Content area
Full Text
AUSTRALIA HAS SEEN saints other than Blessed Mary of the Cross. There would be little argument that Caroline Chisholm and Eileen O'Connor are saints, which is to say, powerful evangelical signs in the 'whirl of secularity ', but Australia has another hitherto unknown saint who died far away from the land of his birth, hidden and unknown because he was a monk in the strictest monastic order in the Western Church, the Carthusian hermits. Dom Hugh Weld lived most of his life in the Charterhouse at Parkminster, England, while his latter years were spent in a Carthusian monastery in Italy. It was here that he died, at Maggiano, near Lucca in 1952, a lifetime and a world away from Government House, Hob art, where he was born to Governor Frederick Weld and his wife, Filumena Weld, on 3 May 1876.
As a Carthusian hermit he lived entirely alone, usually leaving his cell only to celebrate the liturgy with his fellow monks, and to eat in common with them on Sundays. Otherwise the Carthusian monk works, prays, studies and eats alone. The only time spent relaxing with others is the weekly walk during which they can speak of whatever they wish. Theirs is a life hidden in God, yet so many Christians do not understand or appreciate the real nature or value of such a life of apparent withdrawal. The vocation of the solitary is barely understood even by Christians, not even in the age when so many modern men and women long for the refreshment of solitude, silence and communion in the midst of their stressed lives. When even the outlines of the life of contemplative monks and nuns are suggested to them they protest that such a life is a waste or that it is selfish. Such a stance reveals that many modern Christians do not seem to understand that prayer, as communion with God, is a profound communion with all.
The traditional Christian view, and particularly in the Christian East, is that the life of solitude, while involving an external separation from society, is at the same time a life lived in deep communion with the whole Church and with all. Dwelling On the frontier', separated from all, the solitary is at...