Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

Easter Homily: Beyond the Frontier of Death

As we gather this morning, four astronauts are sailing toward the moon. Right now they are over 200,000 miles away from earth. The Artemis II mission is scheduled to circle around the moon tomorrow and begin the long return home.  NASA has a real-time mission tracker website, where you can look at video feeds from four cameras attached to the solar array wings. There is also a computerized diagram of the flight of the Orion spacecraft that allows you view the path to and from the moon from different angles, seeing the relative positions of earth, moon, and sun.

I thought of this last night at the Easter Vigil when we heard about God, at the beginning of creation bringing forth dry land from chaos and creating the two great lights. I came of age in the wake of the first lunar missions and and when I was around ten years old an uncle of mine gave me Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, a classic of science fiction, which I read and re-read. My father and I watched reruns of the original Star Trek series. I was enchanted by the mysterious music of the opening, with the famous monologue that begins, “Space: the final frontier.”

These were words that would have resonated with Americans, for whom, in the 1960s, the frontier still meant the wild west. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, wrote scripts for Westerns before conceiving Star Trek, and he modeled the show after the great naval exploratory novels of C.S. Forester.

Artemis II countdown

But Roddenberry was also and atheist, and I believe that he spoke too conclusively about space being the final frontier. He was right about something in the human spirit that craves discovery, that is impelled to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” But is space all there is?

When I got older, I fell in love with music, and this, for me, was also a kind of exploration, but of the mind and heart and community rather than of the physical cosmos. The world of art and music seemed to have truly endless possibilities, being unbound by time or space. But as you can see, I pursued neither the life of an astronaut nor of a musician. And that’s because, in the end, the final frontier for all of us is death.

In the words of Hamlet, the afterlife is the “undiscovered country,” though Hamlet, like Roddenberry, surely spoke a bit too hastily. That’s because we do have reports from beyond the grave.

We celebrate that first reconnaissance today, the day that Jesus rose from the dead after descending into hell, preaching to the captives in prison and liberating those who had been held captive to death. Not only has the undiscovered country been scouted out, it has been conquered, and we are free to move in and explore.

The Harrowing of Hell

For those of you who heard my homily on Good Friday, I hope that you mind me excavating a bit more a theme I introduced then. If this new world of the afterlife is now open for colonization as it were, how exactly do we get there? Do we just simply wait until we die? No; again, not in the physical sense. Rather, the entryway is baptism.

We were baptized into Christ’s death, Saint Paul says, so that “as Christ was raised from the dead…we too might walk in newness of life.” Right now, in the present tense, we are invited by God to live no longer by the flesh but by the Holy Spirit. This is the fulfillment of the distinctive human yearning for the beyond, the urge that impels us to venture into space and to plumb the depths of the heart. What we have been searching for all along is Jesus Christ, the Risen Christ, the God of love and infinite creativity.

So where do we go to explore this new country? In today’s second reading, Saint Paul says, “Seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Indeed, the very fact of the empty tomb is an invitation to seek Christ, but to do so spiritually, not physically.

The new world opened up for us by Jesus Christ is the spiritual life. And I don’t mean this in the sense of a boutique “spirituality,” where we choose a spiritual lifestyle that suits us. The spiritual life is the life of the unique Holy Spirit, God’s gift to us in baptism, the Spirit of Truth who will lead us into all truth. A personal “spirituality” limits us to what is comfortable. The Spirit of God makes us true explorers of what is real, what is given by God. And we discover this previously undiscovered country first of all in our own hearts.

Saint Macarius of Egypt said this of the human heart: “The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices; but there too is God and the angels, life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space.”

Do you see that he is, like Saint Paul, urging us to seek what is above? God and angels, the apostles and heavenly cities and treasures. Yes, we must take up arms against the dragons and lions and poisonous beasts, that is our sins and vices, but victory is absolutely assured if only we cling to the Lord with all the love of our hearts and fight unwearied at His side.

He is risen indeed, and in His unsurpassed love for you, his sisters and brothers, He has invited us where truly no one had gone before, but now where await all the saints and angels at the eternal heavenly banquet.

Homily for Good Friday

We have no king but Caesar.

The Gospel of John is full of irony. Sometimes the irony is amusing; sometimes it’s profound; sometimes it’s depressing. One of the more depressing ironies is the cry of the chief priests when Pilate presents them with Jesus after finding Him not guilty. They say, “We have no king but Caesar.”

