Monastery of the Holy Cross

Reflections on Wisdom

November 3, 2018

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“Because of her pureness [Wisdom] pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entry into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God [Wisdom 7: 24-26].”

So reads the text from which this evening’s Magnificat antiphon derives (page 16 of this booklet). It appears at First Vespers of the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time because we Benedictines are in the midst of reading through the Old Testament book known as The Wisdom of Solomon. We read a chapter each day at the office of Vigils (which begins here each morning bright and early at 3:30 a.m.) over the Thirtieth and Thirty-First weeks of Ordinary Time in even-numbered years.

Before I say more about the placement of this reading in the liturgy, let me call attention to the excellence of this oft-neglected Book of Wisdom, as it is often known. The sixteenth-century Protestant reformers eliminated it from the Old Testament because it was composed in Greek and not Hebrew. Indeed, in spite of the traditional authorship of King Solomon (ca. 990-931 B.C.), the Book of Wisdom was almost certainly written in the two generations before the birth of Christ. While the focus is on the children of Israel (the second half of the book is a retelling of the Exodus), it was composed in the diaspora, probably in Hellenistic Egypt. As a result, Greek culture deeply pervades the author’s outlook.

It is worth recalling that the academic discipline that we call “philosophy”

(literally “the love of wisdom”) begins in Athens around the time of the beginning of the Jewish dispersion. While later sparring between the Jewish Maccabees and the Greek Seleucid overlords of Palestine might make it appear that Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens, Greek thought and culture was an everyday part of the Holy Land in the centuries before the birth of Christ. We need only consider that the New Testament is entirely written in Greek to appreciate this.

The Book of Wisdom is an extended mediation on the love of wisdom, but told from a distinctive Jewish perspective. We get a glimpse here and in the earlier book of Proverbs of Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God [1 Corinthians 1: 24].” The Book of Wisdom had a profound effect on the thought of Saint John the Evangelist, whose prologue [John 1: 1-18] is a deepening of the insight found in the Wisdom 7, the context of the opening quote of this essay.

The debt of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews is even more striking. “[The Son] reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature [Hebrews 1: 3].”

This is all to say that the advent of Greek philosophy has typically been regarded by the Church as a praeparatio evangelica, a preparation for the gospel, a fertilizing of the great field of humanity into which was sown the Word of God by the Apostles. Fittingly, when Saint Paul visited Athens, he could urge the citizens there by pointing their nearness to the Son of God, even if they were unaware: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious…What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world….made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth…that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him [Acts 17: 22b, 23b, 26a, 27].” This seeking after God took the form, in the Graeco-Roman world, of the love of Wisdom, revealed by the Apostles as the Son of God Himself.

It is for this reason that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his important “Regensberg Address,” warned us about the “de-Hellenization” of Christianity. “The fullness of time” always includes the Providential speculations of the followers of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the other great schools of Stoicism. Salvation is from the Jews, but we rely as well on the Greeks to help us “give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope [1 Peter 3: 15].”

We should note that the Latin terms of the Magnificat antiphon point as well to the person of the Holy Mother of God. In the Litany of Loreto, Our Lady is called the “mirror of justice,” a direct reference to Wisdom 7: 26 in which the female figure of wisdom is called a mirror without stain (sine macula). The absence of any stain (immaculata), and the fact that “nothing defiled gains entry into her,” is seen as a prophecy of the Incarnation and Immaculate Conception.

These weeks of November serve many functions in the liturgy, but a dual aspect is of particular importance. They prepare for Christ’s coming, both in the Incarnation, and at the end of time for judgment. It is, then, a fitting time to read the Book of Wisdom, to meditate on the way in which the wisdom and power of God purifies our souls, frees us from the disturbances of anger and anxiety, and prepares us for the sober joy of eternal life. It is fitting as well that these meditations should include the exemplar of this purity, the Queen of Heaven and Immaculate Virgin Mary, the seat of Wisdom, who cradled the very wisdom and power of God, veiled in the apparent folly of the Incarnation, to her stainless heart.

Radical Witness and Saint Lawrence

August 10, 2018

Monks in the modern world are daily confronted with incongruities. We dress in tunics and scapulars that were the workaday clothing of sixth-century peasants. We pray the Psalms, composed some three thousand years ago in a language that does not translate into contemporary idioms very well. Many of our customs date from the early Middle Ages (suddenly a controversial era!), presupposing a worldview that is unfathomable to many of our neighbors in Chicago.

Join us for Solemn Vespers tonight at 7:00 p.m. to celebrate Saint Lawrence!

It takes time to get used to this worldview, and it would be foolish for me to claim that I’ve mastered it. This is simply to say that to understand our own tradition as Benedictine monks, we must undergo conversion. But this is true for all Christians. In this moment of lingering crisis in our clerical ranks, it is important for us to recall this. The Church is not a place to be comfortable according to cultural standards, passively imbibed. It is a place to become radical witnesses to another world, a kingdom that is not of this age.

