It’s hard for me to imagine being a monk — to give up sex; to live the unadorned life of a solitude. I’m too needy; too wordy; too worldly. If I insist on being alone in the morning to write and meditate, I’m eager to embrace the world after a few hours — and my wife at the end of the day.
Yet I’m inspired by those who embrace instead a life of silence and devotion; who live close to what the monk Thomas Merton called “the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.”
Thus, I was intrigued by this conversation with Teresa Bielecki — now Mother Tessa — which appeared in The Vajradhatu Sun, a lively and ecumenical Buddhist newspaper edited by Rick Fields. Reading it, I was reminded of how inextricably entwined we are with each other, even when we’re most alone; and of the kinds of passion of which we’re capable; and of the higher octaves of love.
— Ed.
Teresa Bielecki first met Father William McNamara, a fiery Carmelite monk, at a college retreat in 1958. She was only twenty-two then, but from that day on she knew what she wanted to do. Father William had just received permission from Pope John XXIII to start a new order, the Spiritual Life Institute, which would be composed of both men and women and which would bring the message of contemplative life to the world.
After graduating from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., Teresa Bielecki became Mother Tessa and, with Father William, co-founded the first home of the Spiritual Life Institute in the desert in Sedona, Arizona. As civilization, in the form of surrounding suburbs, encroached upon the retreat in Arizona, the community moved to a new site in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. In 1985, the community celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen Institute, was one of the speakers at the celebration — but so were a number of bishops of the Catholic Church, a measure of the acceptance and respect that the Institute has won over the years.
Nada Hermitage is located in the high desert, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. We drove up the dirt road for our interview, the mountains rising jaggedly above us, the first snow of a Colorado September glistening on the peaks, and the autumn aspen turning red and gold on the slopes below.
Mother Tessa met us at the parking lot just above the hermitage. She is a direct, vibrant, open-faced woman, given to laughter. She was wearing a long tan robe, and a darker brown scapular, a narrow vest-like over-garment that symbolizes her vows. A matching brown scarf covered her free-flowing brown hair.
The mountain in front of us, she said, was officially called Kit Carson Peak, but the Nada community, whose land runs up one of the slopes, had rechristened it Mount Carmel. Mount Carmel was the mountain where the prophet Elijah talked with God, and where, in the twelfth century, the earliest-known Carmelite hermits lived in solitude. Mount Carmel gave its name to the Carmelites, the order of monks and nuns that drew inspiration and spiritual direction from two of Spain’s greatest mystics and poets, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila. Now this new Mount Carmel is the site of the first mountain retreat cabin at the hermitage, with more to follow: The cabin is always occupied. One of the members of the community, or a guest on retreat, is always sitting up there, looking out at the immense blue desert sky and the valley floor below, “watching” in prayer.
Nada Hermitage itself is a unique blend of southwestern adobe and medieval grandeur. There is a bell tower, a flying buttress, and round turrets. But the flat roofs and the heavy ponderosa pine posts and beams make the rambling buildings look right at home in the desert. All of the buildings — the Sangre de Cristo chapel, the library, the refectory, the guest houses, and the hermitages — are built close to the earth and oriented to the sun, making this possibly the only solar-heated monastery in the country.
Mother Tessa is first and foremost a contemplative, and spends much of her time — as do the other fourteen members of the community — in silence and solitude. But recently what she calls the apostolic aspects of her work have taken up more and more of her time. She is a central and energetic figure in running the community, which now includes two other offshoots: Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado, and Nova Nada in Kemptville, Nova Scotia. She is also a spokesperson for the contemplative revival that has been quietly going on within the Catholic Church for some time now. She has been a regular faculty member at the annual Conference on Buddhist and Christian Meditation sponsored by Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and has given workshops and seminars at the Omega Institute and The Open Center in New York City. She also speaks at colleges and conferences around the country.
These two dimensions of her life — the apostolic and the contemplative — inform and enliven each other, she says. The day we interviewed her, she had just finished a week of solitude, and was about to leave for an East Coast tour, including a United Nations press conference on religion and peace.