To grasp the depth of the irony, it is helpful to return to the Book of Judges and the First Book of Samuel, which form one narrative together, giving us the story of Israel a thousand years before Christ. The Book of Judges ends with this statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

This is not a celebration of political freedom.

The people of Israel had reeled from one crisis to another, with God regularly intervening to save her. At the opening of the First Book of Samuel, the dangerous Philistines are becoming powerful. The people of Israel are growing increasingly fearful of this new political threat, and they demand that God give them a king, a strongman to fight their wars for them. The prophet Samuel warns the people that they will lose their freedom were they to submit to a king. A king would levy burdensome taxes, conscript their sons, build up a huge government bureaucracy. Perennial human problems!

In spite of Samuel’s warnings, God Himself agrees to appoint a king, eventually settling on David. Samuel’s predictions, however, quickly come true. On the whole, the kings of Israel found it impossible to avoid compromising entanglements with the gods of other nations. Israel was never the most powerful nation, and the world powers of the time dominated them, even exiling them. After God brought them back from exile, they became client states of the Persians, Greeks, and then the Romans, which is the background situation for the life and death of Jesus, Son of David.

The kingship in Judea had been suppressed for five hundred years at this point. But there were prophecies about a return of the King, the anointed one, who would free God’s people from domination by the Gentiles. And just last Sunday, Jesus allowed Himself to be identified as this Messiah, by riding into Jerusalem, the capital city founded by David himself, on a donkey, according to a prophecy of Zechariah the prophet.

And in fact, this is the closing of the circle.

When God agreed to appoint a king, He told Samuel that the people “have rejected me from being king over them.” In Jesus, we not only have a legitimate descendant of David, and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne, but we have God Himself, ready to take up His rightful place as the King of the people whom He had, time and again, delivered from her enemies.

Will they reject Him as king again?

The emotional background to this drama is fear. The chief priests fear the Romans. They also fear the mob and the consequences of a riot. Pilate is afraid of divine nemesis of some kind, which accounts for his reaction on hearing that Jesus claims to be the Son of God. He also fears the Emperor if things get out of hand. The disciples fear getting captured and punished by one authority or another, and so they run away.

When we are afraid, we are easily manipulated. This, by the way, is one reason the news is always negative. It serves a political purpose to keep large portions of the population anxious.

The choice that we all face at some point is here before Pilate, the authorities, and the mob. When we find ourselves anxious, will we choose God? Or will we demand a powerful man or ideology or movement to attack whatever is making us anxious? And what does it look like, exactly, to choose God?

Let’s admit that this can be a challenge. Because what God looks like on Good Friday is a condemned criminal humiliated by the powers of the world. Serving this God might not be quote-unquote “safe” in the normal sense of that term. But this is to limit ourselves to too narrow a field of vision. Jesus suggests this to Pilate when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Turning to God will not necessarily give us things that world deems desirable: fame, prosperity, power, comfort, safety. Still, trusting God will give us something much, much greater: victory over death itself. Fame, prosperity, and power will not deliver anyone from death, nor can any worldly power achieve it.

In conclusion, let’s close another circle.

For the chief priests to say, publicly, before Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar” is willingly to adopt the position of a slave—or at best a client serving the interests of a pagan power. My purpose here is not to assign blame, but to present frankly the temptation that we all face in this life.

I said that God will deliver us from death. What does this look like? Is this something that we wait around for, trying to build up credits with God in the time we have left? Where is this kingdom of God, and how do we get there to avoid slavery to the world?

Well, first of all, we have our Lord’s assurance that His kingdom is among us and within us. It is not far at all. On the Cross, He is showing us how to get there. He is opening the path through death to the Kingdom.

We follow, first of all, by being conformed to His death in baptism, by taking up our Crosses daily and following Him through death to life. This requires the eyes of faith, but it has palpable results. It gives us the freedom to live without fear, to accept whatever sufferings come our way, with peace and indeed joy, for they conform us to Christ and lead to His Kingdom.

As we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, let us ask God to open the eyes of our spirits to see anew the great love Jesus showed in becoming man for us and suffering for us. May it free us to let go of fear and find true joy in the Lord.

A Joyful Mystery in Lent

Today’s feast of the Annunciation can seem, at first glance, to be incongruous, falling as it does in the last weeks of Lent. While we are meditating on Jesus’ Passion, does it make sense joyfully to celebrate the Incarnation?

