No Country For Married Men

 If you've never had the chance to witness the film Into Great Silence, you should; it's a slow, thoughtful, intimate meditation on the everyday lives of the Carthusian monks of Grande Chartreuse monastery located in the French Alps. The filmmaker, Philip Groning, proposed the idea to the monks in 1984 and they said they wanted time to think about it. Sixteen years later, they said he could come and film. Groning spent almost three years editing; there are no commentaries, no dialog, no sound--just the everyday rhythm of the eremetic life lived in community.

Thomas Merton wrote in The Silent Life (1957) about the 'charism' (if you might call it that) of the Carthusians and the guarding of solitude above all else: 

"It is a spirit of solitude, silence, simplicity, austerity, aloneness with God. The intransigeance of the Carthusian's flight from the world and from the rest of mankind is meant to purify his heart from all the passions and distractions which necessarily afflict those who are involved in the affairs of the world-or even in the busy, relatively complicated life of a cenobitic monastery. All the legislation which surrounds the Carthusian, and has surrounded him for centuries like an impenetrable wall, is designed to protect his solitude against even those laudable and apparently reasonable enterprises which so often tend to corrupt the purity of the monastic life."

I actually wrote to the Carthusians (Charterhouse of the Transfiguration, the only Carthusian monastery in the United States, located in Vermont) thirteen years ago in a horribly brash and self-assured petition to discern a vocation with them. I don't know if they every responded (I recall they did, but I don't have a record of the correspondence to confirm). If they didn't, it was probably for good reason.

In working primarily from home for the past year of Covid, I've gotten a small taste of the 'monastic cell' in a strictly worldly setting. There's an old adage from the desert fathers: "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." 

What have I learned in the "cell" of my office (which is usually alone at the kitchen table, or a small desk in the bedroom when I need to hide from the kids), working the secular equivalent of Evagrius weaving baskets and then setting them all on fire at the end of the year to learn detachment?

I have an incredibly long way to go, and am very far from my true home. 

Pride, acedia, laziness, vanity, lack of discipline, and, most especially, a lack of inner peace are all my time alone at home have revealed to me. 

Solitude, silence--these things are sweet to a someone at peace. It is a marinade for a soul called to it, that longs for it, relishes in it. For the person not at peace with themselves, silence is unsettling, and solitude disconcerting. But in and of itself, it is only acting as a mirror to the soul, neutral and reflective.

Merton continues in describing the antidote to literal insanity that comes with such solitude for the soul not well disposed to it: 

"The Carthusians have been preserved not only by their rigid exterior discipline, but by the inner flexibility which has accompanied it. They have been saved not merely by human will clinging firmly to a Law, but above all by the humility of hearts that abandoned themselves to the Spirit Who dictated the Law. Looking at the Carthusians from the outside, one might be tempted to imagine them proud. But when one knows a little more about them and their life, one understands that only a very humble man could stand Carthusian solitude without going crazy. For the solitude of the Charterhouse will always have a devastating effect on pride that seeks to be alone with itself. Such pride will crumble into schizophrenia in the uninterrupted silence of the cell. It is in any case true that the great temptation of all solitaries is something much worse than pride-it is the madness that lies beyond pride, and the solitary must know how to keep his balance and his sense of humor. Only humility can give him that peace. Strong with the strength of Christ's humility, which is at the same time Christ's truth, the monk can face his solitude without supporting himself by unconsciously magical or illuministic habits of mind. In other words, he can bear the purification of solitude which slowly and inexorably separates faith from illusion. He can sustain the dreadful searching of soul that strips him of his vanities and self deceptions, and he can peacefully accept the fact that when his false ideas of himself are gone he has practically nothing else left. But then he is ready for the encounter with reality: the Truth and the Holiness of God, which he must learn to confront in the depths of his own nothingness."

My vocation is marriage, as it has been for the past ten years. Such relationships are less hidden than a monk in his cell twenty three hours a day, but that one place where married couples enter into that place is in the bedroom. In some ways, the intimacy of the bedroom is where one enters into the "great silence" of marital love where bodies speak to one another without the need for words; perhaps one of the few times in our day in which we can communicate in such a way. 

But as any married couple knows, the fruit and vitality of the martial embrace is not isolated to the act itself as in a vacuum, but draws its health from the days and weeks preceding it in the everyday communions and interactions throughout the day. Sexual intimacy serves as the barometer for the health of a marriage. One can't ignore or neglect or fail to love one's wife all morning and then expect sublime communion in the bedroom in the evening. 

It is not realistic to expect a married man to behave as a monk, or work out his salvation in the same way a Carthusian would, though it may have appeal at times. St. Paul made it clear that the married man would be concerned with other things--how to please his wife, the affairs of the world. That it is better not to marry. But it is the vocation I was called to. After ten years of discerning monastic life, it became clear that was not my path. If it was, maybe I would relish the solitude, have opportunities to serve in other ways and enter more deeply into silence and all it affords. 

Instead, I find myself snapping at rowdy kids and trying to work an honest day in front of a laptop so I can pay our bills and keep a roof over our heads. When I do have time alone, I squander it watching Youtube videos or frittering around in the kitchen eating whatever I see. I have no abbot, no rule, no guide, just my conscience, which has been chaffing me lately at the sins bubbling to the surface from my time alone in my secular cell within my domestic monastery at how far I am from that divine home, and how far I have to go and how far I have fallen, and how muddied the waters of my mind and soul are versus the crystal clear lakes of pristine wilderness. Silence and solitude is a great teacher, but it's only a mirror.