The last three weeks have been so exhausting (of course by choice--) but it'll be nice to have my own space, after sharing a room with 9 other girls, and to decorate the new bachelorette pad with Lauren (my awesome co-worker! :). We don't start work until the 16th of Sept, but I'm really looking forward to being helpful/having a purpose and seeing how that will change my outlook on living here. These first three orientation weeks were like a vacation, just with some stressful apartment finding interspersed, and I'm looking forward to the transition from being a transitory guest to being an actual resident.

Although it's time to start a new chapter, I'm reminded of what Aniaz Nin (sp?) said once, about how turning the last page in a book (or anything) is like losing a friend... and I'm really feeling that right now because just as we're starting a new chapter in our HK experience, we're losing all our friends who are Fulbright ETAs working in Macau. They left on a bus about 20 minutes ago.

I have no idea how HK/Fulbright placed us in our various locations. If I had to choose for myself, I probably would have placed myself in Macau over HK because it'd be more within my comfort zone of a slower pace, island life (<3 Greece/Hawaii), and a university setting (the main reason I picked HK to begin with was because it had university ETA positions). But I'm going to be really proud of myself for toughing out the rigorous city life, and making it a real home over the next year. HK definitely has a lot to teach me about itself and how I want to spend my life.

There was also that football game between Sweden and Spain.. Spain won. I was kind of cheering for both, since I live in Barcelona och Stockholm is my hometown. 

My friend forced some beers into me (don´t really like beers, but when you´re watching football, there are certain drinking rules) while the little bar got more and more crowdy with spanish football fans. And though we were the only swedes, we couldn´t help but screeming our lungs out  :)

Then there was that day that we spent in Montserrat. A beautiful monastery in the mountains...

Italy police probe monastery raid

Police suspect the attackers were looking for money

Italian police are investigating a brutal attack on four Franciscan friars in a monastery in northern Italy.

Italian media are comparing Tuesday's attack, at the San Colombano Belmonte monastery near Turin, to the violence in the story A Clockwork Orange.

Three or four hooded attackers entered the monastery and bound and gagged the friars, the oldest of whom was 86.

One managed to raise the alarm two hours later, when he regained consciousness after being beaten.

"They unleashed an incredible level of violence against them," Gabriele Trivellin, in charge of Franciscan friars in the area, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

"It was wild and gratuitous violence because they did not resist the attack at all," he said.

The youngest friar injured - 49-year-old Sergio Baldin - is currently in hospital in a coma after suffering severe head injuries. The other three, who range in age from 76 to 86, are expected to be released from hospital in a month.

Police believe the motive may have been robbery, as some cash was stolen from the monastery during the attack.

But the only object of great value in the building - a golden crown which decorates a statue of the Madonna - was placed behind protective glass after the original was stolen two years ago.

If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of  the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

Salon also throws its hat into the Wikipedia ring, with a review of McNeely and Lisa Wolverton's book (in a growing line of neo-Luddite, anti-Internet, antiquarian texts):

McNeely and Wolverton state that the Internet's various outlets for self-expression, "if anything, make the pursuit of reliable, authentic knowledge more, not less, difficult online, by drowning out traditionally credentialed cultural gatekeepers. Relatively few networked forums provide a truly democratic alternative to the focused, substantiated, reasoned -- and elitist -- debate that still governs the disciplines." Them's fightin' words to many proponents of Web 2.0, but the truth is that more of us would agree with that statement than not. Most of the people who distrust scientists or the "MSM" on a pet topic or two, like the safety of aspartame or what really happened on Sept. 11, believe them on a host of other things, like the benefits of exercise or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Without a doubt, we've entered an era when the official truth is easier to challenge than ever before, but do we really want to live in a world without any established truths at all, or where every fact must be democratically elected by a horde of individuals whose judgment may not be informed or trustworthy? Do we want to let the cranks who care enough to make the biggest stink on a subject be the ones to have the final word on it? On the other hand, can we afford to write off all of them as cranks, knowing that every so often a crank turns out to be a prophet? Somehow, we'll have to sort all this out. And when we do, McNeely and Wolverton will have their revolution.

Father Rungi thought he had a possible solution - the internet.  He formulated plans to create an online pageant where nuns could write about their work and vote.  "We have to draw more attention to the world of nuns, who are often not sufficiently appreciated by society," he wrote, adding that he had hoped his initiative would help boost sagging vocations to religious life.