In fact, there are good reasons why this celebration falls precisely around the time of Holy Week each year. First of all, we might notice that in the Creed, the words “[He] became man,” are followed immediately by these words: “For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.” Nothing is said about his teaching or healing ministry. We go directly from His birth to His death.

Medieval Christians had a lively sense that the purpose of the Incarnation was precisely that it allowed Christ to suffer for the forgiveness of our sins. And indeed, historians of the liturgy believe that March 25 was chosen as the date of the Annunciation because it was also believed to be the date of Good Friday. This followed a belief in the early Church that Jesus’s conception and crucifixion happened on the same date, nicely demonstrating their interrelation.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 2

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here is Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh.)

There is a place for pleasure in the Christian life. Aristotle astutely noted that pleasure typically accompanies the completion of a good action, an action with a properly ordered goal. What the flesh would have us do is to seek this pleasure for its own sake. Here lies the beginning of addiction. When pleasure is unhitched from productive actions and achievement, it becomes its own goal. And when it becomes its own goal, our bodies demand that pleasure continually increase in intensity.

So, goals exercise a certain restraint on pleasure. If they are worthwhile, they always entail accepting a certain amount of discomfort, pain, and danger. To become a great academic requires reading and writing when it is not pleasurable to do so. It requires sacrificing other potential good actions which might bring a certain amount of comfort. It requires being tested and corrected by one’s teachers and peers, perhaps even being subject to ridicule and career sabotage. But the young scholar undertakes those risks, believing that becoming learned and being able to credibly teach others will lead to the pleasures proper to a cultivated mind.

As Saint Paul again points out, athletes deny themselves all kinds of things. We can take up his metaphor and note how strength conditioning requires that we continually force our muscles to move weights that cause pain and discomfort.

We have seen that goals naturally tend to reorient pleasure. But what about choosing proper goals? Saint Ignatius of Loyola has made one important contribution to this theme. If I need to choose between two courses of action, when will I know that I am ready to make the choice? The answer has to do with unearthing hidden fears, sensual inclinations and the like. In addition to gathering information germane to my choice, I also must frankly examine the likely fallout from each choice. Only when I am ready to accept whatever discomforts are associated with both choices, am I ready to choose fully rationally, without being swayed by an irrational aversion to difficulties.

If a lot of this sounds like Stoicism, that is because the Stoics’ take on these questions is remarkably similar to the Christian. One area where the Christian parts ways with the Stoic is in this notion of provoking the flesh by voluntarily taking on deprivations. If I could summarize this briefly, and inadequately, while the Stoics contributed much to our understanding of these battles, they shared with other schools of Greek philosophy a tendency to conflate sin and ignorance. They moved closer to the Christian position than did, say, Socrates, but there is still a sense that once the intellect is healed, the will inevitably follows. The Christian, by contrast, believes that the will must be regenerated by grace in order that the intellect may be healed.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Human beings, like all animals, are creatures of desire. We desire food and drink, and we have this desire because we need nourishment to stay alive. And again, this makes us akin to other animals. While plants also need nourishment, they lack desire, properly understood, because they lack awareness of their need. Animals not only hunger but deliberately set off to find food.

In this area, what distinguishes us from other animals is that we can use our reason to determine how to satisfy our natural desires. We can even deliberately not eat, enduring hunger pains for some greater goal such as fasting or dieting. We can also use our intelligence to alter the food we get by cooking it, mixing ingredients, and so on, to produce something that tastes good.

We go even further, using meals to symbolize other desires. For example, we desire companionship and community. A decision to eat together is a decision to satisfy that higher desire. What the philosopher Aristotle discovered is that we have a tendency to rank our desires. He explained this at the beginning of his book on ethics.

When we see someone carrying out an action, and we ask him, “What are you doing?”, we expect that the reason he gives will point to a desire that he is attempting to satisfy.

“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”

“To get to work on time.”

Aristotle then points out that we can continue to ask, “Why?” to the answer.

“Why do you want to get to work on time?”

“Because I want to get paid and not laid off.”

“Why do you want money?”

And so on.

These chains of questions will always terminate at the one thing that Aristotle says we seek for its own sake, which is happiness. We don’t normally ask people, “Why do you desire happiness? What good is it?”

