Homily 
for the Funeral of 
Dom Basil Pennington 

He regarded Dom Edmund as his spiritual father. Thinking big was one of the great qualities of Dom Edmund. He was a person-centered Abbot, a spiritual father in the fullest sense of the word, and he was Basil’s model. Both of these great men were naturally gifted in what, in corporate language, might be called “empire building”. They were prepared to bring the experience of Spencer to all its foundations both of men and women. 

Dom Edmund was a leader who recognized his own limitations and could delegate enormous responsibility to what he called “his team.” This was the model that Basil was imitating, at least, so it seems to me. 

There were four major figures that we should never forget when we think of the efforts that went into the building of this monastery and all of its foundations. The first one was the gifted Brother Leo Gregory who raised the money for these immense undertakings. He was a genius in reaching the hearts of people who could contribute. At the same time, he was a significant witness to monastic life and blew most people away when they first ran into him as a profoundly prayerful monk. 

There was Brother Blaise Drayton, who was also a genius, brilliant in every way, especially in architecture, liturgical art and organization. Brother Blaise designed all the monasteries, especially this one with the help of experts in the Cistercian tradition like Father Lawrence Bourget. 

There was Brother Gerard Bourke who built the new monasteries. He served as hands-on construction boss of Spencer and of the monasteries in Snowmass and Azul, Argentina. 

The fourth member of this team was Father Owen Hoey who upheld the regular monastic regime in the midst of all the burgeoning expansion and accompanying activity. 

None of this could have happened without those four men. Dom Edmund found in these monks a very dynamic group of people, unquestionably moved by the Spirit of God. Basil represented a potential second generation of similar people. He took a big part in the events surrounding the Second Vatican Council and all the reforms that followed from it in the Cistercian Order and in the community. But Dom Edmund left behind more than just a series of accomplishments. At the peak of his expansion program he was in a serious airplane accident and a few years later resigned as abbot of Spencer. After several brief stops, he settled at the foundation in Argentina where he spent the rest of his life. There he experienced the diminishment of his enormous capacities to build, to create, and to bring gifted people into vital mutual interaction to produce enormous results.

You know what happened to Dom Edmund during his last years. He suffered incredible interior trials. First of all, he couldn’t learn Spanish. He experienced, as he told me, the withdrawal of all spiritual consolations. He endured the diminishments of self that Teilhard de Chardin speaks about. In other words, God gave him the grace of experiencing not just the satisfaction of great accomplishments, but the purification of his enormous creative energies and talents. The ultimate best use of talents seems to be to sacrifice them. You may not like to hear this but I’m afraid that is the truth. It’s in letting go and allowing the divinely inspired process of humiliation and the growing sense of powerlessness to enter our lives. Dom Edmund died in that dark night.

I suspect this is what happened to Basil as well. His enormous creative abilities needed the purification process that he evidently underwent in the last few years of his life, when his desires to be a spiritual father in the mold of Dom Edmund and to bring contemplative practice into the world of lay persons were reduced to nothing. These noble desires had to be brought into contact with the humbling process of being just another human being. 

Basil, it seems to me, presents each of us, especially monks who are called in a unique way to transformation into Christ, with a profound paradox. The teaching of his last days seems to me to run along these lines: “You have to let go of everything that you’ve treasured and loved, whether in your ministry, in your talents, or in your aspirations.”

Jesus emphasizes this truth in a wonderful wisdom saying, which I think has been weakened in some translations. The North American Bible translation formerly used in the liturgy and which I prefer says: “One who seeks to save his life (accomplishments, talents, self-image) will bring himself to ruin. But one who brings himself to nothing, will find out who he is.”

Towards the end, his surgeon performed a tracheotomy. That meant he couldn’t speak any more. Can you imagine what that was for a man who was a kind of artesian well of wisdom in every direction, to not even be able to say “Boo”? Here’s a man with such tremendous physical energy, lying on a bed for 67 days, virtually unable to move. 

