God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
quiet, and especially monastic, when my father moved out, taking many of his antiques with him. Thus stripped, it was my mother’s ship, the vessel of her salvation. Like Anselm, she would wake up early in the morning to meditate. The peace and order and abundant light of the house was what she wanted. And it was there and then, in the House of Great Silence, that the urges in me began calling for a decision, for my own assent.
That’s a heavy word, assent. It’s a bit like “belief” but thicker, more demanding. It’s social, and it’s volitional. Assent is what belief looks like in the flesh—the intertwining of person and proposition, when the two become inseparable. Decisions shape beliefs and beliefs make decisions.
The idea of going to an actual monastery came to me during the last months of high school. My mother had recently been on a retreat at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, at the suggestion of the wife of my father’s business partner. Though anything but a Catholic herself, Mom enjoyed the silence of the place and hinted that maybe I should go sometime too. The idea didn’t make much sense to me until some weeks later—I think it was in the shower—when it suddenly, momentously, did. For the past year or so I had been reading my way around religion without clear reasons how or why, and here was an opportunity to test that curiosity on experience. I think it is an interesting place to put myself, I wrote in my journal, an interesting context to throw myself into and see what happens. The timing worked out well. In the last months of senior year, my school gave us the chance to do an independent study project, and I decided to do mine at Holy Cross.
The monastic life isn’t for everyone, least of all an unbaptized teenager. You can’t just slip in. I called up the abbot, Father Robert, told him about my idea, and he allowed me to come for a meeting. In all, I had to make the hour-and-a-half drive west three times for interviews with different monks. Each questioned me about my reasons and my motives. One steely old monk in particular thought that it was a terrible idea, and he made sure I knew it—I didn’t have the maturity, and I didn’t know what I was getting into. But finally they agreed to even more than I had hoped for: a two-week stay, and not even in the guest house but in a cloistered cell, living, working, and praying as they do. By that time, I had fallen permanently in love with the place, set on hilly green pastures, studded with jagged outcroppings. The Shenandoah River runs along one side of the property, and the Blue Ridge Mountains stand just beyond.
Back home, waiting for the project to begin, my reading and thinking intensified. I wrote, still sorting out the meanings of the words, I want to know who I am with respect to the monastery, to the discipline, and perhaps to God. I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the early memoir of Thomas Merton. He was a Catholic convert, monk, artist, and activist—and an extraordinary writer. Later in life, when he discovered sixties radical politics and Eastern mysticism, and fell in love with a woman, that book made him cringe. It does a little for me now. How could anyone think that the monastery would wipe away one’s doubts and passions, once and for all? How could I? But at the time, his certainty and self-denial had me in a thrall. Merton became my patron saint.
I enlisted everything around me in my preparation, which became ever more haphazard and frantic. I summoned the resources of calculus, seemingly the closest among my classes in school to the transcendent: God is the conception of the infinite in things, I mused a few days before leaving for the abbey, imagining some exalted integral of integrals. I alternated between reading my mother’s books on Eastern meditation and whatever I could find from the Western mystics. It was a relief to discover how much they had in common. The Eastern practices of self-emptying and self-discovery my mother had been exploring had counterparts in the West too, forgotten in most ordinary synagogues and churches but remembered in the monasteries, where my father’s antiques would have fit in nicely. It helped that in Catholicism divorce doesn’t exist.
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Holy Cross belongs to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance—the Trappists. It follows much the same code of life as Anselm did at Bec, set out in the sixth century by Benedict of Nursia. The monks live in an eternal return of manual labor and study, punctuated every few hours by prayer together, beginning at 3:30 in the morning, and ending, in midsummer, a little before sunset.
When I first arrived, the sound of monks chanting psalms in unadorned unison terrified me. Their words—calling on God with praise and for help and for deliverance from enemies—only brought into relief what these monks believed and I did not. The men clothed in white habit and black scapular, nearly all gray-haired and wrinkled, loomed over me in the dark choir like shadows, like ghosts, until one showed me a passing, understanding smile. I felt that I needed to know what they knew, which meant learning to believe what they believed.
At Holy Cross, the cottage industry is a fruitcake factory. On a given day I would decorate cakes with red and green cherries, or sift through the yellow raisins for seeds, or spray brandy on top. (The monks cracked up when they gave me the brandy job, since I was still under drinking age.) Afterward we would mop. With the young Merton in mind, I chased opportunities to exercise my humility and obedience, to give myself over to the work, to the community, and through it to the will of their God. I sat in the church on my own for hours waiting for an invisible presence to arrive through the body on the crucifix, curled in literal anguish, hanging in front of a rough-hewn stone sculpture of the Virgin Mother presenting her child. But mainly what I noticed was the ticking clock over the door. I spent too much time reading, consuming book after spiritual book, hoping one or the next would finally tell me what I was doing there. Each lit me up somehow but usually at cross-purposes with the others.
Monasteries are not places for lofty philosophy; in their extraordinary way, they’re built for ordinary life. Monastic thought and literature dwell in the practical matters of prayer, liturgy, community, and sanity, in tune with the silence and monotony. Anselm was unusual among monastic authors for his metaphysical speculation, which was usually the work of scholastics in the cities. Still, his ideas came ensconced in the routine of psalms and contemplation. They were tailored for that life. And that life, in itself, is a living proof; nothing makes sense in the monastery if God doesn’t exist.
One of the monks assumed watch over me while I was there, Brother Benedict.4 Before taking his vows, Benedict had lived a busy life in the world, having worked on a Mississippi riverboat, as an archivist at the New York Public Library, and as editor for the collected works of George Balanchine. He knew great writers and artists, and he had been married. Each day, he would leave a stack of books for me outside the door of my room with a kind note, but he never seemed to be trying to persuade me of anything in particular. I knew I could come to him with my questions. He had been through plenty of his own, though his slight, collected bearing belied it. As I talked and talked half-aimlessly, his eyes followed me through the oversized bifocals that hung above his white beard. I tried to tell him about my fears and doubts and worries there, and how confused I’d been feeling. That’s when something he said changed everything.
“Well, of course, Nathan,” Benedict told me. “We all doubt. We question.”
It was that simple: the idea that their faith is a process, not a possession. A way of living. The monastery, says St. Benedict’s Rule, is to be “a school for the Lord’s service”—for “beginners,” it says, not saints. “As we progress in this way of life and in faith,” it promises, “we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”5 A path. A faith that you don’t take for granted. You mold yourself for it, patiently, with hope and love. The barrier between the monks and me began to dissolve. Their prayers, anyway, had already been finding their way into my sleep after Compline.
The monks sang not just out of certainty, but out of desire. They were living out a relationship, with Jesus among them as a brother, God their father, and Mary the mother of all. It was a family I could belong to, to strengthen me for my family at home. I continued torturing myself with books and unanswered prayers, but I wasn’t alone in it now. Chanting in the choir or working in the bakery, we were building our proofs together. There are moments when I really believe I could love this God, I wrote.
Another week