We all recognize this is a sufficient answer to any question about someone’s motive. If it makes you happy, go ahead!

Aristotle’s theory is pretty sound, but I also think that it requires some filling out. For example, he did not deal with an interesting phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.

I’m thinking of the prophets. If we were to ask Jeremiah why he was continually criticizing the rulers of Jerusalem, it would be a stretch to show that he did this because he thought somehow it would make him happy. What he desired was something more like proper worship of God. If I could use the words of the Beatitude, he hungered and thirsted for justice.

Alright, with that as background, we look at today’s gospel. We see that, from one perspective, it is all about desire. Both the Samaritan woman and Jesus desire water. Both Jesus and the disciples desire food. And Saint John the Evangelist shows us how these desires point to a higher yearning in the human soul.

Jesus says to the woman, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and you living water.” In other words, if we knew the gift of God, we would desire it.

What is God’s gift?

It is the Holy Spirit. Before the Son of God came into the world, would we even have suspected that it was possible to receive God’s Holy Spirit? I think yes and no.

There are stories from many ancient cultures in which a divine spirit enters a human being, making him or her capable of particular impressive deeds, such as the writing of poetry or the invention of writing itself. We say of the Holy Spirit that He has spoken through the prophets, that in some way, they were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

But what Jesus is promising to the woman at the well is something more profound, a permanent union of ourselves with God. This promise reveals to us that our desires for truth, justice, and beauty are in fact different ways of longing for God. That only God can satisfy, and He intends to do this for us in a way surpassing anything we can imagine.

How are we to respond to this offer from God?

Let’s go back to the gospel reading. When the woman is persuaded that Jesus has something of value to offer, she asks for it outright. And so we, too, should ask. Here, though, we should bear in mind that the gift that Jesus is offering will only be available after His death.

What Jesus does next is surprising: He gently talks the Samaritan woman into an admission of her own serial relationship failures. Is Jesus saying that He will only give the Spirit once she’s fixed all her problems?

No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.

Also bear in mind that the woman still thinks that they are talking about water. Things change, however, when she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. This suddenly prompts her to speak about proper worship of God, a point of sharp dispute between Jews and Samaritans at the time.

Jesus says that God the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and truth. This is where God’s invitation points, that we learn to worship Him properly. What this means in the context of this homily is, once again, that God is the final terminus of desire, God is what we crave in our heart of hearts, whether we are aware of it or not.

And the expression of this desire is literally worship. The word worship is derived from the same root as the word “worth.” Worship is then that activity in which we acknowledge that which has highest value, God Himself.

This is what I said that the prophets like Jeremiah were desiring rather than earthly happiness. And it was, in some sense, the Holy Spirit that both satisfies that desire and inflames it. The reason that Jesus brings up the ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman is to help us see that we can’t obtain satisfaction of this desire for God without correcting our lower desires.

The longing for love that the Samaritan woman manifested in her many marriages was a sign that could have pointed to God but did not. At some level that is why the marriages didn’t work.

Jesus is healing her and recalibrating this desire, and it truly changes the woman. She goes from being someone avoiding the eyes of others to speaking directly and persuasively to them.

As we move toward the middle of Lent, what desires of ours point away from God, and how can we redirect them? Is there a hidden sin that I’m keeping from God and from my own scrutiny out of shame? And if so, how might Jesus’s gentle example move me to re-examine and heal my own past?

As we cooperate with God’s grace in this process of healing, the Holy Spirit will become more of a conscious companion. And what more could we ask for than that?

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 1

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World.)

In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” This quote helps to situate what we mean when we say that one of the three enemies of the soul is the flesh. Perhaps when we hear “sins of the flesh” we are inclined to narrow down the temptations of the flesh to lust and gluttony, with a nod toward other excesses of alcohol or drug consumption. But the tradition sees the danger here at a deeper level because of the subtle corruptions of our intellect and will that come about from an undue search for pleasure, comfort, and safety.

In our posts last year, we looked at the three traditional enemies of the soul, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. We saw that they correspond to three parts of the human soul. The Flesh is a distortion of the concupiscible part of the soul, that which seeks health, self-preservation and procreation. The World distorts the irascible part of the soul, that which governs anger, sadness, and to a certain extent vainglory. The Devil operates primarily on our intellect, distorting our notion of ourself and of God.

