NOT Amazon Review. The limits of an Amazon Review meant severe reduction in summarizing Fr. Basil’s account of his trip(s) to the Holy Land. Personal reminiscences became redundant. This fuller version of the Review follows from the
Nunraw Chronicle 4-7 Sept 1982.
4th Saturday – Fr. Basil Pennington arrived in here for lunch, he is staying for 2 or 3 days.
6th Monday – He took the Community Mass, celebrating that of Labour Day. . . He has a lot to give: the brethren have enjoyed his talks very much; Spencer’s Cottage program, Spiritual Paternity and Maternity, Opus Dei, the Constitutions, Contemplation,, Centring Prayer, Cistercian Fathers –on all of which he spoke, informatively and entertainingly.
Fr. Basil took the community Mass again on the 7th for Vocations. He left us shortly after breakfast. His visit was better than any Retreat, it was like a breath of fresh air for many of us.”
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Fr. Basil Pennington; at Nunraw 4th-7th of September 1982; standing under the inn sign “The Pennington Arms” in the town of Ravensglass, Cumbria, not very far from the Pennington seat at Muncaster Castle.
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Journey in a Holy Land
A Spiritual Journal
M. Basil Pennington 2006 ISBN 1-55725-473-7
I was attracted by the title of this book, as I am by any book about the Holy Land.
From Nunraw to Latroun
In the 80s, early one morning I can see Basil Pennington and myself climbing over the railings at Melrose Abbey. The ancient ruins is in the care of Scottish Heritage. It was like Basil to be jumping fences. At that early hour the grounds men were not pleased to see us intruders. It would have been pointless to tell them that we Cistercian monks had more right than anyone to be there. We were in a hurry. Basil had come to give a course on Centring Prayer to our monks – something of a coals-to-Newcastle for contemplatives - during which he himself dozed off. Otherwise his talks on the Order were “like a breath of fresh air”. I was driving him in a search for his forebears, the Penningtons, in the L
ake District, Cumbria. When we got to the village of Pennington, true to character, Basil had to go straight to the Lord of the Manor at Muncaster Castle. Disappointingly his Lordship was away.
But that was typical of the direct simplicity of Basil on his many searches on many journeys, without which he would never have travelled so far. His “Journey in a Holy Land” was no different, nor was his genre of writing in all his books any different from the subtitle, “A Spiritual Journal”.
On the cover blurb he is described as “a monk of Spencer Abbey, Mass., who was perhaps the most widely travelled Cistercian monk in history”, an attribute not much favoured in monastic eyes. Our paths crossed in other unforeseen places as, e.g., at a Centenary Symposium in the Augustianum in Rome in the 90s.
En Route to his “Journey in a Holy Land” he tells how he was jetted into Istanbul where he had to give a practical session on Centring Prayer and later gave a paper on monasticism which, he says, “proved to be a rather unique contribution”.
The book itself consists of his day to day jottings about the Holy Places he has visited, his reflections and considerable passages from the Scriptures seemingly aimed for the use of participants in guided Pilgrimages. He sets off from Tel Aviv and Joppa up the coast to Caesarea and Lavra Netova. The pace seems rushed but the choice of this very remote monastery, Lavra Netova, indicates the bent of his interest. Here, he says, he felt he was on Mount Athos again.
Spiritual Journal or Holy Baedeker
At one point in the book, his musings focus on his monastic obedience and on whether he is called to the desert vocation. Most of those who knew him would smile at the thought. His actual lone ranger travels have a hermit on the move quality. To have the hermit and the lone ranger cohabit in the community could only be possible with a discerning Abbot and a humble and open hearted monk. That personal monastic inner search fits in oddly with his long travelogue but that is the nature of the book. As the journey proceeds, apart from the Pilgrimage framework, his momentum springs from his own inner reflections on his many interests as well as from the Scriptural, archaeological and religious terrain that he encounters. As the publishers explains, “When Pennington died June 3 2005 from injuries suffered in an auto accident, the manuscript of what has become his last book was found on his desk”. His journal is based on his first trip, but also incorporates three later tours. One can surmise that if he had had the opportunity, the author might have applied his undoubted editorial and organisational skills to more consistency. At times the narrative seems disjointed, jumping from the catching of a plane at Tel Aviv back to attending Vespers at the monastery. His observations, at time general, at times personal, at times of the tourist guide, at times of the monk, fall into the frame of his journeys elsewhere: India, China, Mount Athos, and suffer a levelling effect in the process. Because he touches lightly on so many Holy Places, he can also be out of touch at other levels.
