Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for 2020

What To Do When There Are No Good Choices

“But come! With hope or without hope we will follow the trail of our enemies. And woe to them, if we prove the swifter! We will make such a chase as shall be accounted a marvel among the Three Kindreds: Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Forth the Three Hunters!”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Chapter I

The speaker in the excerpt is Aragorn, fated to be king, but, at this point in the story, merely the failed leader of the Fellowship of the Ring. Earlier in the chapter, he observes, “All that I have done today has gone amiss. What is to be done now?” The Ring and its Bearer have vanished, the stout Boromir lies slain, and two other hobbits of the Fellowship have been captured. Aragorn has no good choices in front of him: “An evil choice is now before us.” There is good reason to fear the worst, that the evil Sauron will regain the Ring and use it to exercise totalitarian rule over Middle Earth. 

We face a perplexing situation as the pandemic drags on. How shall we proceed? Tolkien, Shakespeare and other great authors offer us lessons in just such choices. Aragorn ultimately decides to proceed on the basis of the virtues, particularly the virtues of honor, courage, and nobility. He and the other two remaining members of the Fellowship first give proper commendation to the fallen Boromir, which is the just and honorable thing to do. Next, they resolve to rescue and avenge their captured friends. Such is the context of the opening quote above. There seems to be little or no hope. Readers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion will be familiar with this type of predicament. Tolkien is borrowing it from a widespread trope in the literature of heroic paganism. Pagan heroes such as Hector, Siegfried, Beowulf, and perhaps even Anakin Skywalker, are faced with lose-lose situations. Heroism is obtained by accepting one’s fate courageously, honorably, and nobly.

“I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?”–Mr. Spock acts decisively when there are no apparently good choices.

Is this not how our lives feel right now under the dual threats of a pandemic and economic disaster? There are no good choices. It’s important to admit this because if we imagine that there is a right choice, we may well fall prey to finger-pointing, polarization, and a self-defeating victimization narrative. The great pagan heroes were not victims. Aragorn himself had no time to point fingers. “It is I that have failed.” What is especially important is that Aragorn also does not collapse into paralysis: “We that remain cannot forsake our companions while we have strength left.” He chooses an honorable and courageous course, well aware that it is a long shot. But if he fails, he will at least fail doing something excellent, attempting to honor his friendship with the missing hobbits.  

What is more, the author of this story is not a pagan, but a Catholic. This means that no situation is ever truly hopeless. Christian hope is a theological virtue, a gift from the God Who has proven Himself faithful and more powerful than death and despair. This allows us to go beyond even what is just, courageous or noble. We should still choose this, of course, but we add to this natural virtue the horizon of hope. God can see all kinds of possibilities that we can’t yet. Welcoming the gift of hope is largely a matter of cooperating with the divine.

Hope allows us to remain active participants in the drama that is our lives. A large part of the fear, anxiety, and depression that have been affecting us reflect a sense that nothing we can do will change the situation. It is true that most of us will not make a big difference in, say, public policy at the federal, state, or even city level. But this is true at all times, and not just in times of crisis. We can make a big difference in our outlook and the outlook of our families and friends. And hope, like all virtue, is contagious. If enough of us are re-empowered to take action, who knows what breakthroughs we might discover? When we hope, we open ourselves to God’s perspective, a greater vista than that offered by typical politics or science.

So what can you do today for someone you love? What do you owe your family today? What do we owe ourselves? What ignoble behaviors can we identify in our lives that we can resist? These and other questions like them are always good to ask, but we easily overlook them when a situation feels beyond our control and the future feels suddenly uncertain.

The truth is that our future has always been uncertain. On January 1, 2020, our future was just as uncertain as it is today because it was exactly the same future. We just didn’t know certain things four months ago that we know now. In this life, circumscribed by our births and our ultimate deaths, things are always uncertain. The successes of science and sociology have tended to obscure this fundamental truth. However, being reminded of it is not a bad thing, though we might wish that it had become clearer without the intervention of a potential disaster. 