Jesus’s temptations in the desert also typify these three battles. The temptation to turn stones into bread is clearly a temptation of the hungering and fatigued flesh. The temptation to exercise power over all the nations is a world-related one, and the temptation to tempt God, to force God’s hand, is specifically diabolical.

So let’s begin with Jesus’s fast of forty days. The first interesting aspect of this is that Our Lord’s fast was a provocation. He is forcing the battle against the flesh out into the open. Later on, I will be making a brief comparison between the Christian understanding of the flesh versus the Stoic version. One of the important contrasts is here, that Jesus deliberately chooses prolonged hunger in order to get the Tempter to manifest himself on the pretense of the flesh.

Jesus is teaching us that it is a good practice to choose, for a season, what is uncomfortable, whether it be the discomfort of hunger, of a hard chair without a cushion, which is a typical monastic discipline, or hard manual labor. The goal is to get the flesh to mumble and complain against us and then to respond with a simple “no.” This has the eventual effect of freeing us from unthinking sensuality, which often operates at a subconscious level.

When we attempt these things, we can now see that the Tempter will use our discomfort as a pretext. Jesus’s response is interesting: “Man does not live on bread alone.” This is to say that our survival does not depend on comfort and ease.

One of the tempting ideas that the modern world has put into our minds is that these ascetical practices of the great saints of old—wearing hair shirts, sleeping on the ground, eating once every other day—will make us unhealthy, cause us to wither into resentful Feraponts. But in fact the Christian tradition, and more specifically the monastic tradition has always made a distinction between causing pain or discomfort and causing injury and harm. Not all pain is associated with damage.

And indeed, relaxation has its place. A story is told of Saint Antony the Great one of the champions of extreme ascetical practices. A farmer, having heard about Antony incredible feats of self-denial, was scandalized when he saw the great man from a distance, talking and even joking with a group of younger monks. When he confronted the saint Anthony had him string his bow and shoots a series of arrows. After a few bowshots, the farmer objected: if he continued to stretch his bow in this way, it would break. So too, said Saint Anthony, with the monk. It is not healthy to practice asceticism without relaxation.

This is also true when our health is compromised. Sometimes survival and the restoration of health requires treating the body gently. The pain and discomfort of sickness or age, when borne well, are penance in and of themselves.

Dealing with the Lenten malaise

The opening days of Lent are often filled with enthusiasm, a sense of purpose and newness. But Lent is a long season. After a week or two, my own resolutions start to appear more difficult than I had anticipated. What I have found helpful in dealing with this typical Lenten malaise is to focus on simply carrying out the fast, or whatever other resolution I made, without much regard to any tangible “result.”

Aiming at a result is a temptation of Lent. The truth is that we are seeking to grow closer to God, a God who is infinitely greater than anything we can imagine. We can’t really know what a better relationship with God is like. Instead of tracking my weight when I fast, I simply abstain from a meal, or from meat, without asking what it’s for, other than that I pledged to do this for God. Similarly, we can’t know for certain how any alms that we give will be used. Most of all, we can’t know ahead of time what results will come from prayer.

Once we have made the simple resolution to carry out our Lenten penance, we can take a more objective view of how these practices, recommended by Jesus Himself, subtly change us. They challenge me to identify and renounce a tendency toward complaint or victimhood. They help me to discover faults that I hide by eating nice food, buying nice things, and enjoying entertainments instead of prayer. Here is where the real work of conversion takes place. Let’s not waver in our resolutions!

Now Is the Acceptable Time!

“Behold! Now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation! [2 Corinthians 6: 2]” We sing this text from Saint Paul every Sunday morning during Lent. Paul’s impassioned exhortation reminds me of the words of another Apostle. Saint Peter, in his first “homily” on Pentecost morning, says to the crowd, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified [Acts 2: 36].”

In both cases, the Apostles Peter and Paul speak with great urgency. An immeasurable change has just occurred. A man has been raised from the dead and taken up into heaven. Now is the time to act: for Saint Paul, “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God [2 Cor. 5: 20]”; for Peter, “Repent and be baptized [Acts 2: 38]!” This is our chance to make things right with God.

