Author: Rhys Tranter

Rhys Tranter is a writer based in Cardiff, Wales, UK. He is the author of Beckett's Late Stage (2018), and his work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, and a number of books and periodicals. He holds a BA, MA, and a PhD in English Literature.

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Dorotheus of Gaza, quoted in an entry from Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary:

“Don’t look for the affection of your neighbor. He who looks for it is troubled when he does not get it. You yourself, however, have to give witness to the love for your neighbor and to offer him rest, and thus you will bring your neighbor to love.”

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A short passage from this morning’s Office of Readings in the Breviary (Friday, Week 10 of Ordinary Time):

“It is medicine for our spiritual health. Whoever reads it will find in it a medicine to cure the wounds caused by his own particular passions. Whoever studies it deeply will find it a kind of gymnasium open for all souls to use, where the different psalms are like different exercises set out before him. In that gymnasium, in that stadium of virtue, he can choose the exercises that will train him best to win the victor’s crown.

If someone wants to study the deeds of our ancestors and imitate the best of them, he can find a single psalm that contains the whole of their history, a complete treasury of past memories in just one short reading.”

— From the discourses of St Ambrose on the Psalms

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Author Robert Pirsig and his son Chris in 1968
Author Robert Pirsig and his son Chris in 1968

While packing for a trip I pick up an old book I haven’t read for a long time. It’s a 1976 edition of Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery.

It documents a sabbatical year that the Dutch-born priest and teacher spent at the Cistercian Trappist Abbey of Genesee on New York State, immersing himself in a life of silence, prayer, and manual labour.

The book is enjoyable for its many humorous observations about Nouwen’s daily life, and also for its psychological clarity on the issues he struggles with in this environment.

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“You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince” (Ps 82:6-7)

Xavier Beauvois’s 2010 film, Of Gods and Men, begins with this ominous epitaph from the eighty-second psalm. It is to be a portent of the narrative’s themes of death and dignity, explored in conversation with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.

Br Amédée (Jacques Herlin) and Br Luc (Michael Lonsdale)

The film is based on the true story of a community of Cistercian monks at the Monastery Notre-Dame de l’Atlas (Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas) in Tibhirine, Algeria. As you might imagine, my remarks here will reveal key details of the plot and references to the real historical events.

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Thomas Merton’s hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani

A beautiful day. We rise early. I head out into the rain and collect coffee and pastries.

Later, as the sun comes out, we go walking until late into the afternoon.

After Mass, we listen to the sounds of birds and traffic, and settle down for a quiet evening. I read this in Thomas Merton’s journals:

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A quiet evening reading from Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, first published in 1923:

“[The Psalter] is the most excellent of Prayer-books wherein we find in a language that always lives and never grows old, the most beautiful expressions of admiration, adoration, filial reverence, gratitude and love, together with the most ardent supplications, midst situations the most varied and trying […] To read and reread them, to ponder them and make their sentiments our own is surely a highly sanctifying occupation.”

— Adolphe Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology