A Priest - Report from Calabria: A Season with the Carthusian Monks

REPORT FROM CALABRIA

A Season with the Carthusian Monks

by

A PRIEST

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard
Version of the BibleSecond Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition)
copyright 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the United States of America. Used by permission.
All rights reserved worldwide.

Quotations from papal documents, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, are taken from
the Vatican website, http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html.

Cover photograph:
A Carthusian Monk on Mount Pecoraro by B. Tripodi,
courtesy of Museo della Certosa of Serra San Bruno

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2017 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-130-8 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-781-5 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2017933495
Printed in the United States of America

More than ten years ago the remarkable film Into Great Silence by Philip Grning allowed the public to take a peek into the world of the Carthusian monks, considered by many to be the most austere religious order in the Catholic Church. Grning spent six months filming at the Grande Chartreuse and dedicated two and a half years to editing his footage. The three-hour movie, like the Carthusian way of life itself, was unusual: no soundtrack, almost no dialogue, no dramatic plot. He allowed the viewer to enter into the life of men who spend almost their entire day in solitary prayer, and much of their night in singing Gods praises.

What would it be like to live this way? The monastic life is found in many cultures, and it has been an important part of Christianity since the earliest centuries. My own introduction to it came from reading The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton when I was in high school. I was captivated, as countless others have been. Ever since, I have felt the attraction of a life devoted to contemplative prayer, I have delved into the rich spiritual literature that the monastic life has produced, and I have visited monasteries all over the world.

When I was in the seminary a young man several years behind me entered a Carthusian monastery in Spain. Several years later I was able to visit him in his monastery with our bishop. We were there for only twenty-four hours, but the experience moved me deeply. I remember saying to the bishop as we drove away, I feel like someone has just doused me with a glass of ice water. The atmosphere was simple in the extremea life stripped of many of the comforts to which we are accustomed, a life pared down to the essentials. At the same time, our friend struck me as very relaxed, conversational, and natural.

In the spring of 2014 I was privileged to spend four months living with a small community of Carthusian monks at Serra San Bruno, down at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. I sent home weekly reports to family and friends about my experiences there, and this book is made up of those letters. There are works that describe the Carthusian way of life in depth; this is not one of them. A bibliography is given at the end of this book to acquaint you with some of them. The present work is more like a series of short notes sent home from a foreign land, a sketchbook rather than a finished canvas. But sometimes a sketch can capture our fancy and entice us to explore its subject more deeply. Better still, it can make us want to visit some exotic locale. In this case, the exotic locale is found not in Calabria, but in the human heart, for it is there that God waits.

The names of the members of the community at Serra San Bruno have been changed out of respect for the Carthusian desire for privacy. It is customary for Carthusian authors to remain anonymous; that custom will be honored by the author of this book.

March 3

Dear family and friends,

I have taken the title for this first letter from two sources. The first is Rick Steves program Europe through the Back Door . This very popular travel writer introduces his audience to places off the beaten path, hidden gems often missed by the casual tourist. For the next four months I will be visiting a very remote place in a very remote part of Italy, the Carthusian monastery of Serra San Bruno, located almost at the very tip of the toe of Italy.

My second source is a book about the Carthusians written in 1985 by Robin Bruce Lockhart, the author of Reilly, Ace of Spies . Lockhart became fascinated by this unique religious order and wrote a popular description of their way of life called Halfway to Heaven: The Hidden Life of the Sublime Carthusians . (For the record, when a second edition came out, the monks insisted he drop the word sublime they do not consider themselves any such thing.) If you know something about their life, you might be tempted to say, It may be halfway to heaven, but it sounds a lot closer to the other place! Theirs is a rigorous life but a joyful one, if the monks I have met here are any indication.

This will be a different kind of travelogue because I will be spending the next four months in one location, and even for the most part within the four walls of one building. Like other travel writers, I will describe the food, the sights, and the customs of the place I am visiting. As time goes on, I hope we will get beneath the surface, like a visitor who spends a lot of time in one place, not a tourist who does Rome or London in four days and then moves on to the next destination. I will be with these men throughout Lent and Easter, and also as the seasons of nature move from winter through spring to summer. I plan to return home the day after the feast of Corpus Christi in late June. (If you want the abridged version of my experience, watch the movie Into Great Silence on fast-forward!)

I arrived here on Friday, February 21, after spending a few days in Rome. I opted to take the train rather than fly so that I could enjoy the lovely Italian countryside at leisure. South of Naples the train went through several tunnels and emerged on the coast, and then hugged it due south. The weather was cloudy and rainy, the resorts along the beaches shuttered for the winter. It should be very lovely to see a shimmering blue sea when I head north at the end of my stay.

As I rode along, I thought of how Saint Bruno himself first came down here nine hundred years ago. He had been a renowned professor at Rheims, but at the age of fifty he and some companions sought a life of solitude, establishing a remote hermitage in the mountains above Grenoble. The alpine valley was called Chartreux, and this became the name for their monastery. (The Grande Chartreuse is where the delicious greenish-yellow liqueur was invented, which in turn is the source for the name of the color.) One of Brunos former pupils was elected pope, and he summoned Bruno to Rome to assist with the reform of the Church. After a couple of years Bruno finally convinced the pope that he was not cut out for the life of ecclesiastical Rome and asked permission to return to the solitude he loved. The pope agreed, but asked him to stay nearby and not return to France. So Bruno made his way south and established the monastery where I am now staying.

I was met at the train station by one of the Carthusian brothers, and we drove for about an hour through verdant hills to the monastery. Brother Marco entered Serra San Bruno at the age of thirty-two and has been here twenty years. He is from this region, Calabria. When I apologized for my poor Italian, he said, You speak it better than I do. (The Calabrians have their own dialect.) His words were not true, but courteous and encouraging.