Some ideas are just doomed from the start, and it appears that this was one of them.  There are at least three things wrong with it.

First, it was misunderstood by the Italian press and by the church authorities.  People started to write about Nuns on the Catwalk, and Sister Italy 2008.  Many people failed to grasp the concept of 'internal beauty' and 'spirituality'.  It was attracting the attention for all the wrong reasons.

Secondly, only someone isolated within a church community could think that a blog about spirituality, with a contest for the best, would have a significant impact on turning round the decline in women becoming nuns.  There are bigger issues such as increasing secularization and the declining power of the church, not to mention poverty, chastity, and total obedience to an organization dominated by elderly men that need to be addressed.  An internal beauty contest isn't going to make an iota of difference.

Thirdly, why is it that no-one has pointed out to Father Rungi that there is a glaring contradiction in the whole concept. People who seek to be spiritual, by definition, are likely to be humble and self-effacing, and are unlikely to want to write about their own work or want others to write about it.  And they are unlikely to want to do something so tawdry as vote about it.  If they participate in a pageant of spiritual people they are shooting themselves in the feet the moment they enter the contest, and in the eyes of the genuinely spiritual, would be automatically disqualifying themselves from any prize that really mattered.

I know that it would make much more sense if I were to blog about Taize in sequential order, but I don't feel like it. And isn't it great to know that you don't have to do something just cause you don' t feel like it? If only more of life (thinking of a&p in particular here....) was like blogging.

Every morning at Taize we would have bible study, and then we would break off into international small groups to go more in-depth on the bible study. The bible study for the fifteen and sixteen year olds was led by a monk called Brother Tim, who was really, really nice.

This here is Brother Tim, explaining a bible story in the rain. You can't see me even when the photo is big, but I was sitting next to the guy in the hat and the bright orange shirt. If you've ever seen the Andy Griffith show, you might remember that one episode where Andy and Barney keep describing people as "nice"? Well, Brother Tim was nice. Someone actually said that he "radiates niceness", which he does. Once we were chattering away in our tent and one of the chaperones came in, and all she heard of the conversation was "Brother Tim". She said, "hey, you guys aren't being nasty about Brother Tim, are you? Cause he is so nice." And everyone went, "No! We love  Brother Tim!!!". Just to give you an idea of what a nice monk this guy was.

And now every time someone puts a  photo of brother Tim on facebook, the rest of us have to comment and go, "Ohhh, BROTHER TIM!" or "Brother Tim rocks" or other various supportive messages.

Here we have a variety of photos of Brother Tim:

Day one: he teaches us Taize-style dance moves: "Can you do the funky chicken??"

Day Two: He explains why it is in fact very fitting that we are learning dance moves at a monastery, because in Isaiah there is a story about followers of Jesus that do many popular dance moves, and "the brothers we try to emulate that in our own lives."

Day Three: Umm, dancing? What's dancing?

NOTE: ALL PHOTO CAPTIONS ARE LIES.

But anyway, this is the post I've got.

At Taize we had:

•  three meals (bread and chocolate, lunch mush, and dinner mush)
• three worship services (before breakfast, before lunch and after dinner)
• two international small group bible studies
• one big bible study with all the other fifteen and sixteen-year-olds and Brother Tim (who I'm sure would be either flattered or completely freaked out if he had access to our Facebook albums, because every time someone posts a photo of him everyone else comments and says how great he was or how they miss him or how we should bribe him to move to NJ or just that he was so nice or whatever. He's right up there with our bishop in the category of "Insane Commenting on Facebook". What is it with these religious figures? Anyway, interesting side note to remember for tomorrow's post. And fortunately I doubt that a common life of simplicity includes Facebook.)
• one meeting with our small groups from NJ (yay Cobalt)
• optional workshops
• FREE TIME!! My favorite!
• Tent Time, which is when we all were either incredibly tired or just needed a break during free time so we would hang around in our tent, watch the Italians play their sport-of-the-day, listen to the French sing "Oh Susanna", eat Nutella by the gallon, and talk.
• OYAK!

DETAILS to come whenever Flickr fixes their PROBLEMS and gets COUNSELING.

I ache a bit today, probably because I ran for 33 minutes yesterday and then spent two hours paddling out through the surf. My favourite run route is half climbing half descending.  It is a fairly technical off road run, upon mostly sand and hard pack that has been sculptured by the wind and rain.

