Oral History Interview - Ed Bednar part 1

Recorded 4/5/2014 in Elizabeth, New Jersey

Note: Following after this edited transcript is an unedited transcript only for purposes of timecode numbers

Transcript
[Fr. Carl Arico]
The way to kind of look at it, and I think you're the holder of the story of the beginning, so let's just pause a moment and enter into the silence... Okay, my dear friend, what role does Centering Prayer have in your life? And how has that practice, or the practice that you have, impacted on your life?
[Ed Bednar]
Well, for sure it helps me to be present at the moment and in the moment. I'm finding over and over again that wonderful things keep happening. And it's only when I'm not in the moment with gratitude for what it is that I get into trouble. So I'm grateful, for example that I was able to take a hot bath this morning. I was telling you, I learned to do what we're calling now Centering Prayer from a spiritual father, Henri Nouwen at Yale Divinity School, only it was called by a different name. It was called Hesychasm or Hesychia. And this means to practice stillness, and it goes back to the desert fathers of the 4th century, and it involves meditation on the name of Jesus. And the prayer is simply, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” But in Centering Prayer to say a short prayer is good. And I think, Father Basil, Father Thomas, one of them had said to me in the very beginning when I was learning Centering Prayer, that a short prayer pierces the heart like a dart through a cloud. And so I took and I boiled down the Jesus Prayer. Well, Henri Nouwen recommended that I just say the whole Jesus Prayer is one word, ‘Merci.’ ‘Merci’ in French means ‘thank you.’ It means, “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me this hot bath in the morning. It was so refreshing. Thank you, Jesus, for getting me to the train this morning, on time, half an hour early.” And getting a senior discount which, you know, is wonderful when you're ahead of the game. I mean, I was very anxious about this to be honest, Father Carl, because I'm used to speaking to contemplative prayer groups where there's a lot of people in the room. But just you and Ed is…you're making me feel at home, and I like that. Thank you.
[Fr. Carl]
And how through your practice of your ‘merci’ prayer, how does that impact on your life? You gave me some examples.
[Ed]
Yeah, merci. Thank you.
[Fr. Carl]
But in general, what has it made you aware of?
[Ed]
Well, you know, I'm forgetful. I'm getting older now; I'm 70 years old. You're older even still, and you don't miss a thing. So we all age differently. I have to have my papers, Father, because I don't remember things. For example, this morning I couldn't find the keys to my car, and how am I going to get to the train station without the keys for my car? So then I go, “Merci, merci.” And you know, the thoughts arise like, “Where's the keys?” And then you let go of the thought, “Where's the keys?” and you go, “Merci.” And you know, it wasn't very long, maybe 5 minutes, and I still didn't know where the keys were, but I went to get a file to bring here today, and the keys were underneath the file. Now who did that? Who found those keys? It's all good, Father.
[Fr. Carl]
So it makes you more aware. And in your support of your prayer life, since you learned the prayer from Henri Nouwen, who supports you? I mean, is there a group that gives you support?
[Ed]
No, no, no, no. I'm a professional social worker. I have a license; I'm a professional community organizer. That's why the Centering Prayer is such a delight for me because the social architecture of the Centering Prayer is beautiful. And I would say that having constructed the ship, I'm just the one who built the ship; Thomas…people like Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating, they're the captains of the ship. And they're taking people over to the other side of the river. Like Martin Luther King would say, “We're going to cross the River Jordan and get to the other side.” Well, that's what our teachers do. But I built the ship, and I'm so happy that it served so well over 30 years now. How many souls has it taken over?
[Fr. Carl]
And your phrase you ‘built the ship.’ What do you mean by that?
[Ed]
Social architecture, a community organizer is a designer and a builder of social architecture. So I was mentioning to you before, the inspiration for this was when I spent a month, a year at Saint Joseph's Abbey in the early 1970s as a resident. And Father Basil was my Spiritual Father and Thomas Keating was my Abbot. And I lived inside the monastery, inside the enclosure within my own cell, like any, every other monk. And I was presented with the problem of when I get up at 3:00 in the morning and Mass is not until 7:00, what do you do for those four hours? And you know what I found out is the hours between 3:00 in the morning and 7:00 are just beautiful - the sunrise, walking in the cloisters. I used to walk…the monastery is on a hill looking down over a valley, highest hill in central Massachusetts. So I would go there and meditate at sunrise. And I would see the dew drops evaporate while I was meditating, and look over this valley….and I'm sorry. I get emotional because a very, very close friend who's a Zen priest died a month ago at the age of 71, which is very close to my own age. And in her memorial service there's a quote from a Buddhist monk from the 11th century [fact check: 18], Issa. And he goes, “The world is only a dewdrop that disappears. But Oh!” And the death of my dear friend Susan Young (Fact Check: Ji’ung?), the Zen priest, you know, we've known each other for 50 years; she's dead. Basil Pennington is just a dew drop. And the Centering Prayer is a teaching for how to live among the world, a world of dew drops of people that die, like the evaporation of dawn. And the dawns at Saint Joseph Abbey were extraordinary, you know…You're there in the dark with the stars and the moon, and you wait and you sit for an hour and a half. And slowly, this sky…do you know, this time, it's really God's time. This sky gets its first grey and you can hear birds. There's a quiet zone that travels across the world, I’m convinced, and it passes maybe from 3:00 till 5:30 or so. Then you start hearing birds and you can hear the world waking up, squirrels making noises, and animals and monks are walking around, but you know that quiet zone in the early morning with the dew drops evaporating and the sun rising, and these dew drops look like they're made of diamonds.
[Fr. Carl]
And may I ask why you think the teaching about meditation and Centering Prayer is important for the world at this particular time? What role does Contemplative Outreach play in the world today from your viewpoint?
[Ed]
Boy, you're right on target, Father. Of course, you know my favorite book is Contemplation in the World of Action. And my favorite chapter there is the last chapter on prospects for monastic life. And there he talks about communities like the Little Brothers of Jesus who go in amongst the poorest of the poor. And they have sacraments, they have liturgy, they have a meditative, conduct a meditative life. But they also work in factories the way the poor do,and I think they are a sign of the presence of Christ among us. So that's the future, small communities who live a contemplative life and also in the world. Like for example the way I was able to call you from the bus stop today. There was a black woman with a big bag waiting along side of me, and I didn't have a phone. And so I introduced myself and she was very kind to me; she let me use her phone. She said, “Now you don't worry. He's going to be here before you know it, so don't you worry.” And I'm going through files, papers, reading my journals; you know I've got 50 journals. I only brought three and I won't even have a chance to look at one. And she said, “Don't you worry now. That Father Arico, he's coming. Probably be a black car.” She was right; I think it is a black color, right? Dark, a clergy car, and I feel good in clergy cars because, well, my uncle was a priest, a Byzantine priest, Father Bob. He had a Jeep, and he worked among miners in Alaska. And this is the Byzantine liturgy, St. Cyril and Methodius. And it is the Slavonic rite, the rite of the Jesus Prayer, right straight line to the desert fathers. And the Byzantine liturgy is very beautiful, especially if you have a wonderful voice like you or Henri Nouwen or my uncle Father Robert Valusek on my mother's side.
And the miners loved him in Alaska. He had a watch that was made out of a gold nugget that the miners gave him because they loved his liturgies. There were a lot of Czechoslovakian people in Alaska because of the proximity to Russia. And the Byzantine rite was very, very strong in Pennsylvania where my family came from. I had a nun who's my aunt, and she's a great mentor. She's not famous, neither am I, but she lived to be a nun to the age of 90. I've seen the nuns here with their canes and their walkers; they get old and they get really sweet and really nice. Sister Bernard, my aunt, Sister Bernard, she loved the fact that I was meditating and teaching people how to meditate. I taught her how to meditate and how to do the Centering Prayer. She said, “I've been doing this all my life!”
[Fr. Carl]
OK, so the image of the future is the small groups.
[Ed]
The past. Yeah, the desert fathers. It's like the…
[Ray Mueller]
Stand up. I'm going to switch your chair around because I notice there's a squeak.
[Ed]
Yeah, yeah. I move around a lot. I'm sorry. It's because….
[Ray]
Here, this will be better. This would be better.
[Ed]
Yeah. We don't have to start all over again, do we?
[Ray]
No, no, no, no. I know Father Carl has his next question for you.
[Fr. Carl]
Yeah. So when I ask about Contemplative Outreach, what impact does it have on the world, if it is the fact of encouraging individuals and small communities to…?
[Ed]
Find God in the moment. In this moment now like I'm talking to you. Where's God? And to me, God's the ‘merci’ part, you know, moment to moment. That's where God shows up. Merci, thank you.
[Fr. Carl]
Ray, is there anything else we could ask him in regard to our four classic questions?
[Ray]
Hmm.
[Ed]
Does that explain to you how I do Centering Prayer, for how I approach Centering?
[Fr. Carl]
Yeah, I think so.
[Ed]
I could say…I want to say one other thing that might help you as a metaphor. The Byzantine liturgy of the Jesus Prayer, as you know, has an iconostasis, and behind the iconostasis…
[Fr. Carl]
What is an iconostasis?
[Ed]
It's a door, a gold door. And behind….
[Fr. Carl]
On the altar.
[Ed]
It separates the altar from the community, and…
[Fr. Carl]
Start that again and explain it, because folks won't know.
[Ed]
In the Eastern rite, the Byzantine church separates the community, the parish, the people of the parish from the priest at the altar because he faces God; he doesn't face the people. He prays on behalf of the people to God. And in fact, there's an iconostasis which is gold doors. And so the prayers of the priests and what he says in Slavonic….High Church Slavonic comes like a sound. The chanting through the prayers and I'm not good, but you wouldn't know how to do it. My Father Bob would. But they're beautiful words through the prayers of the Mother of God. Save us. Save us all. Repeat it in my original language, which is High Church Slavonic. And so it's a mystery. I don't know these words, but they sound like godly sounds and you're smelling incense. There's a lot of incense, and it smells like perfume. It smells like heaven, and it fills the room and you feel like you're in a cloud…..And you can't see the priest very well because he's behind gold doors, and he's standing up on an altar, and he's praying to God on behalf of the people. And you know, I think it's wonderful that the priest has turned around now since Vatican 2, and he faces the people. I think it's wonderful, but there were good things about the old ways. You know, I don't think….and Merton said we must - Thomas Merton. I was the director of the Merton Center, and he said we must retain what is good in the old ways of the Church, of the Church of tradition, of the Church of our fathers, while being open to fresh air and sunlight, of the new world. So that's why I love this particular book, Contemplation in a World of Action. And when I was studying the Jesus Prayer and Hesychia, Hesychasm, the prayer of the heart, the prayer of stillness with Henri Nouwen, he would just stop sometimes and be quiet before he said anything else. And that was helpful to me because we felt….he would appreciate the words that I was saying, but he also could hear the silence between the words. And you know, I think when you breathe in….I don't know if you've noticed it, but I do the prayer of the heart. I would call it a prayer of ‘ruach,’ the breath, you know, the Hebrew word for spirit. You know, you're a priest. Ruach means breath, and there's a Greek word, ‘pneuma’ means breath, spirit, breath, same thing. So I do the Centering Prayer with the breath, while breathing in, breathing out. And if you watch the breath closely, and you're saying ‘merci’ a trillion times a day, you notice that there's a space between the in breath and the out breath where the world stops. It's not just breathing in and breathing out. It stops. And especially if you do the Jesus Prayer or the Centering Prayer a lot, like for an hour. It becomes very still, like this chair doesn't move at all, and that's wonderful, that silence between the words. Merton said near the end of his life, “I know my place. It is between the in and the out breath of contemplative life.” So you know, he's my guide, and I was telling you before while we were talking that I feel like Merton was the horse that pulled the cart of contemplative life all the way from 1944 when I was born to 1968. He was there like and, you know, he walked like a bull. You know, he used to….It's difficult for me to sit in this chair because they say Merton would walk in the cloister like [clap, clap,clap.] He really meant it. And he hit the ground because he had a lot of energy. And he had a powerful mind, and the spirit was flowing through him like a fire hose. And I mean, the guy only lived to be 53 years old. He published 70 books and he joined the monastery when he was 33 [Fact check 26]. 70 books, Seven Story Mountain. He didn't write it because he wanted to; his Abbott Dom Frederick said, “Merton, I've seen your journal and I order you to write. While the other monks are cutting grass, I want you to be writing in your journal.” You know, in ‘84, I know by ‘84 when we started Contemplative Outreach, he had sold 3 million copies. And he never got a penny. Never got a penny because the money went to the Abbey of Gethsemane. It went into cheese, it went into monks’ bread, it went into cutting the grass and it paid for guys like me to sit on the hill and watch the sunrise. And the dew drops disappear. So you know, I'm thankful to Merton and people like Thomas and Basil that are out there in the world offering this little dew drop of silence called Centering Prayer.
[Fr. Carl]
Thank you. Ray, anything else that you would think you want to ask Ed before we begin with the year 1968?
[Ray]
No, I can't think of anything.
[Fr. Carl]
Excellent wonder. Well, OK, we're going to launch into your 1968 and the first phase of that is Martin Luther King.
[Ed]
Yes. First of all, I want to say that 1968 was the worst year of my life, and it was the best year of my life. It was the worst year because all my heroes were killed. All my heroes died. I was out there marching with Father Groppi in Milwaukee when I was writing about the parable of the mustard seed. The Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a tiny seed. I thought of us demonstrating with Father Groppi, thousands of mustard seeds, millions of mustard seeds marching on the streets in Milwaukee in favor of civil rights. Black and white and so forth, so I was writing on the parable of mustard seed. I wrote my thesis on how the mustard seed is the tiniest of seeds. This one passage in Newman [Cardinal John] and I wrote a whole thesis because these particles are the smallest of seeds. And yet they grow to be a great tree, and we don't know how; we're sleeping in the dark and it's growing. The mustard seed is growing, and it becomes a great tree, and the birds of the air can rest in its branches. There's a physicist named David Bohm. He said that at the beginning of the universe, the one we know through physics, that there was perfect symmetry in the universe, but it was concentrated. The whole universe was concentrated into a small ball that was maybe the size of golf ball. And the whole universe was concentrated. It was extremely dense, extremely heavy, but it was perfectly symmetrical. Right? Perfectly symmetrical the way God is perfectly perfect. So this physicist David Bohm says at the beginning of the universe, the universe was perfectly symmetrical, very small, very small. And then it exploded, called The Big Bang, and that broke the perfect symmetry of this dense particle called the mustard seed of the universe, and everything is exploding outward ever since, planets, stars, all this, and it's all going away from us very, very rapidly, very rapidly. So this mustard seed thing seemed very important to me, especially when Nouwen said the mustard seed is the Hesychia, the prayer of stillness, the Jesus Prayer. For me, merci, that's just a seed. It's nothing else but a seed. But look what these seeds have produced. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of heaven….” This is Jesus we're talking about, said that the Kingdom of heaven is likened unto a tiny seed that grows in the dark and becomes a great tree. Well, look at the church. Look what this tiny seed has produced, my heroes, Thomas Merton, Father Basil Pennington, Keating. Keating's the last one standing. So I think that's very precious to me. And I feel like you're asking the questions, and they're good questions. You know, you are asking good questions. And I know that Thomas Keating has these questions too, because the beauty of prayer is not the answer to the prayer. It's the question. When you say ‘merci,’ there's no answer. It's just….
[Fr. Carl]
So 1968, the worst year of your life.
[Ed]
Worst year in that….Thank you for bringing me back, and I'll do that. First thing was April, Martin Luther King. He's just trying to help out the garbage workers, the sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. And he's going to lead a demonstration the next day. He's at a hotel in Memphis called the Lorraine Hotel. And he's up there and getting ready for this demonstration and he's killed. Shot. The day before he was shot, this is the day before he was shot; listen to me. He said in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3rd at the Church of God in Christ his final words. His final words before he died in public, final words in public.”Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now.” Could you help me out and read this? Just read that what he said because I'm still grieving for those, for that, for that loss. I'm not done with that.
