'And then you fell in with the monks …', W. says. It's the most mysterious of episodes to him, W. He's never had it satisfactorily explained to him how I ended up living with the monks. What drove me to them, or them to me?
How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among the monks as their guestmaster? Why, out of all the other candidates – and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my job – did I become the live-in welcomer of visitors to the community?
He sees in his imagination, W. says: an ape-man who came to stand between the monks and the world, letting in their guests, preparing them lunch or dinner, and showing them up to their rooms, which he had carefully prepared. He sees it, although he doesn't understand what he sees: an ape-man making beds and dusting picture rails, an ape-man going out to Safeways to buy food for dinner, an ape-man taking coats and hats and making pleasantries in the oak-parqued reception room, an ape-man arm in arm with the monk he's escorting across the icy pavement. He sees the ape-man sitting in attendance at ecumenical dinners; the ape-man preparing fasting food for the visiting Copts and for the visiting Russian Orthodox, an ape-man calling a taxi for tired Dominicans heading to the station …
How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? what recommended me to them? what, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean? W., by contrast, has every idea of what living a life of genuine spirituality might mean. He, too, lived among monks, and for a time, even thought of becoming one.
Ah, but he can say little of it, not to me, who puts everything up about him, W., at his blog. A veil has to be drawn over some things. A kind of silence has to observed. But he came to know what it meant, a spiritual life. He met a holy man. They walked along the seashore, talking about the essence of religion.
And isn't that where it began, W.'s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this world? Isn't that where he understood that the question of religion wasn't to be left to philosophers and metaphysicians, and with the philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?
W. took a vow of silence, he says. He spent days in solitary prayer. Hadn't he begun to understand that it was the world here and now to which religion attended. To world as it currently is! As it is, and insofar as it harbours its redemption. Only insofar as it is close to eternity. It was his time in silent meditation that set him on the road to grasping what is so clear to him now: that religion is not a metaphysical affair. It's about ethics!, W. says. Politics!
What did I understand, when I fell in with the monks? What did I grasp of the vision of the world vouchsafed to me? That, too, is a mystery to W., for whom it has always seemed clear that I know nothing whatsoever of religion. There I was, nonetheless, a guestmaster, and for several years. There I was, reading Kierkegaard in my attic room as the monks around me prayed unceasingly for the world. There I was, engaged in my studies, or what I thought of as my studies, as they strove towards union with God.
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