That evening, soon after we began our interview in the adobe guest house, Mother Tessa stopped the tape recorder to listen to the distant, high-pitched wail of coyotes, a sound at first nearly indistinguishable from the wind. One of the things she missed most after moving here from the community’s birthplace in Sedona was the sound of the coyotes. But now that the community has settled and the sounds of heavy construction have stopped, the coyotes have appeared here, too, and it is clear that she considers their presence, and the lonely sounds of their calling over the desert spaces, a sign that she is now at home.
— Rick Fields
FIELDS: How was your community founded?
MOTHER TESSA: Our founder is Father William McNamara, who is a Carmelite monk. He felt there needed to be a new expression of contemplative life in the Church, because traditional contemplative life was too narrow and rigid. There was not enough openness to the world and to other world traditions. So he founded a more open, ecumenical community.
FIELDS: Why did Father William think it was important to have men and women living together in a contemplative community? Isn’t it the traditional idea that that would be a distraction?
MOTHER TESSA: The traditional viewpoint is that men and women should be separated. But it’s much healthier for men and women to live in community together. As we commonly say here, the men become more manly, and the women become more womanly. It’s tied in with the Jungian understanding of animus and anima. When you live in a mixed community, there’s a good chance that a man will develop his feminine side and a woman will develop her masculine side much more strongly. We have seen evidence of that in the twenty-seven years that we’ve lived in a celibate mixed community.
In this day and age, permanent commitments are not very highly regarded. People don’t know what I like to call the “ecstasy of fidelity,” which comes after many years of being faithful to a commitment.
FIELDS: What kind of community did Father McNamara envision at the beginning?
MOTHER TESSA: Actually, he never had a really clear sense of the direction we ought to take. We’ve evolved the way religious communities in the very beginnings of the Church evolved. That is, a charismatic man or woman feels a strong call and wants to live out the integrity of that call. People see that and want to be associated with that person, want the gift the person represents. Then people begin to gather around and you have a community. We’re trying to go back to what Thomas Merton called the primitive Carmelite ideal, the eremitical ideal, which began for the Carmelites around the twelfth century but eroded by the sixteenth century after the Carmelites were driven off Mount Carmel into urban Europe.
FIELDS: What is the eremitical ideal?
MOTHER TESSA: Eremitical means solitary, living like a hermit, in solitude. On Mount Carmel the original Carmelites lived as hermits. But then a process of urbanization took place in Europe. There was a modicum of silence and solitude, but the urbanized communal circumstances resulted in everyone living together in one building with an intense community life.
We’re trying to go back to a literal eremitical life where everyone lives as a hermit in silence and solitude in a separate hermitage.
FIELDS: And yet there’s an apostolic aspect, which means preaching or teaching?
MOTHER TESSA: In the Church there are two kinds of religious life. There’s the apostolic religious life, where your focus is on doing works of service, and the contemplative life, where your focus is on prayer. We emphasize leading a contemplative life in silence and solitude and making ourselves available to God. As God sees fit, we may be sent out. For fourteen years I did nothing but live this life at home. The last thing I ever dreamed of was doing the kind of work I now do.
FIELDS: Does that mean you live in strict hermitage, seeing no one?
MOTHER TESSA: No. There’s a life of balanced rhythms: solitude and togetherness, work and play, discipline and wildness. There’s great variation.
FIELDS: Would you describe a typical day?
MOTHER TESSA: Actually, we live by a weekly schedule. Monday and Tuesday are days of complete solitude. The rest of the week, we have community meditation and prayer together at 6 in the morning, and two hours of complete silence. Then the day’s work begins. We break at noon for a very ancient prayer called the Angelus, which is deliberately meant to stop the mind, and remind us of what is ultimately important. We have another hour of quiet between 4 and 5 in the afternoon, which we call “proximate preparation for prayer.” During that hour, we might prepare ourselves by reading, or going for a jog or a bike ride or a quiet walk.
Most of our meals we prepare alone in our hermitages. Twice a week we eat our dinner together. These meals are convivial. We see one another so rarely that when we are together we do talk.
