Excerpt from
The Privilege of Love
Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality
Peter-Damian Belisle, O.S.B. Cam., Editor
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: A Vision in Context

Overview of Camaldolese History and Spirituality

Part Two: Sustaining the Spirit

An Image of the Praying Church: Camaldolese Liturgical Spirituality

Lectio Divina and Monastic Theology in Camaldolese Life

Monastic Wisdom: The Western Tradition

Part Three: Configurations of a Charism

The Threefold Good: Romualdian Charism and Monastic Tradition

Koinonia: The Privilege of Love

Psychological Investigations and Implications for Living Together Alone

Golden Solitude

A Wild Bird, with God in the Center: The Hermit in Community

The Camaldolese in Dialogue: Ecumenical and Interfaith Themes in the History of the Camaldolese Benedictines

The Camaldolese Oblate Program: History, Tradition, Charism

Concluding Remarks

Camaldoli’s Recent Journey and Its Prospects

Bibliography for the Study of Camaldolese History and Spirituality

Contributors

Index

Introduction

Michael Downey

"It is a small place. But it opens up to a universal space." While I was visiting Camaldoli in the hills of Tuscany, this is how Bernardino Cozzarini, superior of the Camaldolese community there, described the Holy Hermitage several miles up the road. His few words spoken in faltering, broken English, may indeed convey the richness and the depth of the Camaldolese Benedictine spirit: These men and women are hermits living by a monastic rule, committed to both solitude and community life, giving witness to the magnitude of God’s love loose in the world.

Are they hermits? Or are they monks? There is a difference. And the Camaldolese are both. Their life combines a strong measure of solitude and silence that is cultivated, nurtured, and sustained through the discipline of living alone in a hermitage. But they embrace the Rule of St. Benedict, praying and working day by day alongside others in a community of brothers or sisters. Theirs is a rich heritage, unique in the Church. This particular form of life makes provision for the deep human need for solitude as well as for life shared alongside others in pursuit of a noble purpose. But because their life is ordered to a threefold good, the discipline of solitude and the rigors of community living are in no sense isolationist or self-serving. Rather, both of these goods are intended to widen the heart in service of the third good: The Camaldolese bears witness to the superabundance of God’s love as the self, others, and every living creature are brought into fuller communion in the one Love.

The flourishing of different kinds of spiritualities has been one of the greatest riches of the post-conciliar Church. In earlier periods, "spirituality" and the "spiritual life" were sometimes thought to be the prerogative of vowed religious, monks, nuns, and clergy. It is now more commonly recognized that the Spirit is awash in a variety of life forms, and that all the baptized are called to the fullness of Christian life, indeed a life of holiness. And Christian holiness is found in the perfection of charity—the flourishing of love by which we share in the communion of the three in one Love. Indeed the life of love is a privilege, for it is in and through love that we participate in the divine life itself, the very life of God whose name above all other names is Love (1 John 4:16).

One of the great achievements of the century just past was its return to the sources of Christian faith and life. It is because of this resourcissement that we now have a deeper appreciation of the monastic impulse that runs long, deep, and strong in the Christian tradition, and well beyond it. What’s more, in its Christian expressions monasticism is, at its origins, a lay movement. In no small measure, it is this realization that has led to a renewed interest in monastic spirituality on the part of people in all walks of life. Further, of late, there has been a resurgence of interest in those Christian spiritual traditions that place less emphasis on the communal dimensions of the monastic impulse and more on the importance of aloneness, silence, and solitude in all spiritual growth and development.

Perhaps the most significant Catholic spiritual writer of the twentieth century is Gethsemani’s most celebrated son, Thomas Merton. His own spiritual heritage as a Trappist Cistercian is decidedly cenobitic, communal. But Merton himself dug deeply into the sources of that heritage to retrieve the currents of the eremitic, solitary life, within it. It may well be that the reason for Merton’s enormous influence lies in his ability to articulate the struggle to combine these two irreducible elements of the mature spiritual quest. The "cenobitic" and the
"eremitic," evocative of the monk and the hermit to be found at the core of the deepest self of each one of us, are blended in a distinctive fashion in the particular form of life that is the Camaldolese way.

The enduring image of Merton in our own time is not that of the monk in choir singing the divine office together with his brothers in community, but of the solitary figure of "the hermitage years," whose aloneness as well as his struggles with human relationships opened him up and out to the wider world awaiting a word of unrestricted mercy. It is intriguing to note that as Merton’s commitment to the life of solitude deepened, he became more and more open to the religions of the East. In his desire to combine the cenobitic and eremitic strands of the monastic impulse, as well as in his ecumenical and interreligious sensibility, Merton’s life is deeply resonant with the spirit of the Camaldolese. In both we recognize that solitude and the privilege of loving relation widen the human heart so it may be brought into a deepening, eternal communion in one Love.

Merton is impossible to pigeonhole. And so are the Camaldolese. As this collection of essays demonstrates, there are many paths on the Camaldolese way. This is a charism quite varied in expression. The diversity of expression is itself a manifestation of the magnitude of God’s creating, animating, bonding Love. This bonding is the Spirit’s own gift, weaving together the many voices found in these pages—voices of women and men, of monk, hermit, and layperson, from Camaldoli in the hills of Tuscany and from Camaldoli’s most fruitful seed sown in the United States—New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. The voices speak of historical roots and ecumenical routes, of the gold which is found in solitude and the grit of community life which is the test of its purity, of the psychological strength required in any serious pursuit of God as well as the weakness and vulnerability of the human heart which is the home for wisdom’s Word.

It is a singular delight for me to introduce this collection of essays. Although I do not know the Camaldolese all that well, I have had occasion to share in their life of solitude and community, both at New Camaldoli in Big Sur, California, as well as at Camaldoli in the Tuscan hills. Theirs is a distinguished heritage. But it is little known in the United States. Because of the initiative, coordination and editorial skill of Peter-Damian Belisle, o.s.b. Cam., and due to the ongoing commitment of The Liturgical Press to a fuller appreciation of monastic traditions, the riches of Camaldolese Benedictine spirituality are here made available to a wide readership in the English-speaking world for the first time.

Why the abiding appeal of the monk? Of the hermit? Because each seeks in a distinctive way to live in the presence of God. Above all else. It is this for which every heart longs. This is the deepmost of the deepest human desires—to listen long and lovingly to the beating of the heart of God. But our own deepest desires are unrecognized, unnamed, unclaimed if we are strangers in that country whose name is "solitude." Yet the very God for whom we long is the God who is toward us, for us, with us, in us and in every living creature. Our destiny is to be brought into communion, to live in right relationship with others and, in so doing, to be made holy by the presence and power of the Spirit. Thus, by living in the grace of this holy communion, whose very seedbed is the solitude in which we know ourselves to be in loving relation, we bear testimony to the enduring privilege of being in love with Love itself, which is first and finally Love’s own gift to us.