[Fr. Carl]
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he allows me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over there. And I've seen the promised land. I will not get there with you, but I want you to know that we are as people. We'll get there to the promised land. So I am happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything and not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
[Ed]
Great words. These are great words and I can't read them without breaking up. And they say it's bad to cry in front of a camera because then they'll think you're flaky. I don't care because we haven't seen another like him in my lifetime since he died, and I just like to read the end of it. Like, what are you saying in this black AAVA, which I will not try to imitate, but try to get to the feeling, my feeling. That I might not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people we will get to the promised land. That's Centering Prayer. Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington and Thomas Merton said, “You know, we might not get there. But we as people, we're going to get there. Just persevere, you know, don't give up. Don't give up. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Now, I can't pretend to emphasize the feeling, but I'm feeling what he felt. You know, I'm feeling that…righteousness. And that passion. And that's what he gave us. Gave us his life. So then that year, that bear of a year, that lion of the year goes on. But I would say it's the best of years and the worst of years because Senator Kennedy, Ted [Fact Check: Robert] Kennedy had just won the primary in California. This was on June 14th [ Fact Check: 5th], 1968. Carl, you and I are old enough to remember that. Well probably, and because all of us of our generation have that image burned into our minds of our next President, for sure, Bobby Kennedy laying on the ground of the Ambassador Hotel, bleeding from a mortal wound to the head. And don't know....He might have been saying a few things, but he had a rosary. Somebody put a rosary in his hand, and so I like to think that he died with his thought on God the way Gandhi did. You know the last word that Gandhi said when he was assassinated was….He called out God's name very loud. Very brave, you just call out the name of God. And you know, in thinking of Robert Kennedy with that rosary in his hand tells me that there is mercy. You know, in this world….this world will break your heart and kill you, but there's mercy. There's kindness because underneath it all, doing God's will is the the only thing that is right and good. So then I have a few quotes if you'll permit me to read. His funeral was in Saint Patrick's Cathedral which is, as we know, a stronghold of Irish Catholicism since before the Indians almost. And his younger brother Teddy talking, and he really looked up to Robert. Robert, you know, after JFK, John Kennedy died, Robert Kennedy was the ‘go to’ man. 11 [Fact check: 9] children, are you kidding me? And they're all out there doing things - good things. So his father [Fact check: brother] died with the Catholic rosary and his brother [Fact check: JFK?]. Teddy says beneath it all, he tried to engender a social conscience. There were people who were poor. They needed a helping hand. So you know one of the last speeches Bobby gave, he said he quotes his brother. Bobby says…. These words are so powerful that I think I might fall off the chair reading. They're so powerful, but I'm going to give it a try. “It is from numberless acts of diverse courage and belief that human history is shaped.” And isn't that true? It is from diverse acts of courage and belief that human history has been shaped. Robert Kennedy stood for that. He's saying that before he died. He says every man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice. In so doing, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. Everything, like just me, and there's a lovely lady sitting, waiting for my ride. And she's being kind to me and that gives me hope. That little act of kindness to me, an old guy who's nervous, and he's got all these pieces of paper and he doesn't see. It's such an honor to speak the words of Robert Kennedy that I feel incapacitated, and she's kind to me. So I think I can do it, you know? And so because she was the kind of lady that Robert Kennedy was trying to reach out to, you know; she had an inexpensive phone. It wasn't working so well, but she worked really hard to make it work so I could call Father Carl, and we got through to you. So he says each of these acts to improve the the lot of others or strike out against injustice, sends out a tiny ripple of hope, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy, centers of energy and daring, centers of energy and daring. These ripples build a current, a mighty current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression. Now isn't that good? And isn't that true that we, when we're doing our Centering Prayer like the Little Brothers of Jesus or Charles de Foucauld when he was in the desert with his small community living among the poorest people on Earth? You know that when we sit and do our prayer, something's happening. And it's going to make the world better. Don't know how. Don't know why. But when you see the world through the eyes of merci, you can kill me. I'm not afraid. So he concluded by saying, My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, but to be remembered simply as a good and decent man. Not a senator, not a wealthy kid, but a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it.” Now they're Centering right there. We're all suffering and Centering…doing Centering Prayer, praying the Prayer of the Heart, of Hesychasm, of stillness, of just seeing how merci comes with each breath, with each moment. “A good and decent man who saw the wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it. Who saw war and gave his life trying to stop it.” I mean, you know, you're rich; you're a senator. And this guy, he would speak, would be the the only white person in Detroit when everybody wanted to tear the city down at the time of Martin Luther King's death, assassination. He got up there. He stood up, the only black [Fact check: white] person among thousands, and he stood up on top of his car, his car, and he had a bullhorn. And he said to those people who wanted to tear that city apart because their leader had been assassinated, and he said…His words were, “Oh, I think I know how you feel, because I lost a brother that way too. But we're not to give in to anger. We're not to give in to violence because this is the United States of America, and there's hope for the future. There's hope for black people because we're standing together here just like I did with Martin Luther King, just like I did with Cesar Chavez. And just like I'm standing here with you tonight.” And he had no bodyguards; he would then shake hands with people. They'd tear off his cufflinks they loved him so much. He was not afraid. He was not afraid. Now, why was he not afraid? Father, you tell me. Tell me. I don't know how; how could somebody be so brave? I do not understand it.
[Fr. Carl]
He knew he wasn't the fixed point of reference.
[Ed]
Yes, he was a fixed point of reference. He was a fixed point of reference.
[Fr. Carl]
But he knew he wasn't. He knew he wasn't the fixed point of reference.
[Ed]
Oh yes, in this.
[Fr. Carl]
Because he was relying on something greater than himself.
[Ed]
He wasn't a Kennedy when he was standing up there, no.
[Fr. Carl]
He's a child of God's.
[Ed]
Child of God he was. He was a Catholic with a rosary. He wasn't afraid, wasn't afraid to die. Before he entered public life, he dealt with a long time. I know Kennedy very well. I worked…. I'm a community organizer. I did lobbying for things like Contemplative Outreach in the Congress and I worked closely with his brother, Teddy. And Teddy was a lion of the Senate. You know, whether you're Democrats, whether you're Republicans, everybody respected Teddy. And. whatever you….you know, he wasn't perfect. I'm not perfect either. I mean, look at me. I couldn't find my keys going here today. And the Centering Prayer helped me out because when I asked for mercy, I got it. Didn't even know they were under my notes. And that's how the world goes. You know, if you're not afraid, it works.
[Fr. Carl]
And this is one of the gifts that Centering Prayer gives to a person.
[Ed]
Yes, it is, yes, certainly. And you know it does. It's not like a bromide; it's not like Xanax. It's not like a pill; it's not a tranquilizer. It's the opposite of a tranquilizer; it helps you to be brave.
[Fr. Carl]
So in 1968 we had the experience of Martin Luther King, 1968 Bobby Kennedy.
[Ed]
And Bobby. And the big one…
[Fr. Carl]
And then your last one, because these three men were your inspiration.
[Ed]
For the rest of my life.
[Fr. Carl]
And also to empower you to consider a proposal for Contemplative Outreach that was given birth to many years later when you're able to make people hear about it. And your third person who is who?
[Ed]
Yes, you know.
[Fr. Carl]
Thomas Merton. So tell me about your friend Thomas Merton and how that inspired you.
[Ed]
Well, I feel like…this is going to sound weird, but I feel like he's with us today. I'm the same way; I'm like him. When I walk, I pound the ground with my feet and I bump into things and I have accidents. I mean, having a fan fall into the bathtub like it did with Merton, that could happen to me just as well. And I'm full of ideas, and they pour out of me, and just like Merton had Dom Frederick and the structure of the Trappist Order to hold him down to Earth, I need that too.
[Fr. Carl]
Do you have a special quote from Merton that you like?
[Ed]
Yes, I do. I have one that I love and I don't have to look at my notes. Merton died in Bangkok, and he was speaking on the contemplative experience at the very heart of Le Dialogue Monastik at the Interreligious Monastic Dialogue. In other words monks and nuns, meeting from all over the world, the best and the brightest. Dom John Leclair [Fact check: Richard?], you know brilliant minds, Basil Pennington, wonderful people, Buddhist guests. Merton had just seen the Dalai Lama before going there, and the Dalai Lama said that Merton is like the Dalai Lama for Christians, you know. And he even told me…. I asked the Dalai Lama because I worked with him for several years and I asked him, “Well, what? How shall I pray?” And he said, “You know how to pray because Thomas Merton is your Catholic lama. He's your holy man. Just do what he says.” And I thought that was wonderful. The Dalai Lama told me that. And it only reinforced what I already knew was true, that we have everything that we need when we pray to live. So you're looking at me like where's the quote? And the quote is before he died. I know, you're waiting; you're patient. So before he died, Merton said….this is like he was writing in his journal; he wrote a journal called the Asian Journal. And he said that the milk of the tiger is so powerful it shatters the bowl. He was electrocuted the next week, but he said, “The milk of the tiger is so powerful that it shatters the bowl.” Now to me, that's amazing that he would say that and write that in his journal shortly before his death. What does it mean ‘the milk of the tiger?’ That's the spiritual life. And what does shattering the bowl mean? If you don't know the answer to that, I can't tell you. Right? I mean my bowl got shattered just by losing things. I mean, how are you going to get to Newark, New Jersey if you can't find your car keys? And yeah, that was like a a major shattering of my bowl, and it happens to me all the time like that. I couldn't find the photographs that I wanted to put into your cam of pictures of Thomas Merton, but we got through it. And so here's Merton and he writes this wonderful manifesto about the place of monastic life in the modern world, putting forth that there should be contemplation in a world of action, holding up Little Brothers of Jesus and the model Charles de Foucauld in the desert, living among the poorest of the poor, combining a life of prayer and sacraments with service to the poorest of the poor, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I ran conferences which Mother Teresa participated in. I was running these conferences where Buddhist and Christian contemplatives got together in support of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, and I wasn't crossing over to the other side. We were very clear that we are a coalition of interfaith people, people of faith trying to stop the arms race, trying to stop war. And so I asked Daniel Berrigan. For those of you who aren't old like me, Daniel Berrigan is in his 90s now. He's a Jesuit and he lives….he has an apartment in Upper New York with a community of nuns. And as a matter of fact, I was doing this piece on peace and justice. But it doesn't pay much so Daniel got me a small efficiency with the nuns on upper 90th and Broadway and 100th maybe, close to the Merton Center so I could walk to work. And I said, “Well, who's going to spearhead this March?” And he knows I love Thomas Merton, and I'm working at the Thomas Merton Center. And Dan Berrigan says, “Thich Nhat Hanh.” And Merton had also written near the end of his life, Nhat Hanh is my brother. He wrote a very wonderful essay about how we're both monks. We do the same life. We live the same practice, so I'm saying to you in a book, I'm saying to you publicly Nhat Hanh is my brother. This is, you know….he was coming out of the Eisenhower years, which were… the monasteries were like barricades. The enclosures were like bomb shelters. And we didn't talk to Buddhists. He felt uncomfortable talking to Presbyterians, for God's sake, and Merton, on the other hand, said Nhat Hanh is my brother. And so Dan Berrigan and I co-authored a letter to….And you know Dan Berrigan. He's been out there on the barricades since the 50s, throwing his own blood on missile nose cones and going to jail for it. So he's got skin in the game. Nhat Hanh, he's got skin in the game; do you know the meaning of ‘skin in the game?’ That means put up or shut up. Walk the walk. Talk the talk, but let's see what you're going to do. So Nhat Hanh had been in seclusion in France in the Pyrenees living a very simple monastic life, grieving because he had led an exodus from Vietnam, the so-called boat people. He led an armada trying to flee Vietnam. And in the ocean, in the deep ocean off the coast of Vietnam, this little boat overloaded with people was attacked by sea pirates, and they raped and murdered his niece. So we invited him. You know, he was really very private, very secluded. Nobody knew who he was, and Berrigen said he's the one to keep keynote. There were 1000 people at Saint Patrick's, the kickoff event of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, and Nhat Hanh, the way he walked into that church. From the door of the church to the podium took him about 10 or 15 minutes. He was very aware of every step, like he was while he was stepping, he was simply aware of the stepping while he was breathing. He was aware of the breathing. So he didn't have to do Centering, he was Centering. He was Centering and everybody in the cathedral saw that he was different because usually when we walk, we're not walking while we walk. We're thinking of something else. He wasn't thinking of anything else. So by the time he had walked up to this podium, he had already convinced everybody that he was a great man. He hadn't said a word. In the cathedral you could hear a pin drop. And every single one of those thousand people said, “I don't know who this guy is, but he's a great man. He's a holy man.” And that's when he said that the sea pirate is my brother. The man who raped my niece is my brother, and then he said, “Even more,” he said, “I am the young woman who was raped. I am the sea pirate. And so call me by my true name. I am this. I am that, the very best and the very worst.” And so isn't it fitting that my one hero died among the garbage helping sanitation workers and another hero, Nhat Hanh, saying that the man, the sea pirate, who raped my niece is my brother? Not only that, but I am the sea pirate and I am my niece. And that's amazing, you know; that's just true. That's just true, and everybody recognized it. There was a compassion there that was very big and could include everything. Not only the hot bath this morning, but also I can't find my keys. And then also when the train arrived in Newark, I had files, and I was on the phone trying to talk to Father Carl, and I had like in 10 seconds, gathered everything up and jumped out of the train. That was sheer terror. And that's part of my prayer too. So I think that there's nothing that prayer can't cover. There's nothing that prayer can't be about. And if it's not now, then when? If it's not you and I, then who? So Merton, that quote! I had more on Merton.
[Ray]
So….
[Ed]
Merton.
[Fr. Carl]
I think I we better kind of step back for a moment.
[Ed]
OK.
[Fr. Carl]
We've had an hour….
[Ed]
Really?
[Ray]
Yeah.
[Ed]
It started with Newman and the parable of the mustard seed.
[Fr. Carl]
Well, you won't have the camera going.
[Ed]
Yeah, it started with….Wait a second.
[Ray]
You ready? I'm rolling. Yeah.
[Fr. Carl]
Are you rolling OK?
[Ray]
Yeah, so go ahead and talk to Father Carl.
[Ed[
That's alright. So we're at the end of ‘68. Bobby Kennedy died on June 8th [Fact check: 5], my birthday was on June 16th so it was not a happy birthday. I was grieving with the Kennedy family, and I encountered Merton through Nouwen and he was my boat to the future. He had been casting these seeds of contemplation. I was reading Contemplation in a World of Action. I read that book so many times as a manual for the spiritual life that it fell apart. You know, it's just did and so did I. While the book was falling apart, so was I. And that can be a good thing because Leonard Cohen said, “There's a crack in the in the Liberty Bell, and that's where the light comes in. Hallelujah.” And certainly we've all been broken. You know, my mentor wrote a book called The Wounded Healer. And he said in that book that the power of the healings are in the wounds of the healer.
[Fr. Carl]
Who's your mentor?
[Ed[
Henri Nouwen and his mentor is Jesus Christ, the original wounded healer. So I had the Jesus Prayer and the Wounded Healer to guide me through that terrible year of all the killings, and Thomas Merton, or so I thought. And then at the end of the year in December, Merton dies too, electrocuted accidentally. You know, it could have been me. I could have done that. I try to get toast out of a toaster with a spoon. Boom. Gone. And so, Merton said that I worship the God of burnt men. He sure did. He was burnt. He was burnt out in service in a good way. He was a fire that went out, and we should all be that burnt up in service. That's what I thought. That's my motto. So that's when I started thinking of Contemplative Outreach. At the end of that terrible decade and in writing proposals, they were called different things. I wanted to do a Thomas Merton Center at Saint Joseph's Abbey. There was a big debate, and I wrote several proposals about that. But you know the debate was about the issue of enclosure. Right? Could the monks share with the world while respecting their Trappist Strict Observance of enclosure? They have 3000 acres of land, but they use it with sheep, with farming; they do things manual labor, they make jelly, you know. So would something like Contemplative Outreach, which is a worldwide phenomenon….I mean Basil and the Abbot when I started going there in the early 70s, on the recommendation of Henri Nouwen, you had to book six months in advance to get into the guesthouse because Basil and the Abbot were so successful with Centering Prayer. People really needed it. I remember one retreat they did with firemen. And these are burnt out men too. They see people getting burnt up all the time. And yeah, it was….Basil was doing a retreat with a bunch of firemen. And these guys have seen a lot of death. And so the Centering Prayer for them I think helps me to see that you can get through fire if your heart is in the right place.
[Fr. Carl]
What was your….How did you find out about Henri Nouwen?
[Ray]
You could put the water bottle down so you don't get the cracking.
[Ed]
Well, I was a member of Saint Mary's Parish in New Haven. I'm very proud of that because Father McGivney started the Knights of Columbus in our parish, and that was an order of people who were very pious men. My father and my godfather were both 4th Degree Knights of Columbus. And they don't just March in parades; they do a lot of good works. And Father McGivney started the Knights of Columbus. Am I off the subject?
[Fr. Carl]
Yes.
[Ed]
Well, only that at that time, I'm going to give you the segue. Carlton Jones was Rector of Saint Mary's, and he's an Oxford Movement priest. He had written about the Oxford Movement at the Gregorian in Rome. Now the Oxford Movement in the 19th century, Cardinal Newman, my mentor, was a movement of small communities combining liturgy, communities of service to the poor and sacramental, sacramentalism that…You know this parable of the seed was Newman’s because it was going back to the early fathers with the gospel focus on Jesus and the ministry of peace and justice for the poorest of the poor. So I said to Carlton Jones, this Oxford Movement rector of St. Mary's church and don't forget St. Mary is the God bearer. Right? And every monk is this model. It’s Mary who gives birth to Jesus and every monk….he's called to give birth to Jesus in his own heart. Right? There's a word for it in Orthodoxy which means “Bearer of Christ,” but it applies to Mary and it applies to me, and I was getting that from Carlton because he was in that tradition. And I asked him, ”Is there anybody in New Haven who knows anything about this stuff?” Because aside from Saint Mary's, there were a lot of people that were just going through the motions, and they didn't have any inner awareness of what they were doing. They were going….you know, we were like this in the 50s. You got dressed up; the family got their best clothes, shined their shoes, tie and jacket. hair combed. It was about looking good and showing up because you would go to hell if you didn’t. And there were a lot of churches like that. I grew up in one of them. And I said, “Is there anybody besides you, Carlton, Rector of Saint Mary's, who's into this kind of stuff?” And he said, “Yeah, Henri Nouwen, you should see Henri Nouwen.” So you know, he was right on target because we met two or three times a week for prayer, spiritual direction. We had a little group, and there was a little meditation chapel in the crypt underneath the divinity school. And pardon me.
[Fr. Carl]
Where was the Divinity...
[Ed]
Yale Divinity School. Yeah. Yeah, as a.
[Fr. Carl]
Oh yeah. You went to Yale as a student?
[Ed]
No, no, I went to Yale. Well, I was a special student. They didn't accept me at the Divinity School because I was a Catholic lay person. And I didn't have a Catholic Church to sponsor me because I wasn't called to the celebate life. So I took courses as a special student, and Henri said, “Yale's not for you because they're turning out Protestant talkers who do hymns.”
[Fr. Carl]
Right.
[Ed]
Yeah, it was true. He left Yale for the same reason. You know, he left Yale because that little meditation chapel where we met a couple of times a week….and it just had mostly Centering Prayer and a Mass, Henri would celebrate a Mass that were maybe 12 of us. And they put a big organ in there and a bunch of hymn books. And you know, that was why Henri left around 1970. He went to Harvard and it was worse at Harvard. You know, everybody's wanting to make a reputation, wanting to crank out articles about prayer and meditation, you know? But they're not doing it. They're into writing about it.
[Fr. Carl]
So you had this time with….
Speaker 2
Henri, two years. Two years. Yeah. Meeting once or twice a week for his prayer, meditation and Eucharist and spiritual direction at Yale in the prayer chapel. We were the little prayer chapel in the crypt. It was in a crypt.
[Fr. Carl]
Well, what happened? Where did your journey go after that?
