National Catholic Reporter Takes a Look at the Spiritual Life Institute

The monks at the Spiritual Life Institute are hermits focused on mysticism, yet the group embodies an earthy pragmatism, enabling them to build bridges between the institutional church and those struggling to find spiritual health and healing.

In their 40-year history, the hermits have founded four monasteries: in Sedona, Ariz.; Kemptville, Nova Scotia; Crestone, Colo., and the newest in Skreen, Ireland.

The Sedona and Kemptville hermitages have been closed because of vanishing wilderness. Residents think a border of wild lands is necessary to preserve the hermit spirit, but at these two locations developers have encroached on these borderlands.

Founded by Discalced Carmelite Fr. William McNamara, the Spiritual Life Institute began as an effort to renew the ancient Carmelite vision in a contemporary Christian community. In 1960, McNamara had an audience with Pope John XXIII, who blessed his effort and even gave advice on which bishops would support or oppose the project.

In 1963, McNamara became administrator of the Holy Cross Chapel in Sedona. Living in the high desert formed what would become known as the “desert experience,” an elemental part of the Spiritual Life Institute. McNamara believed a renewal of the eremitic Carmelite tradition required a desert or wilderness.

Striving to maintain the spirit of Vatican II, McNamara favored an ecumenical thrust, and pondered the ideal of a male-female community. The theory became reality when Tessa Bielecki came in 1967 after college. She had been impressed by McNamara during a college retreat. Bielecki is now the abbess of the institute.

The Nada–Spanish for “nothing”–Hermitage in Crestone sits at an altitude of 8,000 feet, where the vast San Luis Valley meets the towering Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains. The monks’–as both men and women here are called–small dwellings, bermed on one side with desert sand, evoke images of Colorado’s first hermits–miners seeking gold in the frigid mountains.
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Interview with What is Enlightenment Magazine

Here is an interview Abba Willie gave to What is Enlightenment Magazine in 2000:

WIE: Father McNamara, you are a Carmelite monk, a contemplative in one of the most respected monastic traditions in the world. What inspired you to renounce worldly life and set your feet to the path of asceticism and solitude?

FR. WILLIAM MCNAMARA: The original motive, affirmed and reconfirmed more passionately and intensely over the years, was and is a desire for the fullness of life. In order to be prepared for and receptive to that onslaught of life and love that the Creator provides for us in himself and through everything that is connected with him (because God is not a separate God, he is distinct and transcendental but not separate) one has to become pure, one has to become empty, one has to become responsive, one has to become alive and alert to all the possibilities of living. I wanted that fullness of life and I didn’t want to become halfhearted. I didn’t want to get caught in half-truths. I didn’t want to be stymied or seduced by mediocrity, by pseudo-events rather than events. I wanted the whole thing. I wanted utter reality. I wanted the ultimate. So I had to renounce whatever seemed to me to be less than real.

WIE: What did you see as being less than real?

WM: I found most communication an impediment to communion. We communicate so much—a veritable Vesuvius of verbiage—that we don’t hear the Word itself. The truth escapes us. I think that one of the worst pollutions in the world is verbal pollution.

So I didn’t want to be choked by verbal pollution, by a shallow, empty, febrile kind of talk. I wanted a life that was dominated by and permeated by silence. And then, out of that matrix of silence, I hoped that the deeper words would come, the primordial words. But the only words that would be worthwhile would be those which are connected with the original Word, the Word of God, the Word that became flesh.

Another thing would be the way reality escapes us, precisely because we are in such a hurry. We are in a stampede almost constantly. There’s no time to think, there’s no time to love, there’s no time to be. We’re driven to do, do, do at a rather shallow, superficial level, and that prevents us from being, which is most important. As Lao Tzu said, “The most important thing to do is to be.”

So that would be another aspect of the search for truth, the search for the Ultimate. Again, it’s communion rather than communication. If communication sets the stage for communion, that’s wonderful communication. If it doesn’t, it’s useless. The big thing that every human being is striving for is communion. And if that is not experienced on all levels—communion with God, communion with human beings, communion with animals, vegetables, minerals, the earth—then we experience the terrible affliction of loneliness and isolation. That’s what is dominating this modern society. Everyone’s lonely, everyone’s isolated. So we need time to be, we need enough silence to be, we need enough solitude to be, we need enough good communion with others to be.
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