Journeying from Silence To Life’s Bustle
Reading this book by Upamanyu Chatterjee at a time when the world is rocked by wars, the ever-throbbing threats of climate change and new pandemics feels like an entry into a mindfulness retreat. A zone where small changes feel as significant, a piercing fire-ant or whining mosquito as noteworthy as the large. To begin with, we’re conducted through a life that glows with rare possibilities. We’re escorted through the pages by one of India’s finest writers, whose sentences are plump with aliveness, darting between the foothills of Padua, Italy and the monsoon-drenched streets of Khulna, a Bangladeshi town.
We accompany the young Lorenzo Senesi as he sets out on a trip. “The landscape tumbles down in leaps and bounds to the radiant sea that stretches like blue polythene till the haze of the horizon.” His family thinks he’s off to cavort with friends like most young adults of that age. Except, he’s not. He’s headed instead to the Praglia Abbey to reside with Benedictine monks. His departure is clothed in silence, because that’s what he intends to enter: a more profound, more revealing silence. “For they do not speak much, the Benedictines.”
Inside the Abbey, the sculpture of Time depicts a fit, muscular youth. As if Time always has to work hard to defy its own ravages. This trial period of checking at the Abbey was sparked off by an accident in May 1977, when Lorenzo – whose scooter rammed into the center of a car – was hurled across the roof of the vehicle to land on the other side. Miraculously, he only broke his forearm. But his month at the hospital set him pondering the purpose of his existence. And he’s tugged, bizarrely for someone so young, into exploring his inner world in monastic seclusion.
Based on a true story that Chatterjee encountered while residing in Colombo, Lorenzo’s life depicts that one can traverse time on the planet in many ways. By living according to social mores or by shunning them altogether. By immersing oneself in the service of others, or by merely caring for oneself. In the Benedictine path, this is deemed a tug between the Eremetic and the Coenobitic. The former retreats to a cave or desert to find God. The latter finds God in community or social work.
The routine inside the Abbey is expectedly militaristic. Days are divided into “ora et labora” – or communal prayer and manual work. Monks, when they’re finally admitted into the Order, are dressed in Black cassocks, to stop attending like laypersons do, to the frivolities of fashion.
Dinner is always at 7 pm, and the monks on kitchen duty cook for the others. At night, after their last round of prayers, novice monks are hugged by a Master monk. “As an instrument of good work, each monk, in case of discord with anyone, is to make peace with the setting of the sun.” In the early days, alone in his room, the nightly silence feels heavy and oppressive to Lorenzo.
In the morning, at 5 am, he’s woken by a clanging bell. The early morning arousal is something he never quite gets used to, always feeling that stab of having relinquished a life where he could have just slept in. Prayers and breakfast are followed by work. He works at the cosmetics lab, which transforms purified beeswax into lotions, creams and balms. Monks are meant to labor in this pleasant smelling assembly line without any expectation of reward.
He carries a book by Carlo Carretto, a contemporary spiritual leader who had lived for 10 years in the Sahara desert and written Letters from the Desert among other works. “The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God.”
His first trial stay at the Abbey ends on Jan 4th, 1981, after a fortnight. After his accident, he also started learning Physiotherapy. He has to finish that course, as well as a fine arts diploma and a baking apprenticeship. He returns to the Abbey four times thereafter, by which time he’s done with his Physiotherapy training.
For the first time, he meets Carlo Carretto at Spello. He’s accompanied by others and they live in a tiny hamlet, where they spend a week, praying and engaging in manual work. The labor is not arduous – it’s pleasant work in the fields. With interludes of bread, wine, cheese and olives. When they finally meet the Rockstar Monk, Carretto, Lorenzo feels transformed by his words.
About a year later, 23-year-old Lorenzo returns to Praglia. This time, he’s returning for good. But first, he needs to break the news to his family. His mother is understandably distraught. She tells him this is a selfish decision, that the monks have just run away from their duties to the world, and are cultivating strength to overcome their guilt. No one in his community approves. They can think only of the “cruel blow he has dealt his parents.”
Reluctantly reconciling with his decision, the family drops him off at the Monastery; they seem more at ease by how welcoming the other Monks are, by how familial the atmosphere seems. Of course, while leaving, his despondent mother remarks: “I hope I see you again before I die.”
The first day he’s asked to help pluck grapes in the vineyard. “The vineyards stretch away to the north-east and south of the cloister Doppio like a lush green, ordered and furrowed sea.” The task, like other work at the Abbey, is marked by a meditative slowness and rhythm. Monks gently clip grapes and drop them into red baskets. Lorenzo learns wine making too. How to distinguish, for instance, between grapes that are already bursting through their thin skins, or those that could do with a bit more fermentation. “Live and learn, even while cloistered in an abbey, of the wonders of the subtlest operations of nature at work.”
In October, he works in the cosmetics lab and the apiary. In December, he restores damaged books. A book can take as long as three months to restore.
To become a monk requires qualities that might make joining an Olympic squad or a NASA rocket-building team feel like child’s play. For instance, when a postulant is given an order, the directive is “to be carried out without hesitation, without delay, without apathy, without complaint and without any answering back.”
But Lorenzo does not stay on forever at the Benedictine Abbey. His life takes unexpected turns thereafter, with a stint in Khulna, Bangladesh. He eventually gets married and returns to a more conventional life, abjuring his one-time monastic vows. As Chatterjee puts it in interviews to the press, his is a life lived “anti-clockwise” – sanyasa (renunciation) first, grihastha (householder) last.
Perhaps to be dogmatically attached to the identity of a monk might be less helpful to one’s spiritual growth, than being open to the world and new dimensions of the self. As a fellow-monk puts it, “…even in its discipline, the human mind must always be open to receive, to acknowledge what it does not know…”
References
Upamanyu Chatterjee, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, Speaking Tiger, 2024