LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: There’s a struggle going on inside Thailand. It’s between two powerful influences. One side can be found in places like this; the other in crowded spaces like this. For now it seems that one side is falling behind.

This is Professor John Butt, senior advisor to the Institute of Religion at Payap University in Chiang Mai.

PROF. JOHN BUTT: It’s a real clash with modernity, with social change, and it’s been very intense. The changes that took place in America and in Europe have been extended over a couple of centuries; here it’s been a couple of decades.

SEVERSON: This is a country where almost 95 percent of the population is Buddhist, where the constitution mandates that the king be a Buddhist, and where there are temples almost everywhere.

PROF. BUTT: I think probably this is one of the central if not the central Buddhist country in the world.

SEVERSON: It’s a country that has recently seen a remarkable rise in economic prosperity. There was a time not that long ago when it would have been difficult to find a mall, let alone one so crowded. The roads would have been clogged with motor scooters, and the fancy cars belonged only to diplomats and the very rich. Not anymore. The Thais have embraced consumerism with gusto.

This is An Jang Sang, professor emeritus at Chiang Mai University.

AN JANG SANG: Some of them may be interested in materialism, consumerism, but deep down in their heart they are still Buddhists.

SEVERSON: But he agrees they’re not going to the temples, also known as wats, as much as they once did.

PROF. BUTT: In the past the wat was not just the religious center, it was the life center of the village community. The social life took place there, counseling, respect, authority for the monks. That’s, I think, decreased tremendously.

SEVERSON: And not as many are going to the Buddha to offer their prayerful good wishes for all living things. Some are giving more in donations, but Phra Boonchuey, the assistant abbot at this large temple, says too many are just donating to buy good karma.

PHRA BOONCHUEY: Because now they are coming to the temple just only to offer the offering in order to please, you know, their life for their own benefit.

SEVERSON: Phra BoonChuey is on a mission to get Thai Buddhism back on track.

PHRA BOONCHUEY: And so we have to do many things, you know, to bring people, you know, back to the religion.

SEVERSON: That would include bringing back the monks themselves who have been disappearing. In the past, almost every young man would become a monk, leading a monastic life, some for a few months, some for a lifetime. But in the last 30 years it is estimated that the number of monks has fallen by more than half. Mr. Vinai, our tuk-tuk driver, served as a monk for over a year as a young man.

(to Mr. Vinai): Did you like being a monk?

MR. VINAI: Yes. Yes.

SEVERSON: Do you think every young man should be a monk?

MR. VINAI: No, no.

SEVERSON: He says not every young man should be a monk because some care more about shopping.

(to Mr. Vinai): How many boys do you have?

MR. VINAI: I have two.

SEVERSON: Were they monks?

MR. VINAI: Yes.

SEVERSON: His last boy served only 15 days.

It’s about 5:30 in the morning, and the first monks are showing up to collect alms, their food for the whole day. Sometimes there’s only one meal a day, often followed by some sort of community service, and then there are the hours of chanting, study, and meditation. It’s not an easy life. Professor Butt says he once asked the young men in his class how many had been ordained.

PROF. BUTT: If I had asked that question a hundred years ago, I would have gotten close to a 100 percent yes, that they had ordained as a novice, maybe a short period of time, but they had done so. I went five years before I got one positive response, who had ordained.

SEVERSON: One reason for that might be the Thais have been practicing family planning, and if there is only one boy in the family, and the choice is school, making money, or ordination…

PRHA BOONCHUEY: You may not want him to be a novice or to get ordination.

SEVERSON: A big factor is that in the past many boys became monks to get a free education at the temple. Now Thailand offers 12 years of free public education and far more are attending secular schools. Scandals have also contributed to the diminishing numbers of monks, scandals revealed by social media. Pictures of monks at parties with women, drinking alcohol, watching porn, driving expensive fancy cars. Things monks are not supposed to be doing.

MR. VINAI: Not whiskey, not beer.

SEVERSON: Cigarettes, no cigarettes?

MR. VINAI: Nah, no.

SEVERSON: No women?

MR. VINAI: No women.

SEVERSON: No partying?

MR. VINAI: Yeah, no party.

SEVERSON: It’s not that there has been an epidemic of scandalous behavior, but what there is seems to find its way into the media. Justin McDaniel, the chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was once a monk himself in Thailand.

JUSTIN MCDANIEL: It has a big impact in the press. I think it also has a big impact that if somebody was on the fence about being a monk or nun, that this is kind of relatively a legitimate excuse you could give to your mom for not doing it: well, look at the way monks act.

SEVERSON: Professor McDaniel argues that Thai Buddhism itself is not in decline, that it is gaining considerable traction in the Western world, and that the Thai people themselves are debating it more, which he says is a good thing. He skeptical that there really is a crisis.