The run takes me up into the foothills of a relatively low mountain range called El Corredor that separates a coastal area called El Maresme from El Valles Oriental.  The highest point of the mountain range is 672m.  I think a lot of the rock is decomposed granite, something I remember from living in Hong Kong.  It makes for a slippery surface underfoot and it keeps me focussed on where I am putting my feet on my runs.

Nestled high up on the hills is an old Monastery that dates back to 1416. It is called ‘The monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Vall of Batlem’.  It is perhaps not the most magnificent monastery I have set eyes upon but it is rather nice to run past.  I dug around on the Internet for a while and found out that the Monastery was built upon an old Roman site called Poia (scar-face) which, I think, sums up the terrain rather well.

After my run I had lunch, a mixed chicken salad with beans, red peppers and a less than generous helping of olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing.  In an effort to be serious about what I am doing, I removed the skin from the chicken.  It was quite an effort, it was deliciously golden, crisp and covered in spices. My mouth is watering now as I think of it.

In the afternoon I went out body board surfing.  The waves were small compared to those that I battled with a few days ago but they seemed full of power.  I was using my body board without flippers as I lost one of them in the surf on Thursday and rather than use just one, which quite frankly looks ridiculous, I made do without.  I paddled back and forth for about two hours and can certainly feel it today in my shoulders. After I was done with being hammered in the waves I swam out to the yellow buoys with a view to doing some lengths between two of them.  I turned back after I ran into a swarm (?) of jellyfish, deciding that I could do without being stung. I must look up what sort of jellyfish are found in the waters of the Med, the ones I saw yesterday were light blue with purple lines and short tentacles. Quite pretty but best avoided I think.

Today should be fairly relaxed.  I will swim this morning and then borrow my wife’s road bike for a gentle spin along the coast.  I think I will create a new playlist and upload it to my phone, then switch my brain off for a while and try not to sing too loud.

Breakfast? I think I’ll have some plain yoghurt and some cereal.  Maybe another coffee.

Looking out at the hills again, they are pretty.  Perhaps the Romans were a bit harsh to have called the area Scar Face, certainly the terrain is a bit scarred but it is beautiful.  I would be tempted to run again just to be part of the scenery but I think a flat run along the beach is called for. Perhaps I can slot one in between my swim and my bike ride.

Incidentlally I think I need a digital scale. My trusty IKEA analogue scale is rubbish. I weighed myself today and it read 74KG and I know for sure that I did not lose a kilo yesterday, unless a part of me fell off in the water that I don’t know about yet.

Untill tomorrow then.

Janine gets her snuggle fix at the Donkey Sanctuary in Leh (more photos)

Alright, let's do some shit in Leh.

- Jason

4 days can feel like a long time.

It feels especially long when you spend most of it in bad web cafes trying to download flight information, on shaky telephone connections with agents and hoteliers who speak little English and holed up with travel guides that you've read a half dozen times already and that actually seem to be getting less helpful with each perusing.

But that was our first 4 days back in Leh after our beautiful trek in the Markha valley and Karnak region of Ladakh. We were trying to plan the next big leg of our trip - Mongolia - and it was proving tough. Before giving a 60 day travel visa, Mongolia wanted a letter of invitation issued to us from a tour agent or citizen of Mongolia. Without a letter, it would only give us a 30 day visa, that it said could not be extended. Travel agents in Mongolia were reluctant to go through the trouble of issuing us a letter, preferring instead to simply help us extend the 30 day visa once we got to Ulan Batar. But that meant we'd need to get a 30 day return plane ticket with a reasonable change fee. Figure that one out on Expedia.com with a 0.03 bite per second connection speed, I dare you.

So it was a long, drawn out and frustrating first few days back in the provincial capital of Leh. We'd hit the web cafe after breakfast, taking breaks to make international calls to the Mongolian embassy and travel agents, and finish the whole operation by around dinner. Sure, you'll say, it's better than going to the office. And you may be right. But not by much.

By the end of day 4, we were ready to burst. Here we were in the Himalayas, one of our dream destinations, and all we were was tired and pissed off with foreign bureaucracies. With a last burst of organizational energy, we booked a 30 day return ticket (screw it - we'll fix everything when we get to Mongolia) and headed for Markha Valley Tours to visit our ever-reliable Leh travel agent, Tashi.

It was time to have a little fun again in Leh.