Sacramentality of the Land Called Holy
He unerringly finds the trail to the very remote monastery of Lavra Netova. He does not mention the significance of the founder, Father Ya'aqov Willebrands drawn from the Dutch Trappist monastery of Zundert to dedicate his life in the land of Palestine. His aspiration of 1945, after hearing of the horrors of the Shoah, was realized eventually in 1961. “I want to share the adventure of the Jews returning to their old homeland. I will go to Palestine." From that moment the idea awoke: "I must go in his place, preferably with a group of monks from our abbey". (Typicon of the Lavra Netofa).
Here the insertion in the Melkite Church, love of the Jewish people and a sense of the quasi-sacramentality of the “The Land called Holy”, (Wilken, “Palestine in Christian History and Thought”), gives dimensions of the reality missed by the passing Pilgrim.
On the hills above Haifa he encountered a nun from Salt Lake City Carmel. He asked her why she, as an archaeologist, became a Carmelite. She said she had studied archaeology and that so confirmed the Bible for her that she wanted to get as close as possible to God. In his role as observer, Basil was not one to get his hands dirty, so to speak, at that earthly level.
Nor does he pay much attention to Geographical details. It is difficult to visualize the location he is describing. Way back in the Lake District, I took a photo of him standing under the inn sign of the Pennington Arms. He was holding his camera. He was never without it on his travels. He would be the first to say the virtue of a camera is that it is pointing away from yourself. The book is not enhanced by some unflattering black and white pictures centres on the author – the publisher’s choice?. The next Edition could be transformed from the collection of his own colour photos.
Even so his narrative can be graphic, as, e.g., talking through the Stations of the Cross. He does not give Scriptural exegesis, but describes the “powerful experience of the crowding through the streets getting jostled this way and that in the Via Dolorosa, rather than distracting from prayer only made it more real”.
Some times the narrative is leisurely, dwelling on Christ’s mysteries. At other times it is cumulative; piling one disparate thing after another in the manner of a journalist hard pressed by his Editor, or compressing the information of many Guidebooks into smaller bites.
Latroun Abbey 
At last he comes to visit his Trappist Brothers at Latroun Abbey. Here his flair for detail shows. Although his style is marked by the absence of dates one can work out, from the Blessing of Abbot Paul, that he visited Latroun in 1985. His account is very full and he makes this monastery the last stage of his journey. Ten years later I made an extended Sabbatical stay at Latroun Abbey and found the same welcoming spirit and benefited even more than Basil, I think, by being able to get more rooted in the Holy Land. (See my “Monastic Presence in the Holy Land Today”, Benedictine Yearbook UK 2005, pp. 27-31. Also “Holy Land Chronicle”, Link: nunraw.org.uk).
Unique Experience
At the end of his journey he comments that the visit to the Holy Land has been a unique experience and then adds, with the self effacing asides that pepper his reflections, that in conjunction with too many other experiences some of its impact will be lost. At heart he reveals a simple Catholic love and dedication. I like his musing as he commutes between Tabgha, the place of the multiplication of the loaves and at Capernaum as ponders the words of Jesus in the synagogue John 6, “Your forefathers ate manna and died, but those who feed on this bread will live for ever”. He prays, “How often have I eat this divine manna, yet I still hunger for it! It is daily bread and I hope I shall never have to live through a day without it”.
His publishers have simply taken the manuscript “Journey in a Holy Land” where it is at. And at that cut off point, it may be that we get the truest picture of Basil.
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