MCDANIEL: I’ve never heard any professional religious person, rabbi, monk, priest, imam ever say everything is fine. You know, it’s always we’re in a state of crisis, and we’re in a state of crisis so you should be coming more, and you should be giving more money, you should be becoming a monk or you should be reading more books.

SEVERSON: He would find some disagreement here in Chiang Mai. Phra Boonchuey, for instance, thinks monks need to be taught more critical thinking instead of just memorization, and that the benefits of meditation need to be emphasized more. He wants Buddhists to get back to their basic precepts, such as abstaining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and drinking alcohol. He would also counsel them to consume only what they need and to avoid the trappings of materialism.

PHRA BOONCHUEY: Think before [you] consume.

SEVERSON: There is a branch of Buddhism that’s flourishing. It’s called Dhammakaya. One way to explain Dhammakaya is that it is to Buddhism what the prosperity gospel is to Christianity. In other words the traditional value of selflessness has been replaced with “bigger is better.” The more you give, the more you get. Professor Butt says in some ways consumerism is becoming a religion of its own.

PROF. BUTT: This is the most pervasive and maybe becoming deeply rooted and growing the fastest of any religion in Thailand, and it’s consumerism. This is the way that one identifies one’s life, by what you own. The old thing was “I think, therefore I am.” Now it’s “I buy, therefore I am.”

MCDANIEL: I don’t see consumerism as somehow a-religious. And I don’t see modernity as somehow a-religious. I think that there’s many ways of being religious. I think when we say that consumerism or modernity is somehow a sign of secularism, I think that’s a very particular way of looking at religion.

PROF. BUTT: We’re living in a new world, and religion is a response to life, to what it means to be human, and when that changes, as I said earlier, religion has to change too or it dies. It’s put in a museum.

SEVERSON: No one is suggesting Thai Buddhism is heading for a museum, but many agree that it might need some new packaging.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

The post Decline of Buddhism in Thailand appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

BOB ABERNETHY: The spiraling violence in Syria has affected all areas of life, including religious life.  The Syrian desert monastery Deir Mar Musa, north of Damascus, was once a center of pilgrimage and interfaith dialogue. But the Catholic priest who leads the monastery was expelled from Syria last month, and the future of his ministry is uncertain.  Fred de Sam Lazaro visited before the violence exploded and has our report about Deir Mar Musa and the work once done there.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: So this is where Saint Moses the Abyssinian actually prayed?

REV. PAOLO DALL’OGLIO, Deir Mar Musa Monastery: Yes. This is his house.

DE SAM LAZARO: About three decades ago, Father Paolo Dall’Oglio happened upon these caves about sixty miles north of Syria’s capital Damascus. It was in these remote mountains that a group of monks from Ethiopia first made a hermitage back in the sixth century A.D.

DALL’OGLIO: You see, this is one of the grottoes of the ancient hermits in this mountain. Now here, we have formed this place in a chapel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in 1982, this Italian Jesuit, then 28, was studying Arabic in neighboring Lebanon when he hiked up to this spot for a retreat, a retreat he had to extend because of a serious fall.

DALL’OGLIO: There was no way out so I stayed here one week with my broken leg.

DE SAM LAZARO: He did find the stamina to explore the area and ruins of a long-forgotten monastery. It had been used for centuries before being abandoned in the late 1800s.

DALL’OGLIO: I have found really what I was looking for.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dall’Oglio was seeking a monastic life and he got permission from the local church authorities to rebuild and revive this monastery. His first task was to put a roof on this church built in the eleventh century itself on the ruins of a Roman castle.

DALL’OGLIO: I came in the night. And then, I came inside this church. There was no roof so there was an incredible roof of stars.

DE SAM LAZARO: It took years and a bit more than half a million dollars mostly from European church and individual donors to restore these almost 1,000 year-old images or those that could be restored. Worship services use a rite of the Syriac Catholic Church, one of the several eastern Christian traditions.

DALL’OGLIO: Here in the name of the Lord, asking for peace, brotherhood and extending consideration, respect, harmony.

DE SAM LAZARO: Traditional as the service is, Dall’Oglio is driven by what he calls a practical theology reaching out and building bridges to the Islamic community, the vast majority of their neighbors. Judaism and Christianity predated Islam in this ancient land but today very few Jews remain in Syria, and Christians account for just ten percent of this country’s population. On the eastern wall of the church, facing the Muslim holy city of Mecca, the Arabic symbol Allah. Christian monasteries were protected as holy places by the prophet Muhammad, Dall’Oglio says. And this one harkens back to a tradition he calls Abrahamic hospitality.

DALL’OGLIO: These people have been in the same villages working with the same people for fourteen centuries. We are together in front of God and recognize each other as believers. In the Islamic town, these Muslim, Christian and Jewish, they worship God in a kind of choir.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father Paolo encourages visits from and dialogue with Muslims, many of whom joined Christian visitors in the climb up 347 stairs to the monastery. Some, like scholar Atas Gomul exploring aspects of Islam’s relationship with Judaism and Christianity, stay for a while to conduct research in the growing library.

