About town

This afternoon I ventured out from the monastery to explore the village of Einsiedeln. There was a street fair going on, so there were many vendors selling everything from purses to sausage (I’m told this occurs every first Monday of the month). At a bread and meat booth, I stopped to purchase a soft pretzel and a small hunk of dark sourdough bread with flax seed. Many different kinds of breads can be found around here, and I haven’t tasted a bad one yet! I could live on the bread and soup served in the monastery. It is outstanding!

Einsiedeln is a small but thriving village, dotted with cafes, restaurants, shops, bakeries, and delicatessens. Many people—young and old—were out and about despite the dreary weather. Many were walking dogs or riding bikes. Directly across from the church is a bookstore, but it is closed on Montag (Monday), so I will have to go back some time. Unlike Rome, there is not a gelato shop on every corner, but there is plenty of Swiss chocolate! Things are fairly expensive around here, so perhaps that will help me resist that temptation!

The first picture above is a look toward the village from the hill on which the Abbey church sits. The second photo is a view of the garden behind the monastery. Both photos were taken on Samstag (Saturday) when it was sunny and warm; today was rainy and foggy. Once the weather improves a little, I intend to explore the mountain behind the Abbey.

But for now, I am simply becoming familiar with life inside the monastery. Below is the monastic schedule, or horarium, observed here on weekdays. It is similar in many respects—though not identical—to ours at Saint Meinrad. (This is translated roughly into English; the schedule posted in my room was all in German, but it wasn’t too difficult to make sense of it).

5:30 a.m. – Vigils
Breakfast – Bread, cheese, fruit, cereal, and homemade yogurt (unlike American yogurt, it is rather firm, white, and more tangy than sweet).
7:15 a.m. – Lauds
Work or classes
11:15 a.m. – Mass
12:05 p.m. – Noon prayer
Lunch – This is the main meal of the day, usually soup, vegetable, pasta or potato, and meat. Desserts aren’t big around here.
Recreation until 2 p.m. (includes option of social/coffee with guests).
Work or study
4:30 p.m. – Vespers
Personal time/Lectio Divina
6:25 p.m. – Adoration (juniors only)
6:30 p.m. – Dinner, typically a lighter meal than lunch.
Recreation
7:55 p.m. – Chapter or brief community meeting, followed by Compline and night silence.

Tonight, after dinner and during recreation, Br. Mauritius showed me photographs of his time in the Swiss Guard—specifically his detail during the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He had a pretty good view of everything!

On Wednesday, I will be going with a couple monks to Schwyz. Next week, plans are to visit a monastery in Austria for a few days.

Einsiedeln

Greetings from Switzerland!

After a very long but scenic train ride from Rome, I arrived Friday evening at the Abbey of Einsiedeln, where I will be for the majority of my stay in Europe this summer. The trip was a smooth one, though I was exhausted when I arrived; I had spent 12 hours either on a train or in a train station that day. However, the spectacular view as we rumbled through the Swiss Alps the last few hours of the journey more than made up for it! Toward the end of the trip, the train glided along the shore of Lake Zurich, which is surrounded by small villages, pastures, rolling hills, clear streams, and beyond the valley, the snow-capped mountains. On Friday when I arrived, the day was sunny, and many sailboats were on the lake. I can’t imagine more pleasant scenery!

As much as I enjoyed Rome and Italy, I am very glad to be here in Switzerland. For one thing, it is a little cooler, and much more quiet. In the long run, it is more my speed. Most importantly, visiting Einsiedeln is a unique opportunity for me to be immersed in the tradition from which Saint Meinrad Archabbey sprang. As you know, Saint Meinrad was established by the Swiss-German monks of Einsiedeln in the mid-19th Century. Our church at Saint Meinrad is named for Our Lady of Einsiedeln.

