GOING ALONG

My brother, a redhead, was also a metalsmith, a community college professor, and a Marine sharpshooter.  A terrible fall caused him to hit his head on a sidewalk, left him brain-damaged which gradually grew into psychosis.  When he ended up taking refuge on my uncle's ranch, he grew too paranoid to be tolerated.  They asked him to leave and he went off down the road with a staff, wearing a hoodie.  His mind clung to the image of this, a figure that has persisted since before the Iceman, Otzie, was found felled and frozen.

The image stretches around the world from Star Wars to medieval monks, probably dates most indelibly from that version.  It has a religious vibe, from wizard to mendicant, but also a hint of being protected.  "Scriver" comes from "shriver", a maker of cloaks and by metaphorical extension means to throw protection over someone to warm and shelter them.  But that's my name, not my brother's name.  He was still a Strachan, meaning "river of rocks -- strath au cairn."  Created as a defence, rebuilt into a bridge.

There's a lot more to the story, but I won't tell it here.  His Master's thesis at University of Oregon was a series of armour helmets, each made to fit found skulls of small birds and animals he found on rambles.  So under the monk's cloak there was a sense of militance, even if small and foreign.  The hooded walking man is also related to being outcast and possibly insane.  This rural family had a previous madman in it, a person whose name and identity has been erased as much as possible, but the sense of danger and mystery remain as a dangerous space.  He'd been institutionalized much of his life but occasionally turned up without warning.

This trope of the walking man exists at the edge of community where individuals must find ways to survive alone.  My brother lived in his old pickup on the streets but there was an old friend who took him for a hot meal once a day, a woman who ran a thrift shop who recognized his heart attack, and a couple who took him into their home when the hospital released him.  

The second heart attack took him to the Veteran's Hospital where hundreds of traumatized veterans were turning up before there was any systematic or researched way to know what to do with them.  He and his cousin lied him out, but not for long and he died.  Death is a hooded figure, a being on the liminal edge between life and ceasing, which we know about but resist and try to outwit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPDIbTvoYXk  links to a movie called "The Pilgrimage."  The medieval drama clings to the subconscious of many, re-animated in new ways.  To watch one trailer of this movie I had to swear I was old enough.  I decided I was too old for that much blood and guts.  It was only a clever way to make another list of names with their url anyway.  Just because the figure of a man in a cloak, walking with his staff across long distances, is such a strong one, bad movies can be made about it.  Dedication and violence predominate, a vehicle for martyrdom and heroics.

Historically, the way we see it, human beings and many other hominins have been wanderers.  It may be one of their genetic characteristics.  Their skeletons show they were walkers from the beginning, before there were domestic animals that could be ridden -- in contrast to the neanderthals, whose bones show they loved most to sit in the entrance to home caves overlooking river valleys

From the beginning a few of both kinds had visions and powers that elevated them to power, made them too dangerous to live in communities but able to go into death, then returning with news.  They became satellites to settlements, who took them gifts of food.  Some saw how to capitalize on this, form institutions, claim that they had religious power, the one true connection to God.  They stayed in the town, built temples, blurred with government, became an alternative government.

https://www.ancient.eu/Medieval_Monastery/   "From the 3rd century CE there developed a trend in Egypt and Syria which saw some Christians decide to live the life of a solitary hermit or ascetic. They did this because they thought that without any material or worldly distractions they would achieve a greater understanding of and closeness to God. In addition, whenever early Christians were persecuted they were sometimes forced by necessity to live in remote mountain areas where the essentials of life were lacking."  This is one way of looking at it, but also monasteries were a way to find safety and to preserve knowledge both through books and through teaching.  Since they lived so simply and with mutual support, they became rich.  Sovereigns tried to buy them off by giving land or punish them by the opposite.

And individuals left, possibly ejected and possibly because they were seeking something not found with the walls of the establishment.  They were not priests, were not considered able to do the magic of rites, they went in and out of secular life, what there was of it, since everything was religious in those days.  When Rome, falling, became half Byzantium, the chaos was an invitation for prayer.  The time may be upon us again now.  Our films offer wizards with cloak and staff, some of them evil.  We cannot see their faces clearly.

Shriven, cloaked, the monastic figures may offer priestly services like absolution in confession, baptism, and so on, but the idea of writing, scribbling, also clings to them.  Writing can be a kind of magic, but also carry tales of redemption or obscenity, salvation or damnation.  The deepest unknown under the biggest and darkest cloak is generally neither good nor bad but part of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans at the heart of holiness, beyond the questions of morality.

But also, the "rovers" as the BBC dramas call them, may simply wonder what is on the other side of the mountain and decide to go there.  Their cloak may be an old blanket and their staff cut from a local tree.  They may sing as they go.  Or meditate. Or pray for the rest of us. 

AN EREMETICAL OLD LADY

Hard to believe that it’s thirty years since I left seminary in Chicago in order to serve four Montana fellowships.  That’s a long enough time to have lost my grip on some subjects, if I ever had any.  So I need to do a little catch-up on monasticism, a human impulse shaped by circumstances and institutions.  In the early Christian tradition, there are three kinds:  eremitic (the solitary ascetic hermit), the coenobitic (the dedicated community)  and the skete, which is a mid-way form with characteristics of both.  In societies ranging from New Guinea tribes, where old men create “booths” in the jungle where they can be alone, to the urban artists and poets who occupy SRO hotels where they can concentrate on solitary work, this is a recurrent way of life, sometimes chosen and sometimes imposed or maybe both. 

