Once Upon a Monk: Memoir Essays
By T. C. Abel
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About this ebook
You are about to embark into a book that has taken four years in the making. Once Upon a Monk will hopefully support all readers in better understanding life woven into a fabric of monklore over the centuries. This living story of one monastic man, who continues an ongoing discovery of his real self, will help to turn the pages of your life if you so desire. In experiencing his personal process of Individuation, time never stops but takes him through many reincarnations. These pages tell his story of his twenty year monastic lifestyle that enriched his ongoing growth on the trellis. Much of this transformation is available to everyone. As John Henry Newman wrote over a century ago, In a higher world it might be otherwise, but here below, to live is to change and to be perfect is to change often.
T. C. Abel
In addition to Tom’s twenty years as a monk, he has done graduate studies for a Master’s in Sociology and Doctorate in Pastoral Theology. He currently conducts yearly retreats as well as working in his private practice as a therapist. Tom lives in Louisiana in a city along the Mississippi River named “Red Stick” by the First Americans.
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Once Upon a Monk - T. C. Abel
Table of Contents
EDITOR’S PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
I: THE PATH
II: THE GATE AND THE GUESTHOUSE
III: GROWTH ALONG THE TRELLIS
IV: MIRACULOUS GROWTH
AND A TWIST IN THE TRELLIS
V: GROWING INWARDLY
VI: THE MONASTERY AS A SUBCULTURE
VII: MUSINGS ON SELECTED ASPECTS OF MONASTIC LIFE
VIII: TRANSPLANTING THE TRELLIS
IX: A CONCLUSION
AND SOME CLOSURE
APPENDIX I: TIN MEN HAVE A VOICE ALSO
APPENDIX II: A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY BY DR. GEORGE HILLERY
EDITOR’S PREFACE
To be allowed to travel with Tom through his life was totally my privilege. To be indulged by having him accept my editorial suggestions, an honor. My only desire was to make his experience on his monastic path more accessible for others. I wish you the reader wellness, and trust your visit with Tom on his journey as a monk will be pleasant and enriching.
Kunga ChÖsing, Ph.D.
Mannheim, Germany
10 June 2010
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my many colleagues, my adult children, friends and associates for assisting me over the past several years in working on this manuscript. I am most indebted to my daughter Carrie and two of her brothers, Chris and Joe, who have helped so patiently, since I am anything but computer literate. Also, several members of my monastic family, especially F. Anselm, F. Jim, and at times even the Abbot himself. Many others have encouraged me to continue writing when I thought it pointless, in particular, my editor, Kunga ChÖsing, a friend of thirty years. We worked together during my recent visit to Germany in Mannheim on the manuscript, this was a precious gift.
There are several readers: Dr. Joseph Crowley, Faith Johnston, Marci Allman, A.J. Meek and Jonie Klien. The Administrative Staff of Rockmont Boys Camp in North Carolina who, through the efforts of my son David, allowed me to spend time in their Farm House within a cluster of magnificent mountains.
The following are individuals who supported me, both on and off the computer, during my long and arduous task. They are my son Jon, Dr. David Deephouse, Damian Campbell, Kerry Blanchard, Chris Corbin, Mitch Curley, Bernard Eckholdt, members of our Tin Men Group (Trappist Initiative Network), especially Ed Adams, Peggy Steward, Dr. Leonard Stanton, and his colleague John Myers.
I am also honored to include Dom Armand Veilleux, Abbot of Our Lady of Scourmont Abbey in Belgium along with the Zen priest, Norman Fisher, former co-abbot of the Zen Center in San Francisco.
To anyone I may not have mentioned, I ask forgiveness. My gratitude is extended feebly in all directions.
FOREWORD
The Abbot of Scourmont told me, while visiting the Abbey in Belgium, that we all have experienced many reincarnations. So it is no surprise that sometimes I’m uncertain if I may be at the beginning of my life or approaching the end. If my life was a river, I suppose it would be the Mississippi, broad, flowing over its boundaries, meandering on its way to the ocean, but also with some clear direction and a swift current.
What is it that gives us direction and boundaries in life? More precisely what makes us spiritual or whole? Does the world suffer today because it seems as if we may have lost a simple but profound spirituality of the past or are we on the path of evolution to a place where monasteries, temples and other spiritual traditions are viewed by some as fossils of extinct forms? My life has been, and to some degree still is, a living experiment searching the answer to many of these questions.