[Ed]
Well, I was working at a bookstore called Book World, and I ran the spirituality section and the literature section. So I was really reading all this Merton stuff. And Nouwen was helping me to understand it, like the sign of Jonah being swallowed by a whale. That's the metaphor of my life, you know, like this thing takes you over. You don't know it's God. It feels awful, but then the whale spits you out on the beach, and you're a different person. And I didn't understand these things, but I did with prayer. And I guess Yale had taken me under and spit me out. And so Henri said, “This is not for you.” And Henri couldn't drive; he was not a good driver. He was not a focused person, and he was not safe to drive. So I used to drive him to monasteries. I drove him to the Abbey of the Genesee, and I met Merton’s Secretary Patrick Hart. I drove him up to Rochester to the Trappist monastery in Rochester where I met his mentor who was an Abbot named John Hughes Bamberger, and he was a really great man, very tough. And Henri Nouwen needed people to focus him because he was just like me, all over the place, but he got the books done. He got the books done. And so he said, “This is not for you. You need a monastery, and I think that you might like Saint Joseph's.” I didn't listen to him. This is how God works. I thought that I needed a Zen master up in Maine named Walter Nowick. He was a genius guy. He had a big barn where people meditated, and he was also a gifted pianist. So he would give concerts with Mozart and stuff like that, but he rejected me. I presented myself in the traditional Japanese manner, and his priest, his representative, came out and said, “Walter doesn't want to see you.” And then I go, “Well, it seems like I'm being tested.” And that was part of a ritual where the, Zen master says ‘no.’ And then you persist in sitting in the meditation posture outside the monastery waiting for the Zen master to admit you. That's a Japanese ritual. And so the guy comes back six hours later, and he says, “You're still here. I told you. Walter doesn't want to see you.” And I stayed for 12 hours sitting outside the monastery, and he finally said, “If you do not leave, I'm calling the police.” (Laughter) So I left, and it was a blessing. It was a great blessing because I got a ride, and I shouldn't be saying this, but I got a ride with some truck drivers. They were drinking, and they offered me vodka. And so me and these two truck drivers who were in a pickup truck for drinking vodka. And we're driving from Maine back to New Haven, and I see this sign for, Hey, Spencer Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts. Oh, that's where Henri said I should go. And so these guys…..And so I said, “Can I get off here?” I didn't have that much vodka, but I was pretty loose, and I didn't smell bad. They said not only that; we'll drive you to the monastery. So they took me right to the guest house. Right? And the guest house is like….The Abbot and the community are so much in demand, you have to have a reservation six months in advance like the firemen. And I just show up; here I am. And the guest master says, “You don't have a reservation, but I think we can help you.” So what had happened is that somebody canceled, and he put me into a beautiful room. I don't know if you've been to Saint Joseph's Abbey, but you know how beautiful it is. For those who don't know, it's a 12th century Cistercian monastery classic. The high point of monastic architecture in the 12th century was a rectangle around a graveyard, a big, big cloister, windows everywhere you look. You see the top of the hill, you look down, you see woods, you see farms. And you look the other way and it's the crosses of all the monks who've died. So I thought this place feels really good. And I'm waiting to….I'm thinking, you know, boy, Father Basil. You know, Henri says Father Basil is a great man. You know, you're gonna really like this and you know, I'm sobering up. And Basil gives a session on Centering Prayer. And I won't ever forget that session, because I was just doing ‘merci’ then. Because it boiled down to ‘merci,’ I've been doing the Jesus Prayer for two years with Henri Nouwen. It says that if you persist in the Jesus Prayer, your heart will become like a babbling brook, like a little stream. And I had this stream going. And I was wide open for Basil to say, “It's like a little dart that pierces the Cloud of Unknowing.” Do you remember that part of the Centering Prayer? And I thought, ‘Wow, I'm in the Cloud.” And that was just amazing. The whole retreat was amazing because I got curious, and you know how I am. I'm like a squirrel that's smelling everything and wants…No dog, like a dog. You know, a dog lives through his nose. And I was attracted to the kitchen for that reason because of the smells in the kitchen, right? So during a break in the retreat, I'm supposed to be in my room, but I go in the kitchen, and it says ‘Enclosure; do not go in the kitchen.’ So I go in the kitchen, and there's this really tall, thin guy who's just hanging out in the kitchen, not doing any work or anything. He's just like there. And I think, oh, you know, now I'm in trouble because I'm in the kitchen and I'm not supposed to be there. I didn't know it was Thomas. I thought it was a kitchen knave, and that he was lazy and, so we start talking. What are you doing here? How's your retreat going? And I'm thinking he's not going to throw me out of the kitchen. He's talking to me. And I'm saying, you know, this is really good. I'm in the cloud and Thomas said, “Well,” he said, “You know you're in a dark night, Edward. And it's a cloud, but it's dark, and there's going to be trouble ahead. I can guarantee it. And so you better hang on to that Centering Prayer because things will get worse before they get better.” And I thought this is pretty good for a kitchen knave. I later found out it was the Abbot! (Laughter) I'll never forget that meeting with him because I thought if this is the kitchen knave, the guy who cooks and takes care of the kitchen, well, I'll give him credit. The kitchen's clean. You know, but later, that advice about how things are going to get worse before they get better, I started feeling boredom, restlessness, couldn't stay still. And it took a long time to feel the joy of quiet and the pleasurable interest of the mind and the heart where everything is still like this chair I was sitting in….Once I sat doing Centering Prayer without stopping for six hours; I was in a monastery. I was in a Buddhist monastery; I was doing Centering Prayer. There's this place I showed a graduating class. I was doing a three month retreat at the Insight Meditation Societies, 20 minutes between…
[Fr. Carl]
You didn't stay at the monastery.
[Ed]
No, no, I've done my thing at the monastery. I’d been a resident there for a year.
[Fr. Carl]
After that retreat?
[Ed]
After that retreat, Thomas invited me to be a resident, and I spent a year, 1972, I'm guessing, an entire year there and I didn't want to leave, but Basil told me some cool things. Like I was getting letters from someone that I really loved in New Haven who I didn't marry because I wanted to be a resident at the monastery, and Thomas was discerning that I had a call to be a monk. So Basil said, this is really hard, he said, “When you get those letters, don't read them. Tear them up.” And I did. And eventually, I mean, they kept on going for about several months after that, but she stopped writing. So I had given up something really big. I had some skin in the game at that point, and Thomas was saying you should be a monk. And I'm feeling like I'm feeling like Merton, that I belong halfway between the in and the out of the breath, at that still point between the in breath and the out breath that was my calling. That is my vocation.
[Fr. Carl]
That…
[Ed]
Being a contemplative in the world.
[Fr. Carl]
What did you learn in that one year that you were in residence?
[Ed]
Well, I mentioned I learned about dew drops. I learned that life is effervescent. And you, you know, you're in your 70s. You know that this life goes so fast, like if a bird were to fly in this window and then fly out the door; that's a human life. That's how fast it goes, quick, and the rest is darkness. Out there it's dark where the window is. Out there by the door it's dark. All we have is this room. And now we're 70. It has been so fast: Martin Luther King, Ted Kennedy or Robert Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, the Zen priest, Susan [Fact check: Ji’ong]. They're all dead. And they, pardon me? Henri Nouwen, my teacher died. He was my teacher. He died when he was in his 50s like Merton. Accidentally like Merton. I mean, these mystics are accident prone.
[Fr. Carl]
When did the seeds and the thoughts about Contemplative Outreach begin to percolate for you? Were they percolating when about….
[Ed]
With Henri Nouwen in 1969.
[Fr. Carl]
It started.
[Ed]
Yes, yes, that's that's when we started reading from Contemplation in a World of Action. And it's it's specifically the conclusion of Contemplation in a World of Action where he talks about these communities like Little Brothers of Jesus and Charles de Foucauld. That's in Merton. He said that's the future, and that's what Contemplative Outreach turned out to be. I wrote it. That's the boat I designed. It was a big boat, and it had a lot of lifeboats, like thousands of them.
[Fr. Carl]
So when did you do your first draft? You said you did….
[Ed]
My first draft was immediately around 1972 when I left that residency. Living at Saint Joseph Abbey as a resident was wonderful. It changed my life forever. And I think there's a special charism for being a temporary monastic, someone who goes in the monastery and then goes out. And I felt that I had that charism. God in the world, the God in the world charism, and the book that I read over and over again till it fell apart, and I did too, was Contemplation in a World of Action. And you know, like the sign of Jonah, the whale swallowed me and spit me out a different person, and that different person went to Saint Joseph's Abbey. I did retreats at the guesthouse, and then I felt I had to go deeper. Abbot Thomas and Basil Pennington were also going back….and there's monks shuttling back and forth between the Insight Meditation Society and Saint Joseph Abbey. They're only 20 minutes apart. So there were people like me. I mean, you sit and and not move for six hours. And the Catholic Eucharist, it catches fire. You feel a burning inside, a radiance like a warm radiator, like an electric field. You feel light, you feel ….from just being still. One time when I sat without moving for six hours, hard to believe, right? It's only the breath, but the breath is a very active thing. It moves through the body down here, up here, all over the body. And from that stillness, when I went through the Mass the next day, I felt like Saint Theresa, I felt like John of the Cross, I felt like Thomas Merton, I felt like Basil Pennington, I felt like Thomas Keating. Because there's a light, there's a spark. When you don't move and you are still, something happens. And so I did another year, one year at Saint Joseph's, one year at the Insight Meditation Society. At Saint Joseph's my job was to take care of the oldest monks in the Infirmary and the holiest man was someone you never heard of, Father Bernard. And he was 91 and he was blind, but he could hear. And he had the sweetest inner life. You'd walk into his room in the Infirmary, I was the assistant Infirmarian, and you felt like you were walking into the Cloud of Unknowing. And it was like lightning in a bottle, Father Bernard, I mean. And my job was to read to him. He liked John of the Cross. He mainly wanted you to just read the Gospels over and over again. And the Old Testament and the New Testament and he just loved it all. He loved it all. You couldn't throw a bad pitch to this guy. You couldn't throw him, and I mean, he's blind. He can't move. I had to help him get out of his hospital bed into the wheelchair. And then I’d wheel him down the cloister. And the monks are looking at Father Bernard like I've got $1,000,000; I just robbed the bank. And then I would roll him up to the front of the church and somebody grand like Thomas Keating, you know, 6’ 3” then, holding forth. And Thomas….and the one, the greatest man in the Chapel was not the charismatic blessed Abbot, it was the 91 year old crippled blind man who was with God every day all the time. He didn't have anything to teach. He had been done. He made cheese. He made a lot of jelly, and that's it. That's the purpose of it all.
[Fr. Carl]
Sounds to me as if he's another one of your heroes.
[Ed]
As much or more than Henri Nouwen. As much or more than Robert Kennedy. As much more than Robert and Martin, Martin Luther King because he just was there. Not like a brick but like… it's not lightning in it, not lightning in the bottle. No, it's more like a cloud with something warm inside, a warm radiator and surrounded by a cloud. Is that…does that make sense to you?
[Fr. Carl]
Yes it does. Just thinking of my own memories of Saint Joseph's in 19...
[Ed]
You probably never saw him.
[Fr. Carl]
1975. I was there for a retreat and Father Menninger was giving it. Yeah, and that's how we got introduced to Centering Prayer.
[Ed]
Sure, he is the inventor of it.
[Fr. Carl]
Yeah. Where were you in 1975? What was happening then? You went from the monastery….
[Ed]
I already did my Centering Prayer stuff at the retreat house, and I was in a Buddhist monastery for a year there.
[Fr. Carl]
OK. In ‘75? And what after that?
[Ed]
Well, Thomas and Basil, this is like the Berrigan conversation all over again. I'm talking to my superiors who are Thomas and Basil, and I'm saying, “Who's the best guy? After Merton died, who's the number one guy in the world?”
[Fr. Carl]
The you asked them that?
[Ed]
Yeah, I asked them that. And they both agreed Raimondo Panikkar. So we did a conference; we got Panikkar from Spain. I mean, he's trilingual, multilingual, I don't know how many linguals. Fluent in the Vedic languages, reads the Vedic scriptures in the original. Latin, reads Latin, Greek, you know, brilliant linguist. And he is lightning in a bottle, thin, brilliant, charismatic, at home in Spain, at home in India, and home in the United States. Put him in the middle of an airport, he's fine. It's like for him an airport is like the Sistine Chapel. So he gives 9 sutras in 9 days on the monk as universal archetype. This is the same theme as Merton when he died, the monk as universal archetype. I asked him; I assigned him the topic. Me and Basil and the Abbot, we conferred about the topic. What we wanted him to do was take up the topic that Merton was addressing when he died, namely the monk as universal archetype as the point of convergence in East-West dialogue. And so he gave these wonderful….I've got like 10 files original, some original documents from the conference. I had the whole thing; it became a book. I could show you the book; I’ve got it with me. It's called Blessed Simplicity, the Monk as Universal Archetype. Seabury Press didn't get around to publishing it. I did it. You know, I'm the guy in the kitchen who's doing all the work getting the food out, getting the books published, you know, and these guys...
[Fr. Carl]
What organization were you with at that time?
[Ed]
The North American Board for East-West Dialogue, Le Dialogue Monastique of which Saint Joseph Abbey was the flagship for Le Dialogue Monastique. They were the dialogical Dharma warriors of the religious life, namely Dharma, meaning ‘truth’ and warrior meaning ‘let's get to the heart of this issue.’ What is our common ground? Where do we stand and how do we differ and?
[Fr. Carl]
This is the late 70s?
[Ed]
It was published in 1979, the book, but the conference actually occurred several years earlier. It was really hard to get everything transcribed, and Basil had wondered….Basil, you know, listened the whole time. You know, Basil can listen. He doesn't have to be the center of attention, and he was delighted in Panikkar. But when he got up at the end, he said, “This is all very well, but what's the future of….?” Let's just say, for example, that Panikkar is right, that the monk has a universal common ground all over the world. You know they all pray, they all meditate, they all chant the holy books, and they all die for God alone. You know Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and lay contemplatives also. So that's the contemplative life, but also the differences are important. You know, we're in a devotional path on Jesus. That's our focus as Christians. Right? Jesus. And with that you get the Trinity, you get everything. And it's a mystery. It's a seed, but the Hindus, they have Ramakrishna, a great saint. They've got [Fact Check: Satchi Devi?], a woman. Great Saints.There are saints that aren't Catholics. Would you believe? Would you be shocked to know, who are healers, who perform miracles? I was with such a person, and she knew things about me. She knew, for example, that I lived in a monastery. She saw me off the street, and she called me monk. I was in a room with like 50 people, and I was in the back. And she said, “Hey, Monk, come over here,” and then she took me into a room. This is devotional yoga. And her disciples….This is like a mother with puppies. One disciple is brushing her hair. And the other disciple is massaging her neck, and she's just filling the room with love, and the mother, a kind of Virgin Mary feeling about her. She was…. And I'll tell you something; it was very odd. She was a truck driver…, a truck driver's wife. And she was in the bath, like me, and in the bath staying too long, you know, just very relaxed, nothing in her mind. And suddenly she starts channeling these Vedic scriptures in a language she does not understand. And then she starts with both languages, Vedic and English. And it turns out that Baba Ram Dass and Gordon Allport, who are dialogue partners with Brother David Steindl-Rast, have a teacher named Neem Karoli Baba; he’s a saint, he's a holy man and he does these things. So this woman, who's a truck driver's wife, became a guru. She became a guru. And she took me into this little room, and there was this very devotional scene, like you would see….I know this sounds sacrilegious, sacrilegious, but if you were Little Brothers of Jesus, you would be meditating in front of an altar with the Eucharist. And it was like, it felt like that. All I can say, I'm just telling you the truth. So then she goes, “I want to take you someplace that you need to go.” Just her and me and her driver. She never drove. And I'm in the back. She's got a van with a little temple in it, and it's got incense. It's got a statue of Krishna, her word for God, just like my word is Jesus. We don't know. We don't know who it is. I say ‘Jesus;’ she says, ‘Krishna,’ but we both know it's love. We both know that God is love.
[Fr. Carl]
So where does she take you?
[Ed]
She took me to a Jesuit retreat center, where she did retreats personally. And she took me up to the tower of this retreat center where there was a small room where she used to meditate. And you could see out from all these distances. And we spent some time just in devotional silence meditating on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And then she said to me, “It is your calling; it is your path to build bridges for God in religious life.” That's what she said to me. And I already knew that; I didn't tell her that. She told me that, and she told me in a place where the Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola had been going on for fifty years. Have you ever done an Ignatian Retreat of Discernment?
[Fr. Carl]
Yes, 7-8 Day I did.
[Ed]
Yeah. So you know that that's a sacred place.
[Fr. Carl]
That is a sacred space for you.
[Ed]
And she was showing such respect for my charism which, you know, people were spitting me out all over the place, except for Henri Nouwen and Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington. They said, you know, you're one of us. But not….
[Fr. Carl]
So this aspect of being a builder between religions or between spiritualities is something of your charism, your prophetic nature that was part of you that became more and more obvious during the during the 70s.
[Ed]
Yes.
[Fr. Carl]
During this…
[Ed]
Yes, yes. So the first proposal I wrote, as I was saying before, for Contemplative Outreach, using those words at the Merton Center was to do Contemplative Outreach at Saint Joseph's Abbey, because they, Basil and the Abbot, were just overbooked. And the guest house was too small. They had grown too big, and now I regret, I was telling you before. Thomas spent all these years serving the world, getting into airplanes and giving Contemplative Outreach workshops and training others to do so; and it's a righteous work, but he had to renounce his former life as an Abbot. And he was the Abbot of the most important monastery in the United States of the Trappist Order. And there are wonderful, huge, important monasteries like Gethsemane, dozens of them, and Saint Joseph's Abbey was the most important, in size, in endowment, in the number of monks. There were like 120 monks there at that time, and so for the Abbot to leave was a great sacrifice on his part. And for the community, it was heartbreak because you lose your abbot, like losing your father. Abba means father. I mean, and they did great. I mean, one of the students of the Zen master who did the Jesus Prayer in retreat, the Zen master used to say, “When you make the sign of the cross, how do you realize Jesus?” He used to, in other words….the question. It is what's alive. The answer is worthless….only if it comes as grace. I mean, Keating is right. Finding grace at the center, that's what it's about, not finding the center at the center. Finding grace at the center. It took me a long time to figure that out. It's obvious. But when I was in that tower with….Her name is Joy. She's a spiritual teacher; her name is Joy. Joy. The joy of the Bliss of the Anointed One. There's a man in India who has been on the spiritual path, the bicultural East-West spiritual path, a Benedictine. And he went totally indigenous, took on a Sanskrit name. Do you know what the name was? [Fact check: Abhishiktanands] and it means - I feel his presence because I was there - Bliss of the Anointed One. [Fact check: Abhishiktanands]. You can say Jesus, the name of Jesus too much. I listened to these evangelists: Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. It's better to say the Bliss of the Anointed One…more respectful.
