The Return Of The Monk
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Years ago, inspired by the movie Brother Sun Sister Moon, I became enamored with all
things monastic. Franco Zeffirelli's beautifully rendered, albeit romanticized, depiction of
Francis of Assisi as a 13th century social misfit akin to the hippies of the early 1970's
resonated with me in a manner deep enough to ripple through the succeeding years.
I was a college student at the time, living quarter-to-quarter off government loans
supplemented by a small stipend that allowed me the luxury of a book or two each month. On
the day I rode my bicycle down to the local theater in Pasadena I knew little about Francis
and nothing about the movie The advertisement in the arts and entertainment section of the
newspaper had drawn my eye. The title, the juxtaposition of sun and moon, brother and
sister had a spiritual quality that distilled themes rustling through my consciousness at the
time: nature, spirituality, community. As it turned out, the film marked my introduction to one
of history's most irrepressible figures and awakened my inner monk, an alter-ego whose
childlike faith, simplicity and eternal perspective stood in stark contrast to the pressures and
pursuits of materialism and its discontents.
Over the next several months I acquainted myself with Giovanni Francesco Bernardone. I
bought The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a collection of excerpts compiled in the late 14th
century (Francis died in 1226 AD). I rode my bicycle into the ravines above the college,
walking the creek, sitting on massive granite boulders reading in the warm sun, splashing the
waters of the stream over my body. These communes with nature were both sensual and
spiritual in the way that holiness has the capacity to catch up earth and spirit in the same
breath, the seen and the unseen. I shed my clothes and read The Little Flowers under the
caressing sun pouring down over the San Gabriel Mountains.
For a brief season, from late winter through mid-spring, the life, the ethos, of Francis, God's
troubadour, swirled about me. What sense did it make to chase dreams that left me
exhausted, disillusioned and spiritually atrophied? What kind of meaning could I expect from
a life lived exclusively for my own interests? What did I owe the poor, the disenfranchised,
the guy next door? What ultimate good came from pursuing earthly goods at the expense of
my soul?
Instead of working to keep up with the lead pack in the struggle to acquire life's goods,
Francis purposely dropped back to care for the sick, the wounded, the dying. To pour
oneself out like that, counterintuitive a few weeks earlier, appeared not only rational but
vitally necessary to becoming whole.
To clarify my convictions, I made a novice's attempt at the monastic disciplines of meditation
and contemplation, seeking to still the din of incessant mind chatter and get to the heart of
what ought to matter in life. And as I did, strange, new feelings began to arise. I felt peace,
rest, the first shoots of a joy I hadn't felt in years.
For aproximately six weeks I was as whole as I'd been in a long time.
Gradually, other concerns arose. The exigencies of life came calling. There were broken
relationships and their aftermath of agony and regret lived at the painstakingly slow rate a
heart heals. School pressed in. The college moved from Pasadena to a promontory
overlooking the blue Pacific in San Diego. There were books to read: Christ and Culture by
Niebuhr ; The Kingdom of God by John Bright. Time moved with institutional regularity.
At times the monk surfaced, urging me to slow down, learn to be still, cultivate an
appreciation for silence, work on praying more. When the material I was supposed to be
studying grew stale and disconnected, I abandoned my studies and roamed the isles of the
library looking for companions more suited to my state.
In time, worn down by studies that no longer appealed to me, lacking a vision for why I was in
school, I made the slow trek up the hill to the administration building in November of my
Senior year and dropped out. I moved into a rented house with four other students while
continuing to work in the cafeteria to save enough money to pay off the backpacking gear I
had put on layaway at a local sporting goods store.
My plan was to head to Colorado and hike the Rockies, drawing inspiration for the next
phase of my life from the clear mountain air. I worked for seven months, eventually paying off
the four hundred dollars it took to make the final payment on the Kelty backpack, sleeping
bag, tent, Galibier boots and assorted gear.
In Colorado I would spend the summer hiking the passes in Estes Park. I would walk the
streets of Aspen, Vail, Boulder. When I wanted a change I would head to Denver to visit the
museums and bookstores. More than anything, I needed time to think. Two or three months
in the Rockies would clarify matters. Once I had enough cash saved to purchase the bus
ticket and see me through an interlude of travel I would be on my way.