A few years ago, one aspect of this struggle struck me with particular force. I was working on the early history of Gregorian chant and reading through old collated manuscripts of tenth and eleventh-century liturgical books. They were organized according to the Church year, beginning with Advent. There were the usual solemnities of the life of Christ: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost. Sprinkled throughout were the feasts of saints. At some point, I began to muse on the familiar saints who hadn’t been born yet: Francis, Dominic, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila. Then it struck me that none of these familiar saints were martyrs. I went back to the manuscripts and noticed other names that were not in the calendar, but this time of saints who had lived long ago and were recognized as saints: Augustine, Gregory the Great, Basil. In fact, there were only a handful of feast days of saints who were not martyrs in the strict sense: aside from the feasts of the Mother of God, there were John the Evangelist, and, in some locations, Benedict of Nursia and Martin of Tours.

The rest of the saints were a parade of men and women who shed their blood for the Faith. Many names are still remembered in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I): John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, Felicity and Perpetua. After the Apostles themselves, one of the most famous was Saint Lawrence, whose feast we celebrate today.

Before I say a bit about Lawrence, however, let me finish this thought about conversion. When the persecution of the Church ended in the West in the fourth-century, non-martyr saints became more common. Eventually, beginning mainly in the thirteenth century, these saints were given days on the Church’s liturgical calendar. This swelling of the ranks of the blessed altered the “feeling” of the liturgy in a subtle way. Holiness was demonstrated less by a sacrificial death and heroic witness in the face of persecution, and more in an active life of charity. Now, there is nothing wrong with charity! But even in Scripture, the main proof of love is the “laying down of one’s life for one’s friends.” [John 15 :13]

This seems to me to be at the heart of the misunderstanding of contemplative life, which, from an early period in the Church, was understood as a form of martyrdom, a leaving of the world as a sign of the Kingdom that is “not of this world.” [John 18: 36] The shift of focus has been away from this primary form of witness toward a more exclusive concentration on good works. This subtly tempts us to see our Faith as a form of “religion,” one of many forms of belief that make this world (the one we’re to witness against!) a better, kinder place. It is easy for our horizons to be lowered under these circumstances. Conversion for us today might mean regaining a focus on the example of the martyrs and the Desert Fathers.

And so I finally turn to today’s great saint, Lawrence, who is remembered not only for his brave (and light-hearted) acceptance of martyrdom, but for his selfless charity. This charity grew, not from a desire to make the Roman Empire a kinder place, but out of his renunciation of the world, symbolized by his identification with the poor.

It is sometimes remarked that anyone who dies for a cause is a kind of a martyr. In extreme forms of this assertion, Christian martyrs are compared to suicide bombers and the like. The comparison is not valid—unless we have fallen into the temptation to see the Faith as a species of the genus “religion” in support of this-worldly political “progress.” The suicide bomber is surely brave, but he is seeking political goals in this world. True, he won’t live to see these goals realized, if ever they are. But in any case, the Christian martyr has her sights set elsewhere. The acta of Saint Lawrence were clearly modeled on those of an earlier deacon and martyr, Saint Stephen. As he was dying, his gaze was lifted by the Holy Spirit into heaven, unto the glory of God.

There was a young man there, a zealous and true believer in religion, Saul of Tarsus. His salvation required much the same conversion that we are all striving for. May our celebration of Saint Lawrence help us to train our gaze on Jesus Christ, in heaven in glory and, mysteriously, in our neighbors.

A Crisis of Symbolism

June 9, 2018

Ten years ago, an old friend, now a committed atheist, invited me to participate in an online discussion between atheists and Christians. As rancorous as some of the “discussions” were, I miss the tough back-and-forth probing of my own positions.

At the time, my friend Colleen asked me something to the effect of, “Does it surprise you that I and others don’t believe in God?” My response, which I still hold, is that it is much more of a surprise that people do believe in God in our culture. We have created a whole set of habits that leave no room for God. I was thinking at the time about the privatization of belief, but I’d like to take another angle on the same question. God is not a credible concept in our culture because we are living through a crisis of symbolism. I borrow this phrase from another friend (some implied strong language in the linked blog post).

I’ll opt for the cliche and blame Descartes for the schizophrenia of modern philosophy.

What do I mean by this? We don’t understand the implications of symbols and metaphors because we are frequently unaware that we use them. When we speak metaphorically, we use one image or idea to stand for another. We do this because some ideas are only available to our minds via symbolic representation. By contrast, “univocal” speech, promoted by the fourteenth-century nominalists and fixed in our public discourse by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists, aims at a one-to-one correspondence between a word and an object. Non-material objects, in Descartes’s telling, must therefore be “clear and distinct.”