Can we find this urgency in Lent? Lest we think that the acceptable time has come and gone,we might first note that Paul is writing the Corinthians perhaps twenty-five years after the Resurrection. The acceptable time is always now. The Church dramatically and starkly moves us to action in the liturgy of Ash Wednesday. To dust we shall return, at a time that we cannot yet know. There is no time like the present to repent. In just over six weeks, we will re-energize our baptisms by renewing our promises to serve God and reject evil. What if, in the intervening time, we were able to welcome God’s grace so as to be more saint-like when we pass through the darkness of Good Friday to the light of Easter?

There is another reason for urgency. We are discovering more and more each day, perhaps to our dismay, just how badly in need our world is of moral and spiritual renewal. The extent of evil in the world can be demoralizing. This Lent is a good time to offer our own acts of self-denial for the reparation of the harms done. The power of two billion Christians doing acts of penance and praying fervently is a good place to start tipping the scales back. We are living anew the need to “repent and be baptized,” to be reconciled to God, not for our sake only, but for the sake of the whole world. May God grant us all a holy Lent!

Because she loved more…

Today we conclude our annual retreat, and if you are thinking to yourself that we just did this a few months ago, you would be right. We have moved the time of our retreat back to February from November, where we observed it from 2018 until 2025. Today is an opportune day to end the retreat, since we have the custom of renewing our vows on the final day of the retreat. Today is the Feast of Saint Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict.

We know precious little of the life of Saint Scholastica, which was included by Saint Gregory the Great in his Dialogues, a book about the holy men and women of Italy of his time. We know that she had a convent near the great abbey of Monte Cassino, where he lived the last years of his life, and that she would go out of the convent annually to visit her saintly brother and discuss the joys of the spiritual life.

Gregory also tells us that her prayer was more powerful than her brother’s because she loved more. This should always be a burr in the saddle for the men’s branch of the Benedictines. Our order of monks has much to pride itself on: a 1500 year history during which hundreds and hundreds of monasteries helped to build up Europe, develop the Church’s liturgy, preserve the literary works of ancient Latin scholars, run the first schools for children, and on and on. In uncertain times like our own, there are many who look to monks for the “Benedict Option,” to renew this work of cultural preservation through the current Dark Age. If God wills it, may it be so.

But all of this work can miss the admonition of Saint Scholastica. At one point in the story of her last days, she says to Benedict, “I asked you and would not listen. I asked my God and He listened.” This a good-natured chiding, to be sure, but it contains a sharp point. Benedict begins his Rule with the word, “Listen,” and Saint Scholastica is suggesting to him that he isn’t living by his own teaching. He is forgetting what Saint Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, as I would put it (if you will allow a paraphrase and a bit of hyperbole), “If I have the perfect observance of the monastic way of life, compose great works of theology, and preserve Western civilization, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

So as we monks renew our solemn profession to continue in a life of obedience, stability and conversion of life, we should keep in mind Saint Scholastica’s challenge and example. May we do more—certainly! –not necessarily because we are strong or clever. In God, let us accomplish all that we do because we love.

Does Saint Benedict Forbid All Laughter?

In recent years, I’ve given a few interviews on the topic of monastic life in general and the Rule of Saint Benedict in particular. I’ve also been (happily) involved in quite a few discussions with young men interested in monastic life. In the cases where my interlocutors have read the Rule, there are certain puzzling themes or cruxes that tend to arise. Among the concerns: does Saint Benedict forbid laughter? When there is a dispute between a younger and older monk, is the older monk always right (meaning, do we permit gaslighting)? What do we make of the use of corporal punishment in the Rule? And so on. In this post, let’s examine this first question, whether laughter is at all permitted in the monastery.

In his Rule for Monks, Saint Benedict mentions laughter in the following places:

Laughter appears twice in Chapter Four, On the Tools of Good Works, in verses 53 and 54: “Speak no foolish chatter, nothing just to provoke laughter;/do not love immoderate or boisterous laughter.” Next, Benedict concludes Chapter Six with undoubtedly his harshest words on the matter: “We absolutely condemn in all places any vulgarity and gossip and talk leading to laughter, and we do not permit a disciple to engage in words of that kind.” Finally, In Chapter Seven, On Humility, steps ten and eleven concern laughter. “The tenth step of humility is that [a monk] is not given to ready laughter, for it is written: Only a fool raises his voice in laughter [Sirach 21: 23].” Then: “The eleventh step of humility is that a monk speaks gently and without laughter, seriously and with becoming modesty…” Saint Benedict does not have any passages that refer to laughter as a positive behavior.

