Judy explores the path Charles Brandt took to become a Hermit Priest.
In the interview Charles reads from the Marriage of East and West by Bede Griffiths,
Quotes
“…he says we in the west we’re living from one half of our soul from the conscious rational level and we needed to discover the other half – the unconscious intuitive dimension and he said I went there (to India) because I wanted to experience in my life the marriage of these two dimensions of human existence the rational and the intuitive the conscious and the unconscious the masculine and the feminine. I wanted to find the way to the marriage of east and west…”
“…you know just recently the holy father has said that we should study these eastern religions and we can benefit from them because you know they were practicing a type of monastic life contemplative life far before before Christ and we can benefit from their great discoveries in the east…”
“…first of all and foremost I’m concerned with discovering this deeper level this intuitive level of contemplation, this union experience of god not only for myself but for other people…”
Hunt for History with Judy Hagen 1989 – Transcript
Judy: Welcome to Hunt for History. This week we are on location at the hermitage which is on the Oyster River, and I know that you are going to hear the Oyster River as it just kind of rambles down the side of the building. Our guest is Father Charles Brandt. Charles its really a delight to be out here and I know that our viewers are going to be very interested in hearing about the history of the hermitage
Charles: Well, you are very welcome and you commented on the beauty on the drive coming in. It’s a wonderful introduction to the hermitage. You know we’re sitting here and its absolute solitude and just a few thousand feet away there’s a big subdivision that we’re unaware of because we are surrounded by trees and God’s nature and beauty. We’re not really aware of all the busy civilization around us.
Judy: Now you came here to have a contemplative life.
Charles: That’s right. You know, I think even as a child you know my hero as a child was Henry David Thoreau and Henry David in the 19th century, he went to Walden Pond, and he wanted to see what life was all about. That was his purpose in going. And he felt that most people were living quiet lives of desperation. Those were his words. So, he went for a experience the real meaning of life and as I say he was kind of my childhood hero and I always so kind of a life like that. As a Christian I would you know pray always. How do you do that. How can you pray all the time? It was always a puzzle to me. And then later I became an Episcopalian, or an Anglican and I entered seminary as an Anglican and in Wisconsin and I was ordained a deacon. Then I went to England because I wanted a life of prayer, contemplative life. I wanted to pursue this life of praying always. I really didn’t know exactly what that meant. But there wasn’t anything in North America of a contemplative nature in the Anglican church.
So I entered a community up in West Riding of Yorkshire (?) the Community of Resurrection and they let me it was sort of an ordintory??? type whatever your entry (?) was you could follow it then pray a lot and then while I was there I was ordained to the Anglican priesthood by the Bishop of Wakefield, took a lot of legal maneuvering because I was an American citizen at the time. So, then I was ordained but I still wanted this life, so I came back. I realized that really wasn’t where I belonged, so I came back to America, and I settled as an Anglican hermit in New England, and I was a chaplain in Kent School which is just a few miles away. And then from there I went to the Anglican Benedictines in Michigan and became an Anglican novice monk in a Benedictine House and gradually it became clear to me that I should become a Catholic and you know its interesting while I was at this house there, somebody said you should read the Golden String by Bede Griffiths. And in Golden String is a line from Blake. I give you the end of a golden string, wind it into a ball and it shall lead you through a narrow gate that passes through Jerusalem’s wall. That’s not exactly it but very close to it. So, I read this book and it’s really about his own conversion. He knew CS Lewis at Oxford; he was his tutor and after he graduated, he had a group of his friends lived went into part of Suffolk????? And lives sort of a life just off the land trying to get… something like Thoreau getting to what is life really all about. And they begin to read the bible just as literature for the beginning. Then they realized there was more to it than literature, so then he became a practicing Anglican. Then he was received eventually into the church became a monk at Greenwich abbey and then he always wanted to go to India to take the gospel to India.