***

"I like Mahakala the best. He really doesn't seem to take shit from anyone," I whispered to Janine in the dusty courtyard of Phyang. 20 km from Leh, this little monastery town was putting off its annual festival before a crowd evenly divided between Ladakhis and foreigners. On this, the first day of the two day celebration, monks paraded and danced in peacock-colourful robes and elaborate masks depicting the visages of the tantric Buddhist gods. Displaying swords, banners and reproductions of sacred relics, the deities acted out stories and themes that have been circulating in these mountains for centuries, while their colleagues tapped drums and sang throatily in the background. I had come to especially like Mahakala, the multi-armed, skull-crowned protector of the dharma; for all his fierceness and frightening aspects a force for good and an ass-kicker of those who need to be ass-kicked. Everytime he came out over the course of the day long ritual, I elbowed Janine excitedly and perked up a bit like a little kid watching his favourite part in a movie, looking forward to Mahakala doing something suitably action-heroesque.

But mostly he just danced.

Monks dance in spectacular costumes during the festival at Phyang Monastery, Ladakh.

Seated on the sun-baked ground around us, Ladakhis watched politely, munching potato chips, nursing babies and twirling prayer beads. Some were dressed in the traditional fabrics and styles of their ancestors. Others sported knock off Calvin Kleins and t-shirts of U.S. football teams. Monks all ages circulated among the crowd, exchanging pleasantries, picking up items that had fallen off the dancers' costumes during the dances. Two young boy monks played the part of monkeys for one of the dances, doing cartwheels among the twirling gods until they got too dizzy and started falling on their behinds. Another small boy, dressed in the maroon and gold robes of the monastery, blew bubbles with his chewing gum in between performances on a large horn. The hours flew by, despite the intense heat and the dust. As the sun made its passage over the courtyard, the audience moved with it, following the shade. The only truly annoying thing was our fellow tourists, who treated the spectating Ladakhis like zoo animals, shooting photos of them incessantly and without permission. I thought about how I'd feel if I were strolling about at the St. John's Regatta and some camera toter came up to me and started shooting right in my face. It upset me.

Beside us, an elderly Ladakhi lady, dressed in traditional garb, had fallen asleep sitting up. An Israeli woman smiled delightedly, walked over to the dozing woman, crouched down right before her face and shot a pic within a few inches of the woman's nose. Noticing me staring at her rudeness, she looked at me and smiled obliviously. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm not taking a picture of you."

"Why not?" I thought.

***

"Grab the rope!" our guide yelled frantically, dropping to the floor of the raft and grasping the nylon cord that bordered its rim as it, in turn, dropped 4 feet down into a churning recirculating wave on the Zanskar River.

I thought I'd misheard him. Kayaks flip, canoes roll over all the time. But those huge rubber inflatable rafts don't capsize; even in the big waves. Right? When our Nepali guide had shown us the rope grabbing maneuver on shore, before we'd set off on our one day thrill ride down the Zanskar, I'd assumed that it was similar to the stewardesses on the plane showing you what to do in the case of an "emergency landing." The information was essentially useless and the chances of needing it were extremely remote. Far better to simply prepare yourself mentally for the messy death that was obviously coming.

But when I looked back, there was the guide, white knuckled on the floor, together with Janine and the 6 Israeli kids we were sharing the raft with. Just as I joined them (with a dazed expression on my face that clearly said "Are you shitting me?"), we hit the big wave, whirled sideways and tipped savagely upwards at a 35 degree angle as a cascade of glacial water rushed over us. I wanted to scream like everyone else. But the water was so cold I was instead left gaping, soaked and silent - kind of like those people in the Batman comics that get frozen by Mr. Freeze's cold-ray - as we exited the rapid an instant later, shakily returning to our rowing positions on the edge of the raft. Janine, who had wisely hauled on a nylon jacket before starting downstream, had already shed most of the water and was laughing contentedly.

I, who am unwise, dripped.

The petite young Israeli girl sitting behind Janine summed it up best, her mascara dripping, dark curls plastered around her face. "F-f-f-fuck!"

"Does that happen very often?" I asked our guide, regaining my powers of speech and wondering how my testicles had managed to crawl so far up my bodily cavity so quickly.

"Yes. Sometimes. Not very much," he said helpfully, digging his long paddle into the silty grey water and performing a powerful draw to face the raft downstream once again. Apparently, his first answer had been the most accurate. Later that day, we talked with another team of rafters who had actually capsized near the same place. Unlike us, they'd been given wetsuits by their rafting company. But they'd still been quite shaken by the experience.