ATAS GOMUL, via translator: I was surprised to find so many books about Islam in a Christian monastery. I think it is very good to have a dialogue between the religions, to respect each other and to love one another. Politics always seems to take precedence over religious dialogue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father Paolo has big plans to continue the dialogue. He’s expanding guest facilities and building a new conference center including, he adds, an access road that will allow those unable to make the long hike to visit.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro at the Deir Musa Monastery in Syria.

ABERNETHY: In exile, Father Dall’Oglio has become a strong international advocate for peace in Syria.  He hopes to return and resume his ministry as soon as possible.

The post Syria Monastery appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During a special reception in New York, guests are paying their respects to the Venerable Nicholas Vreeland, or as many here still call him, “Nicky.” The Dalai Lama has given Vreeland an historic task: as the first Westerner appointed abbot of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, he’s to be a bridge between East and West.

ABBOT NICHOLAS VREELAND: His holiness wishes to bring Western ideas into the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system and that comes from his recognition that it is essential that there be new ideas brought in, that there be new air brought into these institutions.

LAWTON: For many observers, it may be surprising that an American has been given this important role…and perhaps even more surprising given the background of this particular American. Vreeland had a privileged upbringing: his father was a US diplomat and his grandmother was fashion icon Diana Vreeland. He was a photographer who had worked in some of the top studios. And then in his 20s, he began exploring Tibetan Buddhism.

VREELAND: What is it about Tibetan Buddhism that interested me? I think that it’s this very linear, very carefully organized, path to enlightenment that I, I liked.

LAWTON: Vreeland sees a linear progression in his own path into Buddhism. He was born in Switzerland and also lived in Germany and Morocco, before his family returned to New York. They were Episcopalian and sent 13-year-old Nicky to a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts. He was miserable there, until he discovered photography.

VREELAND: I don’t know what it was about it that caught me. I really don’t know, but it caught me.

LAWTON: Vreeland says he had a good relationship with his famous grandmother, Diana, the legendary editor of Vogue magazine.

VREELAND: I went to NYU to study film and at that time initially lived with her and became very close. She was a wonderful, enthusiastic friend.

LAWTON: She opened the door for him to work with prominent photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.

VREELAND: In my role in the studios of these photographers I was the assistant, I was the student, I was the devotee as it were. It is the relationship that I have with my teacher now.

LAWTON: It was Richard Avedon’s son John who in 1977 first introduced Vreeland to Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, founder of the Tibet Center. Under Rinpoche’s supervision, Vreeland began learning about Tibetan Buddhism.

Then in 1979, he went on a photography assignment in India. Because of his growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism, he included a visit to Dharamsala, headquarters of the Dalai Lama. Vreeland received permission to photograph the Tibetan leader. His camera had an extremely slow exposure, so his subjects had to sit absolutely still for one minute. That was a challenge for the Dalai Lama.

VREELAND: The shutter opened and we waited 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40, seconds, 50 seconds, and then his holiness started to move. And we did one time after another, after another, and suddenly after all these attempts to get a, a fully, a properly exposed shot, we both burst into laughter and it was as if all the tension went.

LAWTON: The Dalai Lama tried standing and they finally managed to get the shot.

VREELAND: His holiness very, very kindly remained there as I packed up my equipment and talked to me. And I had been so moved by the way in which the Tibetan people had supported me, had helped me in my travels and during my time in Dharamsala, and I asked his holiness what I could do in return. And he said, “Study.”

LAWTON: Vreeland took that advice to heart, and with the help of his teacher, explored the Tibetan Buddhist concept that logic clears the mind and facilitates meditation, which then can lead to developing compassion and attaining enlightenment.

VREELAND: If the ultimate goal is the full enlightenment of a Buddha, a Buddha who is omniscient, that’s the ultimate state of awakenness. All the steps that lead to that are little awakenings.

LAWTON: In 1985, Vreeland decided to become a Buddhist monk. I asked him how his grandmother took the news.

VREELAND: She was definitely concerned. She was not a big proponent of following a spiritual life, and so for a grandson to wish to become a monk was not something she was too happy about.

LAWTON: But she came to accept it?

VREELAND: Well, yes. She was always wonderful about showing her support for whatever I decided to do.

LAWTON: Vreeland pursued his monastic studies at Rato monastery in South India, the monastery that he will now lead. Rato was established in Tibet in the late 14th century to preserve Buddhist teachings on logic and debate. After the Chinese takeover of Tibet, Rato was reestablished in India.

When Vreeland arrived in 1985, there were 27 monks. Today, there are about 100 between the ages of six and 90. The monastery undertook a massive construction project, which was largely funded through the sale of Vreeland’s photographs. He raised $400,000 with a special series of photos documenting life in and around the monastery.