Anyway, I read this book, and there are two books in there one was John Henry Carter Newman’s book Apologia Pria Sua??? talks about his conversion or his life because somebody said just what does Mr Newman really mean and so he wrote the book in just a matter of days to tell people what he really meant and the other book I read which he recommended was Bede’s Ecclesiastical history. This was written in the sixth century. And Bede was a monk, a benedict monk. So on the basis of that I thought well you know I have been studying this faith for about seven years and I should really become a Catholic so I ended up in a …studying in a Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma. Just as my Bishop gave me permission and they had a book bindery there and that’s where I learned book binding while I was at…You know the Benedictines have this sense of crafts and culture and thought in the Middle Ages…. cities were built around….. back to sixth century. So then I was received into the Catholic church and I entered the Cistercian Benedictine house in Dubuque, Iowa and I was there for 7 years and before I went there I went to visit Thomas Merton, famous spiritual writer at Gethsemane abbey. Before I went there… and he said well don’t come here to the abbey, he said we’ll make you a good monk but not a good contemplative, because you know the place was really very busy and even though it’s a….they don’t speak and they had big offices, hours and time in chapel, they had very little time just to practice silent quiet contemplative prayer. So he was sort of looking for something and later he went to Bangkok and he actually did become a hermit at the same time that I did at Gethsemane living on the grounds, but then he went to Bangkok and gave a conference and was electrocuted there. But he was a….
Why don’t you write Thomas Merton and this is that very letter that he answered me. This is his answer. And he said, well if you do become a hermit some place, this is his signature, Father Lewis’s signature from Gethsemane and you will probably find it pretty rough going. But he was a great inspiration Thomas Merton for me to come here. So, I finally got permission to come out to Vancouver Island on the Tsolum River where the hermits were and its such as small world isn’t it, when…. isn’t it when you think about it?
Judy: So how long had the hermits been here before you actually joined them
Brandt: Before they came, I came in March of 1965 and they had come in August of 1964 so that’s just a few months before and its interesting. I just have a little article here. You can see some of the pictures. This is a picture of our founder Jacques Winandy and Jacques Winandy was an abbot of a famous Benedictine house in Belgium, Luxumberg and as a young monk he wanted to become he wanted to be a hermit, he wanted the contemplative life so his father who was a wealthy business man in the town nearby said well, first of all try this abbey that is right here on our doorstep so he did and he was very intelligent and sent him to Rome to study he was a scholar and then when he retired he still had this desire for the real contemplative heremitic life. So, he went to Martinique for a time just to fill in for a prior there and you know people who live the religious life they know what’s going on all over the world. If you want good accommodation you go to Paris, go to a strictly enclosed order this is a good hotel to go to. They know what’s going on, so the monks all over the world they knew that Jacques Winandy had gone to Martinique so several got permission to join him and then they decided that wasn’t the place for a hermitage so they went to Texas and to find solitude in Texas they would have had to purchase a section of land which they couldn’t afford. So, one of the members was a doctor, a MD and he Pieco a Dr O’Pieco (sp?) and he said, well, there’s Vancouver Island. It has a Mediterranean climate. So, Father John and Father Winandy came to Victoria, and they spoke to Remi, Bishop Remi De Roo and Remi was the youngest Bishop in the Catholic church at the time in Canada and he was very avant guard, open to many, many things, very open person and he’s Belgique himself, his family, from Winnipeg and southern Manitoba is a Belgian colony. So, they in fact they say if you want to be a Bishop you have to be in Manitoba you have to be Belgique. So, he welcomed the hermits and we established what we call pia unio (sp?) which is kind of a contract. I’ll accept you and you accept me. It wasn’t an official stable permanent everlasting foundation and so they came looking for land and there was a real estate man in Victoria who said, Well there is some property up on the Tsolum River. So they took a look at it and right across from the old town of Headquarters. So that’s where they settled, and they got a donation from a benefactor in Wisconsin bought the land and 1 acres and lived right along the Tsolum river there. So when I came, they were sort of beginning to get established and I was quite surprised because I learned that you had to not only earn your own living as a hermit but you also had to build your own hermitage and so that was quite a challenge.
