Most of my visits/retreats begin on Sunday evening and end on the afternoon of Wednesday or Thursday. This time, however, I arrived on the afternoon of Friday, December 9, and stayed until the afternoon of Wednesday the 14th, For my spiritual reading I had brought The Genesee Diary, by Henri Nouwen. It consists of extracts from the diary he kept for the seven months he was living alongside the monks of Genesee Abbey in upstate New York. I had thought that it would be way to long to finish during my visit, but instead of pondering every line, I read it normally, stopping to note really striking thoughts. In that way, I finished it while I was there.
A couple of weeks into his time at Genesee, Nouwen asked the abbot, "How am I doing?" and he replied, "I guess okay. Nobody has mentioned you yet." More striking was Nouwen's insight that when you want people to be thinking about you, to be paying attention to you, "you haven't even begun to create a little space for God in your heart."
I also had Puritan's Diary, by Charles Coulombe, a history of America from the point of view of an integralist Catholic. He sees in the British colonization of North America and the subsequent history of the United States a tale of anti=Catholicism triumphant. He has a point, but his ideal of a Catholic establishment is hardly the necessary remedy.
The daily routine was similar to previous visits — prayers at 6:00 a.m., noonish, 5:30 & 7:30 p.m. (slightly different on Sunday), breakfast about 7:25, lunch after the noon prayers, dinner and recreation after the 5:30 service.
During recreation I spent more time than previously with the Prior, Fr. Augustine, who proved to be more genial than I had expected, and Bro. Andrew, a college student from a monastery in Alabama. Of course, there were other monks joining them for games and conversation.
At one point, Fr. Augustine mentioned that he had a video of the 1982 Midnight Mass at the Abbey. One of the networks would trans mit the Mass from a different location each year, and in '82 they chose St. Anselm. He dicided to play it for some of us on Tuesday evening after recreation and Compline. It was interesting to see the monks of the time. Most of them had been there in the late '60s (and most have died or left since then) while a few had entered in the intervening years.
One unusual event was meeting on Monday afternoon with an Assistant Vice President of the College and the Director of the Humanities Institute. I gave the money to create a scolarship for 18th Century Studies in memoery of my father. The awardee will work on a research project during his/her senior year, and present the results in a paper. Thei inspiration comes from my dad's frequent syaying that if he could live at any other time, he'd choose "the 18th Century, because there was a ferment of ideas." The money comes from an inheritance from my brother.
The Director of the Humanities Institute, Gary Bouchard, gave me a copy of a small book of poems he had written, What News, Horatio? He was inspired by some bizarre headlines in his local paper, and each poem has one of those headlines as its title, but then he lets his imagination run free. As the title of the book suggests, each poem also has quotes from or references to Hamlet. It's pretty amusing.
So in many ways this was similar to all my earlier visits, but there were also some unique aspects to it.
