Excerpt From Grace in the Desert

Slattery, Dennis Patrick. Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

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Review by Robert Romanyshyn reprinted from Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, 71, 2005.

As I absorbed their wisdom on the nature of spirit, which was inseparable from an embodied psychological and emotional life, I felt the conviction grow that such a pilgrimage offered an opening perhaps no bigger than the eye of a needle through which to pass in order to complete, to reconnect with, to make conscious some unacknowledged and uncultivated terrains in my life. In retrospect I would call it a quest, for I was full of questions as I approached my mid-fifties; this threshold was calling me to be crossed, to bridge parts of myself. In traveling over 4000 miles in my pickup truck, I would in some small measure make the crossing over the largest freestanding bridge of my life, a bridge that linked parts of myself that had become stranded on the side of success, recognition, fame, promotions to the exclusion of a life lived in joy, generosity, peace, selflessness and service to others. I felt this bridge swaying long before I set footprint or tire tread on its shaky surface.

The Bhagavad-Gita became one of my early mentors in my plans. In fact, as the patterns of a life began to emerge to reveal their invisible powers, I noticed that my guides throughout my life have just as often been a book or a passage I tripped across at just the time I needed to hear it, as they have been persons who offered me words or an example I needed at a strategic moment where I felt necessary a profound shift in direction. A few weeks before I left at the beginning of August, I meditated on the idea of non-attached action in Michael Novak’s fine anthology, The World’s Wisdom: act earnestly but without attachment to results. To identify with one’s actions, to desire and then force certain results, traps one, in effect, to that pattern of action. The truth of this insight helped me realize that I desired to enter into the monastic life with some unarticulated results already at hand. I needed to surrender something of my own desires to the larger reality of the pilgrimage. It had its own life I needed to discern. Once I succeeded in doing so, if only partly, it would be enough to free me to make the journey. From this point on I never looked back.

The entire trip was undertaken with a few insights into my limits: I don’t consider myself necessarily a spiritual person, or one deeply so. Quite frankly, I am uncertain whether I know what being spiritual even means. I have seen some of the deepest reverence for divinity in its various forms from those who have no established institutional belief system. I also do not know how to pray, or pray fervently, or well. I am easily distracted and have great difficulty meditating, calming the mind, eliminating desires, dissolving destructive thoughts, curtailing anger, stifling resentments, muting comparing myself with others or squelching mean or self-lacerating thoughts; I live a good part of each day in the future or the past rather than in the present. Armed with such a panoply of deterrents, I decided to engage the pilgrimage anyway. Jumping into, facing head-on, rather than skirting around or avoiding opportunities that present themselves has been central to my way of responding to life from as far back as I can remember. Why change, now?

The language of the Catholic Church in its homilies and sermons had long lost its connection to mystery. It seemed divorced from any imaginal grasp of how and what I lived; it was so rational and uninspired in its descriptions, as if it had lost its source of inspiration and energy. Instead, what I sought were the numinous shadows hidden in the light of the gospels’ words. The Church preached Main Street theology; by contrast I needed the back alleys, hidden piazzas, and deserted side streets filled with puddles, of a faith in crisis and confusion. The language of church doctrines was that of the garden and salvation, of order and degree, of certitude; my soul sought the harsh arid climates of deserts, the space of austerity, simplicity, the movement of lizards on hot stones, the slow ingestion of a little morsel, not the manic cravings of a dizzy consumer. I felt crucified by clarity, rationality and an absence of what my soul sought, a sense of awe in mystery, laced with a shaky faith. I longed to feel the sharp sting of Christ’s pierced side, not the comforting glory of resurrection and immortality. Not Christ’s light-infused risen-ness but God’s ineffable wounded darkness is what I thirsted after. Belief had become musty, even a bit moldy; it needed some dusting off if not a thorough spring-cleansing. I thought of packing a vacuum cleaner.

Disaffected and of no account, my life journey had grown obscure, out of reach, distant, disconnected. It needed to be anointed by the ineffable again, oiled back to life, massaged back into meaning that was palpable. My story had become despondent; it needed to be prodded along in its sluggishness, even allowed a transfusion. I felt less compelled to save my soul, more interested in seeking soul’s shadows. I asked myself one day: “What are you most alive too?” I sought aliveness, coming to life in this journey, some wise blood that would increase circulation to counter my spiritual anemia.

The one authentic desire I believed in was to explore this spiritual life by retreating from as many distractions and comfortable impediments as possible in order to see what would arise within a cauldron of scarcity and simplicity. If nothing came of it, then so be it; I would rest content exploring a sizeable chunk of America on a grand motor tour. One cannot know the feel of mountain cold water until one steps into the stream. I simply wanted to get my toes wet in the flow of spirit because I felt some deep and intangible life force moving through me. Something was howling with real gusto to be reclaimed and only the journey would allow it to speak with a definition it sought. I needed sustained motion to shake loose the meaning that lay dormant. Were my motives too excessive, too grandiose?