“Einsiedeln” means hermitage, and the church and monastery here in Switzerland were built over the site where Saint Meinrad lived as a hermit and was killed by two thieves in the year 861. The monastic community here began in the year 934, so Einsiedeln is well over 1,000 years old. Among other things, it has survived the Reformation, the French Revolution, and a number of devastating fires. The property here has been destroyed, rebuilt, and renovated many, many times. The beautiful church has undergone several transformations – from Romanesque, to Gothic, and Baroque (its current design, since the early 18th Century).

For now, I have posted only a view of the front of the church’s façade (viewed from the village just below). I haven’t taken pictures of the interior yet—it’s difficult to decide where to begin! To say it is greatly ornamented would be an understatement. Countless frescoes and statues decorate the ceiling vaults, pillars, and capitals in a vast array of color and action. It is teeming with grace and liveliness – one might even say playfulness. Many figures—mostly angels and cherubs—do much more than serve as decorations. They leap from the artwork, dangle from pillars, and point to other action. The purpose is to overwhelm the worshipper and draw one’s attention and devotion to the eternal truth of God, who transcends all. It is quite unlike anything I have ever seen.

Thousands of pilgrims come to this church—many to seek the prayerful intercession of Mary by visiting the black marble chapel of Our Lady of Einsiedeln just inside the entrance. Adorning the chapel since the 15th Century is the well-known Black Madonna and Child (a replica of which was given to Saint Meinrad Archabbey for its church). Every evening, the monks of Einsiedeln process to the shrine to sing with devotion the Salve Regina. To hear it is to be swept up into the praise of God by all his saints.

The monks here, as at other Benedictine abbeys, are dedicated to the daily round of prayer and receiving pilgrims and guests as Christ. As is the case at Saint Meinrad, many minister to surrounding parishes, and give retreats or conferences. In addition, the monks of Einsiedeln operate a high school to prepare students for university. I was afforded a peek at this Saturday night, when I was invited to accompany some other monks to a year-end band concert performed by the students. I was quite impressed!

The Abbey of Einsiedeln is also involved in numerous other works, including horse-breeding and forestry. It is also well-known for its library and archives, which have been temporarily relocated while new facilities are constructed. Br. Mauritius, one of the junior monks here (who will make solemn vows July 11) is a member of the fire department. Incidentally, he is also a former member of the Swiss Guard, and served both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican before coming to the monastery. He will return to Saint Meinrad with me Aug. 9, live in the monastery, and spend a year studying pastoral ministry at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. So, I will have the opportunity to return his generous hospitality!

There are two other juniors here—Thomas and Philipp—as well as two monks from other communities who are studying here—Johannes and Matthias. Each of them speaks at least some English (their English is much better than my German!), and they have all been very welcoming and helpful. So, for that matter, has the entire community. Many of them—including Fr. Urban, the prior, and Abbot Martin—have ties to Saint Meinrad due to seminary studies earlier in their monastic vocation. The most recent is Fr. Aaron, who will soon take over as associate pastor at the parish church in the village of Einsiedeln.

Fr. Urban, Br. Mauritius, and I have briefly discussed some tentative plans for the summer. Primarily, I will be getting to know Einsiedeln, its monks, and their way of life since Saint Meinrad Archabbey is an extension of this place. A number of excursions are also planned—to Zurich, to other monasteries in Switzerland and Austria, and to some mountains for a hike or two.

Perhaps I can also pick up at least a little German, which is almost necessary for all practical purposes. The liturgy here each day is primarily in German, with some Latin. This will be a challenge for me, praying daily in another language (sometimes it makes my head hurt!). The Latin is a bit easier for me since I’ve had more exposure to it and it is so much a part of the tradition of the universal Church. However, it is still difficult, and the liturgy here—while beautiful—is a bit more complex than what I am accustomed to at home. Hopefully, I can ease into it a little. In conversation, the monks and others around here speak a quite distinct Swiss-German dialect, which is more informal. However, many here are very accommodating toward me in using as much English in conversation as they are able, for which I am grateful.

So, basically, I will be soaking up the Swiss-German heritage of Saint Meinrad and Einsiedeln. During my free time, I also hope to get some work done in preparation for an upcoming retreat I am scheduled to give at Saint Meinrad when I return. I also hope to visit Annecy, France, which is near the border of Switzerland. It is in that region that my patron saint—Francis de Sales—lived and is entombed.