Christians have worked out a good deal of history and much prescription about how such social phenomena should be run, especially when there is a political element.  There have been times when the communities were able to accumulate and protect considerable wealth, which then exposed them to raids and dispersal, sometimes by kings.  At other times they have sheltered civilization: writing, writing, writing.  Providing medical care.  Raising orphans.  Sheltering outliers.  Providing retreats.

In Asia an old person might simply walk the streets while carrying a begging bowl, at the mercy of the generosity of the people, to demonstrate absolute acceptance of the simple fact that everyone dies.  They escape the suspicions directed at European monasticism, which is always being examined for unworthy motives, like escaping prosecution or fomenting heresy.  I don’t know of any described monastic communities in the aboriginal tribes of the American continents, though there were no doubt priesthoods and ritual adepts.  No one has looked or written.   The elements of asceticism, discipline and virtue (hard to describe as it is) might be missing or hard to see.  Some hippie communes might qualify and others not.  Avoidance of sex is often an element, but not necessary.  It’s just that pairs are not usually the basic unit, whether or not they produce children.

Scientology says it has a monastic group called “Sea.org” which seems to me bogus verging on criminal.  It is a demonstration of how easy it is to twist something idealistic through power corruption.  At the other extreme are monastic groups that are ecumenical, stepping away from control by institutions, because an institution too easily becomes devoted to its own perpetuation regardless of the virtue of its goals.

Going back to the original three categories, my preference is eremetic.  (Tim’s is nearly coenobitic.)  And yet his nomadism has been connected to the eremetic wanderer while my staying-put is related to community, a double-community of the reservation and  Valier.  Mine is print-centered; his has been art-centered and -- more than that -- addressing healing and hospice.  The imagery in his vooks is often the hooded monk.  

We are united in what I take to be a forming new religious understanding (NOT an institution), welling up through science and nature to change the way we see the cosmos.  It can be quite terrifying, since it shrinks human beings down to a molecular recipe, rising out of the soup of creation and pre-consciousness into a temporary dance that predicts its own demise.  It motivates monasticism because it sees that all hoarding is futile and because the terror of the night demands some kind of shape.  Every flame must have a chalice.  Monasticism is a chalice. 

http://www.stpetersabbey.ca/  is the only Catholic monastery I know very well.  Intended to support homesteaders on the Saskatchewan prairie, it is an outreach from the Collegeville, Minnesota, Saint John’s Abbey.    http://www.saintjohnsabbey.org/  Those Benedictines came to Minnesota in 1856 from St. Vincent Abbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and, earlier, to Latrobe in 1846 from the Bavarian abbey of Metten in southeastern Germany.  http://wn.com/Metten_Abbey

I know Saint John’s Abbey mostly through their journal, “Worship,” which addresses theories of liturgy in a way I find useful.  They are a highly sophisticated and arts-friendly group, to say nothing of their bread and spirits tradition.

St. Peter’s also has publications: http://www.prairiemessenger.ca/Andrewbook.html  A quote:  “As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.”  Etty Hillesum.  (Accompanied by a snow photo taken by David Strachan -- my maiden name -- who is not related to me.)  Andrew Murray Britz, OSB writes from the protection and support of his monastery in the same way that Tim and I try to do, though our content probably only overlaps a bit with his.   I’d bet that an objective reader would find quite a bit.

The internet has made possible a new kind of community in which people are present with their minds and hearts, their on-going conversation,  but never with their physical selves, which might be anywhere on the planet, any age, size, shape, gender, level of prosperity.  Far from scratching out copies with a quill, we are at keyboards and smart phones, flashing and linking images alongside our print.  Many are not religious, simply passing the time, having fun, turning a profit.  That’s okay.  They should go on their way.

When the Unitarians and I visited St. Peters’ in Muenster, Saskatchewan, we were aware that at least one woman lived in solitude in a small cabin.  We were instructed to leave her alone.  Also, it was impressed upon us that it is a great earned honor to live in religious solitude and that no one in the movement is allowed to live that way when they are young.  It is not to be a retreat, but a privileged devotion.  Not an evasion, but a dedication.  As a great sacrifice, this woman occasionally taught, which interrupted her prayers in a solitude that was not a confinement.

I find that my eremetic tendencies chose me rather than the other way around.  I’ve drifted into the ancient Christian worship pattern, even spontaneously rising at 3AM and 6AM.  The Baptist bells next door keep me reminded of 9AM-noon-3PM- 6PM, but they don’t ring at 9PM or midnight.  I am out-of-step with most of the culture, but I am not just religion-centered, constantly praying.  I’m not able to say to whom I would pray or to what end.

Rather I am spinning books into blogs.  Or winnowing.  No longer do I think of grand schemes of success.  It is enough to use my library (which will be dispersed on my death) and create my blogs (which will be orphaned on my death or disability).  How is that different from writing a best-seller that is forgotten in a decade?