Raimon Panikkar
I understand your predicament. You are no longer a novice. You are a professed monk, but not yet with the solemn vows. You have been too long in the monastery so as to be so well adjusted that you seem to have no other option than to continue in the routine you criticize in the older monks, and from which you would like to escape. You feel that you have still a chance to fulfill the ideals of your life, but you do not know in which direction you should go.
The crisis of monkhood seems to be universal. The monastic institution has become not only parte of the Establishment, but one of the major pillars. Preaching patience, and sometimes being blind to injustice, catering for the so-called education of the youth, mainly of the rich, even if scholarships are given to the poor in order that they be assimilated into the main current of this unjust society of ours, singing peacefully old psalms as if nothing had happened, you become an obstacle to the radical change that almost every perceptive thinker sees necessary.
What can you do? To reform your own monastery seems preposterous. We have been trained in obedience as trust to and compliance with the superior; we are never so sure about ourselves as to be able to face with freedom and without fear a venerable and traditional community or institution. To drop out and go away is no solution either. To go on as usual is not satisfying. What is to be done.? I see only one way out.
I am suggesting to follow the very way of Nature: branch off… What I am saying is that break with tradition will not do. We need the roots. Tradition is there in order to be handed down, to be passed on by way of transplant and branching off, by transformation in the very act of handing it over, because although the sun, the water and the air are the same, the soil, the sap of new generations, and the spirit of the times are different.
My plea to the superiors is that they should allow such a freedom; I would ask them to trust in the Spirit and not break the communion, even if the juridical links will have to be loosened due to the rigid legal structure of the present-day status quo. I would like to convince them not only of the need to revitalize present-day monastic life, but that they should take on the responsibility of sponsoring movements of which they do not completely approve, or do not fully understand. The evangelical prudence of the serpent may help here. You bless, you encourage, you give support. Parents, says St. Paul, do not sadden the spirit!
My plea to young monks (and obviously nuns) is that you should think with profound conviction that for God no action is impossible; that the energy you feel within yourselves has historical significance; that where the Spirit is, there is freedom; that real love dispels fear; that as soon as you step out of mediocrity, you will be safe, that the possibilities are enormous and the world is thirsty for such steps. You are the link with the past and, at the same time, the seeds of the future. But seeds must blow in the wind, that is, go with the Spirit, in order to fall on other, unknown ground, and yield fruit. “judge for yourselves what is upright” (Luke 12:57). (Text edited)
(Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010). Written to a North American monk at the beginning of the 1980s.