On Saturday we do our chores, wash our cars, clean our houses. On Saturday night we go through the ancient Jewish ritual of lighting the Sabbath lights and calling on the spirit of Sabbath to come and visit us. On Sunday we celebrate a day of total pattern-breaking. Whatever our spiritual practice is during the week; we do not do that on Sunday. We sleep late on Sunday because we normally get up early. The emphasis is on play all day long. We play volleyball or go on long hikes in the mountains or go cross-country skiing. In Nova Scotia, where we live on a lake, we often go on canoe trips. It’s a day of deliberately being childlike and breaking every pattern we keep during the week, which allows for all kinds of new things to erupt in us. Then we begin our various disciplines all over on Monday morning. In addition, we spend one week out of every month in complete solitude.
FIELDS: When did you first realize you were going to be a nun?
MOTHER TESSA: One of the things that’s very distinctive about my life and the life of almost every single person in this community is that we are all what we call “reluctant monks.” With the exception of Father William and one other woman, not one of us dreamed of living a life like this. We were all headed in completely different directions. Our calls came very unexpectedly and in many cases very late. I like to say that God tricked me into this, because it was never my intention.
FIELDS: What do you mean by that?
MOTHER TESSA: When I was a junior in college, Father William came to give our retreat. The rumor was that he was a hermit. I thought, “Good grief, how can anyone who’s a hermit even be a human being?” They also said Father William had entered the seminary at age thirteen. I definitely thought he couldn’t possibly be human because he had missed out on half of his life! But when I met him, I was simply captivated by this man’s vitality and integrity. That’s what I wanted. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a monk, or a contemplative, or a celibate, or anything of the sort. So I simply came to assist him. Then I realized all that was involved in a life of integrity and vitality for me. I distinctly remember the first time Father William suggested that I might have a vocation to celibacy. I literally screamed and ran away because this was so repugnant to me. All my life I had dreamed of marrying and raising a family. Celibacy was abhorrent to me!
FIELDS: Had your life been “normal” up to that time? Had you dated?
MOTHER TESSA: Oh, absolutely. I’d been proposed to five times and refused each time, because none of them was the right man. What distinguishes every member of this community is that we were all leading very full lives, and every opportunity lay ahead of us. Then somehow we were captivated by something that was very mysterious. For me, it was this desire for a certain kind of fullness of life and vitality that I saw in Father William and wanted in my own life. I came to understand how celibacy and silence were a necessary part of that.
FIELDS: Do you ever regret giving up secular life?
MOTHER TESSA: Not in the least! Although I never thought about this life, I have subsequently learned I was born for it. This is the face I had before I was born. This has been my destiny from before I was born, but I never recognized that.
FIELDS: So you’ve never had doubts.
MOTHER TESSA: When Father William came to give the retreat, I was very skeptical of the whole business. I considered cutting the retreat because I thought this man couldn’t possibly have that much to offer. Yet, from the first moment that Father William began to speak, I was stunned. It was like Saint Paul being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus. I said, “This is it, this is the man, this is the life. I will never be the same again.” It was instantaneous, and from that instant I’ve never deviated.
FIELDS: Would you say, then, that your experience in college was a kind of conversion experience?
MOTHER TESSA: Yes, it was a conversion experience, but I shy away from that term, because we are such a sensate culture and there’s such an emphasis on romantic peak moments like that. I think conversion is a process. I have a conversion experience almost every week! My community is always laughing at me because I’m always saying, “Well, this is a whole new beginning.” That’s what life should be like for all of us.
FIELDS: Was celibacy a difficult choice to make?
MOTHER TESSA: Yes — initially. But again, I feel as though I was born for the celibate life. There’s never been any other way for me — it just took some realizing. I did it very gradually: I vowed celibacy for three months at a time, six months at a time, a year, and finally for life. We now have a formalized process for new members of the community. It takes a minimum of five years to make what is called your final profession. This means you are making vows for your lifetime; you are literally putting your life on the line. It’s an extremely dramatic moment, which we take very seriously.
In this day and age, permanent commitments are not very highly regarded. People don’t know what I like to call the “ecstasy of fidelity,” which comes after many years of being faithful to a commitment. Only fidelity through the dark nights — which occur not only in monastic life, not only in religious life, but in marriage and friendship — brings about this ecstasy.
