Peregrina’s Progressive Pickle: The Story of Vox Benedictina[i] by Margot H. King For the past many years, people have asked me how on earth I got myself into the progressive publishing pickle called Peregrina. Now that the Vox Benedictina phase of Peregrina is drawing to its close, I feel the time has finally come to tell the story. That I have not told it before will soon become clear. It is personal and perhaps too revealing, but it is an important story because it tells how Providence works in an apparently broken life: how healing can come through the people one meets in the middle of the pilgrimage – unexpected and apparently synchronistic encounters which utterly change both the direction and the quality of one’s life. It is not my story, not the story of a recovering alcoholic called Margot Bujila, a Saskatoon-raised cradle Catholic who married, changed her name to King, received a PhD at the University of California in Berkeley, lived in England, returned to Saskatoon, reared three children, worked as the librarian at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, survived a broken marriage, began a financially insecure publishing business, and edited a small journal called Vox Benedictina. It is, though, a story which, thirteen years later, still makes me gasp with wonder and thanksgiving and which, I am convinced, can happen to anyone who, as fearful and desperate as I was in 1981, reaches the point where the only alternative to disaster is what Maggie Ross calls the “free-fall of faith.” By the summer of 1979, although in bad spiritual shape and filled with self-doubt, I had tentatively resumed my studies, sustained by the belief in me of my former adviser in Berkeley, Charles W. Jones and his wife Sally, who had, among many other signs of loving support, given me his entire research library. That summer, thanks to a grant from St. Thomas More College, I was planning to do some research into monastic grammar (an extension of my doctoral work on Bede’s grammatical treatises) at the library of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. Thus do the plans of mice and women! Shortly before my departure, an inter-library loan arrived from an anchoress in Regina whose bishop had asked her to produce a formal rule for him. Intrigued and curious to meet a modern-day Julian, I suggested that I bring down some of Jones’s books on hermits. When she told me that she had no Latin and could not translate the Rules herself, I offered to check them out myself when I was in Toronto. I drove back to Saskatoon in a state of euphoria but my life continued to spin out of control. Despite the pleas of concerned friends like Sue and Ernie McCullough, I steadfastly refused to seek treatment for my alcoholism but did make a retreat at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter’s in Muenster, Saskatchewan. With Abbot Jerome Weber as a wise counseller, I spent a blessed two weeks doing nothing more than attending the Office, praying in a disjointed fashion, looking at the flowers and listening to the birds. All was well, I thought, and returned to Saskatoon – only to discover that the “problem” had not disappeared.   Despite personal disintegration, life goes on – and a few weeks later, I found myself on the plane to Toronto. Once ensconced in the Institute Library, I found that the prospect of tracking down grammatical treatises too dreary to be endured and, in a vain attempt to collect myself, decided to start looking for rules for recluses. And then began one of the strangest experiences of my life. Everywhere I looked, on every shelf of the library, names, biographies, and stories of women recluses came tumbling down. At the end of my two-week stay, I had done nothing on the Carolingian monastic schools but had acquired a boxful of photocopies which I passionately read, growing ever more excited with this strange discovery. On my return west, I told the Abbot my curious story and shortly thereafter he passed on to me a “Call for Papers” for a conference to be held at the St. Benedict Center in Madison, Wisconsin for the celebration of the sequimillennial anniversary of the birth of St. Benedict. Since the women I had unearthed were clearly meat for a conference of this sort, I started to examine this treasure trove more carefully and after presenting a draft of the paper I had written to the monks at St. Peter’s at their community meeting in the spring of 1980, went to Madison the following October. As I was nervously waiting outside the building, gearing up my nerve for my presentation, a young woman sitting beside me struck up a conversation. A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she said she had been intrigued by the title of my paper – The Desert Mothers  – and expressed interest in talking to me at the wine and cheese party which was to wind up the conference. Having successfully delivered the paper, I of course headed straight for the wine table and, drink in hand, resumed my conversation with the young woman and then suggested that we adjourn somewhere for, in the euphemism I then used, “a few beers.” Once on the bus into Madison, I