This 2002 photo of the Dalai Lama was taken in Rato’s debating court. Over the years, Vreeland has collaborated closely with the Tibetan leader,

VREELAND: His Holiness is practical, down to earth. It was those two qualities that I felt the moment that he walked into the room the first time I met him. And they were a surprise. I mean, I think in the West we have a view of holiness as being sort of ethereal and this person was not that.

LAWTON: He says the Dalai Lama hasn’t gotten any more patient in posing for photos.

VREELAND: Many years ago, when I photographed His Holiness, he, I was using the large-view camera. And, after a few sheets of film, His Holiness said, “So, OK?” And I said, “Well, not quite.” And he said, “We must be content with what we have.” [Kim laughs.] And he left.

LAWTON: As abbot of Rato, Vreeland will have administrative and spiritual responsibility for the monastery and its monks. He’ll also interact with abbots of the other Tibetan monasteries. And it’s here that the Dalai Lama has instructed him to help incorporate more Western ideas.

VREELAND: These institutions, if they, if they aren’t contemporary won’t have any relevance. Now, of course one has to be very careful. If you go too far you dilute what they do possess and you’ve lost everything.

LAWTON: Vreeland will divide his time between India and New York, where he’ll continue as director of the Tibet Center, which helps promote Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

VREELAND: I am a human being, I’m a Buddhist monk, I am a Westerner, and how I will bring what I believe in and what I have been, let’s say formed in, trained in? I think it’s by just living my life.

LAWTON: He’s well aware of the challenges he faces.

VREELAND: Your only influence on the rest of the world is the work that you do on yourself and this is an opportunity to do just that in respect to my monastic community.

LAWTON: As for his photography, he says in the new digital world, he finds it challenging to maintain an attitude of mindfulness as he takes pictures.

VREELAND: I wish it were easier to give it all up. I tried hard. But I’m still taking photographs and whether the abbot is going to be able to go out and take pictures, I don’t know. I shall see.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

The post Buddhist Abbot Nicholas Vreeland appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

JAMES ULAK (Senior Curator of Japanese Art, Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries): These are the designated closest disciples of the living Buddha in the time in the fifth century before the Christian era when he preached his message in what is now northeast India.

These close followers who later received the canonical number of five hundred became known as “the worthy ones.” In Sanskrit, the language of the day in India, Sanskrit calls these people arhats. You hear different names applied to these five hundred. The point of Buddhist fascination with these five hundred followers is that they take the role of intercessors and messengers from the Buddha, teaching compassion, showing that the Buddha’s life can be lived on earth, and they take on the role of supermen. The idea was that they were enlightened but yet living among us. And so they were able to show us how to live but yet also conduct these intercessory miraculous acts to save us from our sufferings.

Kazunobo created this ensemble of one hundred paintings between 1854 and 1863. The ancient purpose of painting these one hundred paintings of the five hundred followers was to give a kind of approachable, easy to see Buddhist catechism. Now I use that phrase very loosely, but it became a vehicle to show to people the basic modes for living a good Buddhist life.

The Buddha’s message, of course, was that to achieve enlightenment one has to tear away from the bonds of any attachment to essential experience. The notion in Buddhism is that everything is changing, everything is in transition, nothing is permanent, and everything we see, everything we grasp for in the material world is ultimately deceptive.

The primary question at least for the general population of his day who were viewing them was that in the midst of all of this we can have hope that there is, that the Buddha dwells among us and in us. You see that in all of the paintings.

He attempts to show you how these five hundred worthies lived their life in a monastery. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings that shows the masters of mercy as they take part in the daily communal bath. It was not just a question of hygiene, but a question of gathering together in a communal way to underscore the idea of the Buddhist community. My guess is that Kazunobu actually went down the street to his local public bath, looked at different people doing different things—a man shaving, a man clipping his toenails.

You get a real sense of compassion extended to all living things. There’s a great painting done of the arhats interacting with the animal world, the natural animal as we know it and the mythical animal world, and they’re at comfort with these creatures. There’s a painting where a unicorn-like animal is crouching in front of a seated arhat, and the arhat is cleaning his ear. Next to him is a little, another monk, and on his shoulder perched like a house cat is what seems to be an ocelot.

You see, if you will, natural history borrowings from other information they have from outside, but you also see the Buddha through the vehicle of these masters of mercy embracing everything, telling everyone everything’s all right. We care for you. We’re like you, but we’re not like you. We have this toggle role within your universe.

There’s a wonderful painting where one sees in the pair of paintings in the foreground what was a dry stream bed or river bed, and you see in one painting water spurting out of the head of one of these monk-like characters, endless stream of water filling the dry stream bed. And in the other painting you see water pouring out of a pitcher that also seems to be an endless source of water.