It is a great blessing to experience so many elements of my monastic vocation coming together like this!

Roma: City of Contradictions

Some amusing moments captured on camera during my stroll about Rome Thursday. I think the Centurion was talking to his stock broker.

The Dome

Today--my last day in Italy--I visited the Pantheon, a marvel of ancient architecture. Built almost 2,000 years ago, it includes a huge rotunda capped by a coffered, concrete dome with a central, circular opening to the sky (top photo). It is the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome, and is still well-preserved. Since the 7th Century, it has been a Catholic church, known as Santa Maria Rotunda, but it was built long before that.

It is unique and simply amazing!

The area around the Pantheon is a pleasant one to stroll about. I had lunch (panini) sitting on the steps of the fountain in the piazza, watching people from literally all over the world and listening to the street musicians--some of whom were quite good. The narrow, winding, cobblestone streets spreading from the piazza are filled with shops, cafes, and restaurants of various scales.

I made my way over to the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Baroque church built in the 17th Century. I was stuck by the amount of marble in this church, and the number and elegance of its side altars.

After that I walked over to the Piazza del Quirinale, which includes the palace for the president of Italy, and the Scuderie del Quirinale museum, which is currently featuring a very popular Caravaggio exhibit. Unfortunately, I was not able to go in; advance tickets are sold out, and daily admission requires very long waits in line. Several hundred people were waiting in line outside the museum when I went by.

The Fountain of Trevi is nearby, so I went over to flip in a coin. On the long walk back to Sant' Anselmo, I passed by the imposing Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II (the first king of a unified Italy). It is so large that it can be seen from many vantage points in Rome (second photo).

All in all, a good day. During my visit, I have covered quite a bit of Rome on foot (yesterday, I walked back from the Pope's General Audience at St. Peter's along the Tiber River to Sant'Anselmo).

Incidentally, near the Trevi Fountain, I saw a young man wearing a Toledo Mud Hens T-shirt. Naturally, I inquired about it. He is from Luckey, Ohio, about 20 miles north of my hometown of Findlay! We reminisced briefly about old Ned Skeldon Stadium, and then went our separate ways, an ocean apart (and then some) from Northwest Ohio.

Tomorrow (Friday), I take the train back to Einsiedeln in Switzerland, where I will be the majority of my time in Europe. I am looking forward to it!

Stickers

The following piece of whimsy has absolutely nothing to do with my trip. It is provided purely for amusement and/or consternation. It is a short rant of mine from last summer's Iowa Summer Writing Festival, composed during a "fast-writing" exercise. I was reminded of it during a conversation with a monk here at Sant' Anselmo about the curious (to me) universal practice of placing stickers on fruit. It led to the observation that here in Europe, people peel and pare fruit before eating it. It is not eaten out of hand, skin and all, so there's no need to remove the sticker.

Peeling fruit is just one of many differences in daily life to be experienced in Europe (at least in Itay), such as:

-- Coffee. You drink it from a bowl if it's weak, and from something resembling a shot glass if it's strong.

-- Breakfast. It is likely to include cold cuts and cereal with chocolate chips.

-- Afternoons. If you need to conduct business between noon and 3 p.m., good luck. Many places--even tourist shops--close for siesta.

-- Dinner. Eaten around 8 p.m., at the earliest.

-- Toilets. They may or may not have seats.

-- Weddings (this pertains to Italy). Here, I am told, Catholics are more likely to affiliate themselves with movements rather than parishes. Consequently, people get married wherever they like. Since Rome is filled with beautiful, old churches, if you walk down a street on any particular day, chances are you'll encounter a wedding. I must have seen two dozen of them in my week here in Rome. Big groups of people milling about, all dressed up, taking pictures, etc. It almost seems as though people drive around until they see a church, and say, "Hey, let's stop and have a wedding!"