[Fr. Carl]
I didn't get the first words, the Bliss of the Anointed One?
[Ed]
Bliss. Who else is that? Who was anointed from day one? Bliss of the Anointed One means he was also anointed with sweet perfume when he died. Mary Magdalene, you know, cleaned his body with her hair, right? And so his name and this guy's been living this indigenous path under the auspices of Le Dialogue Monastique East-West dialogue. But he's just living in an ashram very quietly. He's got a few priests. One of them was from Saint Joseph Abbey, name is Father Amaladass and he's Indian. You know, he's a Tamil. You know his ashram is in the poor part of India with the Tamils in the South. It's hot and jungle, and Father Amaladass does is like brilliant and he was there long term. He was sort of like a resident at the same time that I was. And through him, I felt the Bliss of the Anointed One.
[Fr. Carl]
OK, let's stop for a moment, OK.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oral History Interview - Ed Bednar part 1

Unedited transcript only for purposes of timecode numbers

00:00:00 Speaker 1
The way to kind of look at it, and I think you're the holder of the story of the beginning, so.
00:00:06 Speaker 1
Let's just pause a moment and.
00:00:09 Speaker 1
Enter into the the silence.
00:00:13 Speaker 1
OK, my dear friend, what role does centering prayer have in your life?
00:00:18 Speaker 1
And how has that practice or the practice that you have impacted on your life?
00:00:26 Speaker 2
Well for sure.
00:00:29 Speaker 2
It helps me.
00:00:31 Speaker 2
To be present at the moment.
00:00:34 Speaker 2
And in the moment.
00:00:36 Speaker 2
I'm finding over and over again that wonderful things keep happening.
00:00:43 Speaker 2
And it's only when I'm not in the moment.
00:00:47 Speaker 2
With gratitude.
00:00:50 Speaker 2
For what it is.
00:00:52 Speaker 2
That are get into trouble.
00:00:57 Speaker 2
So I'm, you know, I'm. I'm grateful, for example that.
00:01:00 Speaker 2
I was able to take a hot bath this morning. I was.
00:01:03 Speaker 2
Telling.
00:01:03 Speaker 2
You.
00:01:05 Speaker 2
I learned.
00:01:07 Speaker 2
To do what we're calling now, centering pair from a spiritual father, Henry Nallen at Yale Divinity School. And only it was called by a different name. It was called Hezekiah or Hezekiah.
00:01:22 Speaker 2
And this means to practice stillness, and it goes back to the desert fathers of the 4th century. And it involves meditation on the name of Jesus.
00:01:35 Speaker 2
And the prayer is simply.
00:01:38 Speaker 2
Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me and Sinner.
00:01:44 Speaker 2
But in century prayer.
00:01:46 Speaker 2
It says.
00:01:49 Speaker 2
A short prayer is good.
00:01:52 Speaker 2
And I think, Father Basil, Father Thomas, one of them had said to me in the very beginning when I was learning Centering Prayer.
00:01:59 Speaker 2
That a short prayer.
00:02:03 Speaker 2
Pierces the heart like a dart through a cloud.
00:02:07 Speaker 2
And and so I took. I boiled down the Jesus prayer. Well, Henry now and recommended that I just the whole Jesus prayer is one word. Mercy.
00:02:19 Speaker 2
Mercy.
00:02:20 Speaker 2
In French, it means thank you.
00:02:23 Speaker 2
It means.
00:02:25 Speaker 2
Thank you, Jesus.
00:02:27 Speaker 2
For.
00:02:28 Speaker 2
Giving me this uhm.
00:02:32 Speaker 2
Hot bath in the morning.
00:02:34 Speaker 2
It was so refreshing.
00:02:38 Speaker 2
Thank you Jesus for.
00:02:41 Speaker 2
Getting me to the train this morning.
00:02:44
Uhm.
00:02:46 Speaker 2
On time, half an hour early.
00:02:49 Speaker 2
And getting a senior discount which which you know.
00:02:56 Speaker 2
And you know, you know, it's.
00:02:57 Speaker 2
Wonderful when you're ahead of the game.
00:03:01 Speaker 2
I mean, I was very anxious about this, to be honest, father, because I'm used to speaking to.
00:03:10 Speaker 2
Contemplative prayer groups, where there's a lot of people in the room.
00:03:16 Speaker 2
But just you.
00:03:17 Speaker 2
And Ed is, you're making me feel at home, and I like that. Thank you and.
00:03:25 Speaker 1
And how through your practice of your your mercy prayer that the how does how does that impact on your life? It gave me some examples.
00:03:30 Speaker 2
Yeah, mercy. Thank you.
00:03:37 Speaker 1
But in general, what has it made?
00:03:39 Speaker 1
You aware of?
00:03:40 Speaker 2
Well, you know, I'm forgetful. I'm. I'm. I'm getting older now. I'm 70 years old. You're you're older. Even still. And you don't miss a thing. So we all age differently. I have to have my papers, father.
00:03:55 Speaker 2
Because I don't remember things and for example, this morning I couldn't find the keys to my car. And how am I going to get to the train station without the keys for my car? So then I go.
00:04:06 Speaker 2
Mercy.
00:04:09 Speaker 2
Mercy.
00:04:10 Speaker 2
And you know, the thoughts arise like, where's the keys? And then you let go of the thought. Where's the keys? And you go.
00:04:17 Speaker 2
Mercy.
00:04:20 Speaker 2
And you know, it wasn't very long, maybe 5 minutes.
00:04:24 Speaker 2
And I still didn't know where the keys were, but I went to get a file to bring here today and the keys were underneath the file. Now who did that? Who found those keys?
00:04:36 Speaker 2
It's it's all good, father.
00:04:41 Speaker 1
So it makes you more aware and and in your support of your prayer. Like since you learned the prayer from from Henry now and who supports you? I mean is there a group that gives you support?
00:04:56 Speaker 2
No, no, no. I'm. I'm a professional social worker, right. I have a license. I'm a professional community organizer. That's why.
00:05:08 Speaker 2
The centering prayer is such a delight for me because it's such a the social architecture of the century prayer is beautiful.
00:05:18 Speaker 2
And I would say that having constructed the ship, I'm just the one who built the ship.
00:05:28 Speaker 2
Thomas, people like Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington and Thomas Kinney. They're the captains of the ship.
00:05:37 Speaker 2
And they're taking people over to the other side of the river.
00:05:41 Speaker 2
Like Martin Luther King.
00:05:44 Speaker 2
Would say.
00:05:46 Speaker 2
We're going to cross the River Jordan and get to the other side. Well, that's what. That's what. What our teachers do.
00:05:56 Speaker 2
And but I built a ship.
00:06:00 Speaker 2
And I'm so happy that it it it serves so well over 30 years now. How many souls has it taken over?
00:06:10 Speaker 1
And your phrase you built the ship. What?
00:06:12 Speaker 1
Do you mean by?
00:06:13 Speaker 1
That.
00:06:14 Speaker 2
Social architecture, a community organizer, is a.
00:06:20 Speaker 2
Designer and a builder of social architecture. So I was mentioning to you before.
00:06:26 Speaker 2
The inspiration for this was I spent a month a year at Saint Joseph's Abbey.
00:06:33 Speaker 2
In the early 1970s.
00:06:36 Speaker 2
As a resident.
00:06:38 Speaker 2
And Father Basil was my spiritual father and Thomas Keating was my Abbott.
00:06:46 Speaker 2
And I lived inside the monastery, inside the enclosure with in my own cell, like any, every other month. And I was presented with the problem of when I get up at 3:00 in the morning and mass is not until.
00:07:01 Speaker 2
Seven, what do you do for those four hours? And what? You know what I found out is the hours between 3:00 in the morning and 7:00.
00:07:10 Speaker 2
Are just beautiful.
00:07:13 Speaker 2
The sunrise walking in the clusters I used to walk.
00:07:17 Speaker 2
To the monasteries on a hill looking down over a valley, highest hill in central Massachusetts. So I would go there and meditate at sunrise.
00:07:35 Speaker 2
And I would see the dew drops evaporate while I was meditating. And look over this valley and. And I'm sorry. I I get emotional because.
00:07:48 Speaker 2
A very, very close friend who's a Zen priest.
00:07:53 Speaker 2
Died.
00:07:54 Speaker 2
A month ago, at the age of 71, which is very close to my own age and on her in her memorial service, there's a quote from a Buddhist nun.
00:08:07 Speaker 2
From the 11th century Esau.
00:08:10 Speaker 2
And she goes.
00:08:13 Speaker 2
The world is only a dewdrop.
00:08:17 Speaker 2
That disappeared.
00:08:20 Speaker 2
But oh.
00:08:24 Speaker 2
And and and the the death of my dear friend Susan Young.
00:08:31 Speaker 2
The Zen priest, you know, we've known each other for 50 years. She's dead. Basil Pennington. She's a do drop.
00:08:41 Speaker 2
And the centering prayer is a teaching.
00:08:46 Speaker 2
For how to live among.
00:08:50 Speaker 2
The world, a world of dew drops of people that die of of like the evaporation of dawn and the dawns are at Saint Joseph Abbey were extraordinary, you know, from dark. You're there in the dark with the stars and the moon. And you wait and you sit for an hour and a half.
00:09:10 Speaker 2
And slowly, this guy, do you know, this time it's really God's time this guy gets his first grey and you can hear birds. There's a quiet zone that travels across the world unconvinced and and it and it passes maybe from three till 5:30 or so, and then you start hearing birds and you can hear the world.
00:09:29 Speaker 2
Waking up squirrels make noises, and animals and monks are walking around, but you know that quiet zone in the early morning.
00:09:39 Speaker 2
With the dew drops evaporating and the sun rising and these dew drops look like they're meat of diamonds.
00:09:56 Speaker 1
And may I ask why you think the teaching about meditation and centering prayer is important for the world at this particular time? What role does some contemplative outreach play?
00:10:13 Speaker 1
In the world today.
00:10:16 Speaker 1
From your viewpoint.
00:10:17 Speaker 2
Boy.
00:10:19 Speaker 2
You're right on target, Father.
00:10:22 Speaker 2
Uh.
00:10:26 Speaker 2
Of course, you know my favorite book is contemplation in the world of action.
00:10:32 Speaker 2
And.
00:10:34 Speaker 2
My favorite chapter there is the last chapter on prospects for monastic life.
00:10:40 Speaker 2
And there he talks about communities like the little Brothers of Jesus, who go into amongst the poorest of the poor.
00:10:51 Speaker 2
And they have sacraments, they have liturgy, they have a meditative conduct, a meditative life. But they also work in factories. The way the poor do.
00:11:01 Speaker 2
And I think they are a sign of the presence of Christ among us.
00:11:08 Speaker 2
So that's the future. Small communities who live a contemplative life and also in in the world, like for example.
00:11:18 Speaker 2
The way I was able to call you from the bus stop today.
00:11:24 Speaker 2
There was a a black woman with a big bag waiting along sight of me, and I didn't have a phone.
00:11:31 Speaker 2
And so I introduced myself and she was very kind to me. She let me use her phone, she said. Now you don't worry. He's going to be here before you know.
00:11:46 Speaker 2
It.
00:11:47 Speaker 2
So don't you worry and and I'm.
00:11:50 Speaker 1
Like.
00:11:52 Speaker 2
Going through files papers, reading my journals, you know, I've got 50 journals. I only brought 3 and I won't even have a chance to look at 1:00.
00:12:02 Speaker 2
And she said, don't you worry, now that Father Rico, he's coming.
00:12:08 Speaker 2
Probably be a black car.
00:12:11 Speaker 2
She was right. I think it is a black color, right?
00:12:14 Speaker 2
Dark.
00:12:17 Speaker 2
A clergy car and I feel good in clergy cars because.
00:12:22 Speaker 2
Well, uh, my uncle was a priest, a Byzantine priest, Father Bob, and he had a Jeep.
00:12:31 Speaker 2
And he worked among minors.
00:12:35 Speaker 2
In Alaska.
00:12:37 Speaker 2
And this is the Byzantine liturgy. St. Cyril and Methodius. And it is the Slavonic, right, the right of the Jesus prayer. Right straight line to the desert fathers and the Byzantine liturgy is very beautiful, especially if you have a wonderful voice like you.
00:12:57 Speaker 2
Or Henry Nolan or my uncle father Robert Valusek on my mother's side they music.
00:13:03
Yeah.
00:13:04 Speaker 2
And the miners loved him. In Alaska, he had a watch that was made out of a gold nugget that the miners gave him because they loved.
00:13:14 Speaker 2
His.
00:13:15 Speaker 2
Liturgies, and there were a lot of Czechoslovakian people in Alaska because of the proximity to Russia.
00:13:22 Speaker 2
And the Byzantine right was very, very strong in Pennsylvania, where my family came from, and I had a nun who's my aunt, and she's a great mentor. She's not famous. Neither am I, but.
00:13:40 Speaker 2
She lived to be a nun.
00:13:43 Speaker 2
From the age of 90, like I've seen the nuns here with their canes and their walkers, they get old and they get really sweet and really nice, sister Bernard, my aunt, sister Bernard. She loved the fact that I was.
00:14:02 Speaker 2
Meditating and teaching people how to meditate, I taught her how to meditate and how to do the centering prayer, she said. I've been doing this all my life.
00:14:12 Speaker 1
OK so so the image of the future is.
00:14:17 Speaker 1
The past is the small the small groups.
00:14:21 Speaker 2
Yeah, the desert fathers. It's, it's.
00:14:24 Speaker 2
Like the the.
00:14:25 Speaker 2
Stand up. I'm going to switch your chair around because I notice there's a squeak.
00:14:28 Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. I move around a lot. I'm sorry. It's because I.
00:14:31
Yeah, this will be better. This would be better.
00:14:32 Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:14:35 Speaker 2
We don't have to start all over again, do we?
00:14:36
No, no, no, no, no, no, I know.
00:14:39
Father Carl had had his next question for you.
00:14:42
So.
00:14:42 Speaker 1
Yeah. So you're you're when I ask about contemplative outreach, what impact does it have on the world? If it is the fact of encouraging individuals and small communities to?
00:14:55 Speaker 2
Find God in the moment.
00:14:58 Speaker 2
In this moment now like I'm talking to you. Where's God?
00:15:06 Speaker 2
And to me, God's the mercy part.
00:15:12 Speaker 2
You know, moment to moment. That's that's where God shows up.
00:15:16 Speaker 2
Mercy, thank you.
00:15:18 Speaker 1
OK. Ray, is there anything else we could ask them in regard to our four classic questions?
00:15:26
Hmm.
00:15:27 Speaker 2
Does that explain to you how I do centering for how I approach center?
00:15:32 Speaker 2
Yeah, I think so.
00:15:33 Speaker 2
I could say I want to say one other thing that it might help you as a metaphor. The Byzantine liturgy of the Jesus Prayer, as you know has an iconostasis and behind the iconostasis it's a door, a gold door.
00:15:52 Speaker 2
And and behind on the alt, it separates the altar from the community.
00:15:53 Speaker 1
On the altar.
00:15:58 Speaker 2
And.
00:15:58 Speaker 1
Start that again like explain it, because folks won't know.
00:16:05 Speaker 2
The eastern right, the Byzantine church separates.
00:16:11 Speaker 2
The.
00:16:13 Speaker 2
Community, the parish, the people of the parish.
00:16:16 Speaker 2
From the priest at the altar.
00:16:19 Speaker 2
Because.
00:16:21 Speaker 2
He faces God.
00:16:23 Speaker 2
He doesn't face.
00:16:26 Speaker 2
Of the people he prays in behalf.
00:16:29 Speaker 2
Of the people to God.
00:16:32 Speaker 2
And in fact, there's an iconostasis which is a gold doors.
00:16:39 Speaker 2
And and the. So the prayers of the priests and what he says in Slavonic High Church Slavonic is comes like a sound.
00:16:51 Speaker 2
The chanting through the prayers and I'm not a good but. But you wouldn't know how to do it. My father Rob would. But. But they're beautiful words through the prayers of the mother of God. Save us. Save us all. Repeat it in in, in my original language, which is High Church Slavonic.
00:17:10 Speaker 2
And so it's a mystery. I don't know these words, but they sound like godly sounds and you're smelling incense. There's a lot of incense, and it smells like perfume. It smells like heaven, and it fills the room and you feel like you're in.
00:17:26 Speaker 2
And you can't see the priest very well because he's behind gold doors and he's standing up on an altar and he's praying to God on behalf of the people.
00:17:37 Speaker 2
And you know, I think it's wonderful.
00:17:40 Speaker 2
That the priest has turned around now since Vatican 2, and he and he faces the people.
00:17:47 Speaker 2
I think it's wonderful, but there there were good things about the old ways. You know, I I don't think. And Martin said we must.
00:17:57 Speaker 2
Thomas Merton.
00:17:59 Speaker 2
I was the director of the Merchant Center and he said we must retain what is good.
00:18:05 Speaker 2
In the all ways of the Church of the of the Church of tradition, of the Church, of our fathers, while being open to fresh air and sunlight, of the new world. So that's why I love. That's my favorite book, contemplation in a.
00:18:22 Speaker 2
A world of action. And when I was studying.
00:18:29 Speaker 2
The Jesus Prayer and Hezekiah, Hezekiah M the prayer of the heart, the prayer of stillness with Henry Nallen.
00:18:38 Speaker 2
UM.
00:18:41 Speaker 2
He would just stop sometimes and be quiet.
