Desolation Row

When I stayed at Gethsemani Abbey for several months, I chanted in the choir with the monks, and I stood next to Fr. Matthew. To say he was interesting would be an understatement. He would amble into the church in big black cowboy boots if he was feeling particularly masculine or slide into his spot in petite Chinese slippers if he felt in touch with his feminine side. The thick Boston accent from the city of his birth was present eighty years later and compounded by his propensity to mumble.

One afternoon I went out with him and the cellar to purchase some supplies for the monastery. We stopped by a drug store and Fr. Matthew, then in his mid-eighties, walked out with a carton of cigarettes. On his three hour morning walk he told me, he enjoyed one and felt it provided him with a little pep in his step. This shattered all my ideas about piety and holiness. For this I am forever grateful.

He has published several books of his talks including Sermons in a Monastery and The Call of Wild Geese. The following talk provides the unlikely marriage of one of my favorite musicians, Bob Dylan, and a cloistered monk speaking about spirituality. It certainly fits for Good Friday; this is simply the beginning of the talk the rest can be found here. Enjoy.

A Retreat Conference of Fr. Matthew Kelty, O.C.S.O. given at Gethsemani: January, 1970]
Desolation Row 1

Every scribe trained for the Kingdom of God is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things both new and old.2—Here is something old... It struck me for the first time in talking to you and in preparing a few more[conferences] for [the monastery of] Ava, that I say the same thing over and over again in a different way. It's like playing a guitar with one string: I play it sometimes loud and sometimes soft, sometimes quick and sometimes slow. But it seems to be the same string. It occurs to me that I'm much of a gatherer rather than a creator. I'm a primitive type. I don't cultivate and sow and reap. I walk up and down the beach and see what I can find — and every now and then I think I find something pretty good. And I look at it... And so I stumbled on this [song] Desolation Row 3 by Bob Dylan. I don't know anything about Bob Dylan, but this song is very good, and he wrote it. I think some people loathe him, others adore him. But most admit, I think, that his gifts are great and unusual. I don't know what has become of the song in the last couple of years, but it is a series of images more or less connected. Listening to it, you try to get what the message is. And it seems to be a song about the failure of love, and that admission of failure in love is the beginning of healing, and therefore the way to genuine love.


There's a lot of stanzas that describe various characters: some of them from history, some from literature, some of them just types — of all kinds. And the overall indictment seems to be: they failed in love. And what happens when people discover they failed in love? They look for someone to hang it on, someone to punish for their own failure. But Dylan's point seems to be — at least as I read it; you may read it completely differently — that this is not the answer at all. The answer is in the admission that you yourself have failed, and that desolation is not the characteristic of someone else's heart, but of your own. And you realize that you live on Desolation Row. To admit this is to shed pretense and to open the way to a genuine understanding of what love is.


I find it remarkable that so young a man — he was only in his early 20's when he wrote it — should be so shrewd an observer, so keen in his look into the human heart, so aware of contemporary need. I believe he would know what I was talking about if I told him that I thought monastic choir was a lot like Desolation Row.


In the song they are hanging Casanova because he failed in love. Often enough we act this out in our lives. We seek a Casanova that we can hang with good conscience: we hang the abbot, or the house, or the Order, or the religious life, or the Church, or the priesthood, or the community. Anyone, just so long as it is someone else. For if there is one thing we try by all means to make clear it is this: we do not live on Desolation Row. That's why the song ends: "Don't write me no more letters — no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row." (Not very good English, but it has a message.)


It is by being wretched that we win the Mercy of Christ, and by admitting and accepting our wretchedness that we are healed. You know: you go out into the sunshine and you reveal your wounds. And the sun heals them.

What do you do when you discover that Desolation Row is not only the name of a song, but also the name of the street you live on? When you discover after years in holy vows, pledged to chastity, that you still hunger for affection and seek it greedily, that you have no genuine love? It is a shocking thing to grow into maturity (as I am doing) and discover in your past life that you've had little love. What do you do when you realize honestly that you have no love at all for poverty? That you want it as nice as you can make it under the circumstances? What do you do when you realize truthfully that you live in constant fear that some day God may ask you to do something you don't want to do? That is to say: What do you do when it comes home to you that the field of dry bones4 is yourself? That the abomination of desolation5 is you? That Lazarus6, three days dead in the tomb and stinking is not Lazarus at all, but a man with your name? What do you do, in other words, when you learn you are not real, and that the relation between you and the place you live in and the clothes you wear and the things you do, is no relation at all? When it suddenly dawns on you: I am a resident of Desolation Row? What do you do?? Why, you thank God and you sing out for joy that liberation has come, that the day of redemption is at hand!


Discovery that one lives on Desolation Row is a common experience today, because it is a time of judgment: krisis — as in the Greek: "crisis". But the response to this discovery is not always one of gratitude. Sometimes it's flight: people flee from marriage, flee from vows, from Sacred Orders, from society, with the feeling that in this way they will escape the phony. They are mistaken. Marriage is not phony, nor are the vows of Religion, nor Sacred Orders, nor society. It is rather man [who is phony]. God made the world. It's not phony. There's a lot of phoniness in it. Most of it has two legs. Man is not delivered from the phony by taking a trip! If anything, this will make even more clear his unreality.


—Which is one reason why men come to the monastic desert: not to escape their phoniness, but to discover it. Not because they are real, but because they wish to become so. That's when men in a monastery begin to discover the dimensions of their own reality. Running does not always seem to be the appropriate answer. Sooner or later you've got to stop running. And "running" anyhow is just a way of talking; it need not be understood literally. Many people who are running as fast as their legs will carry them are not even moving. Even their running has something unreal about it. Which does not mean everyone leaving the monastery is necessarily running. Nor everyone remaining, holding his ground.


It seems to me that the acceptance of desolation is not merely an accessory to the monastic life, but of its very structure. It is so because that is the point in Christ's redemption. For Christ's life, death and resurrection was not just an "adjustment," a "tune-up," but a complete, entire rebirth. And this rebirth was begun in our death and birth-to-life in Baptism and continues all our life. It will never be complete until the last act by which we at once die and are born to life eternal. But while we live we are constantly being put to death, and constantly being born to life. And the two actions are generally so interwoven and so interlaced, that it is usually impossible to know what is going on. What we take to be our death, may be our new birth. And what we interpret as a new lease on life, may be the beginning of the end. This is certainly true of our residence on Desolation Row. Not many are too anxious to accept the truth of the situation. And when they do, too often it is in terms of being the ultimate catastrophe.


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