So now, this evening, as we have planned on the explanation of the glory of the mass, as you recall, the Kyrie represents, strictly speaking, sort of an advent hymn. In other words, a desire and a longing for the coming of the Most Holy Trinity. And in the Gloria, of course, it begins with the song of the angels with Christi. So our last class will, of course, be next week, next Tuesday. And on that class, we'll speak of the Gloria, which will be very appropriate in preparation for the Christmas feast. In other words, after desire and longing have deteriorated, we arrive at the answer which the angels began with, the answer of Glory be to God in the highest, that the Redeemer is come. Now, tonight, instead of lecturing myself, I have such a privilege in having a man here who is distinguished throughout the United States and well-known in Europe.

[01:06]

Father Bannister Swinton was of the Abbey of Maria Locke in Germany and came over to this country with the idea some years back of founding a priory of Maria Locke Abbey. With time, he fell into the liturgical movement and Catholic action movement of the United States. And he became the chaplain with the coming of the Benedictine to establish the Regina Lauderdale in Bethlehem, Connecticut. I believe you saw Come to Our Fable in the movie. Father Dantzis is the chaplain of that convent of the Benedictine mass. He has written rather extensively in erotic process, as you probably have read quite frequently of many years. And he is noted for his great and profound knowledge of the Liturgy of the Church. He's written recently his Pathways to Holy Scripture, which he's publishing down at Bethlehem, and which you can obtain in order to understand the reading of the Holy Scripture throughout the entire year, as we explain in our treatment of the liturgical year.

[02:13]

So it's a great pleasure that I'm going to turn over the class tonight to Fr. as he wishes, something of his new foundation. He is, in that respect, similar to St. Benedict himself, in that he is to become the founder of an entirely new abbey, which is to start this coming spring. So I think we would like to hear from him himself. He's extremely aware that you ever find the founder. And I think that it would stand for him to ask for some compensation as well to let him talk about it. Let me present Father Daniel. Father Daniel. Everybody's founder, you know. Now, certainly I'm grateful to Father for having given me this opportunity to talk to you, especially about the things that are close to one's heart.

[03:15]

Now, when he wrote this, project this afternoon, that maybe I could talk to you here about this new foundation. I was thinking how I could do it, because it's such a tremendous field, so many implications, so many things that are connected with it, that it's a little difficult to explain it and see it in its right sitting. So I thought maybe, you know, it's always a tremendous, I think, experience for anybody who, as a priest and as a monk, feels that that is his life and his vocation to spread the glad tidings of our redemption, to go to various towns and cities and places in these United States, and to find everywhere, to find groups of people, to find families who are stirred and deeply moved and taken over, so to speak, by the Spirit of Christ, our Savior.

[04:41]

It's that wonderful experience that Some weeks ago, a week ago, in fact, in Cleveland and again in Rochester, everywhere are these little groups forming cells, really living cells, in which Christianity is being taken on and being understood, not as a little side issue in our lives and not as a little ornament, for some days, but as the real central issue around which our entire life is centered. So that was certainly a great experience and an encouraging experience, and if I would speak to a group like that, I thought the best thing is simply to tell you a little about Maybe it's a bad thing, I don't know. I do it in honor, in order to give glory to God, our Creator, and to Christ, our Redeemer.

[05:46]

To tell you a little about the way I myself got into this whole thing, because years and years ago, you know, I belonged to the generation which got into the First World War in Germany, and just grew up, really, during the First World War. So we all lived as boys. We lived in a world which was falling to pieces, in which the old accepted order of the Reich and of the Emperor and of all the things that went with it, completely given up to pieces. We have never known, as long as we are really living deliberately we have never known any stability our entire life the life of my generation how many of them have lost their lives on the battlefields of the world this whole generation has never known any real accepted stabilized order never everything for us

[07:01]

has been questioned and still is being questioned. So, but we were at this time, it was about the end of the First World War, and the whole collapse of the German army and of the entire political system affected us deeply. At that time, most of us turned communist. We all were communist. I mean, in our ideologies, in our ideas. And we also, With the breakdown and collapse of the political order, we also gave up all the accepted standards of the spiritual order. At that time, I think there was nobody in the class who still belonged to any of the Christian churches. I speak of 1918, 1918. There was nobody among us who accepted the Christian churches as they stood. And so then, in this state of mind, we went to the university.

