Father Thomas

New Camaldoli Hermitage is a community of Roman Catholic monks whose life is dedicated to contemplation and prayer. They are a worshiping community, celebrating with their friends and guests the Liturgy of the Hours and the Holy Eucharist. Their monastic fellowship extends beyond the walls of this hermitage and embraces a large and inclusive community of oblates, persons of different walks of life who live the grace of their baptism in spiritual communion with the monks. This page offers a brief history of the monastic men and women whose life and teachings have inspired the Camaldolese Benedictines to this day.

THE THREEFOLD GOOD OF MONASTIC LIFE

“…a threefold advantage: the community life, which is what novices want; golden solitude, for those who are mature and thirst for the living God; and witnessing to the good news of Christ, for those who long to be freed from this life in order to be with him.”

A ruff transcript of our conversation:

I am here with Father Thomas. Let me just introduce myself. Okay, Thomas Matus monk of Newcombe. I’ll delete Hermitage in Big Sur, California. Thank you, sir. Okay, thank you so much for meeting with me today after all of that. I think it’s been a long drive up from Los Angeles. Okay, so I’m just going to jump right into it.

And the first question is why meditate?

the question really is why not you see, right? It’s something that is being talked about being proposed. There’s an enormous amount of literature about it. It’s part of people’s lives. If you ask them why they meditate they might give an answer, but that’s really not pertinent to the experience itself. Right which is a discovery of a dimension of our existence. Which goes beyond the purely physical or the immediate and so forth and certainly isn’t something that is gratuitous. In other words. It is a pure gift. It is not something that produces something that they can be sold or put on the market and so forth. So all of these exterior criteria that are. Very important for people everyday life there their work there the income. What are we going to pay the bills at the end of the month it all of that? These are these are concerns that real concern for people but on the other hand, this does not feed into these concerns. It is a way also of finding a space where we need not be so concerned about. These contingent realities of our life. What are we going to do? What are we going to eat? You know, Jesus reminded his followers to look at the flowers of the field and the other words. This is a meditation that you’re looking beyond your immediate needs and requirements and so forth look at the flowers of the field. They don’t do work. They don’t spend they don’t so they don’t do other activities, but there they are and all their beauty right? There are more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory as the metaphor is in the gospel. So there you are. It is something that you could say. Does not have any justification because it needs no justification. There was no reason to say well I meditate because it does this or that people will say this and I don’t say they’re wrong. I just say that that’s a very marginal part of it. Uh-huh because meditation is discovering who you truly are and it also in a perspective that I think is there in much greater tradition. Of the greatest traditions of humankind who or what is the ultimate in this reality in which we’re immersed and obviously many of our tradition speak of God, right and in very different terms, they can be and all have different metaphors and so forth. I might mention Buddhists are sometimes referred to as atheistic. Well, they’re not because you just ask them they ...