Never underestimate fate.
I made it as far as San Jose where I lived in a Christian community for two years. I learned to
live with others, wash dishes, work hard and survive on five dollars a week. I married,
discovered my first occupational niche in natural foods, continued to buy more books than I
could possibly read, participated in the high drama involved in a church split, bought a home,
rectified a major piece of unfinished business by completing my B.A.
Eventually, I landed a job in one of Silicon Valley's high-flying tech companies
For the next dozen years life settled into a comfortable routine. The voice of the monk
faded, lost in the rush of fifty mile commutes and days performing work I liked but never
loved. The clarity I experienced for a few weeks during that long-ago winter and spring in the
San Gabriel's dimmed, giving way to a life of least resistance; a negotiated passage through
the mundane necessities involved in surviving each day with body and soul intact, available,
if not always inspired, to fight another day.
Now, at midlife, in autumn, the monk has returned. He is speaking again, reminding me that
I'm not so very different than I was when I sat on the rocks near the creek thirty-seven years
ago reading about Francis, my head filled with visions, my heart on a quest to find a place of
meaning, of rest.
I came to the beach this morning determined to sit in my cheap beach chair and think about
that earlier time, the return of the monk and what he has to say. Specifically, my intention
was to wait quietly, meditatively, until the moment offered up something tangible, something I
could take with me - a lesson, some bit of meaning, perhaps a metaphor that linked the
clarity of that earlier time with my own deep longings for a meaningful life in middle age.
I'm recalling, though, how difficult it is to come apart, to sit, to allow quiet to still mind chatter.
When I arrived and placed my chair here in the sand I wanted peace and quiet; now, a mere
hour later, I crave a circus. So much for good intentions.
I am drawn to movement, fidgety, resistant of the waiting required to reflect at depth. Instead,
I follow the alterations in the surrounding field of blue and beige: the couple walking; the
jogger splashing through the wet sand; the lone pelican plunging into the sea; the periwinkle
umbrella off to my right; the boat motoring north three hundred yards offshore.
I close my eyes on the images but they persist against the grey-black of my cloaked vision. It
would be natural to lay my writing pad aside, fold my hands across my lap and become a
spectator. Observation is a prelude to the writing life. This is a truth I could tell myself. The
thought hangs in the salty air. Perhaps I need a walk. A walk could jar my feet loose from the
sludge. I want to write, but not yet.
Diversion is hemlock to the reflective life, as poisonous as procrastination is to writing. I know
the taste. I delay engagement, preferring the ease of the uncommitted moment, the
kaleidoscope of passing curiosities. My attention is ethereal, a drifting cloud, a gust of wind.
Because I'm conditioned to a life of movement and sensory arousal, stillness and solitude,
the learned arts of choosing to sit for a time and meditate on a single line of inquiry, elude
me.
I require the hum of life’s white noise to drone on at some level of my consciousness as a
safeguard against the anxiety of feeling too solitary.
When I cease moving I allow stillness and silence do what process and time do for grape
juice – ferment the elements, coalesce the possibilities involved in the art of producing an
elixir of spirits. Cognitively, I know this to be true. Still, sitting in the chair here on Carlsbad
Beach, I resist.
Shutting down compulsion bears a cost.
Laid next to the reassuring presence of movement and sound, waiting and silence appear
tenuous. Movement and sound have been a part of my daily medication for so long it is
difficult to separate myself from their company. Resisting their companionship extracts a
price. I prepare myself for withdrawal symptoms, for the fallout ignoring their incessant
appeals will bring. To answer the questions that brought me here; to extract my meaning, I
have to become a storyteller again, a child lost in the moment, focused on the tale, oblivious
to the noises in the other room; content to be in the story.
Solitude, like writing or the pursuit of contemplative time, is beset with invitations to be
elsewhere; to hear other sounds, to think other thoughts, to see other images than the
familiar ones that make up the common experiences of everyday life. In trailing after the new,
the novel, I miss the richness of the common: the wind stirring the lace curtain; the back of
the chair in sunlight; the ladybug on the spring leaf; the subtle way one hand reaches for
another on a warm evening; this stretch of beach with its people and shorebirds, shells and
rocks, all so common and alike as to be, in my distractedness, dull.
