Spring Newsletter

New Camaldoli Hermitage

SPRING 2017

CONTEMPLATION IN ACTION

“The mysticism of compassion does not aim at a blind experience of God that is devoted exclusively to one’s own interiority, but to the disruptive experience that occurs when dealing with others, in the dynamics of interpersonal encounters, face to face. This is an experience that is mystical and political at the same time.” ~ Johann Baptist Metz

pages 2–7

IN THIS ISSUE

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Message from the Prior: A Time of Need and Gratitude In Memoriam: Br. Emmanuel Wassinger, OSB Cam Br. Emmanuel: Stories Gathered Along the Way

Contemplation in Action

5–6 Subversive Orthodoxy—Robert Inchausti

7–9 Reﬂections on a Comtemplative Life in Action

10 Becoming Shelter—Deborah Smith Douglas 11 Spirituality with Open Eyes—Prior General
Alessandro Barban quoting Johann Baptist Metz

12 World Day of Peace—Fr. Cyprian Consiglio 13 Oblates and Contemplation in Action—
Fr. Robert Hale

13 Vita Monastica

14 Monastery of the Risen Christ 14 Development 15 Activities and Visitors

62475 Highway 1, Big Sur, CA 93920 • 831 667 2456 • www.contemplation.com
62475 Highway 1, Big Sur, CA 93920 • 831 667 2456 • www.contemplation.com

Message From the Prior

A Time of Need and Gratitude

In Memoriam: Br. Emmanuel Wasinger, OSB Cam

As many of you know by now, the central coast of California was walloped by an atmospheric river of rain this winter, which destroyed sections of Highway 1 and badly damaged our own entrance road. Our property is right in the middle of the most fragile part of the coast, and the worst damage to Highway 1, called Paul’s Slide, was just south of our own entry

road. So we were totally cut oﬀ at several points from all comings and

goings. Even now we locals can only leave the coast and reenter during short windows each early morning and evening during shift changes in the construction crews.

This risk of precarious isolation is part of living in a wild remote place like Big Sur and what being “a place apart” entails. It is also part of the special beauty that people love about the Hermitage, and why guests and retreatants keep coming back.

The community here at the Hermitage, monks and our loyal staﬀ, have

been “holding this space” through the storms and rockslides not just for ourselves but for the sake of our larger circle of friends, oblates, and fellow monastics near and far. These months have actually been a good experience for us. Since we were adequately stocked for fuel and provisions, we rode out the storms and have not minded the extra silence and solitude, with little to keep us from our prayer and meditation. It has also been an opportunity to reconnect with our neighbors and bond with new ones, especially those who were stranded when we were.
Our beloved Brother Emmanuel, age 89, died serenely early morning March 6 at the Windsor care facility in Monterey. He had had a heart attack ten days previously and was airlifted to a hospital in Salinas, but he never fully recovered. He was joyful to the end.

Recent photograph of Paul’s Slide on Highway 1 just below the Hermitage. You can see the roadwork and erosion control required. The Hermitage’s own entry road appears in the upper left hand corner of the photo. The Hermitage’s road has been itself critically damaged, and the photo shows how the active slide (and roadwork) continues to be a jeopardy to the Hermitage’s road as well.

Richard Wasinger was born October 14, 1927, to a German-speaking household on the family farm near Loretto, Kansas. In his last days he often spoke dreamily of Kansas and the wheat

ﬁelds. He became a Benedictine monk, taking

the name Joseph, at Holy Cross Abbey, Canon

City, Colorado, making ﬁrst vows in 1957. He

then followed his novice master, Fr. Joseph Diemer, to New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big

Sur in 1965, seeking a more contemplative life.

He was always a warm and friendly presence and was very dedicated to the Eucharist, the

Divine oﬃce, and also to the Rosary and Way

of the Cross. He delighted in taking care of our generators (which provide all our electricity), maintaining and operating the heavy equipment, and keeping our roads clear, as well as occasionally planting corn. He is also remembered for having a special kinship with nature, animals, plants, and even the weather.

Photo courtesy of Madonna Construction via Caltrans.

However, hospitality is our primary source of income, and not being able

to receive guests for nearly three months has already been a huge ﬁnancial

blow. So like many others here on the coast, we need help getting through this season of destruction and reconstruction. They have already begun the work of rebuilding Highway 1 just below us, only after which we will

need to ﬁgure out the best way to repair our own road, which we expect

to be an enormous, costly project. You may perhaps have already seen our extra electronic appeal for donations; if you have already responded we are deeply grateful. If you have not, please consider giving now at

www.gofundme.com/newcamaldolirelief so that we can continue to

hold this space for everyone.
Despite the slides and road closures, we were able to bring Br. Emmanuel’s body back and celebrate his funeral and burial on March 17. He is survived by his sister Bernadette and brother Edwin, and a nephew, Shane, who is a priest in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Blessings, thanks, and prayers,

2 ~ New Camaldoli Hermitage

“Today oil poured out of the generator and all over the

Br. Emmanuel: Stories Gathered Along the Way

All but the last of these anecdotes are told from the point of view of Fr. Isaiah who lovingly gathered the stories below.