But lots of worthwhile ideas are unclear and indistinct. Let’s take the idea of the “self.” During those old debates, one frequent objection that atheists made to my beliefs was that if God exists, He must be able to communicate Himself to us clearly and distinctly. I would point out that we can’t even communicate ourselves to ourselves clearly and distinctly most of the time, if ever. The more I grow in self-knowledge, the more mysterious I am to myself, and the more mysterious (and glorious) others appear to me. It’s not that we can’t know God; but all of our language about God is analogical and not univocal. We can only speak properly about God by analogy (as we do about our “selves!”). When we say that God is good or even that God exists, we don’t mean this in the same way as we might mean, “This ice cream cone is good,” or “The city of Paris exists.” So we use these terms “good” and “exist” to mean something other than what they commonly mean in clear and distinct speech.

Similarly, we use metaphors all the time. But as Alan Jacobs and many others have pointed out, we often lose sight of them and mistake them for univocal speech. We speak of a “War on Terror,” or a “War on Drugs,” unthinkingly, as if this manner of speaking was clear. Our failure to keep in mind that these are metaphors means, ironically, that our thinking about terrorism and drug dealing and abuse are, in fact, contorted. There might be better metaphors available (as Portugal suggested by decriminalizing drugs).

When I preach retreats, I usually begin by quoting Saint John Cassian, “We practice the frequent reading of and constant meditation on Scripture, so that we may be open to a spiritual point of view [Conf. 14.X].” I do this because even monks lose sight of the fact that a “spiritual point of view” is necessary. Things are not what they immediate seem. Created objects and artifacts–including words–open onto other realms, if we are alive to this fact. In the strongest example of this, created objects and artifacts become sacraments. Common bread and wine become, in the gaze of the spiritual woman or man, the Body and Blood of the Son of God.

A spiritual point of view requires that we learn how to read spiritually. Here is another noteworthy feature of the atheist-Christian exchanges: almost no one in the discussions knew how to read the Bible like a poem or a love letter. All meaning had to be more or less literal, univocal.

When I teach Evagrius to novices and others, the main stumbling block to learning his beautiful system of spiritual maturation is the idea of “natural contemplation.” This means looking at the creatures of the world and seeing in them God’s loving purposes, His wondrous designs, His fond presence. Without this, contemplation becomes something apart from the world, a private set of meanings rather than shared symbols.

Why is art, even sacred art, so impoverished today? Do our contemporaries delight in poetry or fall in love? I can’t help wondering if the recent news of so many celebrity suicides isn’t related to the oppressively claustrophobic world we’ve settled for, the zero-sum, dumb cosmos of flat matter, severed from the spiritual realities that bring hope and joy.

T.S. Eliot: Don’t ask what a poem means [in other words, don’t seek a univocal explanation]; ask what it is.

I will close with a quote from the post that inspired this meandering attempt at being clear and distinct:

Thanks to the Enlightened emphasis of the past 200 years, particularly in academia, on “science, reason, and humanism,” we have utterly lost the capacity to think in metaphor and analogy—the ground on which much religious thinking depends. This, of course, is why Jordan Peterson’s lectures have captured so much attention. It is also the reason, as I keep saying, that I wish he would read my book.

It isn’t the Logos that we have forgotten. It is the Lady—and with her, the real reason that art is so threatening: because…it points us to God.

–Rachel Brown, aka “Fencing Bear”

Of Solitude and Contemplation

May 31, 2016

In my previous post, I noted that behind the Rule of Saint Benedict, there lies hidden the influence of the Desert Fathers. Benedict recommends that the monk eager for advanced pursuits in monastic spirituality should read the “Institutes” and the “Conferences.” Universal tradition as well as common sense asserts that he is referring to St. John Cassian, who spent nearly two decades in the Egyptian desert learning the monastic life. You can find indices to Cassian’s two most important works, the Institutes and the Conferences at the Order of Saint Benedict website.

What I wish to emphasize here, and in keeping with my aim to write brief and manageable posts, is one key connection between these two books and the two-fold path to spiritual maturity. I wrote last time that Saint Benedict is primarily concerned with the correction of behavior in his Rule for monks, but that he also acknowledges, in quiet ways, that beyond the cultivation of virtue and the elimination of vice, there is the further contemplative aspect of monastic (and Christian) life, what Benedict calls “wisdom of doctrine.” The Institutes correspond to the “active” life of conversion, and the Conferences are concerned with the “contemplative” life of adepts.

The first stage of spiritual growth, the correction of behavior, is therefore the primary concern of Cassian’s Institutes. Note that Cassian does not give us what we would consider “morality.” Rather, he is interested in teaching the times of prayer, the style of dress for monks, and the organization of communal life. This is exactly parallel to Saint Benedict’s Rule. The connection is not just one of a common culture. The Rule of the Master, an Italian monastic rule from the generation before Benedict, and Benedict’s primary source, cribs from Cassian’s Institutes, so that we can say that St. Benedict’s Rule is a kind of grandchild to the Institutes. Cassian goes somewhat beyond communal organization, and spends the last eight books of the Institutes on the eight vices and how to identify the thought patterns that go with them. So again, we are not so much in the realm of morality as moderns understand it. Cassian is interested in psychology, how our thoughts influence our behavior.

