The Desert in the Cell

[0:00]Do you want to share a little bit about the Carthusians, who they are and their kind of spirituality, and just try to get across the way that they live and why this change would be seen as so radical to so many people?

[0:12]So the Carthusians—their founder is Saint Bruno, and he dies at about the end of the 11th century, so right around the time that we’re getting the Saint Dominics and the Saint Francises, those very ancient, very illustrious orders. He was looking to bring to the West the feeling of the Desert Fathers in the East. So it would be a monastic life really focused on solitude. That’s what really sets apart the Carthusian. There are other monastic orders that have a great deal of silence, but they don’t have as extreme a solitude as the Carthusian does.

[0:46]So the Carthusian, very uniquely: all of your monks have to chant those eight liturgical hours of the day—so the Psalms and the readings, starting at Matins, ending at Compline throughout the day—but the Carthusian uniquely spends a lot of those designated prayer periods in solitude. So he doesn’t join the community for Terce or Sext or None; those are all prayed by himself in cell. So it’s very unique for its solitude.

[1:18]The Carthusian: he should not speak to anyone except for once a week for a couple of hours on a community walk [spatiamentum], where you walk next to one person and then a couple yards in front of you is another two people, and you walk around the monastery or out into the fields, the surrounding kind of village. So really no speaking, really complete solitude.

[1:43]There’s a division between what they call the Fathers and then the Brothers. The Brothers [speaker briefly slips and says “fathers”] work in the cloister—they’re the pantry man, they tend the garden, they repair the monastery. The Fathers are not supposed to step out of the cell, so they stay in the cell in quiet contemplation of God.

[2:04]And people will sometimes say, “Wow, what did you think about? You must have spent all this time thinking about things.” But contemplation is God thinking and pouring into you His thoughts, which—if God pours into you knowledge of Himself, what Dionysius calls a dark ray—then it’s not going to be particular, because God is not particular. So He’s not a being, He is Being. So you’re not thinking; you’re being taught. God is teaching you. You’re praying, but it’s total silence—and not only silence exteriorly, but silence interiorly. So the monk is trying to get thoughts out of the way. So he sits in cell—I would sit in cell for hours, just as much as the Lord will grant total interior silence, saying Jesus’s name, saying “Come, Holy Spirit” every couple of minutes, and just allowing the Lord to fill me with His truth and His love.

[3:11]So the contemplative life, a day for the Carthusian: you wake up just before midnight every day. And I think it’s funny, Saint Alphonsus Liguori writes in his book to nuns, The True Spouse of Christ—he says in there, in his time, “You know, even the lukewarm religious orders still wake up at midnight to pray.” Today, I think the only religious order that still wakes up at midnight to pray is the Carthusians.

[3:38]So you wake up just before midnight. The bell rings at midnight; you begin praying Matins of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So there’s the Office of the Day, which all monks have to pray, and then there’s the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which are those small prayers in devotion to Our Lady just before, and then the Carthusians also have the Office of the Dead to pray for those souls who have passed. So before every Office of the Day, you have the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So you’re praying the Matins of that in cell, then you join everyone else for Matins, where you chant from about 12:30 to 2:30 or 3:30, depending on the day. That’s your Matins and Lauds.

[4:19]You wake up at 7:00 a.m. in cell for Prime. Then you have some time of reading silently to yourself, Lectio Divina, Mass. Let’s see: Prime; Terce is at 8:00 a.m. in cell. Mass is at 8:15 until about 9:15, 9:30. After Mass, you go back to cell; you could work in your enclosed garden if you would like, back to reading, back to prayer.

[4:47]Sext is at 11:00. Your food is dropped off in a hole cut into your wall next to your door at 11:30. You eat—they call that dinner—and you eat from 11:30 until about 12:30, and put the meal back in the hole cut into the wall. For the majority of the year for the monk, you eat one meal a day, even though you can ask for some slices of bread in the afternoon if you would like. That’s the majority of the year. In the minority of the year, you can have them bring a very small meal in the evening. But you should, as a monk, fast, which means one meal a day.

[5:29]You’ve got some time there; then you’ve got None at 2:15. Vespers is at 3:30 in cell (of the Blessed Virgin Mary), 3:45 together—that’s the other. So you get together for Mass every day, you get together for the midnight Office, and you get together for Vespers every day. That ends at 4:15; you come back to cell.

[5:51]And then from 4:15 to 6:45 was, in my opinion, the real Carthusian experience. For a lot of the year, it’s getting dark, it’s cold. Likely you have one area of your cell where you can have heat, but even there, sometimes you’re too busy to man the stove, so it’s cold, it’s dark, you’re in total solitude from 4:15 to 6:45, which is Compline. And you get to really sit with our Lord. You get to wrestle with your disordered desires—you miss things, you want things. If someone said one thing wrong to you two months ago on a walk, it’s going to surface right there in that time. So a holy wrestling with the Lord. So that’s kind of the Carthusian life.

[0:15]“The vocational work basically is based on trying to channel what the Lord is doing in a safe direction.” Brother David Jones, born to a Welsh-speaking Protestant family in Cardiff, but with roots up in mid-Wales in the farming area—hence the language—and speaking always Welsh at home and going to a Welsh school and a Welsh chapel. The Catholic Church was just practically non-existent on the horizon until I started to travel on the continent because of my parents being language teachers, and I saw it is a bigger picture, where everyone went in countries like France and Austria and Spain and Portugal and only saw one church, and that’s what got me thinking.