FIELDS: Why is celibacy considered an important part of the discipline?
MOTHER TESSA: The question is twofold: is celibacy important because there is something inherent in genital activity that is distracting? Or is celibacy important because of the distractions of being a householder?
Celibacy is definitely important because it provides a certain freedom from the burdens of child-rearing and being a householder. But even more than that, there is something about the sublimation of sexual energy that leads to a qualitative difference in your life. It is important to remember that this does not indicate a negative attitude toward sexuality.
It’s healthy not to drink for periods of time; it’s healthy not to eat meat for periods of time; it’s healthy to fast altogether for periods of time. The same is true of sex.
FIELDS: You’re saying that you can sublimate sexual energy for spiritual purposes?
MOTHER TESSA: Most of us display either an exaggerated negativity about sexuality or an exaggerated positive response. We don’t understand clearly the power of sexuality and the power of sublimating that energy. I feel very strongly that every person needs to practice celibacy for periods of his or her life. I think it has so much to teach us. First of all, sex is overrated. People don’t know that unless they understand what can happen in them if they cut themselves off from that dimension. It’s healthy not to drink for periods of time; it’s healthy not to eat meat for periods of time; it’s healthy to fast altogether for periods of time. The same is true of sex. After the experience of sexual abstinence, we can use the gift of sexuality that has been given to us in a much more intelligent and contemplative way. Sexual energy is the life energy at the heart of every human person. We can choose to exercise that human potential genitally or not. There’s a prejudice that if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you, which is not at all the case. I think that integrated healthy celibates are the strongest witnesses to that. You can’t explain it, but you see people who prove it by the wholeness of their lives.
FIELDS: How does one adjust to that kind of life?
MOTHER TESSA: We are very open about celibacy. As we are preparing people to make a commitment to celibacy, we make sure they understand what they are getting themselves into. We not only go into the physiology, but the psychology, the emotional implications of it. I like to talk about the asceticism of celibacy, and the mysticism of celibacy. First you have to practice the asceticism, and when you cross over that line and the mysticism unfolds, you no longer have the difficulties.
Now there are two difficulties. The simplest — although it does not seem simple at first — is the genital temptation, the physical desire for sexual experience. I like to relate this struggle to what Saint John of the Cross calls “the dark night of the senses.” We struggle with letting go of genital desire and with saying no to it. But there’s an even harder asceticism, which comes later, in what Saint John calls “the dark night of the spirit.” The harder sacrifice in celibacy is giving up the one special person, who is all for you, and you for him or her. That emotional sacrifice is much more difficult.
FIELDS: Do you miss the intimacy of being with one person?
MOTHER TESSA: Oh, yes! But there are compensations, you see. Our emphasis in community in general, and especially in a celibate community, is on what we call “universal love.” We do not settle down with one particular person; we are called to love the whole community. The whole world becomes a vehicle; the whole world becomes friends and spouse. That is a tremendous challenge, and has great rewards. Celibacy has great rewards on the human level and also on the mystical level.
FIELDS: How do members of your community deal with physical desire?
MOTHER TESSA: First of all, obviously, you recognize what’s happening. You see it in terms of your ultimate commitment to celibacy, and you don’t hate yourself for it, because sexual desire is normal and human; it is a power and a gift. Then you have to deal with it creatively. You have to recognize that you are free to choose. This is why celibacy has so much to offer our culture. We are free to choose. People need to know that, because a lack of genuine freedom is killing our culture, killing sexuality, killing marriage, killing love. People feel that every time they experience desire, they have to act on it. There are other ways to act on it besides genitally. We can laugh, and recognize ourselves as sexual animals. Different people will deal with it differently. The old cold shower and exercise option is always good. Sometimes you need not think about it at all. Simply distract yourself. And sometimes you need to work with it very consciously. You take it to prayer.
The harder sacrifice in celibacy is giving up the one special person, who is all for you, and you for him or her. That emotional sacrifice is much more difficult.
FIELDS: What about the accusation that celibate mysticism is “repressed sexuality”?