This emphasis on psychology is the link between the active and contemplative stages of Christian spiritual growth. Before we can properly understand doctrine, we must first work against behaviors that are not consonant with Christian doctrine, but then we must also go after the thought patterns that underlie wrongful behavior. This cleansing of the mind of wrongful thinking allows us to receive true “theology,” knowledge of God. This is the focus of Cassian’s Conferences.

In the next several short posts, I hope to walk with you through the two stages with more attention to the particular battles with behaviors and thoughts, along with recommended reading in monastic spirituality.

The Desert Background to the Rule

May 27, 2016

Saint Benedict composed his Rule for Monks some time around 540 A.D. Egypt, the cradle of Christian monasticism, had been drastically reduced in the previous 150 years from its high point at the end of the fourth century. Saint Benedict makes explicit reference to the “desert” only once, when describing the anchorites in the first chapter, on the kinds of monks. Since his Rule is written, however, not for anchorites but for “cenobites,” monks who live in communities, we might imagine that this off-hand reference to the desert is a mere nod in the direction of Egypt, without any further thread of connection to the ancient tradition.

There are important hints that Benedict knew the Egyptian tradition well and incorporated it seamlessly into his own proto-European style of monasticism. Finding these clues requires a bit of excavation. The place I would like to begin is in a perhaps unlikely spot, in chapter 64, On the Constituting of an Abbot. The abbot, Saint Benedict tells us, should be chosen “vitae…merito et sapientiae doctrina,” for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine. This sounds common sensible enough, but in fact it encapsulates an entire way of thinking about the spiritual quest in Christian monasticism. It also justifies Fr. Terence Kardong’s contention that the abbot is to be the “perfect” monk.

Merit of life corresponds to the presence of virtue and absence of vice. It is the first step in monastic conversion, a change of outward behavior. One learns to act…as a monk acts. When monks promise “conversion of life” (conversatio morum) according to the formula invented by Saint Benedict in chapter 58, they are promising to change their way of living. This is not a matter of mere “morals” but is implicated in all kinds of habits, preferences, and in personal comportment. This is the minimum observance “for beginners” [RB 73]. For those who are striving for greater advancement, however, as Benedict goes on to show us in chapter 73, there is the inward transformation of doctrine, new habits of thought about the cosmos and insight into God’s ways. It is not enough for the abbot to be worthy by his exterior actions; he must also have the interior virtues that allow him to give spiritual counsel and make wise decisions about the community’s welfare. It is noteworthy that one of the primary sources of doctrine, according to RB 73, is St. John Cassian, the primary link between European and Egyptian monasticism.

In future posts, I hope to demonstrate Saint Benedict’s direct dependence on the Egyptian desert fathers for this two-fold description of monastic spirituality. What the great monastic theologian Evagrius (354-399 A.D.) described as the practical (or “active”) life followed by the theoretical ( or “contemplative”) life is the best way of understanding Benedict’s emphasis on merit of life and wisdom of doctrine.

Notes on Prayer, Part 1

April 17, 2016

I had the blessing to spend this past Thursday evening with the Young Adult Ministry of Lake County, which met at St. Mary’s parish in Lake Forest. I had been invited to speak about prayer, and at the end of the event, I offered to post some of my notes here for those who would like to follow up on further reading. I should mention that I found the questions from the participants most helpful and illuminating, and that the entire evening was edifying and encouraging.

Before I list the books that I mentioned there, I should give a short explanation about what I said to the group.

Prayer is natural. Human beings were created by God to know Him and have a relationship with Him. This is the most important fact to know about prayer. We don’t have to scramble to find God or to try to get His attention. If we are moved to pray, the Holy Spirit has already been active in us, and we are doing what our natures are made for.

Therefore, if we wish to pray well, we should set about discovering what it is about our lives that inhibits this natural activity. Walking is also a natural activity of human beings, but it is something that we learn to do (mainly by watching other people and then by trial and error). It is also the case that injuries and disabilities can hamper our capacity for walking. When this happens, we do rehab.

We live in a world where prayer is not highly valued. This means that many of our base-line behaviors are hostile to this capax orationis. This is not something new, however, and this is why my favorite recommendation for learning to pray is Evagrius Ponticus, who died in 399 A.D. He is a master of identifying the ways in which we inhibit our own ability to pray, and a great pedagogue for learning how to be healed of this malady.

The final note for today: prayer is an activity primarily of the mind. Therefore much of what is helpful for prayer involves a kind of hygiene for the mind, a scouring out of harmful patterns of thought, and the introduction of good habits of thinking. That said, our minds are connected to bodies, and so what we do with our bodies has consequences for prayer. The shorthand idea here is this: we will pray well when we uproot the vices from our bodies and minds and plant the virtues. I will have more to say on this at a later time.