[2:06]At the age of 13, I was involved with the whole wave of evangelical renewal that was happening in Wales at the time, and we were involved with evangelization—pretty well anti-Catholic, actually—and I was involved in the Christian Union in school. I was born again in that ambit, and my pastor, a Baptist pastor, calmed me down and kept me in the Baptist church, and he baptized me at the age of 13 by total immersion. We had a good pastor and we also had a very good Sunday school teacher, and he would take us places in a minibus connected with Welsh Christian history and culture, but he would also take us to non-Catholic worship. We went to the Divine Liturgy in Cardiff one Sunday morning and—wow, that was something else for a Welsh Baptist: incense intoxication! And then I thought, well, maybe there is more than actually I was aware to Christian history.

[4:14]One thing that did come through quite a lot in reading Lives of the Saints was that God was performing miracles—not the kind of miracles that we might have had of just healing, but dogmatic miracles, underlining points of doctrine like the Real Presence and the Communion of Saints, in particular the Blessed Virgin. And so, bit by bit, I began to think, does that mean that God is really speaking a Catholic language? And would you believe it, a mule gave me the answer. It was in Rimini that St. Anthony of Padua got this man to put his mule to a fast and came out with the Blessed Sacrament and said to the animal, “Dumb beast, adore your God.” And he did—went down on his knee—and I thought, hmm, that means that there’s something there which I’m not recognizing.

[5:14]And I started to drift towards the Catholic Church in the area, which was always open. Quietly, without telling anyone, I’d just absorb the mystery in the air, because I could sense there was something there. It wasn’t the same as ours. And I actually then went to—it was still in Latin—the High Mass, in around 1968, and it really bowled me over. I thought, there’s something hugely powerful here, which is very different from what we’ve got, all based on the power of the preacher only. And so I thought quite a lot and read even more. And then I got one day to the point of reading the story of Fatima. And I put the book down and said, “That’s it. If that’s true, I can’t stay where I am.”

[6:10]Then I went to see my minister, the Baptist, and said to him in Welsh that I was thinking of becoming—now in Welsh it’s pabith, a papist. And his eyes became like saucers! He calmed me down: “The appeal will pass. Stay where you are.” So I stayed where I was for a few months, but then I went back to him and said I was still thinking of it. And that following Sunday, I asked my father to put me down as he was going to chapel at the Catholic church. And it was a Benedictine church in Cardiff, run by Ampleforth. And I felt: this, strangely enough, is home. Very soon, the monks saw me praying in that church and started to put me under their wings, and eventually I asked for instruction.

[7:20]In the specifically monastic formation, as we had it anyway, it was very classic, but it was happening within the cloister itself, and the textbooks were still Latin. And we had a very good professor, one of our brethren, who was a brilliant scholar, and we had very good classes. Because I’d done so many studies, and I’d done also a degree in Wales in the university—a lot of Hebrew and Greek and good scholarship—to get me ready for ordination when I was eventually in Ireland, they sent me back to the continent, to Rome, and I did the License in the Angelicum. And then after ordination I was sent straight back to Rome for the Doctorate, and they were very happy years.

[8:35]One moment that stands out especially is that of the priestly ordination in the Cathedral in Siena, an ancient cathedral. Lying there prostrate before the high altar during the Litany of the Saints, one could actually feel all the saints, as it were, over one’s head and the power of the Catholic Church. And I remember the actual moment when one is actually made a priest: it’s the consecratory prayer which the archbishop uses. Before it, one is a deacon, and after it, one is a priest. And one felt at that point there is actually something cosmic happening here irreversibly at the deepest level.

[9:31]Much later in time, my brother was here for my profession as a hermit in the hands of Bishop Smith. He’s been very good to me all these years; he comes every month. He organized that the profession should happen in the cathedral in 2010, after three years of formation here as a hermit in this house that he gave me. And my brother was there with his Protestant baggage. I had asked him if he would do one of the readings, and he accepted. And when he came here the previous evening, the first thing he said was, in Welsh, “Now there’s homework to be done. If I’m to do this reading, we must prepare.” So we got all the translations we could get, put them on the table, and went through it word by word to see all the possible meanings, all the sense, all the accents, where the emphasis was, what St. Paul was trying to say.

[10:45]My life here is purely contemplative, with the Night Office in the heart of the night, and then Divine Office completely sung throughout the day, and a lot of adoration going on. But then there is that gap in the afternoon between the Office of None and Vespers, when by appointment people can come. And that’s when things do happen, especially in confession and if you’re helping people to discern. And also, unexpectedly, when people started to follow the homilies—first of all through audio, and then through video—the demand came that this should be made known. So the videos go out from here as well. They’re contemplative in mode, but they seem to reach a lot of people. It’s not over the top, either to the left or to the right… It’s just the Word of God, and depth of exegesis, and encounter with the Logos, who never changes.

[12:41]So it is the Lord, in His quiet way, saying: this is where you’re to be, and your vocation is just to be one of those angels. All you’ve got to do is adore. I am enough. And you don’t have to be doing anything outside the house at all. It is enough to love.

[14:23]What I would say is, if a person is interested: listen and listen, and look. Basically, the safest thing to do is actually to hand over the soul directly to the Holy Spirit and to the Lord in such a way that one says to the young person: expose yourself to the reality of a place and see at the deepest level of your soul what your reaction to it is. Because if the Lord wants you there, there’ll be this phenomenon of interior resonance, a deep peace. And that deep, deep peace at the deepest level is the signature of the Lord.