Monks republish books from a Benedictine priest, writer, and sculptor

One of my favorite spiritual authors is the Benedictine writer Dom Hubert van Zeller (1905-84). His simultaneous humor and realism, along with brevity, make his work refreshing and accessible. “In writing on this and that in the spiritual life I have tried like the variety programme, to cater for every taste,” he says.

Over the past few years, the Irish monastery of Silverstream has brought eleven of his books back into print. Just completed are a set of four matching titles: We Work While the Light Lasts, We Die Standing Up, We Live with Our Eyes Open, and We Sing While There’s Voice Left. (Full disclosure: I had the opportunity to do some design work on these volumes in the course of their production, and am very pleased to introduce these volumes to readers.)

Van Zeller was a monk of Downside Abbey, a house of the English Benedictine Congregation. Born Claude to British parents living in Egypt, he was sent at a young age to Downside’s prestigious boarding school. Even then, he had begun to have a lifelong fascination with sculpture. He recounts his love of art, especially in his autobiography, One Foot Out of the Cradle, and in a more formal way in Approach to Christian Sculpture. On a Sunday picnic in Egypt, he meets an Arab boy carving designs into a piece of driftwood. From then on, van Zeller was obsessed with carving and sculpture. In high school he began to write: these two artistic endeavors would provide needed outlet for energies and even a form of ministry for the rest of his life.

After graduating from Downside, van Zeller worked for a year as a clerk, but what he really wanted to do was enter the monastery. This he did, although he would prove ill at ease in the English Benedictine Congregation. As Downside put an emphasis on ministry in schools and parishes, he wondered if he should be a hermit, and tried his vocation at the Carthusians. This was not a good fit, and so a slightly more contemplative line of work was found for him: writing, giving retreats, and serving as chaplain for nuns. Throughout, he sculpted off and on, and his work eventually became sought after in England and America.

He fell in love with America during his first visit across the pond in 1950, returning to the States many times. Van Zeller eventually served as chaplain to the Benedictine Nuns of St. Walburga’s in Colorado—which I’ve driven by many, many times going to and from Denver while living in Wyoming. It’s funny how such a seemingly far away figure—a British monk-author—who I only started reading in my twenties, turned out to have lived for several years at a place I had regularly passed.

Another fascinating aspect of Van Zeller’s life is his close friendships with other much better known Catholic authors, most notably the spiritual writer, scholar, and Bible translator Fr Ronald Knox; the Dominican author Fr Bede Jerret; and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited has become a Catholic classic and features in many courses on modern literature.

Zeller recounts Waugh’s reaction to his trip to America: asking Waugh what he thought of their mutual American acquaintance, who was to guide Zeller on his journey, Waugh responded: “[He’s] American. He can’t help it.” Of the same trip, Knox said, “You’ll hate it. They have meals out of heated cardboard boxes…” But van Zeller loved America, and his ministry there gave him a new energy—which was fortunate, since he had a rather melancholic personality. Into the 1970s and ‘80s, van Zeller continued to write, and obtained permission (as many English priests at the time did) to continue celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass.

The four volumes just republished date from the 1950s and early ‘60s. Unlike some authors of the time, however, I don’t believe this monk’s writing will hit the modern ear as stilted or stale. Van Zeller weaves anecdotes from his life into his writing, and tries above all to simplify the spiritual life in the best way possible: to discuss ways of prayer, good spiritual practices, and to remind us that it is not so much the way we get to God as the fact that we do get to Him, and are on a trajectory towards union with him that matters.

In We Live with Our Eyes Open, he comments that “What most of us need to cultivate is the innocent eye which is not ashamed to open in wonder.” When curiosity fails, van Zeller opines, we open ourselves up to listlessness. “The too enquiring mind is obviously more of a liability than an asset; but the mind which is too listless to enquire might just as well not exist at all.” If we retain curiosity which leads to wonder, there is the potential that we will not harden to the beauties of both the natural and supernatural life:

Hardly surprising that Christ so often gave us children as our models: to the child there is nothing commonplace, nothing which cannot be vested with some sort of interest. Even if we can’t welcome the normal with a glad cry of surprise, there is no reason why we should deny it the beauty which belongs to it. Beauty jumps out of the dustbin if you let it.”

One of van Zeller’s central themes is that happiness is not something to be looked for and lived for separately from life. In We Sing While There’s Voice Left, he comments that “Happiness, then, is not a matter of having a dream and working round towards its realization; it is much more a matter of being in tune.” Like happiness, which disappears if searched for as an end in life rather than a part of it that naturally comes and goes, so also van Zeller insists that holiness must not be looked upon as something “added” to life, but simply the same thing as “life.”

Van Zeller views love similarly: “Look to the meaning of love, and leave its emotion to come over and above its right use. As happiness is to life, so pleasure is to love: each to be found in its proper element but not to be looked for as an entity by itself.” If you look for happiness separately from the duties or proper actions of love, he is saying, then neither will work out well. “The essential is the life: the essential is the love. Miss out the essential and the rest crumbles to dust in your hand.”

Each of the four volumes contains advice on prayer, holiness for the layman, and considerations as wide ranging as fasting, marriage, liturgical vs private prayer, what “contemplation” is, and the like. Of all the volumes, I believe We Work While the Light Lasts is the most accessible and contains the most gems of spiritual advice: if you want to dip your toe into the world of Hubert van Zeller, start there. Thanks to the good work of the Monks of Silverstream, these books are now available in beautiful, newly typeset editions. Besides the monks own website, they can be purchased from Sophia Institute Press, and Amazon.