A wise sage once said, "You really do not know where you are going until you know where you have been". For a long time my family and friends have encouraged me to write the story of my life. Writing about my self is a task I do not savor very easily. In many years of practice as pastoral therapist, I have admired and been amazed by how easy it is for some persons to reveal intimate details about themselves in such a short while. Using their bravery as an example, I will start at the beginning and do my best with telling my monastic story.
There may be times when you, the reader, sense a pause in the text. Perhaps these were times when I struggled with working to discipline myself to the task. The early desert monks had a name for this difficulty calling it the noonday devil
. The centuries that have passed since they coined this term have not changed the difficulty of staying disciplined, and for me the time of day does not seem to matter. When it is time to write it can always be noon.
An open question is Why write this book?
. A visit to the Internet shows that there are many books in this category of spirituality and related subjects. If there is only one person who reads something here that opens a door or gives a new insight, then my task has been worthwhile.
Even the great Thomas Merton, one of the first modern monks to write his autobiography (The Seven Storey Mountain), had to be urged to continue the work; at one point receiving the task as a request from his abbot under his vow of obedience.
There is also a selfish reason for writing in that the process itself is a way for me to understand myself better. The anonymous narrator of the Russian spiritual classic The Way of the Pilgrim quotes his contemporary, the author Turgenev as saying: Every man should write the story of his life
. Self knowledge can lead to self compassion and that is a prerequisite for both internal and external peace. My wish for all of us is more self acceptance and understanding. Moving forward, I am reminded of the words of Soren Kierkegaard And so it is that I understand everything now. From the beginning, I could not survey what has been in fact my own development (for) life can only be understood backward though it must be lived forward.
I: THE PATH
The cool breeze that sometimes wafts over New Orleans, the city of my birth, carries the sounds of Jazz, the smells of fine Creole cooking and a deeply imbued spiritual presence. To say I was born in the house of God is literally true. Hotel Dieu (House of God) was one of the earliest and best run hospitals in the United States. Founded and staffed by the blue robed, white sailboat
hatted Sisters of Charity, it was a landmark of Creole New Orleans until 1992 when it was sold and renamed University Hospital.
This seemingly small detail in some ways represents a theme running through both my life and this book. Gradually over the years, New Orleans has lost much of its spiritual aura and its Creole traditions just as today not a few former monasteries, particularly in Europe, have become seminar houses or even fancy hotels.
In many Caucasian New Orleans homes, there was an African American surrogate mother. In our family, it was our dear Clara, who left her own family every day to care for ours. Women like Clara were often not only selfless, but also deeply spiritual and full of courage. She even brought her grandson to play with me. We were only four years old.
Later in my life, I noticed that our monastery, as well as many other religious houses, was predominately white. This prompted me on an adventure of founding a new monastery in the hope of attracting more African American vocations. I think Clara’s influence was far deeper than I realized.
Without a doubt, this early environment filled with the challenges and sacrifices of a family facing the Depression, the love and devotion of Clara, and the deeply spiritual flavor of New Orleans played a crucial role in my desire to be closer to God and to have a strong spiritual life.
New Orleans has, and to some extent still has, a dual school system. Public schools were funded with taxes payed by all families, and Catholic schools charged tuition. I spent my elementary years at St. Dominic’s School on Harrison Avenue in the Lakeview neighborhood. My father struggled to stay employed in those depression years and my mother worked in a sewing shop downtown. I had two older siblings, my brother John 9 years my senior and sister Lollie 7 years older than me. When I was eight, my younger brother Ronnie was born.
I helped pay for my early education with a job as a paper boy and was paid also to be the sacristan in St. Dominic’s Church. Each day I prepared the altar for mass, rang the bells and in general cared for the order and readiness of this other House of God
.
There is speculation today that our desire for God could be genetically hardwired (The God Gene, Dean Harner). I have no real opinion of this, but I see clearly how even the choice my parents made about where I would be born started a process that became an unbroken path leading me from one House of God to another. Next door to St Dominic’s Church was the Priory where the friars lived. Over the centuries there have always been spiritual movements that corresponded to the zeitgeist.
The so called mendicant
orders (mainly Dominicans and Franciscans) grew in the Middle Ages when commerce and the rise of the cities made traveling safer and easier. The male members of these orders