Grace in the Desert
Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life

Dennis Patrick Slattery
153 pages
Jossey-Bass, 2004

 

Synopsis

Readers journey as Slattery's travel companions in this vividly descriptive and enriching new book. Slattery's tale traces his three-month journey to 12 monasteries and retreat centers in the American West. Woven into Slattery's reflective prose are the threads to discovering a personal sense of monastic space apart from the structure of formal retreat.

With vivid descriptions of his tops along the journey, Slattery merges his rich Catholic heritage with wisdom drawn from contemporary and classical spiritual writers such as Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, and Thich Nhat Hanh. His reflective visits to retreat centers and monasteries (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Buddhist) and his interactions with the monks and nuns there beckon him more deeply into intentional solitude, silence, and the work of prayer.

Slattery's vulnerability as a pilgrim provides a safe haven for those longing to venture into the monastic world. In gentle, reassuring language his pilgrimage explores many questions:

• What does it mean to be alone in silence, in prayer, and in relation to the divine without the distractions of formal worship?
• How can our own way of being be affected by living among monks and other monastic seekers?
• How can these encounters enhance further reflection, contemplation, and self expression?

Grace in the Desert features a comprehensive list of recommended reading for those interested in exploring ideas about spirituality, psychology, and the imagination; it also offers an appendix describing nine retreat centers and includes a list of 12 online directories for retreat centers and monasteries.

 

Commendations

"This is a marvelous and inspiring book that serves not only as a practical and historical guide to contemporary monastic retreats in the American West but also as a reminder of how much we need to seek out periods of meditative solitude in our lives."

Evans Lansing Smith, author of The Modernist Nekyia and Sacred Mysteries

"In his memoir, Dennis Patrick Slattery writes of a journey that is simultaneously inward and outward with an almost Augustinian appreciation of the 'sweetness' of things. With a writer's relish and a mystic's sensitivity, he describes ... making his way from a stay at one monastic community after another."

Christine Downing, author of The Goddess and The Long Journey Home

 

About the Author

Dennis Patrick Slattery is a professor in the mythological studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Author of Just Below the Water Line and over 200 articles and reviews, Slattery is also a poet. His selected poems, Casting the Shadows was published in 2001. He speaks at workshops and retreats several times a year.

 

Review

Devotional literature often describes life as a pilgrimage through a vale of tears to the eternal home, a “journey of the soul,” a growth from spiritual infancy to saintly maturity. As part of this interior pilgrimage, some devotees journey to the holy places of their religion: Hindus to Ban”ras, Buddhists to S”n”rth, Jews and Christians to Jerusalem, Muslims to Mecca, just to mention some of the holiest cities. For those not able to travel to these distant places, a trek to a local sanctuary is a pilgrimage in miniature where they hope to experience the same transforming power of the transcendent or the divine.

What Dennis Slattery did for his first sabbatical after 25 years of teaching is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in academe. Instead of the usual research project on some recondite topic in dusty libraries, he embarked upon a three-month pilgrimage to 12 monasteries and retreat centers. The idea of a pilgrimage did not come to Dennis out of the blue. For years he had been hearing “the monastic call,” and his frequent visits to Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky during his days of graduate studies had kept the flame of that “vocation” burning. But now, with his wife’s blessing, he could fulfill his life-long dream not simply of visiting these holy sites but of actually living in them, for long periods of time, participating in the daily life and activities of these monks, nuns, and laypeople.

Because Dennis is a dedicated pilgrim as well as a compulsive writer, he made not only a “pilgrimage” but also a “pengrimage.” So, you are now holding in your hands one of the most deeply reflective, richly poetic, and yes, spiritually uplifting “journals of the soul” I have been privileged to read. I trust you will find out for yourself what a spiritual treasure this book is by perusing it from cover to cover. Here I will only briefly describe the many pilgrimages that are narrated in these pages.