Still, it was a blast. For three hours, we zipped down the river, shooting water that would have been suicide in a canoe and enjoying the orange, red, purple and brown peaks of the Zanskar mountains that surrounded the river. The Israelis told jokes and sang songs in Hebrew, shakily smoked joints during breaks on the river bank and generally enjoyed the fact that they were young, alive and no longer in the Israeli army. How could you blame them? Always a few dozen meters ahead of our raft, our safety kayaker kept an eye on our progress, playing and bobbing in the huge rollers with the ease of dolphin. Janine and I savoured the views, discussed the technicalities of the rapids and generally agreed that this whole thing would be a rather nice contrast to the monastery tour we had planned for the next day.

That is of course, if we lived through today.

Rounding a tight bend in the river, we saw another massive wave rear up in front of us. Our guide yelled a command, but one side of the boat completely flubbed it and we spun like a drunk right into the teeth of a roaring souse hole at the worst possible moment.

"GRAB THE ROPE!" our guide yelled.

"ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!" I yelled back at him as I held on for dear life. I could hear Janine laughing again.

Fondling my jugs, in happier, drier times.

***

The snaking, single-lane roads of Ladakh are marvels of engineering. Conquering 5000+ meter passes is routine, skirting razor edged cliffs fronting churning mountain rivers is commonplace. But they are not for the faint hearted or the unskilled driver. We were reminded of this forcefully as we left Leh on our monastery tour, driven by our skilled chauffeur, Tenzin. Fifteen minutes outside of town, at a blind bend in the road we passed the freshly crumpled wrecks of two trucks that had collided, head-on. A policeman walked among the wreckage taking notes.

"Oh, that's blood," I said queasily, looking at the ooze dripping from the shattered glass of one door. Whoever, had been in that vehicle had not walked away. "I hate seeing these," Janine whispered. She'd been in a bad car accident as a child and the memories hadn't faded gracefully. We reminded Tenzin of our favourite Ladakhi road sign, "Safety on the road, means safe tea at home", and drove on, subdued.

In retrospect, it wasn't an entirely inappropriate start to a day that was mostly about Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that tackles head on the issues of life, death and suffering. With our limited understanding of the faith, we couldn't claim any great insights into these matters. But as we wandered the chorten-topped hills above Lamayuru monastery, stared in awe at the mandalas and giant sculptures in the atmospheric temples of Alchi and contemplated the serene smile of the mammoth gold statue of the Buddha of Likir, we at least started to feel some of the peace of mind possessed by the Ladakhi practitioners of this rich religious tradition.

***

"Don't eat too many of those," Tenzin said, looking back at us over his shoulder as he drove, smiling. "Diarrhea."

We stopped, mid-mouthful and looked at each other warily over our pile of Ladakhi apricots. It was high season for these miniature juicy marvels and we'd gone a little crazy. Earlier in the morning, we'd stopped for our first sample near a roadside tree and had gotten completely hooked. At lunch, we'd stripped most of the low-lying fruit from the branches of our restaurant's tree, much to the bemusement of our waiter, who I left a suitably guilty tip. On our way to Likir monastery, we'd passed a group of hitch hiking monks and offered them a ride home. They were taking back a huge crate of apricots (I swear this had nothing to do with our stopping to pick them up - we were just trying to get a little further ahead for our next reincarnation on the wheel of life). Guess how they insisted on repaying us? Finally, on the way home, we'd driven past an adorable little Ladakhi girl on the side of the road selling apricots in a used soup tin. It was like buying Girl Guide cookies with all the cuteness and none of the guilt.

By the time of Tenzin's warning, Janine and I had a blood-apricot level that was off the charts and our Tilley hats were filled with the pits, stains and uneaten little globes of fruit's equivalent to crack cocaine.

Damn you, Cute Little Apricot Girl!

"Well..." Janine mused, "I guess this is one of the reasons we sprung for a hotel room with an en suite bathroom."

I thought on this and looked forward to the long evening that undoubtedly lay ahead of us. "We could give some away," I said tentatively.

Janine's eyes flared for a moment, rather like Bilbo when he tries to take the Ring back from Frodo. Then she softened. "Yes," she said. "Or.... we could just not eat anymore apricots today."

"Yes!" I agreed hastily, my body already craving another apricot. "By tomorrow, our stomachs will surely be adapted to them!"