asked her about herself and she told me that she was a recovering alcoholic and described the treatment centre she had attended in Minnesota. Two months later, I phoned “M” to learn more about her treatment centre. “Hazelden? Center City, Minnesota?” The names meant nothing to me but I was so desperate that I phoned them the next day and was told that I could be admitted on January 28, my forty-sixth birthday. And this is where the public Peregrina story begins. I count the twenty-eight days I spent at Hazelden as the most precious of my life. It was there that through my collapsed ego and my utter defeat, I first learned what St. Benedict calls the Twelve Steps of Humility and which the secular world calls the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And here, for the first time, I can explain why I chose Vox Benedictina as the title of the small journal I was to edit for the next ten years. Although a lover of all things Benedictine, I am not Benedictine. What I am is a person whose life has been transformed by St. Benedict and his followers and by that most mysterious transmutation of his Rule to which countless alcoholics owe their lives. The following summer I returned to Hazelden with my three children to attend the family programme at Hazelden and we spent the rest of the summer at St. John’s in Collegeville where I read furiously and collected still more piles of photocopies of the lives of the Desert Mothers. Back in Saskatoon once more and filled with excitement with my new life and my newly discovered marvellous children, I worked and talked and relished each day. And to my joy, I found my soul-companions, Colleen Fitzgerald and Don Ward. We talked and talked and shared ideas and stories and hare-brained schemes, and their support and love are still very much a part of Peregrina’s history. Encouraged by their support, I wrote a letter to Valerie Lagorio, one of the two editors of The Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter and enclosed a copy of the Desert Mothers paper. Valerie replied almost immediately and insisted that I come to the International Conference of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo the following May. I was so encouraged by this reception that I would have stormed heaven itself to meet the future fairy-godmother of Vox Benedictina, but instead stormed the office of the President of St. Thomas More College who graciously gave me the necessary funds for the trip. When the end of April finally rolled around, I loaded up the car and began the first of many such freeway retreats: solitude, prayer of sorts, silence punctuated by Mozart and Benny Goodman, many cigarettes, and no telephones. Once at Kalamazoo, I corralled Pru Tracy, an old friend from Saskatoon and then an editor at the University of Toronto Press, who introduced me to Valerie: generous, supportive, outrageously funny, a thorn in the side of academic pomposity and a former chorus girl turned academic who on occasion can still do a mean bump and grind. The days at Kalamazoo sped by too quickly and before I knew what had hit me, I was once again on the road. A quick glance at a map, however, told me that it would not be much further out of my way to drive back to Saskatoon via Iowa City rather than Chicago. The next morning I phoned Valerie from the motel. I must come around at once and have breakfast with her – and it was over her dining room table that the seeds for VB were sown. She suggested various places in which I might publish articles and we talked about medieval women mystics and monastics and the future of small journals like The Fourteenth-Century Mystics Newsletter. I virtually flew back to Saskatoon on wings. A few weeks later, an unbidden thought crossed my mind. Why not start a journal myself? I had absolutely no experience in publishing, certainly had no extra money, and only had an inkling of what the focus of the new journal might be, except that it would provide relevant translations from monastic writings of the Middle Ages, especially those of women – much nonsense was then being written (even by academics!) about medieval monastic women because few were able to read the Latin documents. Had not St. Thomas More College been a veritable hot bed of publishing at the time – and Don and Colleen up to their ears in magazine production and layout – I doubt that the idea would ever have got beyond being an idle fantasy. As it was, the more the three of us talked, the more excited I became until I decided I would try the idea out with the Benedictines at St. Peter’s, especially Frs. Andrew Britz, Peter Novecosky and Maurice Weber. Perhaps not surprisingly in this story of pilgrimage, it was during the drive to Muenster that the title of the new journal occurred to me: Vox Benedictina – vox because the gender must be feminine, benedictina because I somehow knew that St. Benedict was central to the projected journal. The reaction at St. Peter’s was startled but positive and that was all I needed. The next year flew by like the wind. I went to the meetings at Kalamazoo, gave a paper in one of the Mystics sessions and met, among