Judy: You hadn’t done that before.
Charles: Well I. No, I really don’t think I really had. I was an officer in the Air Force. I earned a living for a short time doing that. I never really had a job I had been studying all my life various places and so forth, So I had to earn my living, so I felt what better way to do it than book binding and I had a few tools and some monks in Lafayette I wrote to them, and they said well we have some extra equipment. So, they sent it to me, and I set up a little bindery there on the Tsolum River in my hermitage and this would have been sort of the end after I built my hermitage during that year 1965.
Judy: and you actually you still have that as part of the building that we are at today.
Charles: that’s right it that old part of the hermitage over there in fact we were looking at the equipment in the basement that guillotine and that backing machine that was given to me monks in Lafayette in Oregon. And then later I was accepted as one of the hermits and you’re voted in. (11:4)
And the bishop had said well if you are eventually accepted to the hermicile (sp?) I will ordain you to the priesthood and I had always wanted to be a priest, a Catholic priest and so I was elected and so I was ordained then on in Canadian Marsh Church in Courtenay on Nov 21st 1966 and just I have this as my certificate of ordination and its signed by Remi, Bishop Remi de Roo and its interesting he says that Ordained as a diocese priest of the church of Victoria his pastoral assignment is to serve the people of God as a priest hermit according with the decrees of the with the statutes of the Hermits of St Johns the Baptist approved February 2nd of 1965. So, these are the statutes. So that was something. And this was written up in the Colonist.
Judy: Well, I thought it was interesting that it was 2 years that such a designation had been made to have a hermit priest.
Charles: That’s right It was quite an unusual precedent. As I say, Bishop Remi was quite open Avant guard. Yes, and this just shows some of the things like. This is actually my mother giving her my first blessing as a priest and picture of the hermitage and the ordination. So, it’s quite an exciting time for me.
Judy: And it was also an exciting time in the church as this was the time of Vatican II
Charles: That’s right Pope john Paul Pope John and he said he wanted to open the windows of the church to let in a little fresh air which was wonderful and you know that I know just kind of a ecumenical ground you’re Lutheran and I’m a Catholic and people say that you know that had Lutheran lived the time of Pope John or Pope John lived the time of Luther perhaps there have never been a reformation because…
Judy: I believe that
Charles: I do too. It seems like it was partly political and certainly the church not the church as a whole but this business of indulgences and very difficult to understand I can understand Lutherans opposition to the selling of indulgences. That was the thing that really upset him and the church apologized for that kind of thing today but I do think that it might never have happened and
Judy and the course of history would have been completely changed
Charles: but I think today we are moving back towards unity of the various Christian bodies. They are moving back again and it’s interesting you know I plan now a trip to India. I mentioned Bede Griffiths, and this is his latest book and its called the Marriage of East and West and he went to India and he said he went there to discover the other part of his soul. May I just read just one little paragraph. He says, we in the west we’re living from one half of our soul from the conscious rational level and we needed to discover the other half, the unconscious intuitive dimension and he said I went to India because I wanted to experience in my life the marriage of these two dimensions of human existence, the rational and the intuitive. The conscious and the unconscious. The masculine and the feminine. I wanted to find the way to the marriage of the east and west. So, he went there looking for a far greater unity You know just recently the holy father has said that we should study these eastern religion and we can benefit from them you know because they were practicing a type of monastic life contemplative life far before Christ and we can benefit from their great discoveries in the east so I really look forward to going to the east and spending… I am leaving in October, and I am going to southern India a place called the State of Tamil Nadu at Shantivanum Ashram Satinanda. So, it’s a very exciting adventure and pilgrimage for me.
Judy: Now you know you’re talking about all the things you do and to me when I think of a hermit I think of someone who is totally separate from the world who wouldn’t be even doing TV programs who wouldn’t certainly be involved with the environment as you have, I can understand doing the book-binding because that is something you would do as part of a contemplative lifestyle. I find that interesting and I think our viewers do to when we think of the hermitage, we think of people being so isolated from the community.