Anyway, enough of that. My rant on fruit stickers, which (hopefully) provides some food for thought about the struggle to live in the sacrament of the present moment:

Why is there a sticker on my apple? It is so annoying. I wonder whose idea it was to begin putting those little white stickers on each individual piece of fruit?

It gets in the way and irritates me to no end.

They all have them now--have you ever noticed? Oranges and bananas. But those aren’t the worst. Especially irritating are those you want to eat out of hand, skin and all--apples, pears, especially peaches.

I reach my hand into the fruit bin, and before I can take a bite, I have to stop and peel the thing off. And it’s never easy. My fingernail attempts to dig in between the sticker and skin of the fruit, but it won’t lift off! It seems like I spend five minutes with it, working all the angles. There’s a little arrow on one tip, but that, it seems, is just there to toy with you.

It won’t come off! So I flip it back into the bin and grab another. Same thing. OK, last one. This time, I really scrape at it, taking off part of the skin. Is this really necessary? And there’s this gluey film left behind. Is that even safe to consume? What is it? And it won’t wash off under the faucet--it just becomes gummier. So I grab a knife and carve it out, which I should have done from the beginning.

It’s maddening. There’s no point to it. It’s not like they contain essential or useful information. Believe me, I’ve checked. Braeburn, Red Delicious. Dole. USA. Some 4-digit number. Produce of New Zealand. Who cares?

Someone told me it’s for the cashier at checkout time. Well, he or she doesn’t have to eat it--I’m the one who bought the thing!

And not only does this annoy me to no end, but I have to tell everyone about it when I finally sit down at the table with everyone else. I’m still polishing, rubbing, caressing, examining, and I proclaim to anyone and everyone: “Whoever came up with the idea of putting stickers on each piece of fruit should be put away. If God thought they needed stickers, he would have put them on himself.”

No one laughs, or agrees, really, although they aren’t exactly being indifferent. It’s just something that has to be allowed to get out of the way before we all sit down to eat and talk about our days. Just like a sticker. It’s something in the way that needs to be taken care of before we can do what we really want to do.

Perhaps that’s why it bothers me so much. Because it’s there, and I don’t want it to be. It’s in the way.

I wonder now, though, whether it’s really in the way, or if I let it get in the way. It’s just a sticker, and yet it bugs me, sticks me this way and that. I can’t enjoy the fruit until it’s out of the way, but once it is, all I talk about is having had to remove the thing.

So who is in the way, the sticker or me? Is there a difference really?

I wonder now, how often I get in the way of myself instead of simply enjoying the fruit.

I mean really. It’s a sticker.

Witness to Grace

"If your mission is to be truly effective -- if the words you proclaim
are to touch hearts, engage people's freedom
and change their lives -- you must draw them into an encounter
with persons and communities who witness
to the grace of Christ by their faith and their lives."

Pope Benedict XVI
Comments to Catholic media
General Audience, St. Peter's Square

Clinging to the Rock

When I was a child, I loved to draw mountains carved throughout with tunnels and caves. My secret passageways weren't just holes in the ground, though. They were meant to be lived in, and everything was provided to make that possible, even preferable. They were underground palaces.

I was reminded of this during my two-day visit to Sacro Speco (Sacred Cave) about an hour from Rome. The beautiful Monastery of St. Benedict--well over 1,000 years old--is carved into the side of a mountain there. It was constructed over the cave where a young St. Benedict lived as a hermit for three years before he began establishing monastic communities as they have come to be known. It was from this rock-hewn cradle that the Benedictine Order was born.

Petrarch described Sacro Speco as "the threshold of Paradise," and it is easy to undersand why, and what drew St. Benedict there. It looks over a tree-filled valley at the bottom of which the Anio River runs fast and clear over the rocks. There's even a waterfall. The sound of the rushing water rises up and caresses the mountainside 24 hours a day. At night, I kept my window open to breathe in the cool mountain air and listen to the running water. I slept like a baby!

