which were often works of stunning artistic genius. Their life of work and prayer, as the title of Jean Leclercq’s famous book illustrates, harmonized “the love of learning and the desire for God.”10 The unparalleled beauty of Gregorian chant—taking its name from St. Gregory the Great, your biographer—unites angelic psalms and human voices, and even today calms souls listening with the ear of their heart. As Gregory’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, said so eloquently in a speech during his 2008 visit to the former Cistercian house of studies in Paris,
The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man—a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God. But it also includes the formation of reason—education—through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.11
From our monasteries, that word, studied and contemplated in lectio divina, should be dispersed through spiritual direction, education of the young, and writings.
Despite my biased hope that monasticism can contribute to the rebuilding of a more Christian (and therefore more human) culture, holy father Benedict, I have no rosy illusions about the future of American and Western civilization. The final section of my “Subiaco” poem reflects a certain pessimism of mine regarding our secular culture:
Tomorrow boasts of godlessness and ghosts
Which walk in mem’ried quarters, telling tales
In ruined stone, in silent bells, in church;
And we alone are left as reliqued souls
To note the setting suns and Christian shades.
But must we make our graves of hallowed space,
Exchanging fire for frost, the pearl for dust?
For I am not a dying man, not yet,
And we have stood, still stand, on living ground,
Convinced, with proof, that death can yield a dawn
And Love still dares to sow in arid earth.
When places pass, and hearts aflame grow cold,
Please grant us now a faith begot of hope,
Assured that we have not believed in vain.
I wrote those lines several years ago, before I came to think of humanitas as the great gift monasticism can offer souls ignorant of their own glorious humanity. They present a bleaker outlook than the one I hold now, but their sobering perspective is still instructive. Christians must not abandon their ship to the stormy waves simply because they cannot control the winds or waters, and I consider monasticism a rudder steering the ship of the church (indeed, of all humanity) on a Godward course. I take very seriously my privileged duty to share with our guests, and channel to others through them, the rivers of living water which I have found in my monastery. Saint Gregory the Great wrote that you once received a singular grace in contemplation: the whole world was presented before your eyes as if it were collected in a single ray of the sun. May your illuminating example and powerful prayers intercede for me, and all the monks and nuns living under your patronage, that we might be faithful collectors of your inspiring rays and refreshing aqueducts to all who come to us seeking God.
5. Saint Benedict of Norcia (ca. AD 480–ca. 540) lived as a hermit for a short time before establishing a cenobitic community of monks at Monte Cassino in Italy. He is considered the founder of Western monasticism, and his Rule is still the governing document of many monastic orders, including the Benedictines and Cistercians. He is also one of the patron saints of Europe. The opening greeting is a play on his name: Benedictus in Latin means “blessed,” and therefore he is “blessed in grace and in name.”
6. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263.
7. “Letter to Diognetus.” In Richardson, Early Christian Fathers, 218.
8. Fry, Rule of St. Benedict, 258–59.
9. Ibid., 164–65.
10. See Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 1–7.
11. Benedict XVI, “Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture,” para. 3.
Saint Thomas More12
To Saint Thomas More, the king’s good servant, and God’s first:
Above my desk is a print of your silhouette, taken from the famous Holbein portrait, set against the text of one of your prison letters to your daughter Meg. A monastic confrere of mine created it for me, and I have placed it in my university office to guard and guide me in my work. Gazing at it now, the thought of penning some scribbled musings to you strikes me as silly. I have often succumbed to the temptation to write nothing at all to you, rather than organize a vast array of half-baked inspirations arising from your life and writings. With much hesitation, then, do I address myself to you, a man so eminently endowed with that rare combination of learning, humor, and holiness. Given your delight at the fact that your last name means “foolishness” in Greek, you would likely chuckle as you chide me for flattering you at the outset of this letter. How can I properly express my debt to your intellectual genius and “good mother wit?”13 What is the proper way for me to thank you for your witness of faith against tyranny, and your courage in the face of martyrdom? And how can I worthily receive the inheritance which you, my patron saint, have bequeathed to me, and which I have so often neglected?
Perhaps the best place to begin is my own acquaintance with your legacy, both secular and sacred. I take as my starting point a verse from the pen of Saint Paul, who encouraged the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). If to imitate a saint is to imitate Christ, then you have made me more like our Lord than I ever could have hoped to be without your example. To be sure, I have not imitated you to the letter. My desire to be a lawyer irretrievably evaporated in high school thanks to a nauseatingly boring summer at a law firm. Nor have I followed your footsteps as a husband and father. On this score, it may seem strange that a monk vowed to celibacy should take as his patron a lawyer, statesman, and family man. Yet I consider your sponsorship of my monastic and priestly life an immense and altogether appropriate gift.
Your own discernment as a young man greatly helped me in my youth, particularly as I wrestled with a vocation to the abbey I now call home. While engaged in your legal studies, you resided with Carthusian monks, praying with them as your studies allowed and pondering your own future. You either uttered or wrote down a phrase which I found quite comforting as I grew increasingly agitated with my own discernment of the Lord’s will for my life. You feared that you would be a “licentious priest,” and determined instead that you would be capable of being “a chaste husband.”14 The ways of providence guided me to the same terms, but the opposite conclusion: I was made to be, by the grace of God, a chaste priest rather than a licentious husband.
But your discernment was simply one of many aspects that drew me to you. In requesting to adopt the name Thomas as my own to symbolize my new life as a monk, I looked to you as my model. My abbot was good enough to grant me the name Thomas, thus equipping my monastic community with a novel but powerful intercessor. I was attracted to your humor