anglomedved

I have been asked to continue to write about my two years in a Roman Catholic monastery thirty years ago.

It is not easy for me. Of course I could write another ‘Road to Orthodoxy’ autobiography. It would make some people feel good, might even get me into in glossy Orthodox magazine or, who knows, PravMir. But it would be cheap and wrong.

For all the ambiguities, I know that my going into the monastery was a way of trying to express a radicality that had been in me since my teens, a radicality that I knew that I had to be honest to - and I still have to. And ultimately it was probably an inability to get that radicality right that led to my leaving the monastery.

I met in the monastery a man with a radicality that more than matched mine. Dom Paul Grammont, the then abbot.

I owe an awful lot to him, especially giving me space at his monastery when few would have done so – I was not even Roman Catholic at the time. A larger-than-life man in many ways (physically and spiritually), he would have been a key religious figure in whatever culture he had been born in. He was both in the Roman Catholic church, and loyal to it, but also curiously beyond it.

He was a solitary, but his reference was the ‘solitaires’ of Port Royal rather than the desert fathers. One sensed that he had been further into God, or the human condition, than most people ever will. I think this included facing at times huge, barren stretches of emptiness – ‘nada’, to use St John of the Cross’s term which he once quoted to me when things got rough. I still have a recording of his saying the Our Father over us monks, which comes out of that depth.

That depth, I suspect, included a wound. He half-confessed it to me once in a single sentence. I do not know how much it was personal to him, or how much it is a wound that one finds, or is wounded with, at a certain depth of prayer – where the boundary between the individual and the group sub-conscious becomes porous.