the outside ever bring them to a point of doubt in themselves? Does their inevitable knowledge of the incomprehension of the external world cause them to feel even a hint of the sense of absurdity I’m feeling now? Only the return of the Saviour, it strikes me, can adequately justify what these men have committed of themselves. And, what, I find myself briefly wondering, if He has no plans to come back? Where would that leave these great men and what they have made of their lives? I shudder at the implications of the question and delve back into the psalms to suppress the sense of absurdity that threatens to engulf me. For a sense of absurdity is what I feel, in spite of everything I have been speaking about to these men for the past four days.
But then another thought overcomes that one: I am standing observing the dying breaths of Irish Christianity, and what the future holds without men like this is infinitely more disturbing than any fleeting chill I may be feeling now. The brief stab of absurdity I have experienced in this setting stands to become a chronic condition in a society in which there are no longer men and women prepared to live in this way. It strikes me forcibly that, even if we are barely aware of their existences, even if we scorn their sacrifices, their silent prayerful presence here in Mount Melleray and other places is somehow vital to our very human continuance. I don’t mean the fact that they pray for us (though that may be more important than I think) but that the sense they give us of something to be believed in so unconditionally, something to be considered if only as a poetic possibility, something even to be dismissed as implausible or daft — this somehow allows us to continue inhabiting what we think of as the ‘real’ world, in much the way that we once partied all night knowing that our parents slept fitfully at home hoping we would make it back safe with the dawn. It hits me like a train that, in a future without these monks at our backs, everything will seem as absurd as the moment I have just experienced as a spasm of sadness and affection.
In Father Columban Heaney’s booklet, there is also the following startling passage:
The human person is really a metaphysical misfit in the world. He was not made for it and cannot find total fulfillment in it. Hence he is a frustrated creature in this world; this can be taken as a definition of man. Monks and nuns are people who accept this definition of themselves and live accordingly. They know that they have no lasting city here on earth, so they turn to the desert where they hope to meet God and can begin to find part of that ultimate happiness for which they long.
At the back of this observation is the truth of us all, whether we can face it or not. Without this clue as to the ultimate nature of reality, we are headed nowhere rather than somewhere, no matter how determined our step. In a world without such as these monks to remind us, that ultimate meaningfulness would leech away, leaving us with our baubles and the debris of our hopes, cold-sweating in the face of the dawn.
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