We sat in silence for a little while, the mountains of Ladakh whirring by us on the highway, golden in the fading sunlight.

We each ate another 8 apricots before getting back to Leh.

"Maybe we'll give a few away," Janine said quietly as we exited our jeep. I nodded sagely.

Meeting a monk at the store across from our tour agent's place, I offered him some fruit. He smiled happily as he picked an apricot from my hat. "Do you mind if I take two?" he said hopefully.

"Sure, take half a dozen if you like!" I replied, excited by the prospect of both diminishing our laxative stores and getting more good karma for helping monks twice in one day.

"Oh no," the monk said demurely, patting his stomach. "I don't want to get diarrhea."

***

"Thank you for coming," said Tashi, draping the white Kata over our necks.

I'm sure there are lots of nice tour operators in Leh. But how many of them are the kind of people who will invite you to their homes for a formal dinner and treat you like dear friends during your stay? Tashi Gonbo of Markha Valley Tours is such a man. We'd booked our Markha Valley/Karnak tour through him after interviewing many other agents and hadn't bothered dealing with anyone else since. A soft-spoken man gifted with a near-constant smile, Tashi had made every one of our trips with him a care-free pleasure and had taken a truly miniscule profit to boot. It was such a pleasure dealing with him that we'd gotten into the habit of simply popping by his office for a cup of tea during our days in town. Now, as our time with him and in Leh neared its close, he invited us, along with a few other clients, to his house for a meal.

As we sat in his tidy living room/eating area with an amiable small group of Dutch hikers and an American professor, Tashi's wife poured salt and butter tea and served a beautiful traditional Ladakhi meal of mutton dumplings ("momos"), stew ("skiu"), and fresh vegetables. Tashi, though a non-drinker himself, uncapped bottle after bottle of Ladakhi beer and entertained us with stories of his days as a herder, kitchen boy, trekking guide and ultimately, business owner in the busily-expanding capital of Leh. In between tales, the family's new puppy, a fuzzy bundle of fury named Tommi, attacked our mutton-greased hands with playful abandon. Janine played with him until the blood started to drip freely from several nips on her hands.

When we finally could eat and drink no more, Tashi disappeared for a minute and then reappeared with a bundle of white silk scarves called katas. An auspicious symbol, the kata is a blessing to the start of any enterprise or relationship and indicates the good intentions of the person offering it. As we bowed our heads and accepted Tashi's draping of the katas over our necks, we were all deeply touched by this simple but beautiful act of Ladakhi hospitality.

"What a beautiful way to end our time with Tashi," Janine said in the car on the drive back to the hotel.

"Worth the rabies?" I said with a smile, looking down at her hand.

"Totally worth the rabies," she laughed.

Tashi Gondo. Quite simply, the nicest guy in Leh. And a hell of a figure skater.

***

Ladakh had more than lived up to expectations. Like many of our favourite places, it had surprised us by being much more than we'd thought. We'd come for the mountains. But we'd been equally if not more enthralled by the people and the culture. It had been a long sojourn. Long enough to make friends and feel the lovely sad pain of parting. We'd miss the stunning vistas, the delicious Kashmiri, Indian and Ladakhi food, the smiling "julays!" of the locals, the deep, immortal calm of the holy places. Mongolia was calling. But we'd miss Ladakh.

It's been a difficult Summer. Though my faith can never be broken, it is fragile and fragmented. I have no doubts that it is real or it is good, but things conspire to undermine it: my father's ill-health and imminent decline, my love/hate relationship with my mother, my husband's fragile nature and dissatisfaction with his current lot in life, my own mid-life concerns and little plagues, a good friend's grave illness - serious lack of sleep.

Never do I think, "Just pack it in and stop believing." "Forget about ever going back to church", or "don't bother to pray". In fact, when I do go to church, not surprisingly, I am uplifted and restored - momentarily, but it fades quickly into the tiring slog of the week, the reality of what my life has evolved into with its ever-present guilts.

I know I'm not perfect. I know I have my faults. My cynical nature, quick-temper and lack of tact are real flaws, but I love my husband with all my heart and I hate to see him sad, confused and forced to go against his personal grain - for me. I stay home and write, manage the daily contact with my mother, (the care-giver of my father), run her errands, take her shopping, and do my best to keep a tidy house and treat my man to delicious meals, while he works so hard at a job that gives him no sense of fulfillment or creativity - no feeling of having done anything worthwhile. We both struggle.

