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DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY. Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life. Jossey-Bass, 2004.
REVIEWED BY ROBERT D. ROMANYSHYN
G
Robert D. Romanyshyn is an Associate Member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and a core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has published five books and numerous articles in journals and edited volumes. He lives in Summerland, CA with his wife Veronica Goodchild.
race in the Desert is the story of a pilgrimage. It is a tale written by an “everyman” in search of solitude and silence not by a monk living a monastic life within the walls of a monastery. It is a spiritual journey undertaken and undergone by one who has the eye of a witness and the pen of a poet. It is an invitation to become a fellow traveler and to share with Dennis his struggles along the road. He writes eloquently and honestly about ambition, impatience, loneliness and sex as the “prima materia” of a life of prayer, experiences from which ironically one cannot retreat when one is on retreat. As a child of the Catholic Church he grew up in the shadows of “Main Street theology,” the altar boy who, like so many of us, could still remember the musical, strange and wonderful, mysterious and awe-ful qualities of the Latin Mass. But his retreat, which has its roots in his earliest years, was to “the back alleys, hidden piazzas, and deserted side streets filled with puddles, of a faith in crisis and confusion.”(6) Who has not felt this same strange attraction
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to what lies outside the main streets of our lives? “Who has not felt this calling, this longing, for a journey, a reprieve, a pilgrimage to retrieve part of self long ago abandoned, no longer recognized?”(2) Of the many things I like about this book there are three that particularly stand out for me. Before I touch upon them, however, I need to mention how in reading Slattery’s work I cannot decide whether I have in my possession a memoir or a journal. In places it has the intimacy of a journal, and when I fall into this mood of the work, I have the strange and delightful experience of having found a treasure along the way of my own journey, something left behind by another. This experience has a quality of deep quietness about it, the stillness and the darkness of night. It is an experience I once had many years ago, when upon stepping across a threshold into an old Gothic church I saw in the fading light of day these words inscribed upon a wooden beam over the altar.
How low! How fleeting are the joys of Earth How vain to build on hopes this side the Grave Full soon the Rose that blooms may fade by Death Beyond the powers of human skill to save.1
It was a gift in that moment, a treasure left by a stranger from long ago, which strangely comforted me in my loneliness. Dennis’ “journal” is like this gift. Reflecting on this quality of his own work, Dennis writes that he finds journals more interesting than autobiography because they possess a way of writing “closer to the bone of where the person lived.” (68) There are other times, however, when Dennis’ book reads more like a memoir, and the phenomenology of its reading is different. Wayne Fields, writing of his friend John Morris’ essays on the reconstructed life, says this of memoir:
Making a memoir is a mediational work, one in which transient events are liberated from time so that they may be treated deliberately, scrutinized for beauty as well as meaning, removed from the passing moment in an effort to keep them from passing altogether. But besides the mediating of time, the effort to make what is past forever present on the page, there is also a mediation of the private with the public, inner experience and social discourse. The memoir is perhaps the most naked literary expression of our reluctance to keep to ourselves the self we so desperately seek to identify.2
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In this mode of memoir the mood of my reading is one of being side by side with a companion, eavesdropping on his meditations as he makes his way through the day. Dennis’ memoir has the quality of light and muscle, the mix of mind and body, as “we” walk together along forest paths, or sit in the early morning chapels listening to the monks’ songs and prayers, or take notice of the small mouse with very large ears nibbling from a dish of poison pellets while “we” desperately try to keep our thoughts focused on God, a futile effort in the face of this ‘mouse of God’ that leaves “us” almost laughing out loud.(39) It is a small thing, a brief moment on the journey, but rescued from time to be treated deliberately and for its beauty as well as its meaning. In moments like this who Dennis is intersects with who we all are—the private becomes public, the personal universal, and the self so desperately sought becomes visible for a moment. But for the moment, that’s enough! It is Dennis’ fine eye for these details of life which I find so admirable in his book. He is a phenomenologist of the ordinary, which when we are faithful to its presence becomes extra-ordinary, imbued with a sense of the sacred. As I was reading I left markers along the way of some of these epiphanies, and if time and space allowed I would share each of them with you. But perhaps that would be a mistake, because each reader will companion the author in his and her own way. Let it suffice then for me to give just one tiny morsel from the abundance. At the Shalom Prayer Center Dennis walks one final time among the gravestones of the many sisters who have been buried there. There is a melancholic mood of reverie in his prose.
The old gravestones on either side of the path leading to the large white crucifix were now dark and wet. The sisters lay silent, listening to my footsteps above them. They listened to the passage of time skirting across the lawn and through the orchard that protected them. They were as quiet as the walnut and the apple trees around them; they sank their roots deeper into the earth with each day, I imagined. Like tulip bulbs, they needed to be planted deeply to grow. I saluted all of their lives individually in my walk. (81-82)
No one is ever really dead until there is no one left to remember him or her. The journey of the spiritual pilgrim is a journey for the living and for the dead. Earlier I said that of the many things that I admire in Dennis’ book three stand out for me. In addition to his fine fidelity to the small details of
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life, I also admire the sense of vocation that is present from the beginning of the work. “The journey had chosen me,” he writes, and in response to its claim he found himself “waking up to a desire, to a calling, to become more conscious, to enter a path of greater and deeper awareness of myself and the invisible worlds that I knew existed…”(2-3) In Jungian terms Dennis is describing the path of individuation, that moment when soul awakens ego to its life of exile and the journey of homecoming begins. The dangers along this path are many, not the least of which is the sense of inflation. No one is immune to it, and no reader should expect it of this author. But no one can judge the life of the other for its proper mix of ego inflation and soul individuation. The only real measure we have is the effect of the pilgrim’s journey on ourselves, which is a rough and crude one to be sure. So I confess that I find in the journey of this pilgrim a moving and honest account of submission and even humiliation, and for that I trust him as a guide. Indeed, so much is my faith in this story that I have sent a copy to one of my sons who at 36 suffers and has suffered from Parkinson’s disease these past 12 years. I sent it because his life is also a pilgrimage and Dennis’ journal and memoir might, I pray, lighten his path. In closing I would cite as the third thing I admire in his book the presence of the ghosts who haunt it, particularly Dennis’ father. He writes that on his retreat “I began to realize fully, now that he was dead, that I had become only partly liberated from his influence and at the same time saw how much I actually resembled him emotionally.” “Was I here because of him?”(24-25) The pilgrim’s journey through the world is also a journey into the soul’s dark night, and Dennis does not split them. His book is a testimony to the fact that the way out into the world is the way down into the self, where each of us meets the ancestors to whom we owe a debt. Dennis’ book pays that debt and in so doing I believe that he liberates not only his own soul but that of his father as well. In this regard, I think it would be proper to read his journal/memoir as a memorial service for the ancestors, a service that each of us is asked to perform throughout our lives. It is a piece of home-work, which when we do it transforms our lives into a journey of homecoming. NOTES
1. Robert Romanyshyn, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1999), 84.
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2. Wayne Fields, “Words for John Morris: An Afterword to an Afterword,” John N. Morris, Then: Essays in Reconstruction (St. Louis: The Press at Washington University in St. Louis, 2002), 147.
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