ﬂoor. In thanksgiving this didn’t happen at 2 a.m.” “Help us to see the ﬂies as gifts for formation.”

“For the three people killed in an accident on Highway 1, that they might live through this.”
And, in addition, Rich Veum has written a beautiful personal recollection of Emmanuel (“Farewell, Faithful Servant”) on the blog “To Sur, With Love.”
“We had 10 inches of rain today. Former record is 6 inches. We pray to the Lord.”

https://medium.com/@richveum/farewell-faithful-servant- c99bf7390633
“A frozen branch fell on a man in New York. Killed him. For his well-being we pray…”

Once Br. Emmanuel was working in a wet ditch and emerged covered with mud. He said, “Good thing God is everywhere.”
“Thank God for all the beauties of nature. Amazing birds—a

pair of ﬂycatchers has been nestin’ in my shed for the last ﬁve years. Well, one year they didn’t, but the other four they

did. Right above my truck.”
Once at the beginning of one of my retreats, he and Zacchaeus came to my private Mass. Zacchaeus prayed

that I be “set on ﬁre by the Holy Spirit” during my retreat. Br. Emmanuel added, “If he comes out of his cell on ﬁre,

don’t put him out.”
“Let us ask Our Lady of Comfort to comfort us in these hot days. It was 117 degrees in Phoenix yesterday. Supposed to be pretty hot today.”

“For the protection of the turkeys on our property. That they
We had a dog named Buddy that Emmanuel was especially fond of… he’d give them rides in the bucket of his skip-loader. One time Cyprian was coming down at Vigils, and there was a beautiful full moon. He ran into Emmanuel who said, “Wish I could put the moon in a box and give it to Buddy.”

might live out their full lives and fulﬁll God’s plan for them.”

“Help me to live cheerfully today, because God loves a cheerful giver.”

“For Br. Gabriel…I don’t know where he is. I went looking for him this morning and he wasn’t there.”
Once at a prayer convention I shared a motel room with him. He had a snore that would fairly lift the curtains. I told him about it and the next morning he said, “I found out I had another gift.”

He could be so childlike. After his cataract and knee operations he was full of praise and wonder. But even

smaller graces could ﬁll him with excitement. One time

he interrupted a gathering of monks to say, ”I just want to tell people about this back pain I had and the relief I got. I had this back pain that hurt worse than anything I’d had before. Bede then got me some medicine.” ”What was it, Brother?” (Long pause.) “Was it Therapak?” “No, that wasn’t it. Bede took me over and showed me.” “Was it an ointment or a pill?” “It was a pill.” “Was it Tylenol?” “YEAH— THAT WAS IT.”
“God bless the U.S. Texas has too much water, California doesn’t have enough. Lord hear our prayer.”
When I go to town, I try to say a private Mass that day. Br. Emmanuel and Br. Gabriel would always join me. There’s a sweet intimacy in the little chapel, gathered around the altar. Br. Emmanuel said once, “It’s like being in Heaven.”

[From a retreatant:] On my ﬁrst visit to the Hermitage my

car barely made it to the trailer where I was to stay. It was smoking or steaming or both. I asked at the bookstore if there was any help to be had and they sent Emmanuel. He came along, very serene. I could immediately feel that he

had an aﬀection for and understanding of machines. He

might have brought other tools with him but all I remember was the big roll of duct tape. He poked around, jiggled hoses and then wrapped a bunch of things up with the tape. He gave the engine a good tap and said, “Well, that and prayer should do the trick.” And it did. I got home safely.
After a solemn procession to the cemetery, Br. Emmanuel piped up, “Who’s going to dig my grave when I die? I dug all these graves mahself.”

Brother Emmanuel had a unique way of joining in the public prayer petitions at Lauds and Vespers. People loved to hear him chip in, and sometimes it really got our attention. Here are some memorable ones…

contemplation.com ~ 3

Contemplation in Action

The editors

The theme of this issue of the newsletter is not political in the narrow sense in which we usually use the word political. But the Greek word polis implies the whole community: seeking and serving the common good. We now stand at a moment in history that calls (like all moments in history) for our clearest and most engaged response to what the Gospel teaches about how we are to treat one another and especially how we are to love and serve those who are most vulnerable and in most need. Our faith always requires such clarity and engagement from us, but these days raise essential Gospel questions into an even more demanding light.

