Thanks to the great canopy of beech and fir, the pathway up the mountainside is slick with mud and dimly lit. The silence is profound, a deep hush broken only by birdsong or the grunt of a rooting boar or the eerie bugling of a lovelorn stag. In the early eleventh century, this verdant Apennine world still belongs to the trees and the rushing Archiano. But all of this is changing: on a broad, grassy meadow near the summit, a handful of solitary men have quietly begun to settle. These hermits wear goatskins and sandals and live, each to himself, in small cells made of stone. It\u2019s clear they intend to stay; they have just completed a church and a lodge for common meals.<\/p>\n
Their spiritual master is a Benedictine called Romuald, who despite his reclusive nature is known throughout Italy. Though he began as a monk of the great Cluniac monastery of Sant\u2019 Apollinare in Classe, he soon realized he was called to far greater solitude and silence than was being practiced in that beautiful but spiritually lax environment. He\u2019s been traversing the countryside for thirty years by now, a famous peripatetic hermit, now here, now there, stopping only to found small hermitages or reform existing monasteries and then moving on. Pilgrims seek him out for a word of wisdom or, even better, a miracle. After all, he once cured a man\u2019s vicious toothache just by breathing on him. And of course, there was the time he healed a madman with a kiss. When he walks through a crowd, people pull bits of wool from his sheepskin, hoping to be transformed by this personal contact with the holy man.<\/p>\n
Romuald also has the gift of tears. Whether he is preaching or presiding over the Eucharist, he cannot help but break into spontaneous weeping. According to the fourth-century desert fathers and mothers, these copious tears are triggered by sorrow over one\u2019s sins, along with grief over all who are suffering. But they are at the same time tears of joy at the limitless mercy and irrepressible love of God. The desert elders believed that this sudden rush of tears, as from a spring that has been covered by a stone now cleared away, cleanses and heals the troubled heart and crystalizes the vision.<\/p>\n
Mystic though he is, Romuald is also an eminently practical man. He has discovered, like St. Benedict five hundred years before him, that without proper formation, the kind that happens most naturally through communal living, solitude can drive a man mad. More, even experienced solitaries need guardrails, for they can easily start relying too much on their own judgment. Because he organizes his communities on the pattern laid down by St. Benedict, Romuald has become known as \u201cthe father of hermits who live according to right reason and follow the monastic Rule.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he has also learned that if monastics become overly invested in order, the fires of spiritual passion can easily be quenched. Thus, Romuald insists on discretion and balance. The whole point of the eremitical life is not mindless conformity, after all, but the elimination of unnecessary distractions. The goal is to see <\/em>what is normally hidden and hea<\/em>r what is nearly inaudible: the still, small voice of God. But even under the best of circumstances, seeing and hearing on this level is a skill acquired only through persistence and faith. Romuald\u2019s Brief Rule offers instructions for the novice:<\/p>\n Sit in your cell as in paradise.<\/em> If you have just come to the monastery,<\/em> And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up;<\/em> Realize above all that you are in God’s presence,<\/em> Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,<\/em> Under Romuald\u2019s gentle guidance, this small enclave of hermits will in time become the Camaldolese, one of the oldest continuous religious communities in the Western Church. A thousand years after they clamber up that slippery mountainside beneath the firs and beeches, the Sacro Eremo, or Holy Hermitage of Camaldoli, will still be thriving, along with a number of Camaldolese foundations around the world. And Romuald\u2019s model for the contemplative Christian life will still be drawing new seekers, nowadays more likely lay oblates than vowed religious.<\/p>\n As a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate myself\u2014a woman whose life of marriage, children, and full-time work has been far more like that of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton than Romuald of Ravenna\u2014I have to wonder: did Elizabeth ever hear about him? Perhaps during those early, life-changing months in Italy when she first encountered the Catholic Church? And if so, what did she think of his strange and wonderful life?<\/p>\n The only clue I\u2019ve been able to find appears in a letter Elizabeth wrote in 1805 to her first spiritual director, Father John Cheverus; he suggested she study the writings of St. Francis de Sales:.\u201d[I]n reading the life of St. Francis. . . I felt a perfect willingness to follow him and could not but pray that my soul might have its portion with his on the great day.\u201d Elizabeth so appreciated the wisdom she gleaned from this contemplative saint that she translated part of his work.<\/p>\n St. Francis, as it turns out, found some of his<\/em> inspiration in Romuald. As he puts it in his famous Introduction to a Devout Life,<\/em> \u201cOrdinarily moderate cheerfulness should predominate in our associations with others. St. Romuald and St. Anthony [the first influential Christian hermit] have been highly praised because in spite of all their austerity they always had their countenance and speech adorned with joy, gaiety, and courtesy.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond urging Christians to look upon life with grateful wonder, Francis advises plenty of solitude: \u201cBesides that mental solitude to which you may retreat even in the midst of the highest society . . . you must also love real, physical solitude. You should not go out into the desert like St. Mary of Egypt, St. Paul, St. Anthony, Arsenius, and the other ancient solitaries did. You should remain for some time alone with yourself in your room or garden or some other place. There you will have leisure to withdraw your spirit into your heart and refresh your soul with pious meditations, holy thoughts, or a little spiritual reading . . .\u201d<\/p>\n Elizabeth followed this advice as best she could\u2014not from a stone cell on a remote Italian mountainside but instead from the pulsing nerve center of extended family and community. In her lifelong quest for precious moments of solitude, she was much like today\u2019s Camaldolese oblates\u2014contemporary followers, like me, of that wandering, weeping, miracle-working hermit called St. Romuald of Ravenna.<\/p>\n
\nPut the whole world behind you and forget it.<\/em>
\nWatch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish,<\/em>
\nThe path you must follow is in the Psalms \u2014 never leave it.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want,<\/em>
\ntake every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart<\/em>
\nand to understand them with your mind.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nhurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand stand there with the attitude of one who stands<\/em>
\nbefore the emperor.<\/em><\/p>\n
\ncontent with the grace of God,<\/em>
\nlike the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing<\/em>
\nbut what his mother brings him.<\/em><\/p>\n