Here are my recommendations:

by Evagrius:

The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, translated and with an (excellent) introduction by John Eudes Bamberger

The Ad Monachos, translated by Abbot Jeremy Driscoll–also with fantastic notes

Talking Back (The Antirrhetikos), translated by David Brakke

Evagrius Ponticus by A.M. Casiday (contains several treatises)

by St. John Cassian: The Conferences (especially Conferences nine and ten, which can be found online here.)

by Sister Mary Margaret Funk: Thoughts Matter

Father Thomas Keating: Invitation to Love

God’s blessings to you!

Liturgical Strangeness

August 4, 2015

I’m spending the week at my mother’s and stepfather’s farm, working on my book. I do hope to post somewhat regularly during this time, and continue to do so when I return.

I’ve written in the last two posts that our baptisms invite us to become different kinds of persons, not simply better persons, but truly different persons. Reborn persons. I also suggested that this process will keep us out of our comfort zones, that we can’t even be quite sure what kind of persons that God intends us to be, until we have developed the capacity to recognize what this otherness looks like and feels like. I finally suggested that if the liturgy disorients us, we should be cautious of “fixing” it by making it more rational.

Pope Benedict XVI at the Regensburg Address

This may sound like a recipe for complete nonsense. If we don’t know what kind of persons we are going to be until we get there, but we can only get there by being different kinds of persons, how can we proceed? One temptation in modern times is to understand the virtue of Faith as the engine that gets us where we are going. And faith in this sense is understood as a blind stab in the dark. God, in this model, takes pity on our helplessness and responds by mysteriously enlightening us.

This could happen. And it does. But it also is fraught with potential problems. I don’t find evidence of this dynamic in the early Church (with the possible and notable exception of Tertullian). Persons like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen borrowed from themes in the writings of the Apostles John and Paul to stress the objective rationality of the Christian gospel over against the superstition of pagan piety. Pope Benedict XVI dwelt with this profoundly in his much-misunderstood Regensburg Address, titled “Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization.”

Furthermore, this is not a model that commends itself either to separated Protestant brethren or to most non-believers. From a Protestant perspective, the notion of blind faith might actually make sense, but then to make such an act of faith within the Catholic Church appears self-defeating. For critical thinkers outside Christianity, we would seem to be asking them to leave reason at the door.

Finally, such an act of blind faith contradicts the Magisterium, the teachings of the First Vatican Council and of Pope Saint John Paul II.

So what am I getting at? The paradox that I am describing was one recognized by Socrates. How can one discover justice when one is not just? The same way one learns to be a pianist without being born a pianist. One makes an act of faith in a teacher who already knows the craft, the kind of person that the student must become, and how to get train the student to become a real pianist.

Thus, if we are called to become eschatological persons, citizens of the Kingdom of God and fellow citizens with the saints, we must apprentice ourselves to those who already are the kinds of persons who know what this feels like. To some extent, this is all of us who attend the liturgy together, since at the liturgy we really are trained by the combined wisdom of a tradition molded by the experience of prayer and the presence of Christ.

Let me take this one step further, at some risk to myself. Even within the Church, there are those who spend more time and focus their lives more intently on living the life of the Kingdom now (or at least should be doing this). These are monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative type. This is why, historically, the liturgical books in the East have been crafted by monks, and in the West, up until around 1300 or so, the Benedictine Rite is almost indistinguishable from the Roman Rite in general. This is also why, after this link in the West was weakened, the liturgy has become shorter, and more ‘rational’ (meaning less mysterious and baffling). The changes that came after the Council were simply a continuation of a trend centuries in the making.

The incorrupt body of St. John Vianney

This is a shame because the Council’s teachings are actually quite lovely and traditionally orthodox. We as a Church were simply not prepared to implement them well in 1970. This has been changing. Our last three popes have all been profoundly shaped by the documents of Vatican II and have been finding creative ways to correct some misunderstandings. What I am thinking about here is how central the liturgy ought to be in our lives, for example. On the train up to Wisconsin on Sunday, I prayed the Roman Office from the community cellphone. It’s easy to find. Anyone can pray the Office, and many people are. The notes on the website were excellent. When I arrived, my stepfather shared with me his fondness for the publication This Day, which is Liturgical Press’s answer to the popular Magnificat publication. Both have shortened versions of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, based in the Psalms and the rest of Scripture, the daily readings from Mass, reflections on the saints in the calendar. These are beautiful examples not only of the centrality of the liturgy, but of the way in which the liturgy can connect to the increasingly important role of the laity to evangelize in the world. At the heart of our shared identity as the Body of Christ is our shared work of the liturgy, in which we see clearly how we relate as members of the Body, and we allow ourselves to be incorporated into this Body, lifted up with Christ to the right hand of the Father.

So…to wrap up:

Become a different kind of person, an eschatological person.

Live the Kingdom now, and train for this by praying the Church’s liturgy, even if on your smartphone in your room.

If monks and nuns require you to do strange things at the liturgy, don’t neglect them on the grounds that they are irrelevant rituals except to these strange contemplative types. We might not be able to explain right away why certain precepts need to be observed at the liturgy. You will get it once you’ve done it a bunch of times.