What is our responsibility when voices even in some churches distort the teachings of the Gospel into an antigospel of greed and aggression to lend a false legitimacy to a political agenda of racism, torture, scapegoating of immigrants, denial of refugees based on confusing “national security” with religious intolerance, attacks on the dignity of women, depredation of public lands, an aggressive skepticism about science (which, among other things, runs counter to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si), denial of public care for those in need, and an underlying cynicism about the nature of truth itself?
Antoinette Betschart, Phil McManus, Peter and Betty Michelozzi, Ziggy Rendler-Bregman, Elliot Martin, Sylvia Deck, and Rafael Landerreche form another chorus of voices as they share their personal experiences of the interdependence between prayer and engaged work in the world. The voices of these eight friends of the Hermitage suggest a heartening range of social action that immediately

calls to mind Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 25 that “Whatso-

ever you do to these the least of these you do to me.” Cultivating the practice of nonviolence among communities in Chiapas and among other communities in Latin America;

working to create more aﬀordable housing in Santa Cruz;

writing and artwork; building interreligious understanding and fellowship; leading meditation practice at Soledad; not only feeding the poor, but using one’s expertise to improve the nutrition of each meal served; guiding spirituality sessions for those in recovery; bearing witness at Standing Rock.
How do we oppose such a corrupt agenda with the moral forthrightness required while also taking care to not echo the fear and contempt of those promoting it?

And how do we support one another to keep our prayer lives maturing into just action—while also bearing witness to the equal truth that just action deepens and matures our prayer lives?
Two other “voices” in these pages are artistic in a pictorial sense: Corita Kent and her contemporary William Copley. Corita Kent’s compassionate, clear-eyed call for justice and social action in another era of protest came readily to mind as we considered the theme of this issue. And we’re grateful to the Corita Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Harvard Art Museums for their generous permission to include this work.
In addition to the familiar voices and clarity of Prior Cyprian Consiglio, Fr. Thomas Matus, and Fr. Robert Hale, we also draw from the thought of Prior General Alessandro Barban because the idea of “spirituality with open eyes” that he cites in a recent letter accords so closely with the theme of this newsletter. And many oblates and other friends contribute importantly as well, helping us grapple with these questions from the perspective of their own lived experience of “contemplation in action.” Robert Inchausti draws

from his remarkable study Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise to remind us

that Christianity’s relationship to culture and the common good is always crucial and that within the modern Christian tradition we have “a great cloud of witnesses” to help guide us now. And Audette Fulbright Fulson gives us a poem that she rightly understands might have already become our own “Prayer for the Morning” these days.

And ﬁnally in Deborah Smith Douglas’ “Becoming Shelter,”

we stand at a window in Boston in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing. And we feel how concrete and visceral prayer itself can be. Not prayer in default of action. But prayer so ardent that it doesn’t merely “shelter in place,” but instead can transform us and our communities into becoming shelter for others “whose need is beyond

telling.”

CJL

Corita Kent, for emergency use soft shoulder, 1966. San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Denise Hartman. ©Estate of Corita Kent. Photo: Don Ross.

Reﬂections on a “Subversive Orthodoxy”

Robert Inchausti
Consider Thomas Merton’s description of America written at the height of the “Cold War.”
Robert Inchausti is the author and editor of several books

including Thomas Merton’s American Prophecy and Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise.

“We are living in the greatest revolution in history—a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid...We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all we ever had, all that we have achieved! All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good

poisoned by the evil and ﬁghting it, the evil pretending to

be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes,

justiﬁed and rationalized by the purest and most innocent

intentions.” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) p. 54

In Gustav Janouch’s book Conversations with Kafka, a college student is speaking with the writer at the Accident Insurance Company. In the street below, a Communist rally is taking place, and the student says to Kafka: “You are a critic of modern world. Why aren’t you down at the rally?”

Kafka replies, “This is the problem with the modern world. Everything goes by false names. The Communists call themselves revolutionaries; they are really totalitarians. The Capitalists call themselves free-marketers; they are really monopolists. They say I have a good job here at the insurance company; it is really a form of penal servitude. Tonight I am going home, have a little dinner, and do some writing. Not so. Tonight I am going home to my prison cell.

Lock myself in. And try to ﬁnd my soul.”

Or Dorothy Day’s thoughts on the mystery and complexity of poverty.