His was not an ordinary sickness. Neither was the illness of Lazarus, a portion of which we read in today’s Gospel. Lazarus wound up where? In the tomb. What images does this conjure up? Utter powerlessness, death, loneliness, loss of everything loved, including friends. Nobody is going to join you in a tomb. The damp, dark nature of a tomb is not appealing to the living. All of these images suggest the pain of facing one’s own interior corruption and the intimate purification that divine love brings about in those who, like Basil, have the courage to say an unmitigated “yes” to whatever happens. 

His last words on the day of his death, when the doctor offered him another operation to try to preserve his life were: “I’ve had enough. Take out the ventilator”. He knew this meant certain death. To me these words suggest coming to the very bottom of interior desolation, loneliness, depression, perhaps the feeling of despair - the powerlessness for which there are no human words to describe. 

Death is the birth canal into eternal life. It’s the re-enactment of our original struggle to be born into this world. The more difficulty in getting through that birth canal of dying, the greater the share there is in the divine life. In losing everything - his talents and even the possibility of speaking - Basil entered into the fullness of his capacity for leadership. And perhaps we’ll see in the future a greater appreciation of his books and tapes and ministry, which extended into Asia, Australia, and Africa. He was ready to go anywhere, even into Antarctica, but nobody invited him there. 

What Basil is modeling for us now is the most sublime kind of leadership, the kind of leadership that flows from Christ’s passion, death, and please don’t forget it, descent into Hell. This last phrase is in the Creed, so we can never take it out of there. It hints that there’s a place worse than death that we can participate in even in this life. Some people are in that place even now through terrible trials like mental illness, oppression, poverty, violence and all the horrors associated with them. There’s an interior side to such external trials that seems to be recapitulated in Basil’s last words; “I’ve had enough.” They must be balanced with what he said two weeks earlier: “I give myself over completely to God’s will and to the love of Jesus and Mary,” for whom, as you know, he had great tenderness. This state of utter interior poverty is a sublime participation in the sufferings of Jesus and Mary. He was well prepared to enter that state through his grasp of lectio divina, his lifelong practice of meditation, and his will to serve the church and the whole world. 

What’s left in the tomb, when all of one’s self-identities such as one’s role, one’s beloveds, one’s talents, one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, one’s body, are no longer possible to identify with? Now there’s just you, the true self, whoever the hell you are. To be able to accept that is to enter into eternal life, trusting with boundless confidence in the infinite mercy of God. As far as I can see, there is no other possession in this world worth having compared to that one. If we have the infinite mercy of God, we don’t need anything else. 

Basil’s invitation is to follow him, as he followed Dom Edmund, into the purgatorial fires, and even a real brush with the interior desolation or hellishness of the feeling of alienation from God and the inner paralysis that can’t make any acts of love or think of God. Basil now enjoys the fulfillment of his desires to be a spiritual father that were somewhat frustrated during his life, at least to the extent that he envisaged it. What he now enjoys is servant leadership, the capacity to lead out of powerlessness. And this, I suggest, is or will be the most effective form of leadership in the world of the future. People have had enough of pride, pretension, power, and especially violence. 

In this way, as Jesus destroyed violence by submitting to it, Basil enters into the fullness of the grace of the children of God. As a cell in the Mystical Body of Christ, each of us has the total program of transformation in Christ through the Holy Spirit, the divine DNA, so to speak, manifested in the exercise of the theological virtues and the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. This spiritual empowerment is within us through the grace of Baptism. We just think it isn’t there. But it’s there, ready to be activated through contemplative prayer and the service of others.

Basil invites us into the depths of purification, which is especially intense for very talented people, but which frees their gifts and enables their fullest possible expression in what we call eternal life and resurrection. We celebrate Basil’s transition, transformation, and final liberation. Let’s invite all the deceased members of our beloved community at Spencer, and everybody who has benefited from its spiritual riches, to join us with their prayers to make of this experience today a corporate celebration of the great men who have served Saint Joseph’s Abbey.

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