Ultimately, solitude is a path to a higher prize - a congruent self, a way of being in which what
I feel and how I act are in harmony.
Francis, I felt, knew this authenticity, this congruency between his private and public lives.
The search for an authentic self is the Holy Grail of our time. On the surface it appears
adventurous, akin to a journey to the source of the Amazon or an expedition to unearth the
contents of an ancient Egyptian tomb. At mid-life, I recognize the quest for an authentic self
is complex work. It is brutal labor of the excavation kind, calling for the removal of layer upon
layer of sedimentary debris; the incrustations of false pursuits and illusory identities.
Sitting and waiting is part of my plan of approach. If I sit long enough, the festival of
distractions will play itself out. Eventually, the false will become apparent. What is
fundamental will remain, the contours of an elusive, true self.
The focused seeker, the monk for instance, realizes that life is too noisy, too cluttered, too
mindlessly busy to ever answer the deep quest for God the heart demands. The world must
be disciplined away, one trait or attachment at a time. Those who train for the life of spirit
know the culture at large with its propensity to elevate the sensual, the silly, the foolish to
altars of devotion can never be a cradle for the pursuit of their true, actual selves.
So they remove themselves from the numbing culture. They retreat, if only for a handful of
minutes, into a closet; the corner of a couch; a bed with the covers pulled up against the
early morning chill; their car on the way to work; a lonely leaf-strewn path through a park; a
beach like the one before me.
They come away in order to seek presence; the now; the actual.
Actual. The word is intriguing. It comes to us through layers of Middle English, Old French
and Latin, where agere meant “to drive, do.” To be actual carries with it the notion of
intentional existence as differentiated from potential existence. Because discipline strips
away affect and prop and forces me into the moment, discipline and actuality are
experientially related. If I have failed to live an actual life it is because I lacked the requisite
character required to engage discipline long enough to allow it to pare me down to my
essence. By its nature discipline separates truth from fiction.
When I discipline myself; that is, when I choose a path and trade time normally spent in other
activities or pursuits to walk that path, my actual and potential selves meet. It is this capacity
for unifying these seemingly disparately selves that gives discipline its unitive power.
I imagine myself a writer; a musician. Until I pick up the pen, or take my instrument out of its
case, the self that would play music or write prose lives in the dream world of potentiality.
When I choose to take up the pen; when I sit with the tension of waiting for words that may
not arrive anytime soon; when I cradle my guitar on my lap and begin to work the strings in a
awkward attempt to lure music into being, I am choosing to bring imaginative potential into
the world actual existence.
Here, sitting in my beach chair with the Pacific washing up twenty yards away, I am an
unrefined novice. The fact that I know this instills the moment with an existential tenuousness:
what if, after so much evasion and settling for potential, or worse, the mere idea of potential, I
no longer hold the capacity to be actual? What if I have become my evasive self, my mask?
When I fail to drive, to do, I live in the abstract world of the dormant. Potential doesn’t
breathe; it exists as a theoretical construct, without life, force or energy. Eventually, the
failure to agere moves through my interior world like a gathering fog, obscuring my true
identity, that state of essential being and perceiving that can only be discovered through
sustained attention and disciplined effort in a consistent direction.
A few miles out to sea, the singular noise of rotors knifes through the textured sounds of the
waves. I look up, scanning the sky. A military helicopter is making its way towards Miramar,
perhaps Coronado, thirty miles south. I wonder if the phantom monk, that quieter self I've
envisioned living in some corner of my soul for decades, has enough presence to still the
frenzied anxiety of the circus spectator long enough to get beneath the choppy surface of
this sea to its meaning, its metaphors.
Our hearts are restless until they repose in Thee . . .
"Augustine is right," the monk chimes in.
I gather up my stuff, fold up the chair and begin the walk across the sand back to the stairs.
I won't argue with him. The quest for solitude, for clarity, is a manifestation of a deep longing
for relationship with the Maker of the earth, the heavens, the sand beneath my feet, that
ocean stretching out before me.
At some point, I must rendezvous there.
© Copyright Tom Mark Gilbert. All Rights Reserved.
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