It is perhaps too
easy to sieze upon Cistercian monasticism as an icon for
environmentalism and deep ecology. Visitors to their
monumental ruins or spending weeks or even months in their
guest houses is too far from the existence of the monks, too
sequestered in ways of thinking, to participate in their life or to
form any definite opinion. Their own writings stress that the
cloister is a workshop of intercession and expiation for the
mountains of sin which have accumulated since the Fall. All
we know is that their fierce acetisicm with its unbroken cycle of
contemplation, prayer and back- breaking toil, is directed at
taking the sins of others onto their own shoulders to lighten the
burden of humankind. Scholarship was mostly directed at
understanding 'love of God' and the writings of their scholars
emphasis this in homilies, sermons and letters.
Nevertheless in
their daily lives they were surrounded by semi-wild nature, and
their modern counterparts. They were agricultural innovators
and stock breeders. In this respect it is said that Cistercians
were the most famous and most extensive horse- breeders in
Christendom. The importance of wild nature as a setting for
meditation was highlighted by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his account
of his experiences as a guest of the the monks of La Grande Trappe,
the fountain head of the modern Cistercian Order of the Strict
Observance.
"Later, when the air became brittle with frost
and the puddles underfoot creaked with the first ice of winter, the
country surrounding the Trappe was transformed into the world of
Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch –their world, with some element
even more Nordic and haggard and frightening which suggested
Griinewald.
Round the Trappe, edged by hazel and silver birch
and teeming with water fowl, are scattered seven stagnant pools.
The largest of these, 'Etang de Ranee, is only a furlong from the
Abbey and the monks wander here during their periods of meditation,
or sit among the reeds with their eyes downcast upon their
breviaries or merely gazing across the water, on giant cement
mushrooms. The woods are full of game no longer hunted."
The following is an
account of a modern monk, Basil Pennington, trying to communicate
to a Godless lay world what it is really like to be a
Cistercian.
"Cistercians are very down to earth people, very
concrete and real. We have our feet on the ground, our hands deep
in the soil of life. Contemplation, far from removing us from
reality, rather makes us more fully aware of our oneness with all
reality, and its oneness with God. For the true contemplative, all
is God, all is prayer.
When Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux asked, the novice
master of his daughter-house to write a manual for novices, Aelred
of Rievaulx wrote on such things as finances, architecture, and
music as well as crises and emotions and the transcendent and the
cosmic. This is not because of some pseudo- spiritualism to be
sure. The everyday real is very real and needs to be respected in
its reality. At the same time, there should be no dichotomizing.
The "spiritual" and the "real" are one. A monk's "spirituality" is
expressed in and through the real. As the old monastic saying goes,
you can tell how a monk prays by the way he sweeps the
cloister.
The Pseudo-Dionysios, a fifth-century Syrian
monk, has written a classic work on contemplation. In it he tells
us there are three kinds of contemplation: direct, oblique, and
circular. In direct contemplation, like Centering Prayer, we plunge
directly into God, leaving all else behind, only, of course, to
find it all again, and more truly, in God. Oblique contemplation
finds God in and through his creation. Each thing that is shares in
God's being and reflects in some way his truth and beauty. Circular
contemplation circles around the many facets of God's being and
truth, beauty and love that reveal themselves in our lives. Little
by little we are drawn more and more into the whole and get some
inkling of what the whole is like. This is the process of the
contemplative life.
This seems to be the best way to look at the
Cistercian way. Its richness and beauty are many faceted".
