Pico Iyer’s latest book is Aflame: Learning from Silence.
To get to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, just past Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, you have to bump for 13 miles on barely paved tracks. Signs warn of “FALLING ROCKS” and “FLASH FLOODS” and the update posted by the guestmaster monk online alerts visitors each day to treacherous road conditions. “All-wheel drive vehicles are advised,” it recently read. “Also, there are cattle roaming in the canyon. They often stand in the road, especially at night.” This information is a little more helpful than the “news” section of one website I found for the monasteries on Mount Athos, which had not been updated in almost five years.
At the end of the road, after edging along a one-lane path four stories above the surging Chama River, you come upon a cluster of cabins and a chapel smack up against a 600-foot-high sandstone cliff.
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert. (October 1995)Natasha Lane/The Associated Press
The Benedictine monks tend sheep, but it was a huge black cow that stared me down as, on arrival last July, I walked the Stations of the Cross through the desert to the chapel. The silence, as in all such places, was intense, enveloping, a presence, really – of birdsong, leaves shivering in the wind, everything I can’t hear when I’m too much in my head.
The next day, I walked across the brush to the elegant and well-stocked bookstore, where a monk who’d been in residence for 42 years sat alone on a chair, patiently making rosettes out of discarded pieces of silk from saris. There were only 17 monks living here now, Brother Andre said, bent over his labour and threading purple strands into blue. But that was better than when there were three times as many. At that time, he explained, looking up, “there was a lot of coming and going” and men ill-suited to the life were a distraction for those more deeply committed.
“Young people today aren’t so ready to commit,” continued Andre, frowning over his many-coloured creation and clearly in no hurry at all. When Benedict set up his monastic Rule, “there was no dispensation of vows; you couldn’t leave.” Now every kind of commitment – to a partner, a job, a monastery – seems imperilled in our age of fast-shrinking attention spans.
“Our life isn’t always easy,” he acknowledged, smiling at me. “But then whose is? Marriage is very nice, but it’s not always easy.” I thought of how the Dalai Lama, when asked how he remains so cheerful and calm in the midst of an incomparably difficult life, jokes that he has no wife or kids to worry about.
The absolute confidence and serenity of the old monk are two of the reasons why I keep returning to........