[08:08]

And I remember still those days, we went to Göttingen. And in Göttingen, I studied comparative religion. Comparative religion. And of course, in order to study comparative religion, get into all kinds of things, you know, Sanskrit and India and whatever, you know, the whole business. And Protestant theology, I still remember those days when we were sitting there listening in Protestant theology to the Calvinist Myrt who wrote this famous book about the sources of the history of the papacy. Now, these things, of course, completely and utterly destroyed the faith. Necessarily there wasn't much anyhow. But then came, you see, then in this whole situation, I'll never forget, one evening when I entered, I went with a friend of mine who is now a professor of comparative religion in Bonn.

[09:15]

We went into the university and there we saw at the Blackboard, we saw this announcement that Father Albert Hammond stayed there. the prior of Maria Love Abbey, was going to give a lecture to the Catholic students at the university on the idea of the glorified Christ in the Liturgy of Advent. The glorified Christ in the Liturgy of Advent. And I turned around to this friend and I said, now here, took what a rather remarkable topic this man has chosen, because up to then we were accustomed to priests, mostly Franciscans from Fulda, they were the next, to Göttingen, to Pong, and to speak about topics of apologetics. For example, on the first chapter of the book of Genesis and modern, let us say, geological

[10:24]

research or so, findings, you know, about the history of the earth, about evolution and creation, something like that. Now, we didn't, I think, once, I went to one of these things, usually they always irritated us on end, because we felt, you know, that these people were talking about something that really They didn't fully master and that it was all rather hopeless beginning. And then you always are already naturally set against anybody who wants to defend, you know, a cause. So here Father Albert Hamstead used a completely different approach. He didn't want to defend, you know, any position that the average university student in our days considered as lost anyhow. that he spoke about something, you know, which would lead into the inner life of the church.

[11:31]

It was something one could say simply was something positive. It wasn't defending, but simply positively unfolding something, and something high and something, say, glorious and sublime. And so I said to this friend of mine, I said, now let us go there, and let us listen. And so we went. You know, that evening we went, and I'll never forget, you know, Albert Humpstead, he was then, that was in 1921, I think it was. He was then at the peak of his influence. He used to go all over to the universities, all over Germany, one can say all over Central Europe. And there he was, very impressive, I mean, in his whole attitude, one could see right away that he was... a man who had a large cultural background, and there he spoke then and he explained to us the liturgy of Advent. I still remember, you know, the word Advent, and he started then his whole background of this idea about the coming of the king into a city and the way the citizens would greet their king, you know, in the nation, and how this Advent was then the

[12:50]

beginning of a new period, and how the king would come as the saviour, you know, would give his gifts, the manifestations of symbols or letters of his goodwill to the city and so on. So this whole background on the antiquity of Advent, you know, he gave first, and then he gave us a picture of the November days in Mariela, you know, how outside, how nature you know, loses all its, you say, its radiance, its splendor, and how the fog, you know, settles down on this lake, and how the days become shorter and shorter, and the trees have lost their leaves, you know, and everything in that way dies and sinks into darkness, and that just at this time, precisely at this time, the church then, in the spirit of the risen Savior, and as the one who knows that she has the spirit of the resurrection, you see, lifts up her heart and sees the light of Christ coming.

[14:04]

And how therefore this natural death, this natural dying, you see, is overcome, transcended by the church in her new spirit that she has received from the Son of Justice, And it's taken as the background for a tremendous, beautiful revelation of the light of divinity here in the darkness of the human world. And then afterwards, after he had explained all these ideas about Advent, then the – oh, I still can hear, you know, the people talking about the students, you know, they were all very deeply impressed by it, because it was the first time that they had learned anything about it. Most of them didn't even know the word literature and what it meant in those days. And here, suddenly, this world was open to them, and they certainly saw an aspect, you know, of the church that they hadn't seen before at all.

[15:09]

At their best, you know, those who know little about it, To them, the church was an institution, and this institution would take care that the Ten Commandments were observed, you know, and that the laws of the church were observed. So the church was simply identified with keeping some laws. But the idea that the church would be the bride of the Spirit, and that the church had a life of her own, and which she would give, you know, to the faithful, and to which the faithful would then be lifted up and transfigured, transformed, according to the image of the gloriously risen Christ. That was a completely new idea. Whatever we had of Christian background was absolutely some remnant of Christian morals, you know, good behavior, you see. but that there was something tremendously, immensely more, divinization, becoming like God, you know, a confirmation to the risen Saviour, that was for us really a new idea.