Our choices are always made in the face of an uncertain future. Often enough, choices that seemed to be correct at one point in our life look terrible in hindsight, and vice versa. What we always need in the face of such choices is hope that no matter how bad things get, God is accompanying us in the persons in our lives, especially those imbued with virtue. When there are no good choices, we are still free. In fact, we are freed precisely from the burden of having to be “right” in a narrow technocratic or utilitarian sense. We are free to ask the more important question, “What kind of person, city, and nation do we want to be in the midst of our suffering?”

Tolkien answers for Aragorn in his actions. “On and on he led them, tireless and swift, now that his mind was at last made up.”

The Feast of Saint Mark

Choosing my favorite gospel would be a foolhardy task. Each of the four canonical gospels has its profound insights, theogical importance, and literary charms. I do, however, tend to return to Saint Mark in lectio divina. Since he is traditionally identified as a disciple of Saint Peter, perhaps it’s the influence of my patron saint at work (in the First Letter of Peter, the author refers to “my son Mark” [1 Peter 5: 13]). Since today is his feast day, I’d like to share with you some of what makes this gospel special and interesting.

First of all, it is the shortest of the gospels, mostly because Jesus does very little teaching. The breathless story leaps from event to stunning event. Mark resorts often to the word “immediately,” when describing the action. This is probably an allusion to the immediacy of the creation narrative in Genesis 1. God speaks, and things spring into being. Jesus’s speech has the same power and efficacy.

Saint Mark is the patron of Venice, where one finds the famous basilica named after him.

We now know, almost for certain, that the earliest version of Mark’s gospel had no report of the resurrection. The earliest manuscripts lack chapter 16, or have a confused mixture of different resurrection stories which appear to be later insertions. Some critics leverage this fact to claim that there was no resurrection. This begs the question of why Mark would trouble to write a book if nothing special happened after the death of Jesus. Nevertheless, this curious fact demands an explanation. From a purely literary standpoint, Mark’s gospel has no need of an account of the resurrection for several reasons. First of all, he’s writing for insiders who either believe already, or are surrounded by persons who know and retell often the stories of the risen Jesus. There is good reason to think that the Church herself is the presence of the risen Christ in Mark’s worldview (an idea unpacked by my NT professor Deacon Charles Bobertz). Most importantly, in the opening of the gospel, Mark unambiguously announces that Jesus is the Son of God [1: 1]. John the Baptist then prophesies “Prepare the way of the Lord [=God],” just before Jesus arrives. This is followed by Jesus’s baptism, which is a clear anticipation of the resurrection, ascension, and descent of the Holy Spirit: “When he came up [anabainon=”arose”] out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens open (Ascension) and the Spirit descending upon him (the Spirit descending on the Church, which is Christ’s risen body) [Mark 1: 10].”

In fact, the lack of a resurrection narrative strikes me as the foremost instance of one of Mark’s literary innovations, the use of irony as a challenge to the reader or listener. Will I decide for or against Christ? Mark leaves the story unfinished so that we must ask ourselves, “What do I think happened next? Do I believe that the man depicted here is the Son of God Who died for us and rose again?”

This challenge appears in another often-misunderstood episode in Mark’s gospel:

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. [Mark 10: 17-18]

Hasty readers often paraphrase Jesus’s words to mean, “Why are you calling me good? I’m not God after all.” But what if the Lord’s question is not rhetorical? Jesus, like a good rabbi, has proposed a syllogism to the man. The major premise is that only God is good; the minor premise is the fact that the man called Jesus good. Will the man draw out the implication of his own words and recognize Jesus as God? Or is the man is only calling Jesus good to flatter him? Either way, the question goes unanswered. The man’s dejected response to Jesus’s later invitation to follow Him demonstrates a blinding attachment to the world. As a result, he lacked the insight to grasp the question that Jesus posed. It’s as if he didn’t even hear it. Will I avoid that mistake?