Imitate the lives of the saints. Of every era, not just recent ones or those who fit your definition of sanctity. Learn to be catholic in your tastes.

Never despair of God’s mercy.

“My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us.”–St. John Vianney

Going to the Father 5: The Full Benedict Option

July 18, 2015

Our community began life living according to the charism of the Community of Jerusalem. This new religious order began in Paris and spread to many major European cities and to Montreal. We were going to be their foundation in Chicago, and in a filial sense we were. When the brothers arrived in Chicago in 1991, however, there were canonical obstacles in the way of an official affiliation.

Palmisano Park and Saint Barbara’s parish in Bridgeport. It looks a lot nicer in the summer! For a terrific gallery, click on the photo.

This meant that our continued existence depended upon the local Archbishop. Cardinal Bernadin had invited us, and was a strong supporter of our work, but by the mid-90’s, he was experiencing serious health problems, including the cancer that would eventually claim his life in 1997. So we were looking for a way to strengthen our community canonically, perhaps by affiliating with a different monastic community. Another factor in this discernment process was the strain of translating what was then a _very_ French, even Parisian, religious ideal into the blue-collar, multi-ethnic, South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. These were the days before Bridgeport became the new Bohemia (or for locals, the new Wicker Park/new Pilsen…), but even now, I don’t see the Jerusalem model working here.

We began looking for something more stable and at the same more flexible. The idea of becoming Benedictine had been tossed around, but most of the Benedictine communities we knew were operating schools or involved in other active ministries. Our mission from the Cardinal was to be contemplative. One of the monks went on retreat to Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, and there learned that they had recently entered into a congregation of Benedictines that was more oriented toward contemplation. Formerly known as the Cassinese Congregation of the Primitive Observance, in 1997 the newly-christened “Subiaco Congregation” numbered nearly seventy communities, spread over six continents.

Christ in the Desert has its own very interesting history, which you can read about here. Make no mistake, this is a place of contemplation. Fourteen miles down a gravel road into the Chama canyon, it’s pristinely quiet and just rustic enough to keep you alert (e.g. rattlesnakes). The community there very generously offered to adopt us city boys as a dependent house, if we so chose. After consultation with Cardinal Bernadin, who enthusiastically supported the change, we entered into the Benedictine family.

Christ in the Desert, a place of extraordinary beauty and prayer.

During one of the abbot’s first visits, he got rid of the community money box and pointed out that we needed to pray the office of Vigils. We began to visit there more frequently, often returning with new ideas. We noted how traditional practices like statio (brothers lining up in ‘battle rank’ and processing into the choir) and penances for latecomers at the liturgy helped to create an atmosphere of recollection and purpose. We also discovered that once we would adopt a new practice from the Rule, we would begin to see how it connected to other practices in the Rule. Many disciplines that seemed silly or outdated when we began, gradually came into focus, and the wisdom of the Rule understood as a whole, and within the larger monastic tradition, began to invigorate us. We became evangelists for Saint Benedict’s monastic vision.

There were two other significant events in this movement toward a stronger, more integral observance of the Rule.

First was another article in Worship magazine, this one by Monsignor Francis Mannion. The article discussed the blessings for brothers leaving and returning to the cloister. These are minor exorcisms. This being the case, use of these blessing generates a certain disposition of the monk toward the world. It is not hostile, mind you. But it is cautious and realistic about the importance of the discipline of silence and withdrawal for the monk or nun. We live in a bustling city with many potential dangers to one’s spiritual health, especially for those who cultivate a contemplative openness to God’s quiet communication through His creatures. So we began to use the blessings.

A profession at St. Walburga’s Abbey. Note the abbess’s crosier.

Secondly, we struck up a friendship with the nuns at St. Walburga’s Abbey in Virginia Dale, Colorado. We used to go there regularly on community retreats as a way to experience a bit of distance from the city. They are another contemplative community, and even have a mitered abbess (meaning, among other things, she has the canonical right to carry a crozier and to preach). It was there that the idea of doing all 150 Psalms in a week took shape in our minds. We had felt that the peculiar circumstance of the city required us to have less Psalmody and more silence, but the sisters’ example worked away at us. There was something about their joyful, matter-of-fact acceptance of the requirements of the Rule that moved us deeply. We began chanting the full Psalter in the year 2001, and once more, the immediate effect was that many other aspects of the liturgical code of the Rule suddenly made sense. They seemed rational.

Now I recount all this because it is parallel to our experience with the larger tradition of the liturgy. Our typical experience tends to narrow of thinking about the liturgy to: 1) the Mass; 2) Tridentine vs. Novus Ordo; and 3) political leanings of those who favor one of the two options. But the liturgy is celebrated by all Christians, and has been for two millennia. It includes the whole panoply of the Mass, Divine Office, Processions and Litanies, blessings of persons and holy items, and all the accoutrements that go with: vestments, buildings, music and so on. Once we began to discover the ancient Benedictine rite of the Divine Office, for example, other aspects of the liturgy seemed less odd, less tied to contemporary political positions, more laden with potential for spiritual growth, more full of joy. This is the broader background of our use of the ad orientem posture at Mass. There is a whole world of thought that created the liturgy under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and working our way back into this stream of life brought insight into theology and prayer that we had not obtained through newer, more locally restricted practices.