MOTHER TESSA: As the British philosopher E.I. Watkin said, “Mysticism is not disguised sex; sex is disguised mysticism.” This is the heart of living a celibate life. The deepest hunger in every person is the hunger for God. Sexuality is an expression of that, which is why men and women fall in love with one another and why sexuality is given to us.
The deepest hunger in every person is the hunger for God. Sexuality is an expression of that, which is why men and women fall in love with one another and why sexuality is given to us.
FIELDS: What is contemplation? It’s a word that many of us use, and it has a certain vogue. What do you mean by it?
MOTHER TESSA: Contemplation is our birthright. We are all natural-born contemplatives. But the contemplative dimensions of our being atrophy, especially in contemporary American culture. Contemplation is looked on as something esoteric, strange, and special. It isn’t. It’s an absolutely normal human process. My favorite non-theistic description of contemplation is a long, loving look at the real — with a small “r” — which shows you how absolutely normal it is. And then it expands to a long, loving look at the Real, with a capital “R.” For a Christian, that would ultimately be the Father as He is made known to us in Christ. My favorite theistic understanding of contemplation is loving, experiential awareness of God. There’s no separation between us and God, between the world and God. God permeates the entire universe. The contemplative life lifts you up to that realization.
FIELDS: Do you teach forms of meditation or prayer?
MOTHER TESSA: No, we don’t. We’re rather unusual in this. We believe that Jesus did not come to teach us how to pray, or how to meditate. He came to teach us how to live. He said, “I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.” Why? Because he was so convinced that if we live fully, deliberately, deeply, humanly, we will inevitably pray.
FIELDS: What is prayer? Is it the same as contemplation?
MOTHER TESSA: Prayer can be described in many different ways. No one description says it all. Father William calls prayer “a cry of the heart.” You can’t teach a technique for the heart’s crying out; it simply happens. Saint Teresa’s description of prayer is my second favorite. She calls prayer “a heart-to-heart conversation with God our Father who we know loves us.” Again, you can’t exactly teach techniques for heart-to-heart conversation. But you can teach people how to dispose themselves to do that, how to quiet down to be ready to do that. Ultimately, in the Carmelite tradition, prayer is really a love affair. It is not a practice but a passion. It’s not a discipline but a delight. You can’t teach techniques for that.
FIELDS: Do you think contemplatives have an important role to play in social action?
MOTHER TESSA: There’s an absolutely intimate connection between contemplation and action. A hermit in a hermitage — even if he or she never has anything to do with any other human being — can change the world.
FIELDS: Change the world? How?
MOTHER TESSA: I cannot describe how that happens; it cannot be empirically determined. But if I didn’t feel that way, I couldn’t live this life. The world is in such dire straits, and I have a responsibility for the world. We all have to choose how we’re going to assume responsibility for the future of the planet. I think this is a new dark age. There are a lot of people who think this is a great age to live in. I don’t. I feel as if I’m living in a time similar to the one Saint Augustine lived in when he wrote The City of God, at the fall of the Roman Empire. I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. I feel that my own vocation is to live heroically, patiently, and peacefully in the midst of the fall, and to teach other people how to do that.
Action without contemplation is blind. You cannot give what you don’t have. There are a great many people running around, doing things they have no business doing because they don’t know what they’re doing, or what needs to be done.
Saint John of the Cross said, “If we do not act contemplatively, half of what we do will have to be undone by somebody else.” We know that from personal experience. There are some people who are called simply to be a quiet witness. Other people are called to what we call the mixed life, which is really what we live here. The word “apostolate” means one who is sent. We need to be sent; we need to be led by the spirit into enlightened action and not be self-propelled.
FIELDS: There’s been a lot of talk recently about women’s spirituality.
MOTHER TESSA: Yes, it mystifies me! I can’t think of what I would say to a woman that I wouldn’t say to a man, or what I would say to a man that I wouldn’t say to a woman, except to talk about the dark and light sides of their strengths. You can help a man be more gentle and more sensitive, to listen better and express his feelings more. We all know that — that’s no big deal. And you can help a woman be more objective and think more, instead of feeling so much. But that’s really elementary. I infinitely prefer the man-woman dynamic, and I honestly don’t see how people can understand themselves apart from it. I think that going off into more exclusive gender groups is some kind of backlash.