I can barely face my father and I feel consumed with the guilt. He is another person, sitting slumped in his recliner with the lift mechanism. His eyes still sparkle with that Irish-twinkle blue, but the movements are stunted and the speech is so quiet and garbled, I don't know what he says to me and I can't respond. He drools and I can hardly stand it. What does that make me?

I miss the way it all used to be--before I was a grown-up. Even after I got married, when it was two sets of lives - mine and my husband's and Mom and Daddy's. They lived in the house I grew up in, with it's reupholstered furniture and wear-worn cabinets and patched up rugs. They listened to classical music and drank sherry every day and we, moved from flat to flat to town-home and then to our cozy house of today. We talked on the phone and we laughed and carried on. We got together a couple of times a month and we ate fantastic home-cooked meals and drank wine and joked and Daddy and I did cryptic crosswords and my husband went for walks with my him while Mom and I drank tea and chatted about family down east.

All gone. All those days disappearing into the past - swallowed up by the present reality. They live here now--in our town, not 5 minutes away, in a sweet, luxuriously appointed apartment with a fireplace and 2 bathrooms and a laundry room en suite.
Mom does laundry every single day, and she keeps "her bathroom" spotless and lovely with the pink flower-trimmed bathmat and the organza shower curtain -- the bathroom she never had at home.
Unspeakable, hidden things happen in my father's bathroom. Things you don't talk about unless you're family. The former Chartered Accountant and erudite epistolarian (it seems there is no politician, newspaper or magazine to which he did not write) is reduced to protective underwear and a stranger giving him his ablutions.

I have yet to weep.

Yesterday, my mother confided in me that she struggles with her faith as well. Although she receives communion every Sunday from a kind extraordinary minister, she sometimes can't even keep her eyes open - depending on how went the night before. I tell her that God knows she's still trying and he doesn't expect her to go through this without questions.

I confided in her that I have not been to confession in years. I asked her why, as a family, we always went to a different church at Easter and Christmas to make our confessions. She said "Because we knew the priest too well." Maybe that's why I like to remain anonymous. When I've tried to get involved, it has backfired. I just don't fit.

I sometimes think I was meant to be a nun - closeted away with my faith, able to believe from the confines of a cell in a monastery, in the mountains. If I hadn't met my husband, perhaps that's where I'd be.

I confess to sometimes wanting to run, far away.

I confess to Almighty God...

Latin Version:

Confíteor Deo omnipoténti et vobis, fratres,
quia peccávi nimis
cogitatióne, verbo, ópere, et omissióne:
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.

Ideo precor beátam Maríam semper Vírginem,
omnes Angelos et Sanctos,
et vos, fratres, oráre pro me
ad Dóminum Deum nostrum.

English Translation:

I confess to almighty God,
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have sinned through my own fault,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do;
and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,
all the angels and saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.

New Monasticism is becoming the new word on the lips of many Christians during the beginnings of the 21st century.

The term in itself can have a variety of expressions within the monastic tradition; the great monastic reforms of the eleventh and twelve centuries, in particularly the formation of the Carthusians and Cistercians, have often been referred to as the age of a new monasticism, Dom John Main, the founder of an experimental monastic community of lay people and monks in Montreal, Quebec, referred to his foundation as a kind of new monasticism.

In a sense the term opens its self up to usage in relation to any new development within the monastic tradition. For the Christian of the 21stcentury the term New Monasticism primarily finds is source within a letter written in 1935 by the late great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his brother Karl-Friedrich. The letter was calling for a counter-cultural movement against the Third Reich which was becoming increasingly more influential within the German Church, and is included here in part: The restoration of the Church will surely come from a kind of new monasticism, which has in common with the old kind only the uncompromising nature of life according to the Sermon on the Mount, following Christ.

I think that it is about time go gather the people for this…. Bonhoeffer wrote this letter during the compilation of his book, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ On reflection of this book, Eberhard Bethge stated, Bonhoeffer was calling for a church that needed to take a stand, no longer being fought with words, but with ‘Renewal and a transformed lifestyle were necessary.’