When we look at the paintings we see a significant amount of narrative drama that involves murder, war, pillage, suicide, earthquakes, fires and these elements alone appearing in the five hundred worthies’ paintings I think is a bit unusual. And Kazunobu in his paintings was reflecting the tumult of the day. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that he was an eye witness to certainly physical catastrophe and tried to depict that and to let his audience know that the mercies of the Buddha were there even for the suffering.

You see interventions. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings showing the worthy ones descending on clouds and hovering over the pits of hell where flames are licking at the damned and demons are poking at those who are condemned, and they come down to give mercy and in essence rescue. You see people condemned in hell climbing out of their terrible pit of torture and reaching up to a staff which one of the worthy ones is extending to his hand.

These would not be paintings you would sit in front of and meditate on. These are paintings that entertain and engage the eye. The eye cannot stay still. Every square inch of these paintings shows color, activity, detail that leave you constantly searching.

These humble looking gentlemen, these gnarled and whimsied old monks are really the embodiment of layers and layers of power inside of them. So there’s no need to show a central or overall dominant Buddha figure. The message is that the Buddha is within and moving about in very mysterious ways.

The post Masters of Mercy appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Teacher (speaking to students): So I want about four people per bench. Go. Grab your journals.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: These boys, grades six through eight, are having fun examining mollusks and worms in a typical science class. The school they attend is anything but typical, however. There are only 40 students here—all boys—and though they study the usual subjects, these boys are here for something more. This is the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. Boys come here to sing. Music is so important that this place has been described not as a school with a choir, but as a choir with a school. The music director is John Robinson.

JOHN ROBINSON: They would have started in the monastic tradition, when boys would have gone to the monastery to seek an education, and at some point during the time that the boys were getting this education, they would have joined the monks in singing.

VALENTE: Robinson, now 29, is the product of a famous choir school in England, where boys’ choirs have long been a part of the Anglican tradition.

ROBINSON: In England where I’m from, the choir schools began perhaps in the seventh century. Initially, the monks would have been singing chant, all on one note, and as the history of music progressed they started to sing in more than one part. They needed the boys to sing higher parts. The unique sound of a boys’ choir is particularly fascinating to work with, because we know it’s the sound that composers had in their ears when they were conceiving much of the music.

VALENTE: Boys’ choirs were never a large part of the Catholic tradition in the U.S., but in 1963 the choirmaster at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts established a choir school to help preserve and promote sacred classical music in the U.S. Today, the St. Paul Boys Choir is the only one of its kind in the country. There are no other Catholic choir schools. The reasons: changing tastes in music, the costs of training the boys, and the trend toward boy-girl choirs. Here, daily rehearsals start each morning before 8:00.

ROBINSON: At that first rehearsal, I’ll do some exercises to warm up different parts of their voices.

(to the boys) Okay, let’s get the lips warmed up.

ROBINSON: We do arpeggios with funny words. “My car has flat tires” is one that we often do.

VALENTE: The boys, most of whom are Catholic, must learn to sight-read hundreds of pieces of music.

ROBINSON: The boys sing music right from the word “go” in music history. They sing classical music as well as the music by Mozart, Hayden, Mass settings by those composers, and into the Romantic period with motet–Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Romantic composers, and then into the modern day as well.
Piano Teacher: Good. Let’s just try the right hand alone from here, okay?

VALENTE: Each student is also required to learn to play the piano. Some learn other instruments as well. Alex Pattavina, a tenth-grader, learned to play the organ when he was at the choir school and now plays at a Sunday Mass here.

ROBINSON (speaking to choir): It’s a lovely sound, but it’s just very unclear, the words “I cry out “Praised be the Lord.”

Singing ” I cry out, “Praised be the Lord.”

VALENTE: The rigorous curriculum makes recruiting a challenge. To find boys who can sing like this, Robinson visits dozens of schools in the Boston area, auditioning third and fourth graders.

ROBINSON: We’d sing a song, maybe “Happy Birthday” or the National Anthem or something like that, and then test them each individually, just very briefly and very positively, to see whether they have that ability to match pitch. When we say “matching pitch” with a boy we mean that we play or sing a note to a boy and we see if he can sing that note back to us accurately. The one word that defines what we’re looking for is “potential”—that we don’t expect to find boys who can already do all the things that we’re going to teach.

AIDAN LEWIS (Chorister): When I was in the fourth grade, I tried out for a play, and it had a singing part in it, and my music teacher said that I had an amazing voice, and she told my mom about this school, and she sent me here, and then when I came here I started to realize I had a good voice.

VALENTE: The school’s $5,000 annual tuition doesn’t cover the cost of educating the boys. The difference is made up through donations and money the choir earns from what are called “working scholarships,” that is, public performances like this one at Fenway Park. The have also sung at weddings and at funerals, including those of Rose Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. They sing at Masses six days a week. But some boys may have to drop out of the choir before they graduate.