I don’t believe Kafka is saying that the world is a lie. I think he is telling us that it hasn’t yet been accurately described— and reminding us that folly is a commitment to virtues that are not really virtues and to truths that are not really true.
“We must talk about poverty because people lose sight of it, can scarcely believe that it exists. So many decent people come in to visit us and tell us how their families were brought up in poverty and how, through hard work and decent habits and cooperation, they managed to educate all the children and raise up priests and nuns to the Church. They concede that health and good habits, a good family, take them out of the poverty class, no matter how mean the slum they may have been forced to inhabit. No, they don’t know about the poor. Their conception of poverty
The great Catholic writers—I am thinking now in particular of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and G.K. Chesterton—point out very much the same thing. They too sought truth by exposing the prevailing hyperboles and the clichés that turn other people into caricatures of our own fears and anxieties.

contemplation.com ~ 5

is something neat and well-ordered as a nun’s cell. And maybe no one can be told, maybe they will have to experience it. Or maybe it is a grace which they must pray for. We usually get what we pray for, and maybe we are afraid to pray for it. And yet I am convinced that it is the grace we most need in this age of crisis, at this time when expenditures reach into the billions to defend ‘our American way of life.’”

Prayer for the Morning

Audette Fulbright Fulson Did you rise this morning, broken and hung over with weariness and pain and rage tattered from waving too long in a brutal wind? Get up, child. Pull your bones upright gather your skin and muscle into a patch of sun. Draw breath deep into your lungs; you will need it for another day calls to you. I know you ache. I know you wish the work were done and you

Or G.K. Chesterton’s honest observation that there is more going on in our so-called “age of progress” than progress.

“We live in a time when it is harder for a free man to make a home than it was for a medieval ascetic to do without one.”

In our highly politicized time when cynics call themselves “realists” and crass blowhards claim they are just being “honest,” it is easy to forget that our great Catholic writers and activists like Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day had very little interest in changing the world. They didn’t use words to build mass movements, defame their opponents, or even as advertisements for themselves. They were antipoliticians and anti-propagandists who wrote to describe reality in the light of God’s all-inclusive and redemptive love.

with everyone you have ever loved were on a distant shore safe, and unafraid. But remember this, tired as you are: you are not alone. Here and here and here also there are others weeping and rising and gathering their courage. You belong to them and they to you

And if in the process, they sometimes said things that were

in conﬂict with privileged interests or contradicted popular

culture or required them to reconsider their own convictions—well, let the chips fall where they may. For they knew it is more important to live in the truth than it is to be right, admired or successful, and this simple imperative put them on the far side of a very important political and ethical divide: on the side of the poor, the outcast, and the humble against the Caesars, the Pilates, and the princes of this world.

and together,

Not that The Sermon on the Mount revealed to them exactly what was to be done. It did re-direct their attention away from the speck in their neighbor’s eye to the log in their own and—by so doing—allowed them to see through the distortions of opportunists, ideologues, extremists, and their own occasional lapses of hubris and self-righteousness—however furtive and unconscious.

we will break through and bend the arc of justice all the way down into our lives.

For men and women of conscience, it is unlikely this situation will ever change. But we can take some solace from another great Catholic novelist Léon Bloy who wrote: “You do not enter paradise tomorrow, or the day after, or in ten

years. You enter it today when you are poor and cruciﬁed.”

That is to say, whatever our failures or disappointments, personal or political, all things still work to the good for those who love God (whether we understand the mechanism or not). A blow to the ego can be a victory for the soul if it is met with humility, contrition, and understanding.

Audette Fulbright Fulson is an ordained Unitarian minister in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Reﬂections on a Contemplative Life in Action

Franciscan author Richard Rohr captures the “contem-

We’ve invited eight friends of the Hermitage

to reﬂect upon how their own practice of

“contemplation in action” lives itself out in their own commitments and experience.

plation in action” theme of this newsletter very well

when he writes, “If our prayer runs deep, our whole view of the world will gradually change from fear to connection because we no longer live inside our fragile and encapsulated self anymore. In contemplation we are moving from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being driven to being drawn. We will go back to our life of action with new vitality.”

Over the years this is what our contemplative time at the Hermitage has given us as we have walked the Hermitage’s winding road, rested on its benches which expand vistas both outer and inner, sat quietly in the chapel, and absorbed the pervasive silence.

Upon early retirement from careers in education, we began

to volunteer in the development of aﬀordable housing

for families living in substandard conditions in Santa Cruz

County. Then we moved on to the same kind of work in

Central America, work which involved publicity, fundraising, and organizing teams from the U.S. who worked on housing projects in Guatemala.

For three weeks in November I visited Standing Rock,

As we grew older, we retired from that demanding work,
North Dakota. The months-long protest of the oil pipeline but not from outreach to those in need. We’ve moved into was rising to a peak as the pipeline’s completion drew near prison ministry and continue to lead meditation groups for and public attention grew. Snow hadn’t yet fallen on the northern plains, and the camp was bustling as it prepared for winter and for stopping the pipeline. inmates at Soledad State Prison.