From cloister to nature's sanctuary: notes on my spiritual journey

From cloister to nature's sanctuary:
notes on my spiritual journey - Roman Verostko 2011

Grand Canyon, January 2000, photo by rv

A year after I graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh the U.S. was engaged in military conflict with North Korea and I was of draft age. The tragedies of World War II were still fresh in my mind, especially that of my older brother George who had been blown up in a half track in Germany in the last throes of the war. Such memories fueled my interest in a way of life withdrawn from the turmoil of war. Through the influence of another older brother, Bernard, I began reading about the history of western monasticism.

Bernard had committed himself to monastic life a couple years earlier. My weekend visits with him at the St Vincent monastery deepened my interest. But it was Thomas Merton's popular Seven Storey Mountain that captured my imagination and drew me to romantic notions of a cloistered life. On my 21st Birthday in 1950, I entered a scholastic program there as my first step to becoming a fully committed Benedictine monk and a priest. My spiritual formation intensified as I learned more about Benedictine traditions associated with art and spirituality.

Thomas Merton as a Cisterian Monk (1915–1968). His autobiography, Seven Story Mountain, first published in 1948 sold over 600,000 hard cover copies. Several colleagues, who were about my age and who had entered monastic life around the same time, had also been influenced by Merton's book. There had been a large influx into religious life about this time suggesting that our experience of WW II, the war in Korea and anxiety over the emerging cold war had set the climate for this surge.

Those years were filled with enthusiasm as we embraced spiritual, artistic and academic challenges. Eighteen years later I withdrew from monastic life. Since that time some friends have wondered about what caused me to make that change and where it has taken me.

For several years leading up to 1968 my meditations often led to self doubts and questions about what I truly believed or thought I believed. My advanced studies and reading in history & philosophy in New York and Paris drew me to look more critically at my approach to art and spirituality. My work as an artist came to be fraught with ambiguities in both form and content. My experimental audio-visual presentations posed evocative texts about our experience of life without pointing to answers. My "Psalms in Sound and Image" celebrated nature and the "marvelous" aspect of commonplace life. Those works led me to place more trust in my own experience of life. My innermost beliefs became disturbing questions I could not reconcile with my experience. Belief in a divine revelation, had faded. I came to realize that I had been hiding my unbelief with subtle rationalizations. I experienced myself emerging as an existential contradiction, an "unbelieving" believer or, the opposite, a "believing" unbeliever.

My final confrontation with myself took place in the last months of 1967 and the first weeks of 1968. In January, following a lecture tour with my "Psalms in Sound & Image", I found peace. Unwieldy doctrines that weighed heavily on me for decades faded. Their believability and binding force disappeared. I found myself free to follow the truth of my inner experience. An experience that would lead me more deeply into nature's sanctuary with a renewed life.

Leaving the monastery turned out to be a liberating experience. The restraint of unwieldy “creeds” was gone. My mind embraced the freedom to explore and ask questions without twisting answers to fit inherited beliefs. And it turned out to be OK to embrace life as a mystery without having an answer.

Freed from the time consuming repetition of prayers and religious ceremonies I had more time for my study and studio. More importantly, regional nature preserves became my sanctuary for meditation and reflection . Coupled with the study of world cultures these meditations nurtured a growing interest in our human relationship to nature and ecological ethics. For me our nature preserves emerged as precious "sanctuaries" of our time, cathedrals nurturing life.

Home Garden, Spring 2009

Through these sanctuaries the mystery of life and the immensity of cosmos has seeped more and more into my consciousness. This new life heightened my inner experience of "being here", awakening me to the binding interconnections to each other, to other life, and to the earth. This experience has charged me with a spiritual strength and peace I had not known before. It has brought me to embrace life more fully and to stand without any fear of the unknown.