ROBINSON: Boys’ voices are going to change, and there’s very little that can be done about that. For many boys it really is no man’s land vocally, and the sound that they can produce is unpredictable and sometimes embarrassing, so we just have to be very kind to them when that day comes because, of course, it’s quite shocking that suddenly their whole life for the last four years as they’ve known it singing these beautiful treble parts is no longer happening in that way.

VALENTE: Those whose voices have changed can sometimes continue with the choir, learning to sing in falsetto. Others will serve as altar boys or ushers or will sit with the congregation, singing to encourage those around them.

ROBINSON: When I’m conducting the choir so many things are going through my mind. You’re thinking about the effect it’s having on the people listening. Sometimes their concentration will wander. They’ll start to do something they shouldn’t be doing. You have to wave at them and that kind of thing, and that can be very distracting to a performance, so you’re constantly trying to train those things out of them and get them purely to focus on singing.

VALENTE: How do you impart a love of this difficult music to these very young boys?

ROBINSON: They come to it, and they find something intrinsically beautiful about it, and other times they don’t really get it, and then my job’s harder to try and show them what’s good about it or what’s interesting about it, and different boys react in so many different ways. Sometimes they learn from each other. You’ll get one boy who loves it, and other people catch on when they see that he loves it.

VALENTE: Forrest Eimold is twelve years old. He sings, plays the organ, and composes.

FORREST EIMOLD (Chorister): It’s one thing to sing or play a piece by somebody, like let’s say Mozart, and you can definitely express emotion in that, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to express your own emotions and to write exactly what you want.

VALENTE: What have you written? What have you composed lately?

EIMOLD: I’ve composed many works for piano. I recently finished my second piano sonata. I’m currently working on a Mass for the choir school to sing, actually. And I’ve done some other short pieces.

VALENTE: At High Mass on Sunday morning, the boys sing with the men.

ROBINSON: When the boys sing with the men of the choir on a Sunday morning, the dynamic is rather different. If they hear professional adult singers singing, they’re far more likely to imitate something which is good like that and to learn from the way that the adults around them are singing, so I think it’s a very positive dynamic.

VALENTE: The pastor of St. Paul Parish is Father Michael Drea.

REV. MICHAEL DREA (Pastor, St. Paul Parish): That music that the boys provide can be such a source of inspiration to Catholics as well as those who are searching to better understand who God is and to come to a greater knowledge and appreciation of the many gifts and graces that God bestows on individuals.

ROBINSON: I think the boys get an absolutely unique experience, because they’re learning confidence to sing in front of people from an early age. One of the most satisfying things of all is to see a boy who doesn’t realize he has potential and talent coming into the school in the fifth grade or the fourth grade and leaving three or four years later having learned so many skills that he would never even have imagined he could have learned when he first came in, and seeing that confidence grow is a wonderful thing.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The post Boston Boy Choir appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

DEBORAH POTTER: The bells of St. Mary’s set the rhythm of life at this abbey in Glencairn, sounding the call to worship. On this day, Sister Michelle rings double bells for the Feast of the Ascension.

SISTER MICHELLE MILLER: It has a knack to do it, and about one or two of us have the knack, so that’s where I am. I was ringing the double bells yesterday. From a young age I had a yearning to be a nun, in my teens, so it was part of my journey in seeking a life where I felt I could be as close to seek God as possible.

POTTER: Life here is all about seeking God. This is Ireland’s only Cistercian monastery for women, founded in 1932.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY (Abbess, St. Mary’s Abbey): It’s a place where God is loved and worshiped, and it’s a place where we pray for humanity. We’re conscious of interceding before God for people, and it’s a place of conversion, where we constantly try to become who we are meant to be as fully human persons and overcome the demons and the less positive aspects of our life.

POTTER: In some ways, life here is the same as it’s always been, governed by the Rule of St. Benedict. Seven times a day, the nuns gather for prayer, starting well before dawn. They spend hours in church and in lectio divina, reading the Bible and other sacred texts.

SISTER MICHELLE: The first word in the rule is “listen.” So in that sense you learn to listen to how God is speaking to you, and to the Holy Spirit in daily life, and how you gradually more attune yourself to his grace. And it takes a lifetime to sustain that, and in that sense you learn to love, and love your sisters as they are, where they are. And it’s a sense of freedom.

POTTER: Most of the day is spent in silence. It’s peaceful most of the time. The abbey is also a working farm with eighty head of cattle.

SISTER LILLY: Takes energy to keep up!

POTTER: For four hours a day every nun works, as they always have. It’s what they work at that’s changed.

NUNS AT COMPUTER: They just added that blue part on top of the head. Ah, yeah, that’s an extra job.