[16:23]

And this new idea, it stuck so much with me that I went home then, didn't tell anything to this friend of mine, who was a complete liberal, And then I remember, the only thing I can remember of my Catholic days beforehand was the first verse of the Holy God, we praise thy name. So I remember this entire night I was singing the first verse, and it didn't go any further, you know. I got always stuck at the first verse. But I could repeat it, you know. I mean, during this night, the next morning I went to him, and I said, I want to become a monk. at Mariella. So she looked at me, you know, and at this kind of... Now I had all this, what students have, you know, cane and this winter coat, you know, and all these various things. So he looked at me and he said, now, do you know what a monastery is and so on? I said, no, I don't know.

[17:25]

I'm sure I shall become a monk of Mariella. So that was absolutely said. The marvellous thing, very strange, I shall never forget it. When we saw this announcement there on the blackboard, I read the prior of Mariella Abbey. When I read it, I had immediately a clear, absolutely clear feeling that that would be the place where I would stay. Absolutely. Although at the moment I was not a Catholic. One can see that's the only reason why I say that, you know, that if God, when God wants, takes, you know, as I say, our lives into his hands, he acts far above our heads, you know. He acts through us, but in a way, you know, which is absolutely, which we ourselves can never grasp. He's always miles ahead of us, of course, now. But I mean, at this moment, you know, for a student who is studying comparative religion, you know, and never met any Benedictine monk.

[18:38]

I'd never seen any Benedictine abbey. And I read this. I was sure that I would land one day at Mariana. Absolutely sure. So I went there, you see, and then we had a long talk. And he explained then to me He asked where I came from. I said, I come from Hannover. And he said, no, that is North Germany. And he didn't like the North Germany. You know, he was a percent for the Western civilization, all these things. And he thought that the Northern Germans are too much sentimental, and they didn't, you know, really grasp the spirit of the literature somehow, you know. So he explained all these things, because he didn't succeed in discouraging me at all. And then he said, but we at Maria Latvia are farmers. We are living on a farm, and we are peasants. So I got immediately the idea that the novices in Marialva would live in German, North German farmhouses, where people, downstairs is the stable for the cows, and then you go up the ladder and up there the people live.

[19:42]

It's very nice, it's a heating system in winter. And that was the worst thing that I could ever imagine. I mean, for me as a city fellow, to live, you know, that way in a farm, oh my gosh. But nevertheless, I was so convinced that if I had laughed, there had to be a stable, you know, and I would have gone there to become a monk without knowing what I was doing, absolutely not knowing what I was doing. So then he said, and he said, now what do you think would be in your monastic life when you become a monk, what do you think would be your greatest difficulty? And then I said, now I have to tell you that by nature I'm extremely vain at it. And he was looking at me and he said, and you will always stay that way. I think more and more the wisdom of this is not.

[20:44]

Oh, he explained that ultimately. He said that monastic life as such never kills your natural characteristics, but your own attitude towards these natural characteristics, of course, becomes a completely different one. So we were talking about this, and then at the end I looked probably Right away, I looked very satisfied with myself for having made this decision to become a monk, and suddenly he looked at me again and he said, Now, what shall I do? You expect me to take two candles and burn them in front of you? So I decided, and the first feast that I went then to Mariela, the first time I went to Mariela was the Feast of the Epiphany. because I thought that that would be a real benedictine feast, you know, the idea there of the manifestation of glory of God, and the epiphany idea as such, the idea of the manifestation, the coming of the light into this world, and so on.

[21:57]

Now, then I went to Mariella, and it was a terrific experience. Mariella is in the Eifel. It's on the left bank of the Rhine. You go there, first you go by train to Cologne or to Bonn or Andernach. In Andernach, you have to take one of these little, little railroads. You know, you always have the feeling you're pushing something like the Rutland. Right? And then we stay, you know, indefinite, indefinite stays there and stops. And people say, I don't know if you have ever traveled in Europe. You know, that's a funny thing. In the centre there are big, large, you know, just the large compartments, you know, and then benches along the walls. In the centre, everything free space, except that in the centre there's a stove, you know, standing. So that was an experience, you know, me there among all the farmers, you know, the people sitting around these benches in the middle of these stoves, you know, and then we would wait.