Charles: Well in a sense I really am isolated, but I am also in touch with what is going on and I would say that my life is really sort of three layered in a sense I am first of all I think foremost I am concerned with discovering this deeper level this intuitive level of contemplation of this union experience of God. Not only for myself but for other people and I teach Christian meditation, or Centering Prayer I give retreats from time to time in Victoria and Bethlehem retreat centre in Nanaimo and may be giving a retreat in India too, so I teach that kind of contemplative prayer. Maybe we can we say a little bit more about that later, and then I am also interested in the earth because I think God is present there. You know the original blessing is God’s creation of the earth 19 billion years ago or whenever it happened and I think God is not nature, but God is in nature, and we have to respect it. It is something sacred and if I see something happening to that why then I have to speak out, I have to say something about it. So ordinarily I don’t look for things to do or action to take place but if something presents itself, I feel that from my life I have to say something. That’s right. Out of love for God’s beauty and out of his earth. If we lose the earth in a sense, what have we got. We’ve got nothing.
Judy: that’s right so you said its three layers so what’s the third one.
Charles: Yes So, I guess I mentioned myself and then others. I think that would be second and then the earth.
Judy: The reaction to God’s world then
Charles: that’s right
Judy: Which of course, anybody that is aware of the environment is very aware of what you are doing for the environment.
Charles: I’m sorry and the other thing that I didn’t mention the third thing that is really important is to conserve what flows from man’s spirit and that’s the creative things that he does such as works of art, his writing, his books. That’s what I do. That’s why I really do conservation. Why I have a conservation studio here. So, its all sort of conservation. Conserving my Soul, Spirit, Spirit of others conserving the earth and conserving what flows from man’s spirit. Those three different layers.
Judy: Now the other hermits were they also involved in other projects that would lend themselves to their lifestyle.
Charles: Well, you know Father Winandy. What did he do? Well, we had to make a living. That was a very different thing for most of us to do. It was a lot easier for me. But most of them had a really hard time. There’s a picture of Mathew here and you know Matthew tried to do a little farming and he actually had a goat and here it shows him a picture of him feeding his goat and he worked as a fire warden during certain parts of the season to make a living. Another person did some pottery. A Father Winandy quite a latin scholar he created papers and occasionally he would go out and take a service for Father Tunner. I would do that from time to time. I would go to Cumberland for a period of time and take for a time Bishop Remi would you like to go down to Salt Spring Island. The priest has left there, and I need somebody temporarily, so I did that. As far as speaking out I am not sure, maybe Dunsten Morrisy (sp?) he was pretty much into social justice, and he would write about things and for example I do a little bit of writing. This is our Island Catholic News and picture of Bishop Remi de Roo and Bishop Shephard over on Friendly Cove consecrating …… and this is an article I did called Rivers Forever; I like the way sort of ….and what it is is kind of an answer. You know the forestry groups have been having a program called, Forests Forever and I felt it was a bit one sided because they don’t talk about some odit (??) Forever, or rivers forever but just isolating one Forest Forever and I don’t think you can have forests in isolation. You have to look at the whole ecology at the whole picture so that’s what I am trying to do. It’s a corrective thing. To make people aware that there’s more than just forest, there’s the whole environment to be concerned about.