00:18:45 Speaker 2
Before he said anything else.
00:18:48 Speaker 2
And.
00:18:51 Speaker 2
That was helpful to me.
00:18:54 Speaker 2
Because we felt.
00:18:56 Speaker 2
He would he would, he would appreciate the words that I was saying, but he also could hear the silence between the words.
00:19:05 Speaker 2
And you know, I think when you breathe in.
00:19:09 Speaker 2
I don't know if you've noticed it, but I do the prayer of the heart. I would call it a.
00:19:15 Speaker 2
A prayer of.
00:19:17 Speaker 2
Rua de breath.
00:19:20 Speaker 2
You know the Hebrew word for spirit. You know, you're a priest. Ruah means breath, and there's a Greek word, numa.
00:19:29 Speaker 2
Means breath, spirit, breath, same thing. So I do the centering prayer with the breath.
00:19:37 Speaker 2
While breathing in, breathing out.
00:19:39 Speaker 2
And if you watch the breath closely.
00:19:43 Speaker 2
And you're saying mercy of a trillion times a day.
00:19:49 Speaker 2
You notice that there's a space between the in breath and the out breath.
00:19:53 Speaker 2
Where the world stops.
00:19:56 Speaker 2
It's not just breathing in and breathing out.
00:20:02 Speaker 2
It stops.
00:20:04 Speaker 2
And especially if you do the Jesus prayer or the central.
00:20:07 Speaker 2
Prayer a lot.
00:20:09 Speaker 2
Like for an hour.
00:20:12 Speaker 2
It becomes very still.
00:20:14 Speaker 2
Like this chair doesn't move at all.
00:20:19 Speaker 2
And that's wonderful. That silence between the words Merton said near the end of his life. I know my place. It is between the inn and the out Breath of contemplative life.
00:20:35 Speaker 2
So you know, he's my guy and I was telling you before while we were talking.
00:20:41 Speaker 2
That I feel like Merton.
00:20:46 Speaker 2
Was the horse that pulled the cart of contemplative life all the way from 1944, when I was born to 1968. He was there like and, you know, he walked like a bull.
00:21:02 Speaker 2
You know, he used to I. It's difficult for me to sit in this chair because they say Martin would would walk in the cloister like.
00:21:16 Speaker 2
You know, he really meant it. And he hit the ground because he had a lot of energy.
00:21:24 Speaker 2
And he had a powerful mind, and the spirit was flowing through him like a fire hose.
00:21:33 Speaker 2
And I mean, the guy only lived to be 52 years old. He published 70 books and he joined the monastery when he was 33.
00:21:42 Speaker 2
70 books, Seven Story mountain.
00:21:46 Speaker 2
He didn't write it because he wanted to, his Abbott Don Frederick said. Martin, I've seen your journal and I order you to write while the other monks are cutting grass, I want you to be writing in your journal.
00:22:02 Speaker 2
You know and.
00:22:04 Speaker 2
In 84.
00:22:06 Speaker 2
I know by 84 when we started.
00:22:10 Speaker 2
Contemplative outreach, he had sold 3 million copies of the and he never got a penny. Never got a penny because of the money, went to the Abbey of Gethsemane.
00:22:22 Speaker 2
It went into cheese, it went into monks bread. It went into cutting the grass and it paid for guys like me.
00:22:35 Speaker 2
To sit.
00:22:38 Speaker 2
On the hill and watch the sunrise.
00:22:41 Speaker 2
And the dew drops disappear.
00:22:45 Speaker 2
So you know, I'm thankful to Martin and and and and people like Thomas and Basil that are out there in the world offering this little drop of silence called century prayer.
00:22:57 Speaker 1
Thank you.
00:22:59 Speaker 1
Ray, anything else that you would think you want to ask Ed before we begin with the year 1968?
00:23:08
No, I can't think of anything. It's all neat.
00:23:12 Speaker 1
Excellent wonder.
00:23:14 Speaker 1
Well, OK, we're going to launch into your 1968 in the first phase of that is Martin Luther King.
00:23:22 Speaker 2
Yes. First of all, I want to say.
00:23:26 Speaker 2
That 1968.
00:23:29 Speaker 2
Was the worst year of my life, and it was.
00:23:31 Speaker 2
The best year of my life.
00:23:34 Speaker 2
It was the worst year because.
00:23:36 Speaker 2
All my heroes were killed. All my heroes died.
00:23:41 Speaker 2
I was out there marching with Father Grappy in Milwaukee when I was getting my when I was writing about the parable of the mustard seed. Like the Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a a tiny seed. I thought of us demonstrating with Father Groppi.
00:23:59 Speaker 2
Thousands of mustard seeds, millions of mustard seeds marching on the streets in Milwaukee in favor of civil rights.
00:24:07 Speaker 2
Black and white.
00:24:09 Speaker 2
And so forth. So I was writing on the parable of mustard. See, I wrote. I I wrote my my thesis.
00:24:20 Speaker 2
On how the mustard seed is the tiniest of seeds.
00:24:24 Speaker 2
This one passage in Newman I wrote you.
00:24:27 Speaker 2
Know a whole thesis.
00:24:29 Speaker 2
Because these particles are the smallest of seeds, and yet they grow to be a great tree and we don't know how we're sleeping in the dark and it's growing. The mustard seed is growing and it becomes a great tree, and the birds of the air can rest in its branches.
00:24:50 Speaker 2
There's a physicist named David Vaughn.
00:24:53 Speaker 2
And UM.
00:24:55 Speaker 2
He said that at the beginning of the universe, the one we know.
00:25:00 Speaker 2
Through physics that there was perfect symmetry.
00:25:05 Speaker 2
In the universe. But it was concentrated. The whole universe was concentrated into a small ball.
00:25:11 Speaker 2
That was maybe the size of golf ball.
00:25:14 Speaker 2
And the whole universe was concentrated. It was extremely dense, extremely heavy.
00:25:20 Speaker 2
And but it was perfectly symmetrical.
00:25:26 Speaker 2
Right.
00:25:27 Speaker 2
Perfectly symmetrical the way God is perfectly perfect.
00:25:32 Speaker 2
So this physicist David Baum says.
00:25:35 Speaker 2
At the beginning of the universe, the universe was perfectly symmetrical, very small, very small. And then it exploded, called The Big Bang, and that broke the.
00:25:48 Speaker 2
Perfect symmetry of this dense particle called the mustard seed of the universe and everything's exploding outward. Ever since planets stars all this and it's all going away from us very, very rapidly, you know very rapidly.
00:26:08 Speaker 2
So.
00:26:11 Speaker 2
This mustard seed thing seemed very important to me, especially when now, one said the mustard seed is the Hezekiah, the prayer of stillness, the Jesus prayer. For me, mercy, that's just a that's just a seed. It's nothing else but a seed. But look what these seeds.
00:26:31 Speaker 2
Have produced, Jesus said.
00:26:35 Speaker 2
The Kingdom of heaven. This is Jesus we're talking about said that the Kingdom of heaven is likened unto a tiny seed that grows in the.
00:26:44 Speaker 2
Dark.
00:26:46 Speaker 2
And becomes a great tree. Well, look at the church. Look what it this tiny seed has produced.
00:26:53 Speaker 2
My heroes Thomas Merton, father Basil Pennington Keating.
00:27:01 Speaker 2
Keating's the last one standing.
00:27:04 Speaker 2
So I think that's very precious to me.
00:27:07 Speaker 2
And I feel like.
00:27:09 Speaker 2
You're asking the questions.
00:27:11 Speaker 2
And they're good questions. You know, you are asking good questions. And I know that Thomas Keating has these questions too, because because the beauty of prayer.
00:27:23 Speaker 2
Is not the answer to the prayer. It's the question.
00:27:26 Speaker 2
When you say mercy.
00:27:28 Speaker 2
There's no answer.
00:27:30 Speaker 2
It's just.
00:27:36 Speaker 1
So 1968.
00:27:38 Speaker 2
The worst year of your life, worst year in that. Thank you for bringing me back. And I'll do that.
00:27:49 Speaker 2
First thing was.
00:27:52 Speaker 2
April.
00:27:55 Speaker 2
Martin Luther King.
00:27:58 Speaker 2
He's just trying to help out the garbage workers, the sanitation workers in Memphis, TN.
00:28:05 Speaker 2
And he's going to lead a demonstration the next day. He's at a a hotel in Memphis.
00:28:17 Speaker 2
Called the Lorraine hotel.
00:28:21 Speaker 2
And he's he's he's up there and getting ready for this demonstration and he's.
00:28:27 Speaker 2
Killed.
00:28:27 Speaker 2
Shot.
00:28:30 Speaker 2
UM.
00:28:34 Speaker 2
The day before he was shot.
00:28:37 Speaker 2
This is the day before I was shot. Listen to me.
00:28:41 Speaker 2
He said in Memphis, TN on April 3rd at the Church of God in Christ.
00:28:48 Speaker 2
His final words, his final words before he died in public, final words in public, like anybody.
00:28:57 Speaker 2
I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now.
00:29:11 Speaker 2
Could you help me out and read this?
00:29:17 Speaker 2
Just just read that what he said because I.
00:29:22 Speaker 2
I'm still grieving for those for that, for that loss. I'm not done with that.
00:29:30 Speaker 1
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
00:29:34 Speaker 1
Longevity has its place.
00:29:37 Speaker 1
But I'm not concerned about that now.
00:29:40 Speaker 1
I just want to do God's will.
00:29:44 Speaker 1
And he allows me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over there.
00:29:49 Speaker 1
And I've seen the promised land.
00:29:52 Speaker 1
I will not get there with you.
00:29:55 Speaker 1
But I want you to know.
00:29:58 Speaker 1
That we are as people. We'll get there to the promised land.
00:30:03 Speaker 1
So I am happy to night. I'm not worried about anything.
00:30:08 Speaker 1
And not fearing any man.
00:30:11 Speaker 1
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
00:30:15 Speaker 1
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
00:30:21 Speaker 2
Great works. These are great words and I can't read them without breaking up.
00:30:27 Speaker 2
And they say it's bad to cry in front of a camera because then they'll think you're flaky. I don't care because we haven't seen another like.
00:30:40 Speaker 2
In my lifetime.
00:30:43 Speaker 2
Since he died and I just like to read the end of it. Like, what are you saying in this black Indian which I will not try to imitate but try to get to the feeling my feeling.
00:30:58 Speaker 2
That, you know, I might not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people we will get to the promised land. That's centering prayer. Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington and Thomas Merton said. You know, we might not get there.
00:31:14 Speaker 2
But we as people, we're going to get there.
00:31:17 Speaker 2
This.
00:31:18 Speaker 2
Persevere, you know, don't give up.
00:31:22 Speaker 2
You know, don't give up.
00:31:25 Speaker 2
I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Now. I can't pretend to emphasize the feeling, but I'm feeling what he felt.
00:31:41 Speaker 2
You know, I'm feeling that.
00:31:45 Speaker 2
Righteousness.
00:31:47 Speaker 2
And that passion?
00:31:50 Speaker 2
And that's what he gave us.
00:31:52 Speaker 2
Gave us his life. So then. So then that year, that bear of a year, that lion of the year goes on, you know. But I would say it's the best of years and the worst of years because Senator Kennedy Kennedy.
00:32:09 Speaker 2
Ted Kennedy had just won the primary in California. This was on June 14th, 1968.
00:32:17 Speaker 2
Carl, you and I are old enough to remember that.
00:32:20 Speaker 2
Well, probably, and because all of us of our generation have that image burned into our minds of our next President for sure.
00:32:33 Speaker 2
Bobby Kennedy laying on the ground of the Ambassador Hotel.
00:32:41 Speaker 2
Bleeding from a mortal wound to the head.
00:32:44 Speaker 2
And.
00:32:48 Speaker 2
Don't know. Don't know. He might have been saying a few things.
00:32:54 Speaker 2
But he had a rosary. Somebody put a rosary in his hand.
00:32:59 Speaker 2
And he so I I like to.
00:33:00 Speaker 2
Think that he died.
00:33:03 Speaker 2
With his thought.
00:33:05 Speaker 2
On God.
00:33:06 Speaker 2
The way Gandhi did.
00:33:08 Speaker 2
You know last word that Condi said when he was assassinated was?
00:33:18 Speaker 2
He called out.
00:33:20 Speaker 2
God's name very loud.
00:33:23 Speaker 2
Very brave. You just called out the name of God.
00:33:28 Speaker 2
And you know, in thinking of Robert Kennedy with that rosary in his hand.
00:33:35 Speaker 2
Tells me.
00:33:37 Speaker 2
That there is mercy.
00:33:39 Speaker 2
You know, in this world that this world will break your heart.
00:33:44 Speaker 2
And kill you.
00:33:45 Speaker 2
But there's mercy. There's kindness, because underneath it all, doing God's will, it is the the only thing that.
00:33:59 Speaker 2
Is right and good.
00:34:02 Speaker 2
So then uh.
00:34:08 Speaker 2
His I I I have a few quotes. If you you'll permit me to read.
00:34:16 Speaker 2
His funeral was in past Saint Patrick's Cathedral, which is, as we know, a stronghold of Irish Catholicism since before the Indians. Almost.
00:34:27 Speaker 2
And.
00:34:29 Speaker 2
Uh.
00:34:29 Speaker 2
And and his younger brother Teddy talking about. And he really looked up to Robert. Robert, you know, after after JFK John Kennedy died.
00:34:43 Speaker 2
Robert Kennedy was the go to man 11 children. Are you kidding me? And and they're all out there doing things. Good things. So his father died with the Catholic rosary and then his brother Teddy says beneath it all.
00:34:59 Speaker 2
He tried to engender a social conscience.
00:35:04 Speaker 2
There were people who were poor.
00:35:07 Speaker 2
They needed a helping hand.
00:35:09 Speaker 2
So you know one.
00:35:11 Speaker 2
Of the last speeches Bobby gave.
00:35:14 Speaker 2
He said he quotes his brother, Bobby says.
00:35:29 Speaker 2
These words are so powerful.
00:35:31 Speaker 2
That I think I I might fall off the chair reading. They're so powerful, but I'm going to give it a try.
00:35:39 Speaker 2
It is from numberless acts of diverse it is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief.
00:35:49 Speaker 2
That human history is shaped.
00:35:55 Speaker 2
And isn't that true?
00:35:58 Speaker 2
It is from.
00:36:00 Speaker 2
Diverse acts of courage and belief that human history has been shaped. Robert Kennedy stood for that. He's saying that before he died, he says every man stands up for an ideal.
00:36:14 Speaker 2
Or acts to improve the lot of others or.
00:36:18 Speaker 2
Out.
00:36:20 Speaker 2
Against injustice.
00:36:22 Speaker 2
In so doing, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
00:36:28 Speaker 2
Everything like just me and there's black lady sitting waiting for my ride. And she's being kind to me and that gives me hope.
00:36:38 Speaker 2
That little act of kindness to me, an old guy who's nervous and he's got all these pieces of paper and he doesn't.
00:36:46 Speaker 2
See, it's such an honor to.
00:36:51 Speaker 2
Speak the words of Robert Kennedy that.
00:36:55 Speaker 2
I feel.
00:36:56 Speaker 2
Incapacitated, and she's kind to me. So I think I can do it, you know? And so because she was the kind of lady that Robert Kennedy was trying to reach out to, you know, she had an inexpensive phone. It wasn't working so well, but she worked really hard.
00:37:14 Speaker 2
To make it work so I could call Father Carl and we've got through to you.
00:37:19 Speaker 2
So he says each each of these acts to improve the the lot of others or strike out against injustice, sends out a tiny ripple of hope, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy centers of energy and daring centers of energy.
00:37:38 Speaker 2
During these ripples build a current a mighty current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.
00:37:47 Speaker 2
Now isn't that good? And in, isn't that true that that we when we're doing our centering prayers like the little brothers of Jesus or Charles difficult when you know he was in the desert with his small community living among this poorest people on Earth?
00:38:06 Speaker 2
You know that when we sit and do our prayer.
00:38:13 Speaker 2
Something's happening.
00:38:15 Speaker 2
And it's going to make the world better.
00:38:17 Speaker 2
Don't know how. Don't know why.
00:38:21 Speaker 2
But.
00:38:22 Speaker 2
One you see.
00:38:30 Speaker 2
When you see the world to the eyes of mercy.
00:38:34 Speaker 2
You can kill me.
00:38:39 Speaker 2
I'm not afraid.
00:38:46 Speaker 2
So he concluded by saying my brother need not be idealized.
00:38:53 Speaker 2
Or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.
00:38:58 Speaker 2
But to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, not a senator, not a wealthy kid, but a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to ride it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it. Now they're centering right there. We're all suffering and centering.
00:39:18 Speaker 2
Doing centering prayer, praying the prayer of of the heart.
00:39:23 Speaker 2
Of hesychasm, of stillness, of just seeing how mercy comes with each breath with each moment.
00:39:34 Speaker 2
A good and decent man who saw the wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it. Who saw war.
00:39:42 Speaker 2
Gave his life trying to stop.
00:39:46 Speaker 2
I mean, you know, you're rich, you're a senator. And this guy he would speak would be the the only white person in Detroit when everybody wanted to tear the city down at the time of Martin Luther King's death assassination, he got up there. He stood up on.
00:40:05 Speaker 2
The only black person among thousands, and he stood up on top of his car, his his car, and he had a bullhorn.
00:40:15 Speaker 2
And he said to those people who wanted to tear that because their leader had been assassinated and he said his his words were.
00:40:17 Speaker 2
Of.
00:40:29 Speaker 2
I think I know how you feel.
00:40:33 Speaker 2
Because I lost a brother that way too.
00:40:38 Speaker 2
But.
00:40:40 Speaker 2
We're not to give in to anger. We're not to give in to violence because.
00:40:47 Speaker 2
This is the United States of America and there's.
00:40:49 Speaker 2
Hope for the future.
00:40:51 Speaker 2
You know, there's hope for black people because we're standing together here just like.
00:40:58 Speaker 2
I did with Martin Luther King, just like I did with.