others, a German-born scholar from Sudbury called Gertrud Jaron Lewis whom I found intimidating but strangely approachable, a publisher from Santa Fe called Barbara Clow who was smitten by Hildegard of Bingen and a whole raft of exciting, strange, kind and eccentric scholars the like of whom I had never met before. When July rolled around, I was on the road again – this time on peregrination to visit Benedictine libraries for an article on hagiography in The Dictionary of the Middle  Ages and to sound out monastics about the feasibility of the as-yet-unborn Vox Benedictina. From the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto to the Institut d’Études Médiévaux in Montreal, to St. Vincent’s in Latrobe PA and finally to St. Meinrad’s in Indiana where I spent two weeks and for the first time in my life, glimpsed that sacred time and sacred space about which Jean Leclercq had written in his Love of Learning and the Desire for God: the way in which work finds its proper place when placed in the context of prayer. Over the next year I continued to pursue my dream, bemused by the apparent synchronicity of events. Sister Lillian Shank of the Trappistine Abbey of Our Lady of the Mississippi, for instance, wrote in answer to a letter of mine that a brilliant Trappist monk in Oregon had begun work on thirteenth-century holy women in the diocese of Liège. I wrote Fr. Martinus Cawley and he invited me to come to Lafayette in the fall of 1983 to work with him on a translation of the Life of Lutgard of Aywières. That spring, totally computer-illiterate, I had invested in a tiny computer with a microscopic screen and after spending a summer learning to recognise basic things like cursors and “wrap-around text,” I packed the computer into the car and headed west to Oregon. The fortnight with Fr. Martinus at Our Lady of Guadalupe was a truly extraordinary experience. I learned more about translating monastic Latin from him than I could have imagined possible and more about the balance between work, prayer and study than could ever be learned from books. Suddenly one day, Fr. Martinus closed the dictionaries, concordances, and Office books – and announced that we had done enough and that now we were to concentrate on Vox Benedictina. And concentrate we did! He stood over me until I had written a letter to prospective subscribers. With his friend Marilyn Karbonski, typed up lists of names and addresses of abbeys and monasteries, bought the stamps, helped stuff, address and seal the envelopes and even – if I recall correctly – put the envelopes in the mail box in Portland. Had not Fr. Martinus been in attendance at the birth, I know that VB would have remained simply another of my pipe-dreams, exciting perhaps, but never more than an idea. It was during that same year that I met Katharina M. Wilson, another of VB’s midwives. I had presented a paper on Christina of Saint-Trond at a conference hosted by SUNY Binghamton and while waiting for my connecting flight to Saskatoon, a woman who had attended the conference struck up a conversation and expressed great interest in the idea of a journal devoted to monastic women. We began corresponding and when Katja offered her help in contacting interested scholars, I accepted with alacrity. By the beginning of November 1983, Vox Benedictina was almost at term. No birth, however, is easy and in this case, the labour lasted about two and a half months. Colleen, Don, Sarah, Bernard, David and I spent countless hours talking up the new venture over the dinner table and coming up with the name of the publishing company (Peregrina was an obvious choice given the many thousands of miles I had spent in the car criss-crossing North America) and a name for our house on Garrison Crescent (Gyrovague House – an inspired choice I still feel). Fr. Martinus supplied us with his Progoffian study of Lutgard of Aywières and Fr. Daniel Callam of St. Thomas More College and editor of The Canadian Catholic Review, wrote an article on Ambrose’s sister. But two articles clearly weren’t enough. What to do? I furiously flipped through pages and pages of Mabillon – and, not for the last time, synchronicity struck: Jacqueline de Blémur, seventeenth-century Benedictine nun, hagiographer and collector of the lives of women saints whom I immediately took as unofficial patron saint of VB. Just as I was beginning to think that things were finally coming together, Collen threw a monkey wrench into the engine. She wondered if, perhaps, my concentration on ancient, albeit saintly, women, was not at the expense of more modern, but equally saintly, women. Suddenly and painfully aware of how little I knew, another panicky search ensued, more furious reading and page flipping and I managed to churn out a potted version of the life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the formidable American founder of the Dominican congregation of St. Rose of Lima. Illustrations were clearly required: academic books especially need pictures to lighten the burden. Colleen suggested using woodcuts to mark the divisions and my daughter Sarah (as artistic as her mother is not) produced a series