POTTER: Computers and automation have come to the convent. In addition to a small greeting card business, a bakery produces Eucharist bread that’s sold to churches across Ireland. The oldest nuns help with the shipping.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: We live by the work of our hands and also have some left for helping out those who are maybe less fortunate. Work is creative. Part of you needs to have some kind of creative expression; you can’t spend all the time praying and reading. It’s very important to have a balance.

POTTER: The balance of life here is partly what drew Sister Fiachra, who used to run a garden center.

SISTER FIACHRA NUTTY: You know what they say about weeds? They’re like the poor, they’re always with us.

POTTER: She entered the convent five years ago and expects to make her solemn profession next year, committing to live the rest of her life as a cloistered nun.

SISTER FIACHRA: I felt I needed space to be with God, and that’s not very easy, I’ve found, for me in the outside world, because I am quite an extrovert, and I get involved in an awful lot of things, so enclosure was important to me, but at the same time I have a horror of restriction, as in claustrophobia. So here we are absolutely truly blessed. We have 200 acres within which to wander, you know, so that was a huge factor for me. Also the enormous welcome and warmth I felt from the community on my very first visit. That was just so wonderful.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: We’re not completely silent. We value communication, and communication is important to maintain good relationships.

POTTER: Thirty-seven women now live at the abbey, and unlike in the past when all would have been Irish, today there are sisters from India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. They’re also older. A third are well above retirement age. The oldest is 93. In the past decade, a dozen nuns have died. Like most monastic communities, St. Mary’s is smaller than it used to be. But six women are in formation, on the path to becoming nuns—far more than might be expected. Only nine women entered religious orders in all of Ireland in 2006, according to the most recent survey.

SISTER SARAH BRANIGAN (Vocations Director, St. Mary’s Abbey): I knew that people wouldn’t be rushing in the door, but I am surprised at how occupied I am, actually, with inquiries from people of all different ages. People from 20 to late 60s, so there are a steady flow of inquiries about this kind of life.

POTTER: Several times a year, the abbey hosts “monastic experience weekends” for women of all ages who want to try it out, and they share the experience in more modern ways, too, on their Web page and even on Facebook, where they’ve picked up more than 400 fans.

SISTER SARAH: I feel that monastic life has an enduring kind of appeal. I don’t see it as part of the traditional Catholicism that is in demise, if you like. I see it as lasting.

POTTER: For those of you who live here, what makes it really unique and special?

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: I think the opportunity to live close to God and close to one’s self and have time for prayer and have time for leisurely walks and good reading and reflection on God’s word, and I think living at a deeper level.

POTTER: As the world outside the cloister becomes ever more frenetic, the sisters of St. Mary’s live a simple life in communion with each other and with God.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: “Christ Jesus intercedes for us before the Father. With him we pray…”

POTTER: For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in County Waterford, Ireland.

The post St. Mary’s Abbey appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The post Desert Monastery in Syria appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The lumber shed at the Abbey of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky. It’s late February. Each night at 8:00 Brother Paul Quenon walks to the shed, as he has every night for 20 years. He goes around back, where he finds his mattress. This is where he will sleep—outdoors, no matter the weather.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON (The Abbey of Gethsemani): I can’t be a full-time hermit, but I can be a night-time hermit, and there’s something about waking up in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody around. There’s a kind of an edge of solitude that you cannot experience in any other way.

VALENTE: Here, a monk seeks to live every moment in the presence of God, in unity with God. Brother Paul came to Gethsemani 52 years ago. He was 17, inspired by reading the autobiography of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who introduced many Americans to the contemplative life. Merton would eventually become his spiritual director and would encourage Brother Paul to write. Thomas Merton said monks and poets are people who live on the margins of society. Brother Paul decided to become both. He says monks and poets remind us to pay attention to the world around us, to focus on what’s essential.

BROTHER PAUL: Poetry is the language of the heart, and it’s the language of the imagination, and so the mind abides in silence. Contemplation is an abiding in silence, and what comes out of silence are words of the heart, words of love. When the heart is really full, the mouth goes silent.

VALENTE: Indeed, many contemplatives say the transcendent is beyond words. Brother Paul has published three books of his poetry and is working on a fourth.

BROTHER PAUL: “The Hood”: —a hiding place / for the head / a portable anonymity / a refuge from / artificial light / a cover to make / dimness dimmer / to make time slow down

VALENTE: Ideas for his poems usually come to him on long, solitary walks across the monastery’s vast stretches of woods and fields. During each walk he writes a haiku—a Japanese form of poetry usually three lines, seventeen syllables and set in nature.

BROTHER PAUL: The monastery is a poetic context to begin with, and we live in a beautiful environment, and nature is so present day in and day out. I discovered the haiku, and the haiku is such a short form I started combining it with my meditation practice:

“Above dim snow fields / lone light of Venus, lone wail of goose / pleading for spring”

You’re in God’s beauty, and it’s physical. It’s almost like a symphony flowing by me as I walk along, relaxed, and it’s a beautiful experience.