Below and to the right of Sacro Speco is the Monastery of St. Scholastica, which I also briefly visited, and the town of Subiaco, which comes from the Latin term Sublaquem (below the lakes). The name comes from three artificial lakes created in the valley by the Emperor Nero in the 1st Century (and which no longer exist). Incidentally, I learned that the first printing press in Italy was at St. Scholastica in the 15th Century.

Anyway, back to the "cave." There are five monks living at Sacro Speco right now, all from different countries. The monastery and church are well-preserved because they are owned by the state. I arrived on Sunday afternoon, when a 23-year-old intern (from Missouri) who works at the monastery was in Rome and came to Sant' Anselmo to pick me up. Together, we took the Rome metrobus (subway) to a bus station, and from there got on a bus to Subiaco. (This was a blessing, as I am still a little intimidated by the public transporation system here.) At the Subiaco bus station--at the bottom of the mountain--the monastery's prior, Fr. Luigi, came down in a car to take us up.

After getting settled, the intern (Andy) showed me around, and gave me a tour of the church. I was instantly awestruck. Everything is beautiful and yet very humble; overwhelming yet intimate. The church is hollowed out of the mountain in an irregular pattern and on several levels (like my caves!) Practically every surface is adorned with colorful frescoes that are hundreds of years old. Most date to medieval times, and each highly symbolic rendering tells a specific story in the life of Christ or in the lives of the saints, particularly St. Benedict. The cave's walls breathe prayer in a way that wraps you in them and makes you feel part of them rather than below them or held at an adoring distance. It is at once very sacred and very human, and therefore honest.

I wish I could post photos of the church's interior, but camera flashes are not allowed. Some frescoes have been damaged over the years by light, humidity, and human touch. If you're interested, I recommend you view some of them using the link I provided in the previous post. Still, that fails to provide the "full effect."

Nestled deep in the Lower Church is what remains of the opening of St. Benedict's cave, lit by 12 lamps representing the monasteries he founded. It is a place of profound peace, and I could not help but think of the life that has flowed from this "Rock" for 1,500 years. That includes the prayer and work of the five monks living at Sacro Speco, but also that of every monk throughout the world in the history of the Benedictine Order that has profoundly influenced not only Christianity but Western civilization.

One night, after Vespers and dinner (the food is outstanding here, too), I walked alone into the courtyard after a brief rainstorm. For some reason, I was drawn to a raised bed of roses, where I spotted at least a dozen snails. This struck me as funny because the dinner conversation (in Italian, so translated by Andy into English for me) had included the topic of snails. For at least 20 minutes, I stood and watched the snails, slowly doing what snails do, plugging away through the damp earth or clinging to the wet rocks, largely unnoticed.

At that moment, at least for me, and given the historic nature of my surroundings, I was struck by the myserious, plodding, clinging virtue of perseverance which even death cannot overtake. Over the years, the monks of Sacro Speco have been buried within the mountain--literally becoming part of a rock that still pours forth life 1,500 years after the time of St. Benedict.

Originally, I was only going to stay at Sacro Speco one night. I ended up staying an extra day. I did not realize until I arrived how much I needed the rest and peace the place offered.

On the second day, the other intern (Eli, from Guatemala) and I hiked down to the valley and the Anio River to the waterfall, which I have included a picture of. It speaks for itself. (Then we had to hike back UP the hill!)

On Tuesday, I ran into some good fortune, or providence, whichever you prefer. I was going to head back to Rome on my own this time via the bus and subway (as I said, still a little daunting to me). However, a group from Rome's Lay Centre (mostly Americans from New Jersey) had arrived for a tour. The priest traveling with the group is a Benedictine monk and the prior of Sant' Anselmo where I have been staying in Rome -- Fr. Elias (his home monastery is also in New Jersey). There was extra room on the group's bus, so I was offered a ride back to Rome, which I accepted. First though, the group stopped for lunch (pasta and lamb!) at the excellent restaurant/hotel run by St. Scholastica. No one would let me pay even for an after-dinner cup of coffee!

On Wednesday, the group's leader told me, they are all going to the Pope's general audience at St. Peter's. They have an extra ticket, and asked me to join them--so tomorrow it's off to the Vatican!