of fine line drawings. Learning as I went, I betook myself to the basement – sometimes called my work dungeon – where, staring at the tiny screen of the Osborne, I entered copy and, as frequently, lost it all when I forgot to save. By mid-January the deed was done, Colleen did the paste-up, and we sent off the camera-ready copy to St. Peter’s. In due course, Fr. Peter telephoned to say that everything was ready except for the collating, folding, binding and cutting – and, in the dead of an unspeakably cold January, Bernard and I drove out to Muenster, bursting with energy. It was as well that we were so geared up, for when Fr. Peter took us out to the press, we were faced with 3,000 signatures piled to almost to the ceiling on skids. When I asked what we should do, he patiently explained the procedure. First we must fold them and then flatten the creases. When I asked how on earth one could press 3,000 signatures, he looked at me as if I were mad and said, “Why, with your thumb, of course!” Instead, we used my handy Swiss army knife for this first – but not the last – marathon. As time went on, we became more adept and after about a year the production end of VB had become considerably more streamlined. I found a cheap second-hand guillotine paper cutter which I installed in the basement and every three months would lure friends to the house with the promise of chili, followed by that fine old Western custom, a folding-collating-stapling-cutting bee. The reaction of the first subscribers was heartening and circulation slowly grew until by the summer there were about 300 members of the VB family. After the second issue, it became very clear that given the smallness of our journal, we simply could not manage to publish complete translations of the texts. Thus was born the Matrologia Latina, the title of which was later changed to the Peregrina Translations series when it became sadly evident that only a handful of people understood the subversive feministg allusion to the Patrologia Latina. The Calendar of Holy Women was born over hamburgers and hot dogs on our deck when I complained to Colleen that I was spending far too long each morning trying to discover whether there was a woman saint celebrated on that day. “Why not publish a Calendar of Holy Women?” Colleen brightly suggested. And so it was done. It was in ways such as this that, my editorship notwithstanding, Vox Benedictina has always been a collaborative effort and many of the best ideas have been the ideas of others. In 1988 Peregrina lived up to her name when we moved to Toronto and where she assumed a New Look, due to the expertise and willing help of a new extended family: Lauretta Santarossa, enthusiast, go-getter and publishing whiz; Gail Burns, no longer the five-year old playmate whom I had known at West Hawk Lake outside Winnipeg but then a columnist with The Catholic New Times; John Burns, Gail’s husband, a rare combination of dedicated historian and talented businessman; Susan Cox, desktop publisher and proof-reader extraordinaire, whose rigorous standards cleaned up the forest of typos for which VB had acquired a certain reputation; [ii] Mary Forman, a Benedictine and pre-doctoral student at the Centre for Medieval Studies; and, above all, Nancy Jackson. It was due to Lauretta’s nagging that I met Nancy and it was Nancy who, through the goodness of her heart, redesigned the format of VB and, in 1990, transformed The Calendar of Holy Women from an academic oddity into a work of art. And synchronicity continued to amaze me. Elspeth Durie reappeared in my life after disappearing for twenty-five years, now living in Varenna on Lake Como and married to Billy Carnahan, a retired journalist and the copy editor of one’s dreams. From a childhood acquaintanceship in Saskatoon and one madly hysterical partying summer in the late ’50s, we met again through VB, the Desert Mothers, Mothers Maria and Thekla, Ephrem the Syrian and Maggie Ross. Such are the strange twists of fate that we ended up in the same continuum after travelling utterly different paths, and I write this last editorial sitting on a terrace overlooking Lake Como and pondering the mystery of friendship, love and a shared commitment. And how to thank adequately those countless others who have played a major role in the Peregrina story over the past eleven years? In the Saskatoon years, Elena and Kevin Corrigan, a pair of rare Russian-Irish birds whose flight pattern surprisingly took them into the Saskatchewan plains and whose passion for Dante, Plato and Shakespeare gave added depth to the pages of VB; Rabbi Saul Diament and Ann who gave sustenance to my Jewish-Catholic soul; Dewey Kramer, a tower of strength over the years and her wonderful husband, Victor, a Thomas Merton and Walker Percy scholar who joined the VB family early in its history; Elizabeth Petroff, like me an early graduate student in Comparative Literature at Berkeley but whom I did not meet until we were both head over heels in love with the holy women of the Middle Ages; Barbara Newman, the kind of rigorous scholar I admire inordinately, whose genius is to act as a bridge between