There is of course a physical pilgrimage to various centers of prayer and spirituality. Some of these are well known, others less so; some prospering, others on the way to extinction. An experienced traveler, Dennis a perceptive tour guide to these places and the people who run them. Some of these centers offer only the bare minimum of creaturely comforts, sometimes with a friendly mouse as a daily visitor; others offer the conveniences of a modern motel. Some look out over a breathtaking scenery, with deer grazing nearby; others a drab parking lot, with “retreatants” partying with pizza and beer. At some places, food is Spartan; at others, the nuns try to fatten you up with special meals marked “For the Hermit”! In many pilgrimages the devotees “circumambulate” upon arriving at and leaving the holy site to absorb as it were its sacred atmosphere. Dennis, a modern pilgrim, rode in his truck up and down the west coast and the Midwest, but he never missed the chance to walk in the woods surrounding the monasteries in solitude and find his God there (and once, attacking dogs!). Readers who desire to visit these places for they would do well to take note of Dennis’s unique information on them in addition to the usual guides sold on the market.

There is next an economical and interreligious pilgrimage. One of the monasteries Dennis visited is Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Monastery, also known as The Monastery of Mount Tabor; another is Sonoma Mountain Zen Center, outside Santa Rosa. At one place, the once-altar boy, raised in Catholic schools, was introduced to the strange world of icons and Byzantine Divine Liturgy. At the other, he was initiated into Zen meditation through a series of minute rituals and the practice of mindfulness by raking the gravel and dirt (“I rake; therefore, I am”), practices that his church looked upon with suspicion not so long ago. In this way the Catholic pilgrim’s eyes were opened to the wealth of spiritual riches of other religious traditions.

There is thirdly a pilgrimage in the company of saints and scholars of the past. Though solitude was the most pervasive feature of Dennis’s pilgrimage, he was never along. Spiritual masters such as Pseudo-Dionysus, Benedict, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, and contemporary writers such as Thomas Merton, Thick Nhat Hanh, David Steindl-Rast, William McNamara, Anthony De Mello, and Thomas Berry kept him constant company. Through Dennis’s meditations, we are introduced to these spiritual teachers whose wisdom continues to nurture humans in their journeys to God.

There is a fourth pilgrimage, and a most pleasant one. It is the journey with novelists and poets and psychologists, from the venerable Dante, whose Divine Comedy is a spiritual pilgrimage itself, to Dostoevsky, whose insights into the evil of the human heart continue to haunt us, to Carl Jung, whose reflections on dreams illumine the secrets of the human soul. But these are not the only creative writers present in the book. Dennis himself is an accomplished poet, and so here and there he regales us with his own poems, when mere prose is unequal to the deep emotions stirring deep within his heart.

Finally, there is a fifth pilgrimage, and a most painful and difficult one. It is Dennis’s journey back into his own past, between memory and imagination, a past traumatized by his father’s alcoholism and rage, and by his own demons of anger and self-doubt. It is an unflinching and searching gaze of his memory into the depths of his soul, but a memory washed over by the unabashed tears of joy and gratitude in the quiet of the early morning in the chapel and in the silent vigil before the Blessed Sacrament. Joy and gratitude, because now the memory is redeemed by the imagination of the possibilities of God’s transforming forgiveness and love. Only a person who has experienced God’s gratuitous love can write the following words: “Grace, I suddenly understood, is a gift of freedom, of a full liberation from one’s self. It does not ask that anyone or I deny ourselves; in fact, grace becomes a way of moving closer to who one is, but by a route that does not depend on one’s will but on the will of God. And it visits one in love. Love liberates in its gentle but powerful force.”

Belden Lane’s The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, which Dennis cites, refers to the desert, the mountain, and the cloud as the geographical symbols of the three stages of the spiritual life, namely, purgation, illumination, and union. May we who read Dennis’s book also move through the desert of the dark night of the soul, to the mountain of the light of divine knowledge, to the cloud of unknowing which wraps us in the radiant darkness of divine love.

Peter C. Phan
The Ignacio Ellacuria Professor of Catholic Thought
Georgetown University

 

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