FIELDS: At the very beginning of this discussion, you said that your community was ecumenical. Why is that important?
MOTHER TESSA: We’ve reached an age, I think, where no tradition can afford not to know more about the others. I think the best way is by living your own tradition much more deeply. In the contemplative depths, you meet everyone. Not on the level of doctrine, but on the level of practice and contemplative experience. The world has become so big that East-West dialogue is absolutely essential.
FIELDS: Do you think it’s true that all paths lead to the same place?
MOTHER TESSA: I’m not so sure. But in a very real way it is true that we can no longer understand the significance of our tradition except in dialogue. I feel that I am a far better Christian after years of dialogue with other world religions. I am not the same kind of Christian I was, and never could be. I think that’s the whole point. You can’t go into that dialogue and expect to come out the same. It takes a tremendous amount of risk and vulnerability, and I think we are all going to have to take those risks because there is a higher truth to come out of all this.
But I don’t think we are all the same. It’s a terrible mistake to try to water down our differences and make ourselves look alike. At first you think, “Oh, we’re so different.” Then you think, “Oh, my gosh, we’re all really the same!” And then you realize, as you go deeper, “No, we’re not at all the same!” And we shouldn’t be. Vive la différence! I really think we need more confidence in that. God has created a tremendous fabric with different colors and textures and tastes. There’s no way in the world I could ever be a Buddhist. But my whole life is immensely enriched because of what I’ve learned from Buddhism. I have tremendous appreciation for it.
FIELDS: What do you think Buddhism has to offer Christianity?
MOTHER TESSA: I’d like to talk about what each has to offer the other, because, quite honestly, I think there is far more said about what Buddhism has to offer Christianity than the other way around. I think Christianity is far more receptive to Buddhism than Buddhism is to Christianity.
Buddhism can remind Christianity of the contemplative and mystical center which has never had sufficient attention in Christianity. The emphasis on the spiritual teacher is a great aid. The non-theism is a great challenge to what can be called the “Christo-fascism” in Christianity. In my own life I have been forced to broaden my understanding of what I mean by Christ, what I understand of Jesus, and to look much more deeply into the ineffable mystery of the Trinity. The Zen quality of debunking is also extremely helpful because there can be so much fixation in Christianity on doctrine and on liturgical acts. There’s nothing like a good Zen master for debunking — although a good Carmelite does the same thing.
From the other perspective, there’s a communal aspect in Christianity that I think Buddhism can learn a great deal from. Also, the whole idea of service is stronger in Christianity. Enlightened action is something that Buddhism has steered away from. The danger in Buddhism is in saying that personal enlightenment is the most important thing, and in not realizing that enlightenment could come through action as well as from individual practice.
FIELDS: Your community has just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Has the experiment been a success?
MOTHER TESSA: We aren’t an “experiment”! In view of Buddhist lineages and Christian orders, we are very young. But in terms of groups and communities and movements, we are very old. Twenty-five years is. . . .
FIELDS: . . . a long time?
MOTHER TESSA: Definitely! We’ve come a tremendous distance, but at the same time, we are just beginning.
FIELDS: What is it like being a nun? Do you feel happy, or ecstatic, or mystical all the time, or are you just doing a job?
MOTHER TESSA: Oh, it’s definitely not a job! This is a vocation, a very special call, and it’s also a destiny. I feel that personally, but I also feel that anyone who is called to be a monk or a nun, or any kind of contemplative in this age, should have a great sense of destiny — particularly at this time in human history. What it’s like for me is an agony and an ecstasy. I’m human, which means there are good days and bad days; there are ups and downs. One of my favorite descriptions of living this kind of life is “the balance of polarities.” I think that’s what life is all about. It’s never this or that: truth comes in the tension between opposites.
We’re thankful to The Vajradhatu Sun (1345 Spruce Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302) — and to Yoga Journal, which also published the interview — for permission to reprint it here.
— Ed.