The more we discovered, the more we hungered for discovery in the Church’s broad experience of the Kingdom of God, inbreaking in the the Divine Liturgy, to which we will return in the next post.

Back to School

June 17, 2015

As many of you know, I am working on a memoir. This was first suggested to me by an editor at Paulist Press after a short interview I gave appeared in the Sun-Times few years ago. From January 1994 until July 1997, I performed in a jazz/rock sort of band called OM. And the transition I made, from playing at the Taste of Chicago, then five months later beginning my novitiate, has generated some interest. This band was not so typical. As I was working on the book on Monday, I noticed the fact that in some way or other, most of the significant persons who went through the band (our line-up had up to six people, including horns and violins) are now educators. I include myself in that group, since I am the prior of what Saint Benedict calls “a school of the Lord’s service.”

One of the interesting points of the memoir has to do with parallel themes in my former work as a musician and my life now as a monk. One such parallel has to do with the marginal status of both monks and artists in the world. Artists are often restless until they can pry open some hidden aspect of reality and show it to others. But then, not everyone has eyes to see what is uncovered, at least right away. Some ‘fusion of horizons’ needs to take place, to introduce others to the language of poetry, art and music, and then the unique perspective of the artist.

Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah. [Bruegel the Elder's depiction of Icarus unmourned]--"Not an important failure," as told by Auden.

Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of Icarus unmourned and unnoticed…a splash at the lower right… Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah; I wasn’t paying attention —“Not an important failure.”

At some point, my bandmates and I realized that for the average listener to take an interest in what we were doing, we needed to undertake some efforts at teaching. We took our cue from Wynton Marsalis, who was then teaching young people how to listen to jazz. In music, any effort to educate runs into serious problems, since musical interest is usually considered a matter of personal taste. The idea that one might deliberately change one’s taste because of someone else’s expertise smacks of snobbery. Yet any musician worth hearing ought to be passionate about the quality of the music she or he is performing. And this passion depends on the music being more than a personal predilection–somehow the it must be true, and this truth must be urgent. It doesn’t really belong to the performer at all. The performer is at most a conduit, maybe a conjurer. At least the performer is a witness.

Any good teacher is in a similar position. Henri Nouwen suggested many years ago that the model of education today is based in a kind of violence that is competitive (students competing for scarce recognition of achievements), unilateral (the transference of a commodified knowledge from strong teacher to weak student), and alienating (marking the gap between the material to be mastered and the real life that comes once one gets the degree). We’ve all had good teachers, though. What were they like? One of the best classes I took in college involved working through Newton’s Principia.

Noel Swerdlow, who taught initiated me into the magical world of Isaac Newton

Noel Swerdlow, who initiated me into the magical world of Isaac Newton

What was fantastic about the class was that the professor wrote out, and actually worked out, Newton’s proofs on the blackboard, inviting us to work through them with him. I will never forget his enthusiasm, as if he were the one discovering this and not Newton…rather that we were discovering the beauty of nature’s patterns together, with Newton as quirky guide, friends on an amazing journey past the veil of sense to the mathematical harmony of physics.

Sometimes a learning experience of this sort can be so powerful that it requires a reordering of our old way of thinking. Learning to like jazz or to understand calculus takes time and a kind of ‘conversion’ (Newton had to invent calculus to figure out the moon’s orbital math!). The early Christians called this metanoia. Metanoia means literally to change one’s mind. This idea is also expressed as repentance. When Jesus began His ministry, he preached, “Repent [Metanoeite!] and believe the gospel [Mt. 4: 17].” Learn to think differently! We must undergo a kind of education–note that Jesus spends much of His public life teaching. He teaches not so much a series of facts. Nor does He just impart information. Repentance involves learning to think anew about old facts, seeing from a new perspective, noticing things that had always been there, but discovering in them God’s presence and transforming love. It requires something like contemplation.

Monastic formation is perhaps the most radical instance of this Christian conversion, but it is simply what all Christians pledge to do at baptism. The thought patterns of the old Adam must give way to the new Adam, to the mind of Christ [Phil. 2: 5; 1 Cor. 2: 16]. Recognizing how exactly the old Adam thinks is not so easy, for our cultural upbringing lingers in unsuspected ways. What’s more, we live in a peculiarly blind kind of culture, that no longer recognizes its own dependence on tradition. Freud thought that he discovered a universal psychological law in the Oedipal complex, but in fact, he was merely noticing the modern Western tendency to want to do away with one’s fathers. This habitual refusal to recognize our intellectual and cultural debts causes disruptions and discontinuities in our background tradition, and therefore in our thinking.