00:41:03 Speaker 2
Chasar Chavez. And just like I'm standing here with you tonight and he had no bodyguards, he would then shake hands with people. They'd tear off his cufflinks. They loved him so.
00:41:17 Speaker 2
He was not afraid. He was not afraid. Now, why was he not afraid? Father, you tell me.
00:41:24 Speaker 2
Tell me. I don't know how could how could somebody be so brave? I do not understand it.
00:41:38 Speaker 1
He knew he wasn't the fixed point of reference.
00:41:43 Speaker 2
Yes.
00:41:47 Speaker 2
He was a fixed point of reference. He was a fixed point of reference.
00:41:52 Speaker 1
But he knew he wasn't.
00:41:55 Speaker 1
Pardon. He knew he wasn't the fixed point of reference.
00:41:58 Speaker 2
Ohh yes in in this.
00:41:59 Speaker 1
Because he was relying on on something greater than himself.
00:42:03 Speaker 2
He wasn't a Kennedy.
00:42:05 Speaker 2
When he was standing up there, no.
00:42:07 Speaker 1
He's a child.
00:42:08 Speaker 1
Of God's.
00:42:08 Speaker 2
Child of God. He was he was.
00:42:11 Speaker 2
A Catholic.
00:42:14 Speaker 2
With rosary.
00:42:16 Speaker 2
He wasn't afraid.
00:42:19 Speaker 2
Wasn't afraid to die.
00:42:22 Speaker 2
Before he entered public life, he dealt with a long time. I know, I know Kennedy very well. I worked. I'm a community organizer. I did lobbying for things like contemplative outreaching, the Congress and and I worked closely with his, with his brother. Teddy and Teddy was a lion of the Senate. You know, whether you're Democrats.
00:42:42 Speaker 2
Whether you're Republicans, everybody respected Teddy.
00:42:46 Speaker 2
And.
00:42:49 Speaker 2
Whatever you, you know, he wasn't perfect. I'm not perfect either. I mean, look at me. I couldn't find my keys going here today. And the centering prayer help me out. Because when I asked for mercy, I got it. Didn't even know they were under my notes. And.
00:43:07 Speaker 2
That's how the world.
00:43:08 Speaker 2
Close. You know, if you're not afraid, it works.
00:43:13 Speaker 1
And this is one of the gifts that centering prayer gives to a person.
00:43:17 Speaker 2
Yes, it, yes, certainly. And you know it does. It's not like a bromide, it's not like.
00:43:26 Speaker 2
Xanax. It's not like a pill. It's not a tranquilizer.
00:43:30 Speaker 2
It's the opposite.
00:43:33 Speaker 2
Of a tranquilizer it it helps you to be brave.
00:43:37 Speaker 1
So in 1968, we had the experience of Martin Luther King.
00:43:42 Speaker 1
1968 Bobby Kennedy.
00:43:42 Speaker 2
And Bobby?
00:43:45 Speaker 2
And the big one?
00:43:46 Speaker 1
And then your last one, because these three men were your inspiration.
00:43:51 Speaker 2
For the rest of.
00:43:51 Speaker 2
My life.
00:43:52 Speaker 1
And also to empower you to consider a proposal for contemplative outreach that was given birth to many years later.
00:44:04 Speaker 1
When you're able to make people hear about it, that's your third person is is who now?
00:44:07 Speaker 2
Yes.
00:44:13 Speaker 2
You know.
00:44:14 Speaker 1
Thomas Merton. So tell me about your friend Thomas Merton and how that inspired you.
00:44:18 Speaker 2
Thomas.
00:44:21 Speaker 2
Well, I feel like.
00:44:26 Speaker 2
This is going to sound weird, but I feel like he's with us today.
00:44:33 Speaker 2
I'm the same way. I'm like him. I when I walk, I # the ground with my and I bump into things and I have accidents. I mean, having a a fan fall into the bathtub like it did with Merton, that could happen to me just as well. And I I I'm full of ideas and they pour out of me and.
00:44:52 Speaker 2
And and you know, just like Merton had Don Frederick to.
00:44:56 Speaker 2
And the structure of the Trappist order to hold him down to Earth.
00:45:02 Speaker 2
I need that too.
00:45:04 Speaker 1
Do you have a special quote from Merton that you like well?
00:45:10 Speaker 2
Yes.
00:45:12 Speaker 2
I do. I have one that I love and I don't have to look at.
00:45:15 Speaker 2
The.
00:45:15 Speaker 2
My notes.
00:45:19 Speaker 2
Martin died in Bangkok.
00:45:25 Speaker 2
And he was speaking on the contemplative experience as at the very heart of 82 monistic into monastic dialogue. In other words, monks and nuns, meaning.
00:45:37 Speaker 2
From all over the world, the best and the brightest dumb.
00:45:41 Speaker 2
John leclair. You know brilliant mind, Basil Pennington.
00:45:49 Speaker 2
Wonderful people, Buddhist guests. Martin had just seen the Dalai Lama before going there.
00:45:58 Speaker 2
And.
00:46:01 Speaker 2
The Dalai Lama said that Martin is is is like the Dalai Lama for Chris. For for Christians, you know, and and he even told me.
00:46:11 Speaker 2
I asked the Dalai Lama because I worked with him for several years and I asked him, you know, well, what, what? How shall I pray?
00:46:20 Speaker 2
And he said.
00:46:23 Speaker 2
You, you, you. You know how to pray because Thomas Merton is your Catholic lama. He's your holy man. Just do what he says.
00:46:32 Speaker 2
And I thought that was wonderful dilemma. Told me that.
00:46:35 Speaker 2
And and it only reinforced.
00:46:40 Speaker 2
What I already knew was true that we have everything that we need when we.
00:46:48 Speaker 2
Pray to live.
00:46:51 Speaker 2
So, so, so, so. So you're looking at me like, where's the quote? And the quote is before he died. I know you're waiting. You're patient.
00:47:04 Speaker 2
So before he died, Merton said this is like the he was writing in his journal. He wrote a journal called the Asian Journal.
00:47:13 Speaker 2
And he said that the milk of the tiger is so powerful it shatters the bowl.
00:47:20 Speaker 2
He was electrocuted the next week, but he said the milk of the tiger is so powerful that it shatters the bowl.
00:47:31 Speaker 2
Now.
00:47:36 Speaker 2
To me, that's amazing that he would say that and write that in his journal shortly before his death. What does it mean to melt the tiger? That's the spiritual.
00:47:46 Speaker 2
And what is shattering the ball mean?
00:47:49 Speaker 2
If you don't know the answer that I can't tell you.
00:47:53 Speaker 2
Right. I mean my ball got shattered just by losing things.
00:47:58 Speaker 2
I mean, how are you going to?
00:48:01 Speaker 2
Get to Newark, NJ if you can't find your car keys. And yeah, that was like a a major shattering of my bowl and it happens to me all the time like that. I couldn't find the photographs that I wanted to put into your can of pictures of Thomas Merton, but we we we got through it. You know, I.
00:48:24 Speaker 2
And.
00:48:26 Speaker 2
And so here's Martin and he's he writes this.
00:48:31 Speaker 2
Wonderful manifesto about the place of monastic life.
00:48:36 Speaker 2
In the modern world.
00:48:38 Speaker 2
Pulling forth that there should be contemplation and world of action, holding up little brothers of Jesus and the model Charles de Focal in the desert, living among the poorest of the poor, combining a life of prayer and sacraments.
00:48:58 Speaker 2
With service.
00:49:01 Speaker 2
To the poorest of the poor, like mother trees of Calcutta, I ran conferences which Mother Teresa participated in, and I was running these conferences.
00:49:11 Speaker 2
Where Buddhists and Christians Contemplatives got together in support.
00:49:21 Speaker 2
Of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, and I wasn't crossing over to the other side. We were very clear that we are a coalition of interfaith.
00:49:32 Speaker 2
People, people are fake for.
00:49:37 Speaker 2
Trying to stop.
00:49:39 Speaker 2
The arms race trying to stop war.
00:49:42 Speaker 2
And.
00:49:44 Speaker 2
So I asked Daniel Berg and.
00:49:46 Speaker 2
For those of you who aren't old like me, Daniel Berrigan was is is in his 90s now. He's a Jesuit and he lives. He has an apartment in Upper New York with the community and nuns. And as a matter of fact, I was doing this piece of peace and justice.
00:50:07 Speaker 2
But it doesn't pay much so.
00:50:09 Speaker 2
Daniel got me a a small.
00:50:13 Speaker 2
Efficiency with the nuns on Upper 90th and Broadway and 100 and maybe close to the merchant center. So I could walk to work.
00:50:25 Speaker 2
And uh.
00:50:28 Speaker 2
And I said, well, who's going to spearhead this March? And he knows I'd love TomTom smart, and I'm working at the Thomas Merton Center. And Dan Berrigan says.
00:50:40 Speaker 2
Take that, huh?
00:50:42 Speaker 2
And Martin had also written near the end of his life, not hunt as my brother.
00:50:50 Speaker 2
He wrote a very wonderful essay about how we're both monks.
00:50:55 Speaker 2
We do the same life. We live the same practice, so I'm saying to you in a book I'm saying to you publicly not Han, it's my brother. This is, you know, he was coming out of the Eisenhower years, which were the monasteries are like barricades. The enclosures were like bomb shelters. And we didn't talk to Buddhists.
00:51:16 Speaker 2
He felt uncomfortable talking to Presbyterians, for God's sakes, and and Martin, on the other hand.
00:51:25 Speaker 2
Said not Han is my brother.
00:51:28 Speaker 2
And so I, Dan Bergen and I.
00:51:31 Speaker 2
Co-authored a letter.
00:51:35 Speaker 2
To and you know Dan Bergans. He's been out there on the barricades since the 50s.
00:51:41 Speaker 2
Throwing his own blood on missile nose cones and going to jail for it. So.
00:51:48 Speaker 2
He's got skin in the game.
00:51:51 Speaker 2
Not Han. He's got skin in the game.
00:51:54 Speaker 2
He you know that, do you know the meaning of skin in the game that?
00:51:56 Speaker 2
Means put up or shut up.
00:51:59 Speaker 2
Walk the walk.
00:52:01 Speaker 2
Talk to talk, but let's see. See what you're going to do. So uh.
00:52:08 Speaker 2
Not Han had been in seclusion in France.
00:52:11 Speaker 2
In the Pyrenees.
00:52:13 Speaker 2
Living a very simple monastic life. Grieving.
00:52:16 Speaker 2
Because he had LED.
00:52:20 Speaker 2
An exodus from Vietnam.
00:52:23 Speaker 2
The so-called boat people, he led an Armada trying to flee Vietnam and in the ocean in the deep ocean off the coast of Vietnam. This little boat overloaded with people, were attacked by sea pirates.
00:52:43 Speaker 2
And they raped and murdered his niece.
00:52:52 Speaker 2
So anyway, we invited.
00:52:54 Speaker 2
Him.
00:52:55 Speaker 2
You know, he was really very private, very secluded. Nobody knew who he was.
00:53:01 Speaker 2
And Bergen said he's the one to keep keynote. There were 1000 people at Saint Patrick's, the kickoff event of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament and not Han.
00:53:19 Speaker 2
The way he walked into that church.
00:53:25 Speaker 2
From the door of the church to the podium.
00:53:28 Speaker 2
Took him about.
00:53:30 Speaker 2
10 or 15 minutes, he.
00:53:33 Speaker 2
He was very aware of every step.
00:53:39 Speaker 2
Like he was while he was stepping, he was simply aware of the stepping while he was breathing. He was aware of the breathing.
00:53:48 Speaker 2
So he didn't have to do centering, he was centering.
00:53:52 Speaker 2
He was centering and everybody in the cathedral saw that he was different because usually.
00:53:58 Speaker 2
When we walk, we're not walking while we walk. We're thinking of something else. He wasn't thinking of anything else. So by the time he got and he walked up to this podium.
00:54:09 Speaker 2
He had already convinced everybody that.
00:54:16 Speaker 2
He was a great man.
00:54:17 Speaker 2
You hadn't said a word.
00:54:19 Speaker 2
The cathedral. You could hear a pin drop.
00:54:23 Speaker 2
And every single one of those thousand people said I don't know who this guy is. He's, but he's a great man. He's a holy man.
00:54:30 Speaker 2
And that's and then he, he said that the sea pirate is my brother.
00:54:37 Speaker 2
The man who raped my niece is my brother and then, he said.
00:54:43 Speaker 2
Even more, he said.
00:54:48 Speaker 2
I am.
00:54:50 Speaker 2
The young woman who was raped.
00:54:53 Speaker 2
I am the sea pirate.
00:54:56 Speaker 2
And so call me by my true name I am.
00:55:01 Speaker 2
This.
00:55:02 Speaker 2
I am that the very, very best and the very worst, and so isn't it fitting that my one hero died among the garbage helping sanitation work workers and another hero, not Han, saying that the man who the sea pirate who raped?
00:55:22 Speaker 2
My niece.
00:55:25 Speaker 2
Is my brother not only that, but I am the sea pirate and I am my niece.
00:55:31 Speaker 2
And that's an amazing, you know, that's just true.
00:55:37 Speaker 2
That's just true, and everybody recognized it that that there was a a compassion there that was very big.
00:55:46 Speaker 2
And could include everything you know, not only the hot bath.
00:55:53 Speaker 2
This morning, but also can't find my keys and then also.
00:56:01 Speaker 2
You know when the train arrived in Newark, I had files and I was on the phone trying to talk to Father Carl, and I had it like in 10 seconds, gather everything up and jump out of the train. That was sheer terror. And that's part of my prayer, too.
00:56:20 Speaker 2
So I think that there's nothing.
00:56:25 Speaker 2
That prayer can't cover. There's nothing that prayer can't be about.
00:56:32 Speaker 2
And if it's not now, then when? If it's not you and I, then who?
00:56:43 Speaker 2
So Martin, that, that I had more, I had a lot on.
00:56:45
So.
00:56:46 Speaker 2
Martin.
00:56:47 Speaker 1
I think I we better kind of like step back for a moment.
00:56:52 Speaker 2
OK.
00:56:54 Speaker 1
We've had an hour, really.
00:56:57
Yeah.
00:56:58 Speaker 2
It started.
00:56:59 Speaker 2
With Newman and the parable of the mustard seed.
00:57:01 Speaker 1
Well, you won't have the camera going well.
00:57:04 Speaker 2
Yeah, it started with. Wait a second.
00:57:04
You ready? I'm. I'm. I'm rolling. Yeah.
00:57:07 Speaker 1
Are you rolling OK?
00:57:07
Yeah, so, so go ahead.
00:57:09
And talk to Father Carl.
00:57:10 Speaker 2
That's alright. So we're at the end of 68.
00:57:16 Speaker 2
Bobby Kennedy died on.
00:57:19 Speaker 2
June 8th, my birthday was on June 16th.
00:57:26 Speaker 2
So it was not a happy birthday.
00:57:30 Speaker 2
I was grieving.
00:57:31 Speaker 2
With the Kennedy family and I encountered Merton through now and and he was my boat to the future. He had been casting these seeds of contemplation. I was reading contemplation in in a world of action.
00:57:47 Speaker 2
I read that book so many times as a manual for the spiritual life that it fell apart. You know, it's just.
00:57:59 Speaker 2
And so did I. While the book was falling apart, so was I. And that can be a good thing.
00:58:08 Speaker 2
Because Leonard Cohen said there's a crack in the in the Liberty Bell, and that's where the light comes in. Hallelujah.
00:58:16 Speaker 2
And certainly we've all been broken. You know, my mentor wrote a book called The Wounded Healer.
00:58:24 Speaker 2
And he said in that book that the power of the healings are in the wounds of the healer.
00:58:31 Speaker 1
Who's your mentor?
00:58:32 Speaker 2
Henry down and his mentor is Jesus Christ. The original wounded healer.
00:58:41 Speaker 2
So.
00:58:44 Speaker 2
I had.
00:58:45 Speaker 2
Jesus prayer.
00:58:47 Speaker 2
And the wounded healer.
00:58:50 Speaker 2
To guide me through that terrible year of all the killings, and Thomas Merton, I thought. Or so I thought. And then at the end of the year in December, merchandise too electrocuted accidentally, you know, could have been me.
00:59:06 Speaker 2
You know, I could have done that. I I try to get a toast of a toaster with a spoon.
00:59:14 Speaker 2
Boom. Gone.
00:59:17 Speaker 2
And so, you know, Merton said.
00:59:23 Speaker 2
That I worshipped the God of burnt men. He sure did. He was burnt. He was burnt out in service.
00:59:31 Speaker 2
In a good way.
00:59:33 Speaker 2
He was a fire that went out and we should all be that burnt up in service. That's what I thought. That's my mom. So that's when I started thinking of contemplative outreach. At the end of that, that, that terrible decade and in writing proposals, they were called different things. I wanted to do a comp.
00:59:53 Speaker 2
Thomas Merton, Center at Saint Joseph's Abbey and there was a big debate and I wrote several proposals.
01:00:00 Speaker 2
About that. But you know.
01:00:04 Speaker 2
The debate was about the issue of enclosure.
01:00:07 Speaker 2
Right. Could the monks share with the world while respecting their Trappist strict observance of enclosure? They have 3000 acres of land, but they use it with sheep, with farming, you know, they do things manual labor, they make Jelly, you know, so wood.
01:00:28 Speaker 2
Something like contemplative outreach, which is a worldwide phenomenon, I mean basil and the Abbott. When I started going there.
01:00:36 Speaker 2
In the early 70s, on the recommendation of Henry Nallen.
01:00:42 Speaker 2
You had to book six months in advance.
01:00:45 Speaker 2
To get into the guesthouse because Basil and the Abbott were so.
01:00:52 Speaker 2
Successful with centering prayer, people really needed it. I remember 1 retreat they did with firemen.
01:00:58 Speaker 2
And these are burnt out men too. They see people getting burnt up all the time. And they they're. Yeah, it was. Basil was doing a retreat with a bunch of firemen. And these guys have seen a.
01:01:09 Speaker 2
Lot of death.
01:01:12 Speaker 2
And so the centering for I think helps me.
01:01:16 Speaker 2
To see.