Taking an analytical overview, two things about this list stand out right away. First of all, all of these warnings take place in the more general context of concern about excessive and idle speech. Monks, after all, are men who specialize in listening. If we should avoid all speech except that which is necessary, then clearly idle words of any kind are dangerous for the monk. And plenty of humorous subjects are either idle or vulgar.

On the other hand, monasteries, rooted in the life of the Spirit, should not be places of oppressive gloom. Indeed, a gift of the Holy Spirit is joy. Given the normal ups and downs of community life, it can be something useful or even charitable to lighten the mood with a witty comment or even a joke. Notice that twice in the above quotations, Saint Benedict is concerned not about laughter as such. He seems even to suggest the possibility that laughter is a normal part of the life, so long as the monk is not readily given to it and avoids the boisterous form of laughter. It is possible to smile at something amusing and even chuckle, without losing a thoughtful and serious disposition.

Again, monastic tradition includes a very famous saying by Saint Antony the Great, recognizing the need for brothers to relax together.  In fact, in this story, he and some brothers actually scandalized a visitor by their levity! A good-humored appreciation of the ironies of life builds bonds of camaraderie. There can be no doubt that Saint Bernard, a model of austerity, wrote passages that were meant to be funny. His short treatise The Twelve Degrees of Humility and Pride is full of wry observations on the faults of monks (and Bernard does not spare himself). He also fires biting satire at both Cluniac (Benedictine) and Cistercian monks in his Apologia to Abbot William of St. Thierry (in which he described the myriad techniques the Cluniac monks of his day had for “torturing” eggs at breakfast).

There is a second thing to note about the context of the five passages in which the word “laughter” appears in the Rule. Saint Benedict borrowed these sentences almost word-for-word from an earlier document, known as the Rule of the Master. I don’t mean to suggest that Benedict did not intend to convey his own teaching through those sentences. These references to laughter were undoubtedly understood by Benedict to be ancient and proverbial in monastic circles, and he is eager to transmit the tradition to his monks. But when Saint Benedict speaks more in his own voice, his tone is inevitably gentler than the Master and more penetrating, both psychologically and theologically.

The last references to laughter are in steps ten and eleven (of twelve) of the Ladder of Humility. I agree with Fr. Michael Casey, OSCO, that the Ladder is descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, the reticence toward laughter will describe a monk who has nearly reached the heights of humility. To prescribe a forceful suppression of laughter, while it might occasionally be a necessary discipline, will not automatically make monks humble. Genuinely humble monks have acquired a fund of self-knowledge and tact in relationships, in both cases by letting go of the ego which needs to be the center of attention. A holy monk will know that even innocent laughter can cause harm sometimes, and teasing slips quite easily into mockery and implied derision. He will, in turn, set an example for younger monks, who, one hopes, will be sensitized to the demands of charity with regard to humor.

To conclude, I offer a couple of anecdotes. My maternal grandfather was, I believe, a great man. He was unusually taciturn, but never glum. In fact, as he aged, his entire demeanor became, if anything, more mischievously impish while remaining inscrutably quiet. He delighted in word play, in sports, children and animals. The object of his humorous remarks was frequently himself, but never in a way that betrayed any self-pity. He certainly was not seeking pity from anyone else. When he lost his hair to chemotherapy, he wore a hilarious winter hat everywhere, and even though I know that he was often in pain and fatigued, he rarely stopped smiling—taking in his surroundings, making an occasional observation, asking a question. Just writing this makes me smile and even want to chuckle, remembering how good-natured he was as he waited for death.

Later, in the Jubilee Year of 2000, I happened to be at a general audience with Pope Saint John Paul II on his 80th birthday. He was quite frail at the time, barely able to stand, and he spoke with an audibly slurred voice. When he greeted the thousands of pilgrims in several different languages, he began his address to the Anglophones saying, “I welcome all the English-speaking pilgrims here today, especially all of those who, like me, are celebrating their 80th birthday.”

Both of these examples show that humor can function as a way, ironically, to offer comfort and reassurance to those who are unsettled by suffering, and to remove the focus from ourselves as some kind of victim. At the end of their lives neither men were likely to tell jokes that would lead to immoderate laughter, nor did they laugh boisterously themselves. The were joyful servants of God who knew how to share their joy and put others at ease. This seems to me to be in keeping with the spirit of sobriety that Saint Benedict so prizes.

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