VALENTE: Occasionally over the years, he would climb to the top of this water tower until finally the abbot closed it off. Brother Paul quips, “This used to be a fun place.”

It was this little cottage, The Hermitage, where Thomas Merton spent years in isolation, praying and writing. Retreatants visit the abbey year round, seeking to slow down at a place where prayer is the main form of activity.

BROTHER PAUL: I think they come here seeking for quiet and, you know, an atmosphere of prayer, and maybe some seeds of wisdom, and just to see what it is to live this kind of life.

VALENTE: What purpose do you see in living the Trappist’s life in the modern world?

BROTHER PAUL: Well, I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are, so you need to shatter that. You know, somebody has to come along now and then just say listen, you know, that’s not it. That’s not what life is.

VALENTE: Forty-eight monks now live at the abbey. Once, there were more than 200. Brother Paul says many people are still attracted to the regular prayer and quiet rhythms of monastic life, but few are willing to stay.

BROTHER PAUL: I wish they would perceive the genuineness of the life. A man has to have, you know, a home and a career, and these are ways of achieving identity. Well, what we do is in a sense forsake our identity. We give up our identity to get a new identity, which really God formulates for us.

VALENTE: And yet Brother Paul says you don’t have to live in a monastery to seek what is important.

BROTHER PAUL: If you just sort of rest with what you have, be grateful for it, there again the chemistry of gratitude can transform what you have. Contemplation is simply maybe a big fat word for gratitude. To sense the presence of God in life and around me and in other people gives me a very deep gratitude.

VALENTE: Today the average age of the monks here is 70. Funerals are a regular part of life.

BROTHER PAUL: A monk lives in the presence of death, and you come here to die. You’re going to give up your whole life. If you decide to give up your whole life to Christ, well, it’s in Christ’s hand.

“Curved Walkway”: The burial ground fills with practical sounds from Tierce bell, drenching the dumb unheeding crosses. Alone I skirt around this rim of destiny, stirred by the bell… ‘til someday I’m left un-busied in this ground’s silent keep.

VALENTE: Brother Paul says that to be a monk is to live at the heart of a mystery, to live in a perpetual state of becoming. To him, that is both the power and poetry of monastic life.

BROTHER PAUL: We never get there. As Merton said, you know, if you think you have arrived you’re lost. People in the world come, you know, they come here on retreat. They ask me, “How long have you been here?” I answer as, what, another elsewhere, 52 years. But it is a fiction. How long have I been here? Excuse me, I haven’t gotten here yet.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

The post Brother Paul appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The Cowl

–solemn as chant,
one sweep of fabric
from head to foot.
Cowls hanging
on a row of pegs—
tall disembodied spirits
holding shadows
deep in the folds
waiting for light,
for light to shift
waiting for a bell
for the reach of my hand
to spread out the slow
wings, release the
shadows and envelope my
prayer-hungry body
with light.

My Novices: late 1950s

Young men came
looking for
–don’t know what–
Left the place
looking for
-don’t know what–
Of these I had no regrets.

Some came, seemed like
looking–
heard some talk about
-what-
stayed awhile
and left
talking like– Well,–
like somewhat.

Serious young men came looking.
took up talk about,
-don’t know what,
stayed long and left
talking
about everything what-not.

Some came completely
clear and sure about
what–
Those I sent away.

Silent young men, a few,
came looking for–
don’t know what-
stayed
and kept on looking
stayed and never got to
what–
wore out,
died,
had never stopped looking for
what–
For these I have no regrets.

All of these I loved, but
seems the part I loved the best
was–
don’t know what–

Confessions of a Dead-Beat Monk

Of course, I’ve set the same bench
brushing off flies and thoughts,
how many years? What winters of
silence and summer variations,

what prodigious mockingbirds
I’ve heard! And that kitchen job!
Broccoli and spuds on Mondays,
rice twice a week, and Oh,

toasted cheese sandwiches,
Fridays! This diet of psalms,
fifty and hundred, runs ever
on from bitter to sweet,

returns like the sun to bow
and stand. And I tread the same
stairs and stare at walls, blank
or lit rose and gold. I rise

with whippoorwills singing
at 3, though night ever keeps
its secret from me, ‘till in
its treasure I’m locked.

Then I will be what always
has been, that enigma of
sameness between
now and the then.

My Last Poem

When I write my last poem
it will not say good-by
to poetry, but hello to itself,

will heave a glad sigh
it got into the world
before the door closed,

will look to its companion poems,
that it might have place
among these orphans,

that they might reach out hands
in company to go together
into oblivion or into memory,

or to some secret cove
where eternity sits,
from time to time, and reads.

The post Poems by Brother Paul Quenon appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The post Abbot Senecal Extended Interview appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.