different spiritual and intellectual traditions; Mother Thekla, Orthodox nun and real-life Desert Mother living in North Yorkshire whose sanctity, profundity, erudition and madcap sense of humour must surely be unparalleled; Judith Sutera, OSB, a student in a seminar I gave at St. John’s University in 1985 but from whom I have learned far more than she ever learned from me and who generously – but to no avail – tried to help me in the last, financially doomed years of Vox Benedictina; Ritamary Bradley, SFCC, partner-in-mysticism with Valerie Lagorio and my spiritual mentor and soul-companion; and, latterly, Nancy and Jack Hubbell who – like so many in this story – resurfaced in my life after a long absence and have helped rescue me from the organisational chaos in which I was floundering. I cannot, alas, mention the names of all those who have contributed to the Vox Benedictina story but each one has had a part to play, academics, non-academics, clerics, children, dogs (especially my beloved Fletcher, now resting under a pussy willow tree in the garden of Gyrovague House III) and cats and hamsters all! For most of its history, Peregrina has been a puzzle to me and when the Toronto contingent pressed me to draw up a Mission Statement in 1989, [iii] I was at a loss to explain what I was trying to do. It was not until this spring, however, when I decided to give up the journal that I began to have an inkling of what I have been trying to do over the ten-year history of Vox Benedictina. Although I knew that I owed my life to the Benedictines, I was always hard-pressed to explain the title. Even the contents were a mystery. Although I knew what I didn’t want included, I would stumble when asked to specify what I did want. I suppose this is what they mean when they talk about the intuitive depths. But I now realise that the apparent muddle was, in fact, based on ideas which I had taken in, as if by osmosis, from all those people whom Providence has sent me over the past sixty years: a sense of community, based on a monastic devotion to study and prayer; the hidden tradition of a feminine spirituality available to both men and women, receptive and holistic; the glimpses of the Divine granted to those who inhabit the mystical continuum which they generously have shared with their more pedestrian brothers and sisters; the profoundly subversive approach of these mystics rightly seen by ecclesiastical bureaucrats as potentially dangerous to the structural church but which has has provided the basis for its continuing existence; an unwillingness to label or to be labelled; an openness to new traditions and new ideas; and a rigorous scholarship which believes that Truth can never be served by fiddling with the evidence; and the priority of love. Our perception of the Truth is perforce incomplete and we forget at our peril that any philosophical system is the product of a finite understanding. It seems to me that as humans, scholars and pilgrims, we can only stand in humble awe before the Providence which allows us to catch glimpses of the Divinity through those whom we encounter on our journey. [i] The title of this article is a conflation of my original but rather too cute title, “Peregrina’s Progress,” and Valerie Lagorio’s considerably more subtle allusion to Smollett’s “The Adventure’s of Peregrine Pickle.” For a moment, I considered calling this “The Progress of Pickled Peregrina” but dismissed it as hitting too close to the bone. [ii] How I wish I had had the wit to say, as did Eugene B. Borowitz, editor of Sh’ma, “For long we didn’t even correct typos, figuring college-educated readers could do that themselves,” and according to Michael Wyschogrod, a founding Contributing Editor, “As I recall now, the imost important feature of the new magazine was that it would print typos. This policy did not last very long because some people thought that typos would give readers the impression the magazine stood for slipshod thinking. So the typos diminished, a development I did not greet with the greatest enthusiasm. Printing typos was a kind of insurance policy. When the criticism got too intense, one could always claim that the whole thing was a typo. Without typos, one had to invent better excuses” (Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility 23/455 [May 28, 1993]). [iii] “To disseminate the writings and works of persons of spiritual insight in a scholarly and informal manner; to make monastic spirituality more widely known, understood and appreciated; to focus on the recovery of our feminine heritage and on the integration of history with our present experience; to foster the special relationship between Peregrina Publishing Co. and its family of readers; to promote innovation in contents, products and services. to be economically viable so that Peregrina Publishing Co. will grow and diversify.”
	Peregrina’s Progressive Pickle: The Story of Vox Benedictina
	The Mission of Vox Benedictina: 1984-1994 by Dewey Weiss Kramer, DeKalb College, Decatur GA
	Seventy-Five Years of Vox Benedictina by Elspeth Durie, Varenna, Italy

© 2006 Peregrina Publishing Co. All rights reserved.