Experiencing the tradition

...s it happens I'm teaching for a year at the diocesan seminary run by the Benedictine monks in Mt Angel, Oregon My wife wanted her master's in theology and I arranged . to teach literature in the seminary's college program We send the kids off to the bus-stop every morning, pack up the van, and go, driving north into rolling farmland An hour later we see the abbey in the distance, red-tiled roofs on a forested hill I was euphoric my first few weeks there, delighted with the warmth of the people and the scale of the place I've moved now into the stage when details come into focus Abstractions are taking on their particulars the stale smell of cigarettes in the halls, the sound of rap music on some distant stereo, doughnut crumbs in the coffee room Mt Angel is becoming a real place, the monks and seminarians real people, with their own particular names and voices Students yawn here, too, and slouch at their desks There's the same tension and tightening a month into the term, the same resistances and the same need to convince What struck me at a recent faculty meeting was how familiar things seemed, despite the monks' long, flowing habits and 5 THE VIEW FROM MT...

...ANGEL EXPERIENCING THE TRADITION GOD IS IN THE DOUGHNUT CRUMBS the opening prayer People were nicer than I'm used to, trying harder to listen and cooperate But there was still the wrangling about procedure and the bumbling around about dates and times, the talking at cross-purposes, the reinventing of wheels What seems solid from a distance never is up close Even in the church the premises are contested There are camps and conflicts and the slow, restraining pressures of inertia There are the glances across the conference table, the lifting of eyebrows I' ve found all this deeply reassuring—a corrective to the kind of easy stereotyping the press and others fall into whenever a pope comes to visit or Catholicism needs to be talked about It's not just that the focus always seems to be on sexual issues to the exclusion of anything else or that many people and even many Catholics still talk about the church as if Vatican II never happened The problem in these discussions is that the church is always presumed to be some vast, monolithic, impersonal institution, a system of dogma-enforcement so old and so powerful that it can't be felt as human The image seems to be of long, hushed corridors and echoing chambers—the church as nothing but tradition m the abstract, nothing but ideas the Immaculate Conception, celibacy, patriarchy But what I'm experiencing every day at the abbey is not "the priesthood" or "the crisis of the priesthood" or "the male-only, celibate-only priesthood " I'm experiencing Jose and Mark and Maselmo their individual stones, the sound of their laughter in the halls As we work together on Wordsworth or the Iliad, I'm not thinking about these people as future priests but as students trying with varying degrees of sensitivity and intelligence to understand the language of literature, no different in many ways from any other group of students I've taught, no less capable of insight or misreading There are some differences, good ones for me as a teacher of literature a greater respect for authority, a greater willingness to work hard, a greater openness to imagination and feeling Yet in its daily give-and-take the teaching seems just as haphazard and messy as it always does I feel right at home Each day at noon prayer, my wife and I watch the monks trail in from wherever they've been, bowing to the altar and taking their places in the choir Each day we join them in the chanting of the Psalms What we're experiencing is not the "Benedictine tradition" exactly We're standing at that place, at that time, with that noon light streaming through the windows, that monk on the back left coming in on the wrong measure And we know that monk now, his name, his quick smile When we look at the choir we don't see "monastic life " We see Dominic, Konrad, Joachim What we join every noon is grounded in centuries-old tradition and a spirituality worked out in every detail, dignified, structured, beautiful And yet there also seems to me something wonderfully amateurish and ad hoc about the whole thing— something specific and local, as if a bunch of guys have just gotten together and agreed to go through these odd motions for a while Voices crack, shoulders shrug, someone hurries in late It seems almost made-up, spontaneous I'm sitting in on a class myself in "Fundamental Theology " What we're learning, among other things, is the grand structure of the church as it's laid out in Dei verbum, the Vatican II document on revelation It seems to me quintessentially Catholic in some ways, a powerful summary of the church's belief in apostolic succession and the teaching authority of the magistenum Somehow, I know, this structure is underneath what draws me to the abbey in the first place the silence and the peacefulness, the holiness at the center, the reverence Yet at the same time I wonder if the church ever really exists on the level of council documents, whether there really is a "church" in this sense or whether there's just a whole series of moments and glimpses and individual acts earned on dayto-day, informed by tradition, informed by theology I wonder how the church would change if we started seeing it this way It would certainly be a lot harder to dismiss or evade responsibility for It would be too vulnerable It would be too complicated I bet the disciples had sore feet and growling stomachs sometimes, and it's clear from the Gospels that they were often making things up as they went, making mistakes and doing the best they could The Gospels are stones, after all, good stones, full of the complexities of character and the concreteness of scene There are all these distracting place names Capernaum, Caesarea Phihppi, Bethsaida, Tyre What Catholics most centrally believe is that God intervened in history, came, that is, to a certain place and a certain time We miss the point altogether if we don't imagine the dusty roads and the smelly donkeys and the hawking of the sellers in the marketplace I think we're too quick to generalize, to read past the contingent to the transcendent, when the contingent matters just as much if not finally more What's astonishing about the stones the magisterium is meant to preserve and interpret is their claim that God came into a haphazard and bumbling and continually reinvented world exactly like our own—in fact, that God has come into this world, nght now, the world of the rolling fields and the doughnut crumbs and the slow, sweet chanting of the prayers at noon CHRIS ANDERSON Chris Anderson is associate professor of English at Oregon State University and the author of, most recently, Edge Effects Notes from an Oregon Forest (University of Iowa Press) 6...