Judy: So, each of you then that were here and working as the was working hermitage and the number of you and then each of you have a specific thing you did. Did you get together daily to have meals or
Charles: Well, no, there was no communal life. Some of the big feasts like feast St Benedict or we would get together and have a celebration at Easter and maybe Christmas a communal celebration at Father Winandy’s hermitage but I think the thing that happened was that we just have a lot of meetings about property and taxes and about the car and I think a lot us felt that we’re getting sort of back into a community again and these were monks that had come from all over the world and they were formed monks. They weren’t just accidental people off the street. They had been living the Benedictine or Cistercian contemplative life for years and they wanted to go off into the desert and that’s kind of a natural law that was recognized by Benedict that after a time you go off into the desert and you live the communal life, and you go off and enter into hand-to-hand combat with Satan or enter into a deep prayer in the desert. So, then we came, and we found out It was kind of a community life. We wanted to give… So, we talked to Bishop Remi de Roo, and he said if you can find a piece of property someplace you can live as an individual hermit and so we begin to do that. So we begin to move to various places and I went around and I found a number of places for the other hermits like on Hornby (Island) I found a place and the Savoys (sp?) offered me a piece and then down on….the Island off of Salt Spring I can’t think of it right now….not Pender but there is a little island there, and up at Port Alice and at Nanaimo and…Donald went down to live on the Gogos (sp?) …. property and Bernard went to Hornby and somebody else went to Port Alice so forth so we sort of kind of found a place and I came to the Oyster River and I wanted to live on a river because I thought that it was really important the sound, it’s the movement of the river and it’s a very spiritual thing a river. And it speaks, it speaks to you. I always hear it. Its never out of my sound of my hearing.
Judy: Now it was interesting to me that you had gone to Peel Neil Andersons (sp?) company to do this
Charles: Yes, I don’t know why, why I went to him I guess I think we were talking about this before and you said that he might be a member of the parish. I didn’t remember that that’s probably the reason I did go to him. And I went and I said I would like to find something on a river so finally one of his agents said, well, we have found a piece on Catherwood Road that’s where we are now. And I remember walking in that coming in this clearing and a perfect spot for a hermitage you know and I knew that was the spot and it was too expensive. I couldn’t possibly afford it and then I found out there were two lots, and I was able to because I was working as a technician near my hermitage for the Federal Fisheries they set up a hatchery just 2 ft from where I was. I had a little bit of money, so I was able to get this property some savings
Judy: You were a biologist
Charles: Yes, I was trained in Cornell as a biologist
Judy: So, everything fit in. It was all in the pattern so that you would end up here on this piece of property.
Charles: It seems that way doesn’t it yes.
Judy: Because everything as we have spoken before all the crafts that you have learned all the other things it just everything seemed to be dovetailing in so that you would be able to be here for your contemplative life.
Charles: It’s a wonderful privilege you know I would just like to if we have a moment talk a little bit about you say what is the hermit life and the hermit life the contemplative life is really living a life of prayer I said that I was always sort of seeking how do you pray without ceasing like St Paul says to pray without ceasing and Jesus teaches us to enter into your closet and pray and in the 4th century I’m talking about John Cassian who went to the East to discover a teacher who prayed and he met the Abbot Issi (sp?)and it’s contained in these conferences Cassian and benedict admonishes his monks to read these conferences in that he tells this experience with the abbot and the abbot when you pray take a single phrase a single word and just repeat it for the entire time that your prayer don’t think about it but it kind of entering into a great poverty and so that’s what we do when we pray. At least that’s what I do and people practice centering prayer they take a word like Maranatha and they repeat it for the entire time they are praying. They are not thinking, they’re trying to get beyond their concepts, their imagination, their intellect, entering into a deeper consciousness and exposing themselves to the consciousness of resurrected consciousness of Christ and he’s there and all we have to do is get rid of all the clutter that surrounds us. Get rid of our false self, enter into our true self, opening up ourselves to this consciousness of Christ and that’s what prayer is. It’s the prayer of Jesus.
Judy: You know we have come to the end of our program, and I think that’s rather a fitting close to it as you explain exactly what it is to be in the contemplative life. Charles, I really appreciate you allowing us to come out to your place of quiet of rest. Its has been wonderful for me to be out here and away from the cares of the world and I hope that our viewers get that sense of peace that we have found here.
Charles: I am certainly happy that you are able to share this peace.
Judy: Thank you We’ve been talking to Father Charles Brandt about the Hermitage. Thank you all for watching and we’ll see you again next week on Hunt for History.