[23:00]

So that was a nice introduction to my life, and I came to Nidamendi And these Eiffel villages are all built of black lava stone, and they are all roofed with black slate. So everything was black and dark. It fizzled, such a fizzling rain. You know, it was early January. I went there, you see, and trotted along this road for about an hour through this rain. And then finally I got into a place which looked terribly dingy. and uh awful and i went in there and i thought my this is maria you know still kept my determination becoming a monk then i thought oh that was the farm so i had to go all the way around you know then to the real place finally i rang this monastery bill you know and then out of a wide window open like to see first a beer coming out you know nothing but beer beer beer and then after this beer came the two eyes, you know, questioning eyes of this porter, brother, you know.

[24:01]

And then I came and he asked me what I wanted. I wanted to talk to you, think about my vocation. So I was brought into the monastery, and then we had, that was the Saturday evening or something. On Saturday evenings, there's always cold noodles and potato salad. That's the customary diet in Maria Love, you know. And then you get to all of these impressions, you know, they're extremely strange to me. Later on, I was brought into this room, there was kind of Victorian style of furniture, you know, that some had inherited from monks, you know, from their carons, and they were put in there, and the pews, and then these pictures, you know, and so on. It was all rather strange. But then the next morning came the Pontifical Mass for the Epiphany, you know, and this whole marvellous manifestation and marvellous revelation of the beauty of the Church. And I think there's no no place in the whole world which can in any way reach or compete with the way in which the liturgy is celebrated at Mariela.

[25:09]

I have seen dozens of monasteries and vindictive abbeys, and I must say that the place is absolutely unique. It is really, really marvellous. So I was absolutely taken in. After the first time I heard the glory be to the Father and to the Son, And to the Holy Ghost, per omnia saecula saeculorum, I said to myself, per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen. And so then I became a monk. If I think back of what was the, as I say, the list, what was the great experience that the life that Maria Lars gave me, the first experience was that, of course, of the abbot, Hildebrandt Hervegen, a great spiritual leader. really a great spiritual leader, a man who, imagine, he was abbot for 37 years. And during these 37 years, he preached practically to the same community.

[26:10]

He gave conferences three times a week for 37 years. At every conference that this man gave, we were sitting at the edges of our chairs, not to lose any word that he said, you know. Such a tremendous inner light such a tremendous capacity of communicating this inner life that really that one can never forget. It was simply a complete transformation of my entire life, of the entire outlook that I had on life under this great spiritual leader. He was the first to, in the year 1913, the first year after he had become an abbot, open the doors of the monastery, to the outside world in order to participate in a large-scale manner in the celebrations of Holy Week. Holy Week of 1913 in Mariola was the first liturgical week that was ever celebrated, and Abbot Ildefons was the initiator.

[27:16]

He wanted in the face of this modern world and of the dangers that this modern civilization has, he wanted to what he saw in the liturgy of the church. He saw the great remedy, first of all, in order to overcome... Testing, one, two, three, four, five. Testing, one, two, three, four, five. Testing, one, two, three, four, five. The great German, and one can say the temptation of all Nordic people, you know, is always to consider their relation to God as a completely private affair of the inner secret of their hearts, something absolutely exclusive, something that can essentially never be shared with anybody. Especially Germanic peoples always think in this way.

[28:19]

The religion, you see, is exclusively a matter of your private individual conscience and nothing else. And Albert Ildefons did, you know, and he did really a wonderful job in teaching and informing these novices who came out of this individualistic world to open up to them the need and the glory and splendour and the power of the community worship of the church, the idea that really the church is there first, and that we are born through the church, that we cannot become Christians without the church. All these ideas he impressed very much upon our minds in order to open up to our individualistic minds, you know, the grandeur and the deep necessity of the church, the life of the church as a community, the idea of the mystical body.

[29:27]

And that was one great thing that we learned with the importance of community. And that was the beautiful thing in my life, and also I'll never forget Now, you love a monastery, a Benedictine monastery, without any external activity whatsoever. We did not teach. We had no school. The thing that filled the life of the monks was the celebration of the liturgy and then all the things that are, say, all the values and the propagation of all the values and the beauties that come and flow from the liturgy of the church. That was our whole apostolate. And Abbot Ildefonsetti, he was then the one who taught us not only, let us say, to live as a community and as a family,

[30:24]

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