What emerges from Bonheoffer’s statement is something of a contradiction, Augustine summed up the monastic life in the early medieval period as, regarding the monk as the embodiment of the ‘sermon on the mount’ and that their service and prayer was the greatest service to the church. I am not assuming here that Bonhoeffer read Augustine’s, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholica, but that in equating Bonheoffer’s new monasticism with the ‘sermon on the mount’ what is left to leave behind of the old? The discussion here though is not so much concerned with Bonhoeffer, but with our modern day use of his term. Bonhoeffer’s writings have had a profound effect on many peoples life’s and in particular the development of community living. The late Very Rev. George Macleod, (founder of the Iona community) was influenced by Bonhoeffer’s ethos and writings during the foundational period of the Iona community. In 1980 the then to be Rev. John Skinner, who was training to become an Anglican priest at Lincoln, came across Bonhoeffer’s passage, and, described his response to it as, ‘receiving an epiphany for living’. Rev. John Skinner, was one of the first to associate Bonhoeffer’s term ‘new monasticism’ firstly, in the application of monastic themes within the life of the non- monastic, and

Secondly in the development of community life, amongst the laity or secular, after many years reading monastic history and spirituality, cultural studies and through participation within traditional monastic institutes, What Rev. Skinner began to express through his journals and writings was that if the Church was to survive its journey into the new emerging cultural shift, from modernity to post-modernity, people needed to find a new way of living as a Christian within their Church life, in order to cope amidst the new cultural and social-political world-views that were taking shape. For Rev. Skinner this new way was through a new monasticism, but his new monasticism was entwined within old monasticism, in the sense that it needed to respect for and consultation with traditional monasticism, in order for it to have any longstanding effect. Rev. Skinner writes, ‘ the effect of new paradigms on human psychology and community, and the importance of monastic themes of prayer, meditation, work, study and the common life in negotiating periods of change and upheaval within the human psyche and society, is paramount for the survival of the church as she moves forward. Twenty five years on, the Christian community at large are waking up to the fact that we are now living in a cultural new age, sociologists call post modernity.

This is illustrated in a large amount of books now being published concerning post modernity with the word Christian nestled in the title. An affect of a slow awakening is the fact that the effects of post modernity have already began to take shape in the environment around and in the lives of the individual. The consequence is not so much of this occurrence, but in the fact that people may be unaware of these changes within society and their life’s, a result being, that as individuals and church seek to change amidst the new developments, the change is in danger of becoming a symptom of, rather that a reaction to, post-modernity.

What seems evident through recent publications from new monastic communities and groups is that we are being presented with series of alternatives, self awareness courses, spiritual pursuits, community based belonging and the most alarming, an alternative to Church. Whist you could argue that some of these new alternatives can only be a good, especially in our ever stressful and busy environment, there is a danger that new monasticism is being developed into a leisure activity and a facility for people to use in their despondency with Church, quest for spirituality and need for belonging and security, amidst the chaotic and insecure lifestyles that are being lived. These feelings are in a sense expected within a society that is driven by secularism and materialism, amongst other ‘ism’s’, but the coping mechanism are being produced in order to keep the society working. An effect that a pick and mix society is having on new monasticism is a manipulation of traditional monastic values and spirituality in order to clean, refresh and re-package monasticism to make it easier to live with and more socially acceptable. This is not a call for monastic preservation or an obstacle for change, but is a sad case that the symptoms of post-modernity are impacting the development of new monasticism, shaping monastic spirituality to suit our life’s rather than allowing monastic values to change our own life.

The early monks who fled the cities and towns in the Near-East to inhabit the nearby deserts, did so not to set up new churches, but to explore a new way of living a Christian life amidst the social and economic changes that were apparent in Roman society during the third and fourth centuries AD. Contrary to some popular belief, the monasticism that emerged from the deserts of the near-East was fully committed to the Church from which it came, and what emerged was a mutual relationship between the two, both respecting and supporting each other.

In the same way, we as Christians are faced with similar changes in the 21stCentury, with the growth of secularisation and other social trends that are emerging out of a post-modern world view. It is to this backdrop that inspiration given from monasticism can help reorganise and reconstruct how to live a Christian life and in consequence help equip the church as a whole as She moves into a new phase of life. But this cannot be fully achieved unless we stand in the middle of this cultural storm together as an individual and church supporting each other. It is within this context that the genius of Rev. Skinner’s new monasticism can be realised.

There are some recordings of chant, both Russian and Byzantine, which the sisters have made a serious study of. These recordings may be of interest to some of my readers, along with the brief but informative explanations that accompany them. I've recieved benefit from the addresses or sermons, and the icons, as well, and I have not yet finished exploring the site.

Here's the link.

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