In our monastery, we are trying to counteract this situation with different approaches to teaching. One test case, upon which I will dwell more at length in a future post, would be the following question. Can a modern Christian learn to read the Scriptures from the profound spiritual sense that guided the formation of theology from St. Paul until Rupert of Deutz? We live in a scientific age, and Catholic Biblical scholars have been celebrating their freedom to engage in historical-critical method for the past sixty years. Should we even bother to go back to allegory?

But what if the historical-critical method and our enthusiasm for it would turn out to be an unhealthy preoccupation with the world that is passing away? What if it locks us into the very worldview that a conversion is meant to leave behind? Given the present struggles of the Catholic Church in her historic lands, this kind of question bears asking and patient and careful response. It also may call for metanoia. Repent and believe!

Prima Theologia

June 6, 2015

Key concept #1: Liturgy is theology. In fact, it is primary theology.

The “Benedict Option” as exercised by actual Benedictines, is not a rejection of the world, but of regnant worldviews that distort and obscure the gospel. Which is to say such worldviews obscure reality. This is because Christ the Truth came from the Father to free us from sin and error. Worldviews are not so easy to change. They are generally the whole background of everything we think and do. To subject our worldview to a systematic examination can be profoundly disorienting. We should recall that it took Saint Paul many years to sort out the full implications of his conversion (he doesn’t specify, but note the passage of seventeen years in Galatians 1: 18–2: 1, some of which was certainly spent rethinking everything). Saint Antony the Great retreated to the desert around the age of 20 and emerged as a public figure again at 50. Things take time.

Paul’s early career was a series of reversals. Here is depicted his stealth escape from Damascus, the city where he had gone to persecute Christians.

But it helps when others can point out something of the goal, something of the discrepancy between what we had been taking for granted and what our new worldview-in-Christ should look like.

In the early Church, theology was roughly the equivalent of contemplative prayer, a first-hand, personal knowledge of God. This is to be distinguished from knowledge about God or from mere knowledge that God exists, hearsay accounts of God. But contemplative prayer took for granted the Church and the Church’s regular engagement in liturgy. Liturgy is our participation in the exercise of Christ’s high priesthood, the lifting up of our hearts and minds to God, our mystical encounter with God.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the word ‘theology’ began to undergo a certain transformation, becoming the more familiar academic concept. This wasn’t entirely bad; in fact, there were many good things that came about from the more systematic application of philosophical methods to the common fund of the knowledge of God.

Blessed Columba Marmion, OSB

But this new idea of theology is at a second remove from the encounter with God. At least it can be performed that way. This began to be felt as a problem in the early nineteenth century, as the effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt even within the Church. The roots of the liturgical movement are found in the efforts of Dom Prosper Gueranger and the Wolter brothers at Beuron. In both cases, an effort was made to experience a fuller liturgical celebration. The movement gained greatly in the twentieth century and bore real fruit in the Second Vatican Council (even if it’s taken us time to sort of the wheat from the tares in the intervening years). The liturgical reforms of Vatican II were meant to help re-open the font of theology to everyone, to make available the insights of Benedictines like Odo Casel, Lambert Beaudoin, and Blessed Columba Marmion, for the whole Church, especially those outside the cloister.

Joseph Bottum relates a telling anecdote in An Anxious Age. He is discussing contemporary Catholicism with students in California. One tells him, “I just go to church for confession, to pray, and to take Communion.” The gist of the story, in Bottum’s version, is that young people tune out the homilies and don’t expect much from priests, other than that they show up and dispense the sacraments. What strikes me in this quote is the lack of any sense that Communion, confession, and prayer are all liturgical acts, couched in a whole world, strewn with Biblical vocabulary, thick symbolic gesture, and so on. Rather than living an entirely new life in Christ, the sense is that we go on living in the old world, the one that’s passing away, and from time to time we get our sacramental immunization shot a church, then return to that old world, hopefully not to lose too much fervor along the way. This is better than skipping church! But is it adequate to the New Evangelization that we are being challenged to undertake?

We all know (thanks to Vatican II and Saint John Paul II) that the Eucharist is the source and summit or our baptismal lives. But how do we make sense of it? The Church has given us a whole liturgical discipline to assist us in unpacking the life-altering content of Christ’s gift.

Acclimating ourselves to this “Liturgical Asceticism” (I use here Notre Dame prof David Fagerberg’s term) takes time. And so often when I mention this idea of liturgy as primary theology, the concern is that we need something more immediate, effective, engaged! Something slimmed down for a jet-set generation.

But this was part of my point in mentioning Paul and Antony. Learning to see with spiritual eyes does take time. Yes, there are prodigies like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who benefit from saintly parents and a strong Catholic culture in general. But for most of us, in most ages of the Church’s history (we conveniently forget that the first thousand years were not always so resoundingly successful in the West!), divinization is a long, and sometimes arduous process. And why not? Isn’t the God of all peace worth the finite struggles of this temporal life? More to come.