Black Lamb

Celebrating the light

December 1st, 2004

BY JEREMY DRISCOLL, O.S.B.

Advent. I have passed more than thirty Christmases in the monastery. What a marvelous time of the year it is. We prepare for the feast with four weeks of a season called Advent. Ancient and special melodies, reserved only to that season, are sung in the dark church. The vestments of the liturgy are a sober purple, and there is no decoration in the church at all: nothing at all like all the Christmas lights that go up in the cities at Thanksgiving or before. In the monastery the sign that Christmas is coming is the dark and empty church and the sparse melodies that define that time. One verse from the hymn we sing each evening at Vespers could be rendered in English (translating also its spirit) like this:

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Driscoll, All Christmas Issue | Link to this Entry

Poet and model

June 1st, 2003

BY JEREMY DRISCOLL, O.S.B.

Czeslaw Milosz. I have long admired this Polish poet and essayist, and so I was greatly pleased when in 2001 a splendid selection of his essays was published under the title To Begin Where I Am. The same year also saw his New and Collected Poems (1931—2001). Born in 1911 in Szetejnie and raised in Wilno in present-day Lithuania, he was there in 1939 when the Soviets invaded, while Hitler simultaneously invaded Poland. He lived through the horrors of the war in Poland. After the war, as part of the Polish intelligentsia, he tried to make a life for himself in his own nation and was part of the diplomatic core of Communist Poland’s postwar government. He was posted in Washington until 1951. In that year he defected to the West and lived in Paris in a Polish exile community for the next nine years. In 1960 he took a position at the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of Slavic literature. Since then he has lived and worked in the United States, spending half-years recently in Krakow. In 1980, at the age of seventy, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He is still writing at the age of ninety-two.

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Category: Books and Authors, Driscoll, All Book Issue | Link to this Entry

Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B., is a Roman Catholic priest and Benedictine monk who lives at Mount Angel Abbey in western Oregon. He teaches classes annually on early church history in Rome. His Black Lamb column is called A Monk’s Alphabet.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Driscoll | Link to this Entry