01:01:18 Speaker 2
That you can get through fire if your heart is in the right place.
01:01:25 Speaker 2
You know.
01:01:26 Speaker 1
What was your? How did you find out about Henry Nowen?
01:01:32 Speaker 2
You could put the water bottle down so you.
01:01:33
Don't get the cracking.
01:01:34 Speaker 2
Well.
01:01:36 Speaker 2
I was a member of Saint Mary's Parish in New Haven. I'm very proud of that because Father Mcgivney started the Knights of Columbus in our parish, and that was an order of people who.
01:01:51 Speaker 2
Were very pious, man. My father and my godfather were both.
01:01:56 Speaker 2
4th Degree Knights of Columbus.
01:02:00 Speaker 2
And they don't just March in parades. They do a lot of good works.
01:02:04 Speaker 2
And then Father Mcgivney started the Knights of Columbus. Am I off the.
01:02:08 Speaker 2
Subject.
01:02:09 Speaker 1
Yes.
01:02:11 Speaker 2
Well, only that the at that time.
01:02:16 Speaker 2
The.
01:02:19 Speaker 2
I'm going to give you the segue I'm.
01:02:20 Speaker 2
Going to give you the segue.
01:02:22 Speaker 2
Carlton Jones was director.
01:02:26 Speaker 2
Of Saint Mary's.
01:02:28 Speaker 2
And he's an Oxford movement priest.
01:02:32 Speaker 2
And he had written.
01:02:35 Speaker 2
About the Oxford movement.
01:02:40 Speaker 2
After Gregorian in Rome now the oxen movement in the 19th century, Cardinal Newman, my mentor, was a movement of small communities combining liturgy.
01:02:53 Speaker 2
Communities of service to the poor and UM.
01:02:58 Speaker 2
Sacramento, sacramentalism that you know this parable of the seed was Newmans because it was going back to the early fathers with the gospel.
01:03:13 Speaker 2
Focus on Jesus and the Ministry of Peace and Justice for the poorest of the poor.
01:03:20 Speaker 2
So I said. I said to Carlton Jones, this Oxford movement, rector of St.
01:03:29 Speaker 2
Mary's church and don't forget St. Mary's.
01:03:32 Speaker 2
Is the God bearer.
01:03:34 Speaker 2
Right. And every monk his model.
01:03:38 Speaker 2
Is Mary who gives birth to Jesus and every monk.
01:03:43 Speaker 2
He's called to give birth to Jesus in his own heart. Right. There's a there's a word for it in the in Orthodoxy.
01:03:54 Speaker 2
Which means.
01:03:57 Speaker 2
Bearer of Christ, but it applies to Mary and and it applies to me and. And I was getting that from Carlton because.
01:04:06 Speaker 2
He was in that tradition and and I asked him, is there anybody in New Haven who knows anything about this stuff? Because aside from Saint Mary's, there were a lot of people that were just going through the motions and they didn't have any inner awareness of what they were doing. They were going. They were, you know, we were like this in the 50s.
01:04:27 Speaker 2
You got dressed up. The family got their best clothes, shine their shoes, tie and jacket.
01:04:34 Speaker 2
Hair combed and it was about looking good.
01:04:39 Speaker 2
And showing up because you would go to hell if you did.
01:04:44 Speaker 2
And there were a lot of churches like that.
01:04:48 Speaker 2
I grew up in one of them.
01:04:50 Speaker 2
And I said, is there anybody besides you? Carlton director of Saint Mary's, who's into this kind of stuff. And he said, yeah, Henry, now you should see Henry now.
01:05:03 Speaker 2
So you know, he was right on on target because.
01:05:07 Speaker 2
UM.
01:05:08 Speaker 2
You know, we meant two or three times a week for prayer, spiritual direction. We had a little group and there was a there's a little meditation Chapel in the crypt underneath the divinity school.
01:05:24 Speaker 2
And pardon me.
01:05:24 Speaker 1
Where?
01:05:26 Speaker 1
With the affinity.
01:05:27 Speaker 2
Yale Divinity School. Yeah. Yeah, as a.
01:05:28 Speaker 1
Oh yeah. You went to Yale.
01:05:31 Speaker 1
Student no, no.
01:05:32 Speaker 2
I went to, I went to Yale. Well, I I I was a special student. They didn't accept me at the Divinity school because I was a Catholic late person.
01:05:43 Speaker 2
And I didn't have a Catholic Church to sponsor me because I wasn't called to the salivate life. So I took courses as a special student and Henry said, you know, Yale's not for you because they're turning out Protestant talkers who do hymns.
01:05:49 Speaker 1
Right.
01:06:05 Speaker 2
Yeah, it was true. He had he left Yale for the same reason. You know, he left Yale because that little meditation Chapel where we meet a couple of times a week and it just had mostly centering prayer and and and a mass. Henry would celebrate a mass that he maybe 12 of us.
01:06:22 Speaker 2
And they put a big organ in there and a bunch of hymn books. And you know, that was Henry left around 1970.
01:06:33 Speaker 2
You went to Harvard and it was worse at Harvard.
01:06:36 Speaker 2
You know, everybody's, you know, wanting to make a reputation, wanting to crank out articles about prayer and meditation, you know? But they're not doing it. They're into writing about.
01:06:47 Speaker 2
And.
01:06:49 Speaker 1
So you had this time with with.
01:06:52 Speaker 2
Henry, two years. Two years? Yeah. Meaning once or twice a week for his prayer, meditation and Eucharist and spiritual direction at at Yale in the prayer Chapel. We were the little prayer Chapel in in the crypt. It was in a crypt.
01:06:54 Speaker 1
Have been.
01:07:01 Speaker 1
Right.
01:07:09 Speaker 1
Well, what happened? Where did your journey go after that?
01:07:13 Speaker 2
Well.
01:07:19 Speaker 2
I was.
01:07:23 Speaker 2
Working at a bookstore called Book World and I ran.
01:07:27 Speaker 2
The spirituality section and the literature section. So I was like really.
01:07:35 Speaker 2
Reading all this Martin stuff.
01:07:37 Speaker 2
And non was helping me to understand it like sign of Jonas being swallowed by a whale. That's the metaphor of my life, you know, like this thing takes you over it. You don't know. Know it's God. It feels awful.
01:07:55 Speaker 2
But then.
01:07:56 Speaker 2
The whale spits you out on the beach and you're a different person.
01:08:00 Speaker 2
And I didn't understand these things, but I did with.
01:08:05 Speaker 2
Prayer.
01:08:06 Speaker 2
And I guess Yale had taken me under and spit me out.
01:08:12 Speaker 2
And so, Henry said, this is not for you. And and Henry couldn't drive. He was not a good driver. He was not a focused person, and he was not safe to drive. So I used to drive him to monasteries. I drove him to the Abbey of the Genesee. And I met Merton Secretary Patrick Hart. I drove him up to to.
01:08:34 Speaker 2
Rochester to traps monastery in Rochester where I met his mentor was an Abbott named John Hughes Bamberger, and was a really great man, very tough and Henry need Henry now needed people people to focus him because he was just like me like just.
01:08:52 Speaker 2
All over the place and but he got the books done. He got the books done.
01:08:58 Speaker 2
And so he said, this is not for you. You need a monastery and.
01:09:05 Speaker 2
I think that you might like Saint Joseph's. I didn't listen to him. I didn't listen to him. This is how God works. I I thought that I needed a Zen master up in up in Maine named Walter Nowick. Very. He was a genius guy. He had a big barn. Where people.
01:09:25 Speaker 2
Meditated and he was also a gifted pianist. So he would like give concerts with Mozart and stuff like that. But he rejected me. I presented myself in the traditional Japanese manner and.
01:09:40 Speaker 2
His his priest, his representative, came out and said Walter doesn't want to see you, you know, and and then I go. Well, it seems like I'm being tested. And that was part of a ritual where the Gen. Zen master says no. And then you persist.
01:09:59 Speaker 2
In, in sitting in the in the meditation posture outside the monastery, waiting for the Zen master to admit you, that's a Japanese ritual. And so the guy comes back like.
01:10:12 Speaker 2
Six hours later and he says you're still here. Walt. I I told you, Walter don't want to.
01:10:16 Speaker 2
See.
01:10:16 Speaker 2
You, you know, and I stayed like for 12 hours sitting outside the monastery and he finally said, he said if you do not leave, I'm calling the police.
01:10:31 Speaker 2
So I left, you know, and and it was a blessing. It was a great blessing because I got a ride.
01:10:37 Speaker 2
And I shouldn't be saying this, but I got a ride with some truck drivers and they were drinking and and they offered me vodka. And so, you know, me and these two truck drivers who would pickup truck for drinking vodka. And we're driving from Maine back to.
01:10:57 Speaker 2
New Haven.
01:11:00 Speaker 2
And I and I see this sign for hey Spencer, Abby Spencer MA.
01:11:09 Speaker 2
Oh, that's where Henry said I should go. And. And so these guys and. And so I said, you know, can I get off here, you know? And, you know, I didn't have that much vodka, but I was pretty loose. And then I didn't smell bad. And and they said not only that we'll drive you to the monastery.
01:11:31 Speaker 2
So they took me right to the guesthouse.
01:11:35 Speaker 2
Right. And and and the guest house is like the Abbott and Tom community are so much in demand. You have to have a reservation six months in advance like the fireman. And I just show up here I am and and you know the guest master says you don't have a.
01:11:52 Speaker 2
Reservation.
01:11:54 Speaker 2
You know, but I think we can help you. So. So what had happened is that somebody canceled and he put me into a beautiful room. I I don't know if you've been to Saint Joseph's Abbey, but you know how beautiful it is. It's a for those who don't know.
01:12:14 Speaker 2
It's a 12th century Cistercian monastery classic. The high point of.
01:12:21 Speaker 2
Monastic architecture in the 12th century was a rectangle around a graveyard.
01:12:28 Speaker 2
Right, big, big cloister. Windows everywhere you look, you see the top of the hill. You look down, you see Woods, you see farms.
01:12:37 Speaker 2
And you look the other way and it's the crosses of all the monks who've died. So I thought this place feels really good.
01:12:45 Speaker 2
And I'm waiting to. I'm thinking, you know, boy, Father Basil. You know, Henry says Father Basil is a great man. You know, you're gonna really like this and you know, I'm sobering up.
01:12:59 Speaker 2
And Basil gives a session on centering prayer.
01:13:05 Speaker 2
And I won't ever forget that session.
01:13:11 Speaker 2
Because I I was just doing mercy then.
01:13:14 Speaker 2
Because it it it boiled down to mercy, I've been doing the Jesus prayer for.
01:13:19 Speaker 2
Two years with Henry down and.
01:13:23 Speaker 2
You know, it says that if you persist in the Jesus prayer, your heart will become like a babbling brook, like a little stream. And I had this stream going.
01:13:36 Speaker 2
And I was it was wide open for basil to say.
01:13:42 Speaker 2
It's like a little dart that pierces the cloud of unknowing.
01:13:47 Speaker 2
Do you remember that part of the sending prayer? And I thought, wow.
01:13:53 Speaker 2
I'm in the cloud.
01:13:57 Speaker 2
And.
01:14:00 Speaker 2
That was just amazing. The whole retreat was amazing because I got curious and you know how I am. I'm like a.
01:14:07 Speaker 2
A squirrel that that's smelling everything and want. No dog. A dog. You know, dog dog lives through his nose. And I was attracted to the kitchen for that reason because the smells in the kitchen, right.
01:14:21 Speaker 2
So during a break and the retreat, I'm supposed to be in my room, but I go in the kitchen and it says enclosure do not go in the kitchen.
01:14:29 Speaker 2
So I go in the.
01:14:29 Speaker 2
Kitchen.
01:14:30 Speaker 2
And there's this really tall, thin guy who's just hanging out in the kitchen, not doing any work or anything. He's just like there. And. And and I think, oh, you know, now I'm in trouble because I'm in the kitchen and I'm not.
01:14:44 Speaker 2
Supposed to be.
01:14:44 Speaker 2
There. I didn't know it was Thomas. I thought it was a kitchen, knave.
01:14:49 Speaker 2
And that he was lazy and and.
01:14:55 Speaker 2
So we start talking. What are you doing here? How's your retreat going?
01:15:01 Speaker 2
And I'm thinking he's not going to throw me out of.
01:15:03 Speaker 2
The kitchen. He's talking to me.
01:15:06 Speaker 2
And and and I'm saying you know.
01:15:13 Speaker 2
This is really.
01:15:13 Speaker 2
Good. I'm in the cloud and.
01:15:19 Speaker 2
Tom said.
01:15:20 Speaker 2
Well, he said.
01:15:24 Speaker 2
You know you're in a dark night, Edward.
01:15:26 Speaker 2
And it's a cloud, but it's dark and there's going to be trouble ahead. I can guarantee it.
01:15:34 Speaker 2
And so you better hang on to that centering prayer because things will get worse before they get better.
01:15:41 Speaker 2
And I thought this is pretty good for a kitchen knife. I later found out.
01:15:45 Speaker 2
It was, yeah.
01:15:49 Speaker 2
I'll never forget that meeting with him.
01:15:52 Speaker 2
Because I thought if this if this is the kitchen knave, the guy who cooks and takes care of.
01:15:58 Speaker 2
The kitchen well.
01:15:59 Speaker 2
I'll give him credit. The kitchen's clean.
01:16:02 Speaker 2
You know, but later.
01:16:06 Speaker 2
That that advice about how things are going to get worse before they get it, I started feeling boredom. Restlessness couldn't stay still.
01:16:16 Speaker 2
And it took a long time.
01:16:20 Speaker 2
To feel the joy of quiet and the pleasurable interest of the mind and the heart.
01:16:26 Speaker 2
You know where everything is still like this churro? I was saying, you know, once I sat.
01:16:33 Speaker 2
Doing centering prayer without stopping.
01:16:37 Speaker 2
For six hours, I was in a monastery. I was in a Buddhist monastery. I was doing centering prayer. There's this place I showed showed a graduating class. I was doing a three month retreat at the Insight Meditation societies, 20 minutes between.
01:16:52 Speaker 1
You didn't stay at the monastery.
01:16:55 Speaker 2
No, no, I I, I, I I've done my thing at the monastery. I've been a resident there for a year.
01:17:02 Speaker 1
After that retreat.
01:17:03 Speaker 2
After that retreat, Thomas invited me to be a resident and I and I spent a year, 1970.
01:17:12 Speaker 2
Two, I'm guessing an entire year there and I didn't want to leave, but Hazel told me some cruel things.
01:17:21 Speaker 2
Like I was getting letters from.
01:17:26 Speaker 2
Someone that I really loved in New Haven who I didn't marry because I wanted to be a resident at the monastery and and and Thomas was discerning that I had a call to.
01:17:36 Speaker 2
Be a monk.
01:17:37 Speaker 2
So Basil said.
01:17:41 Speaker 2
This is really hard, he said. When you get those letters.
01:17:44 Speaker 2
Don't read them. Tear them up.
01:17:49 Speaker 2
And I did.
01:17:52 Speaker 2
And eventually, I mean, they kept on going for about several months after that, but.
01:17:58 Speaker 2
She stopped writing.
01:18:01 Speaker 2
So I had given up given something really big. I had some skin in the game at that point.
01:18:09 Speaker 2
And Thomas was saying you should be a monk. And I'm feeling like I. I'm feeling like Merton, that I belong halfway between.
01:18:18 Speaker 2
Being in the out of the breath.
01:18:20 Speaker 2
At that still point.
01:18:22 Speaker 2
Between the in breath and the out breath that was my calling. That is my vocation.
01:18:29 Speaker 1
The.
01:18:31 Speaker 2
Being.
01:18:33 Speaker 2
Are contemplative in the world.
01:18:40 Speaker 1
What did you learn in that one year that you were in residence?
01:18:45 Speaker 2
Well, I mentioned I learned about drops.
01:18:49 Speaker 2
I learned that life is effervescent.
01:18:53 Speaker 2
And you, you know, you're in your 70s.
01:18:56 Speaker 2
You know that this life goes so fast, like if a bird were to fly in this window and then fly out the door, that's a human life. That's how fast it goes quick.
01:19:08 Speaker 2
You know, and the rest is darkness out there. It's dark. Where the where the window is out there by the door. It's dark. All we have is this room.
01:19:19 Speaker 2
And now we're 70.
01:19:21 Speaker 2
Has been so fast.
01:19:23 Speaker 2
Martin Luther King.
01:19:25 Speaker 2
Ted Kennedy or Barbara Kennedy.
01:19:29 Speaker 2
Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, the Zen priest, Susan G young.
01:19:35 Speaker 2
They're all dead.
01:19:37 Speaker 2
And they, you know, pardon me, Henry down. You know, my teacher died. He was my teacher. He died when he was in his 50s like Martin.
01:19:38 Speaker 1
All right, now.
01:19:40 Speaker 1
Only now.
01:19:48 Speaker 2
Accidentally like Martin. I mean, these Mystics are accident prone.
01:19:56 Speaker 1
What did the seeds and the thoughts about?
01:20:00 Speaker 1
Contemplative outreach begin to percolate for you. Were they percolating then about creating?
01:20:06 Speaker 2
What Wick now? And with Henry now and in 69?
01:20:09 Speaker 1
It started.
01:20:10 Speaker 2
Yes, yes, that's that's when we started reading from contemplation and world of action. And it's it's specifically the conclusion.
01:20:20 Speaker 2
Of contemplation in a world of action where he talks about these.
01:20:24 Speaker 2
Communities like Little Brothers of Jesus and Charles difficult. That's in Martin.
01:20:31 Speaker 2
He said that's the future, and that's what contemplative outreach turned out to be. I wrote it. That's the boat I designed. It was a big boat and it had a lot of lifeboats, like thousands of them.
01:20:45 Speaker 1
So when did you do your first draft? You said you you did.
01:20:49 Speaker 2
My first draft was immediately around 1970 when I left 72. When I left that resident living at Saint just as happy as a resident was wonderful.
01:21:03 Speaker 2
It it changed my life forever.
01:21:06 Speaker 2
And I think there's a special charism for being.
01:21:12 Speaker 2
A temporary monastic, someone who goes in the monastery and then goes out.
01:21:16 Speaker 2
And I felt that I had that charism.
01:21:19 Speaker 2
God in the world, the God in the world cares and and the book was that I read over and over again till it fell apart and I did too was contemplation in a world of action. And you know, like the sign of Jonah.
01:21:34 Speaker 2
The whale swallowed me and spit me out a different person and that different person went to Saint Joseph's Abbey.
01:21:41 Speaker 2
And did it and did retreats at the guesthouse and and then I felt I had to go deeper and Abbott, Thomas and Basil Pennington were also going back. And there's monks shuttling back and forth between the inside Meditation Society and Saint Joseph happy. They're only 20 minutes apart. And so.
01:22:01 Speaker 2
There were people like me. I mean, you do you sit and not move for six hours.
01:22:12 Speaker 2
And the Catholic Eucharist.
01:22:18 Speaker 2
It it it catches fire. You feel a burning inside a a radiance like a radiator, like an electric field. You feel light, you feel from just being still.
01:22:33 Speaker 2
So that one time.
01:22:35 Speaker 2
When I sat without moving for six hours, hard to believe, right?
01:22:40 Speaker 2
It's only the breath, but the breath is a very active thing. It moves through the body down here, up here, all over the body and.
01:22:50 Speaker 2
From that stillness, when I went through the mass the next day.
01:22:57 Speaker 2
I felt.
01:22:58 Speaker 2
Like Saint Theresa, I felt like John of the cross. I felt like Thomas Merton. I felt like Basil Pennington. I felt like Thomas Keating.
01:23:06 Speaker 2
Because there's a light, there's a spark.
01:23:09 Speaker 2
When you don't move.
01:23:11 Speaker 2
And you still.
01:23:13 Speaker 2
Something happens.
01:23:17 Speaker 2
And so I I did another year, one year at Saint Joseph's, one year at the Insight Meditation Society.
01:23:23 Speaker 2
At Saint Joseph's, my job was to take care of the oldest monks in the Infirmary and the the holiest man was someone you never heard of, Father Bernard. And he was 91 and he was blind. But he could hear.
01:23:38 Speaker 2
And he he had the sweetest in her life. You'd walk into his room in the Infirmary. I was, you know, the assistant Infirmarian.
01:23:47 Speaker 2
And you felt like you're walking.
01:23:50 Speaker 2
Into the cloud of unknowing.
01:23:53 Speaker 2
And it was like lightning in a bottle.
01:23:56 Speaker 2
Father Bernard.
01:23:58 Speaker 2
I mean.
01:24:00 Speaker 2
So and and my job was to read to him.
01:24:03 Speaker 2
He liked.
01:24:05 Speaker 2
John at the cross. He he like mainly he want you. Just you just read the Gospels over and over again. And the Old Testament and the New Testament and he just loved it all. He loved it all. You couldn't.
01:24:19 Speaker 2
Throw a bad pitch to this guy. You couldn't throw him, and I mean, he's blind. He can't move. He I have to help him to get out of his hospital bed, into the wheelchair. And then I wheel him down the cloister. And the monks are looking in front of Bernard like I've got $1,000,000. I just robbed the bank.
01:24:39 Speaker 2
You know, and and then I would roll them up to the front of the of the church and somebody grand like Thomas Keating, you know, 6-3 then. And you know, holding forth.
01:24:54 Speaker 2
And Thomas and and the one the greatest man in the Chapel was not the the charismatic blessed.
01:25:07 Speaker 2
Abbott it was.
01:25:09 Speaker 2
The 91 year old crippled blind man.
01:25:13 Speaker 2
Who was with God every all the time.
01:25:17 Speaker 2
He didn't have anything to teach. He had been done. He made cheese.
01:25:22 Speaker 2
He made a lot of Jelly.
01:25:25 Speaker 2
And that's it.
01:25:28 Speaker 2
That's the purpose of it all.
01:25:29 Speaker 1
Sounds to me as if he's another one of your heroes.
01:25:38 Speaker 2
As much or more than Henry now.
01:25:41 Speaker 2
As much or more than Robert Kennedy as much more than Robert and Martha Martin Luther King because.
01:25:49 Speaker 2
He just was there.
01:25:52 Speaker 2
Not like a brick.
01:25:55 Speaker 2
But like.
01:25:58 Speaker 2
It's not lightning in it, not lightning in the bottle. No, it's it's more like a cloud with something warm inside.
01:26:08 Speaker 2
You know.
01:26:10 Speaker 2
A warm radiator.
01:26:12 Speaker 2
And surrounded by a cloud.
01:26:16 Speaker 2
Is that? Does that make?
01:26:17 Speaker 2
Sense to you? Can you? And I'm.
01:26:18 Speaker 1
Yes it does.
01:26:19 Speaker 1
Just thinking in my own memories of Saint Joseph's in 19.
01:26:22 Speaker 2
You probably never saw.
01:26:24 Speaker 1
1975 I was there for a retreat and father Menninger was giving it. Yeah. And that's how we got introduced to center prayer.
01:26:32 Speaker 2
Sure he is the inventor of it.
01:26:34 Speaker 1
Yeah. Where were you in 1975? What was happening then? You went from the modest?
01:26:39 Speaker 2
I already did my centering, press stuff at the retreat house and I was in a Buddhist monastery for a year there.
01:26:44 Speaker 1
OK. In 75? Yeah. Yeah. And what after that?
01:26:50 Speaker 2
Well.
01:26:52 Speaker 2
Thomas and.
01:26:55 Speaker 2
Basil.
01:26:58 Speaker 2
This is like the the the bargain conversation all over again. I'm talking to my superiors. Who are Thomas and Basil, and I'm saying who's the best guy?
01:27:09 Speaker 2
After Merton died, who's the number one guy in?
01:27:12 Speaker 1
The world you asked him that.
01:27:13 Speaker 2
Yeah, I asked him that.
01:27:15 Speaker 2
And they both agreed Raimondo Panikar.
01:27:21 Speaker 2
So we did a conference, we got panikar from Spain.
01:27:26 Speaker 2
I mean, he's.
01:27:29 Speaker 2
Trilingual, multilingual I don't know how many linguals fluent.
01:27:36 Speaker 2
In the Vedic languages, reads the Vedic scriptures, Hindu scriptures in the original.
01:27:44 Speaker 2
Latin reads Latin. Greek, you know. Brilliant.
01:27:48 Speaker 2
Just.
01:27:49 Speaker 2
And he is lightning in a bottle. Thin. Brilliant.
01:27:56 Speaker 2
Charismatic at home in Spain, at home in India and home in the United States.
01:28:01 Speaker 2
Put him in the middle of an airport. He's fine. It's like for him. An airport is like the Sistine Chapel.
01:28:10 Speaker 2
So he gives 9 sutures 9 days on the monkey's universal archetype. This is the same theme as Merton. When he died, the monk as universal. I asked him. I assigned him the topic. Me and basil and and.
01:28:26 Speaker 2
The Abbott we conferred about the topic and what we wanted him to do was take up the topic that Merton was addressing when he died, namely the monk as universal archetype as the point of convergence in East West dialogue.
01:28:43 Speaker 2
And so he gave these wonderful.
01:28:47 Speaker 2
I've got like 10 files original.
01:28:51 Speaker 2
Some original documents from the conference. I had the whole thing. It became a book. I could show you the book. I got it with.
01:28:57 Speaker 2
It's called.
01:28:59 Speaker 2
Blessed simplicity.
01:29:02 Speaker 2
The monk as universal archetype. Seabury Press Press didn't get around to publishing it. I did it. You know, I'm the guy in the kitchen who's doing all the work getting the food out, getting the books published, you know, and these guys.
01:29:15 Speaker 1
What organization were you with?
01:29:16 Speaker 1
At that time.
01:29:18 Speaker 2
The North American Board for East West Dialogue 8 into 1 is steak of which.
01:29:27 Speaker 2
Saint Joseph Abbey was the flagship for aid into men that want to speak. They were the dialogical Dharma warriors of the religious life, namely Dharma, meaning truth and warrior meaning. Let's get to the heart of this issue.
01:29:48 Speaker 2
You know what, what is? What is our common ground? Where do we stand and how do we differ and?
01:29:57 Speaker 1
This is the late 70s.
01:30:01 Speaker 2
It it was published in 1979, the book, but the conference actually occurred several years earlier. It was really hard to get everything transcribed and Basil has wondered. Basil, you know, listen, the whole time, you know, basil can listen.
01:30:19 Speaker 2
He doesn't have to be center of attention and he was delighted.
01:30:25 Speaker 2
In panic car. But then he got up at the end.
01:30:28 Speaker 2
He said this is all very well, but what's the future of say? Let's just say, for example, the panic is right that the.
01:30:37
Think.
01:30:38 Speaker 2
Has a universal common ground all over the world. You know they all pray, they all meditate, they all chant the holy books and they all die for God alone.
01:30:52 Speaker 2
You know Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim.
01:30:55 Speaker 2
And lay contemplatives also, you know. So that's the contemplative life, but. And also the differences are important. You know, we're we're in a devotional path on Jesus. That's our focus as Christians. Right. Jesus.
01:31:13 Speaker 2
And with that you get to.
01:31:14 Speaker 2
Trinity, you get everything.
01:31:17 Speaker 2
And it's a mystery. It's a seed, but but the Hindus, they have their.
01:31:23 Speaker 2
Dave Ramakrishna, great St.
01:31:26 Speaker 2
They've got you, David. You're woman. Great Saints. There are. There are Saints that aren't Catholics. Would you believe? Would you be shocked to know who are healers who perform miracles? I was with such a person and.
01:31:41 Speaker 2
She knew things about me she knew, for example, that I lived in a monastery. She saw me off the street and she called me monks. I was in A room.
01:31:49 Speaker 2
With like.
01:31:51 Speaker 2
50 people.
01:31:53 Speaker 2
And and I was in the back.
01:31:57 Speaker 2
And she said, hey, Monk, come over here and.
01:32:01 Speaker 2
And then she took me into a little room. This is devotional yoga.
01:32:06 Speaker 2
And her disciples? This is like a mother with puppies.
01:32:10 Speaker 2
The 11 disciple is brushing your hair.
01:32:14 Speaker 2
And the other disciple is, you know, massaging her neck and and she's just filling the room with love. And the mother the the A, A kind of Virgin Mary feeling about her.
01:32:32 Speaker 2
She was. And I'll tell you something. It was very odd. She was a truck driver.
01:32:38 Speaker 2
A truck driver's.
01:32:39 Speaker 2
Wife and she was in the bath, like me and in the bath staying too long, you know, just very relaxed. Nothing in her mind.
01:32:47 Speaker 2
And suddenly she starts.
01:32:50 Speaker 2
Channeling these Vedic scriptures in language she does not understand.
01:32:57 Speaker 2
And she starts. Then she starts with both languages, Vedic and English.
01:33:04 Speaker 2
And it turns out that Baba Ramdas Gordon Allport, who dialogues whose dialogue partnered with brother David Stone to Ross.
01:33:12 Speaker 2
Has a teacher named Neem Karoli Baba. That's just saying he's a holy man and he does these things.
01:33:17 Speaker 2
So this woman, who's a truck driver's wife, became a guru. She became a guru.
01:33:23 Speaker 2
And she took me into this little room, and there was this very devotional scene, like you would be.
01:33:32 Speaker 2
I know this sounds sacrilegious, sacrilegious, but if you were little little brothers of Jesus, you would be meditating in front of an altar with the Eucharist.
01:33:43 Speaker 2
And it was like it felt like that.
01:33:46 Speaker 2
All I can say, I'm just telling you the truth. So then she goes. I want to take you someplace that you need to go. Just her and me and her driver. She never drove. And I'm in the back. She's got a van with little temple in it, and it's got incense. It's got a statue of.
01:34:06 Speaker 2
Krishna.
01:34:08 Speaker 2
Her word for God. Just like my word is Jesus.
01:34:14 Speaker 2
We don't know.
01:34:16 Speaker 2
We don't know who it is. I say Jesus, she says, Krishna. But we.
01:34:24 Speaker 2
We both know it's love.
01:34:30 Speaker 2
We both know that God is.
01:34:31 Speaker 1
Love. So where does she take you?
01:34:33 Speaker 2
She took me to a Jesuit retreat center.
01:34:38 Speaker 2
Where she did retreats personally and.
01:34:44 Speaker 2
And she took me up to the tower.
01:34:47 Speaker 2
Of this retreat center, where there was a small room where she used to meditate.
01:34:52 Speaker 2
And you could see out from all these distances.
01:34:56 Speaker 2
And we we spent some time just in devotional silence.
01:35:02 Speaker 2
Meditating on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
01:35:07 Speaker 2
And then she said to me.
01:35:09 Speaker 2
She said it is your calling. It is your path.
01:35:13 Speaker 2
To build bridges.
01:35:16 Speaker 2
For God.
01:35:18 Speaker 2
In religious life, that's what she said to me. And I already knew that I didn't tell her that. She told me that, and she told me in a place where the exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola had been going on for years.
01:35:42 Speaker 2
Have you ever done an an Ignatian retreat of discernment?
01:35:47 Speaker 1
Yes, 7-8 day I did.
01:35:49 Speaker 2
Yeah. So you know that that's a sacred place.
01:35:53 Speaker 1
That is a sacred space for you.
01:35:55 Speaker 2
And she was showing such respect for my charism, which, you know, people were.
01:36:03 Speaker 2
Spitting me out all over the place.
01:36:07 Speaker 2
Except for Henry nowen.
01:36:09 Speaker 2
And Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington. They said, you know, you're one of us.
01:36:15 Speaker 2
But not not.
01:36:16 Speaker 1
So this this aspect of abelian and being a builder between religions.
01:36:23 Speaker 1
Yes, or between spiritualities is something of your your charism, your prophetic nature that was part of you that became more and more obvious during the during the 70s.
01:36:28
Yes.
01:36:34 Speaker 2
During this, yes, yes. So the first 3 proposal I wrote as I was saying before for contemplative outreach, using those words at the Merton Center was to do contemplative outreach at Saint Joseph's Abbey, because they.
01:36:51 Speaker 2
Passel and the Abbott were just overbooked.
01:36:55 Speaker 2
And it was the guest house was too small. They had grown too big, and now I regret I was telling you before.
01:37:03 Speaker 2
Thomas spent all these years serving the world.
01:37:06 Speaker 2
Getting into airplanes and giving contemplative outreach workshops and training others to do so, and it's a righteous work. But he had to renounce his former life as an Abbot.
01:37:22 Speaker 2
And he was the Abbot of the most important monastery in the United States of the Trappist order. And there are wonderful, huge, important monasteries like Yosemite, dozens of them. And Saint Joseph's Abbey was.
01:37:40 Speaker 2
The most important.
01:37:42 Speaker 2
In size in endowment in the number of monks, there were like 120 monks there at that time and and so for the Abbot to leave was it was a great sacrifice on his part.
01:37:57 Speaker 2
And for the community, it was heartbreak.
01:38:03 Speaker 2
Because you lose your thoughts, like losing your father. ABBA means father.
01:38:08 Speaker 2
I mean, and they did great. I mean, one of the students of the Zen master who did the Jesus prayer in retreat.
01:38:15 Speaker 2
That is that master used to say.
01:38:19 Speaker 2
When you when you make the sign.
01:38:21 Speaker 2
Of the cross.
01:38:25 Speaker 2
How do you realize Jesus?
01:38:28 Speaker 2
He used to, in other words, the question.
01:38:33 Speaker 2
It is what's alive. The answer is worthless.
01:38:37 Speaker 2
If it only if it comes as grace, I mean Keating is right. Finding grace at the center, that's what's what it's about not finding the center at the center. Finding grace at the center.
01:38:49 Speaker 2
It took me a.
01:38:50 Speaker 2
Long time to figure that out.
01:38:51 Speaker 2
It's obvious.
01:38:53 Speaker 2
And.
01:38:56 Speaker 2
But when I was.
01:39:00 Speaker 2
In that tower with her name is Joy. She had that that's she's a spiritual teacher. Her name is Joy.
01:39:07 Speaker 2
Joy.
01:39:09 Speaker 2
The joy of at the bliss of the Anointed One. There's a man in India has been on the spiritual path, the bicultural east West spiritual path of Benedictine. And he went totally indigenous, took on a Sanskrit name.
01:39:22 Speaker 2
Do you know you know what the name was?
01:39:25 Speaker 2
Abhishek Ananda and it means.
01:39:31 Speaker 2
I feel his presence because I was there.
01:39:34 Speaker 2
Blessedly, the anointed 1.
01:39:36 Speaker 2
Abhishek inanimate.
01:39:41 Speaker 2
You can't say Jesus, the name of Jesus too much. I listened to these evangelists. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.
01:39:50 Speaker 2
It's better to say the.
01:39:51 Speaker 2
Bliss of the anointed one more respectful.
01:39:55 Speaker 1
I didn't get the first words, the bliss of the anointed 1.
01:39:57 Speaker 2
Bliss.
01:40:00 Speaker 2
Who else is that?
01:40:03 Speaker 2
Who was anointed from day one?
01:40:09 Speaker 2
Bliss of the Anointed 1 means he was also anointed with sweet perfume when he died.
01:40:16 Speaker 2
Mary Magdalene, you know, cleaned his body with her hair, right?
01:40:22 Speaker 2
And.
01:40:24 Speaker 2
So his name and this guy's been living this this indigenous path under the auspices of aid into one and Steve East West dialogue. But he's just living in an ashram very quietly. He's got a few priests. One of them was his Saint Joseph Savage. Name is Father Emeraldas and he's Indian. You know, he's a tunnel.
01:40:44 Speaker 2
You know his ashrams in the poor part of India with the Tomlinson.
01:40:47 Speaker 2
The South it's.
01:40:48 Speaker 2
Hot and jungle and Father Emil does is like brilliant and he was there long term. He was sort of like an.
01:40:58 Speaker 2
A resident at the same time that I was.
01:41:02 Speaker 2
And through him, I felt the bliss of the anointed 1.
01:41:08 Speaker 1
OK, let's stop for a moment, OK, this is.