Mark’s use of irony helps to answer yet another famous conundrum. At the end of Mark’s gospel, the only words that Jesus utters from the Cross are slightly scandalous: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [15: 34]” This verse is again used as supposed evidence that Jesus did not anticipate his resurrection, and that he had been mistaken in trusting God. In short, it is the clincher that Jesus is not the Son of God, and that the divine “Jesus of faith” is a later fabrication of the Church. How ironic, then, that the centurion standing at the foot of the Cross does identify him! “And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was a son of God!’ [15: 39–my translation]” Once again, Mark depicts the scene with heavy irony; an anonymous pagan soldier has more insight into the identity of Jesus than anyone else. Whose vision do I share?

To understand the real import of Jesus’s words from the Cross, we should look to their source, Psalm 22 [21 in the Vulgate]. This poignant, beautiful poem chanted every Sunday in the monastery is a classic example of a lament. The Psalmist describes merciless attacks by enemies, disease, and wild animals as an anticipation of death and abandonment by God. Mark alludes to two prophecies from this Psalm: “they have pierced my hands and my feet [v. 16],” and “they divide my clothing among them [v. 18–cf. Mark 15: 24].”

A Coptic icon of Saint Mark, traditionally the founder of the church in Alexandria, Egypt.

Next we should note the amazing reversal that takes place in this Psalm. After twenty plus verses of agony, a light begins to appear:

You who fear the Lord, praise him!…For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him….All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the famlies of the nations shall worship before him. [vv. 23a, 24, 27]

I could easily have quoted more, but the point is that the reversal that takes place in Psalm 22 is foreshadowing of the resurrection from the dead (the great Jewish Biblical scholar Jon D. Levenson corroborates this reading, especially in his book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel). Moreover, the result of this resurrection is that not only Israel worships the One True God; all nations are gathered to God. Saint Mark, probably writing around the year 70 A.D. in Rome, can point to his own mixed congregation as proof that the prophecy of this Psalm has been fulfilled by Jesus, who quoted its opening lines in the inaugurating moment of salvation.

The evangelist John, writing much later (and it’s hard say whether he knows Mark’s gospel), perfects these techniques of irony, but it is Mark who first seized on this procedure to press his readers toward the crucial moment of decision. The urgency of this gospel speaks to us at every moment. Am I one who witnesses to Christ’s identity by my own life? Am I like the rich young man who wants reassurance from Christ but refuses the act of faith that would alter my world? Is my faith in need of strengthening, such as the blind man whose initial cure allowed him only partial vision [Mark 8: 22-26]? Once you’ve finished reading Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, maybe Mark’s gospel will provide the comfort and challenge fit for the moment.

How to Sort Your Thoughts

My last post ended with a question. Once we get some emotional separation from our thoughts, and we use our newfound perspective to assess our thoughts, how do we determine which ones are good and which ones are bad? To answer this question, I would like to look more closely at where our thoughts come from, and then offer some ideas on how to separate out good thoughts from bad. 

Not only are we not our thoughts, but many of the thoughts we have don’t originate with us. This might sound surprising at first, until you give it a little thought (so to speak). Human beings use language to assist us in our thinking, and the words that we use are not our own. So to some extent, the shape that our thoughts take depends on the language we grow up using, and our facility in using it. We learn a lot about the world from what other people tell us. How we think about politics depends on which sources of news we read, how much we’ve learned about history and civics, and so on. In today’s world of hyperconnectivity, we often passively absorb all kinds of thoughts and feelings from advertising, movies, and social media. 

So the very idea that what I happen to be thinking or feeling at the moment is somehow “me,” or even “how I tend to think” hides from us the important fact that a good deal of our interior life is borrowed from sources external to our minds. Ancient monastic tradition understood this well. The monks of old referred to good thoughts as “angelic” (literally “messages” from God), and darker thoughts as “demonic.”

Our Lady trained herself by meditation on Israel’s scriptures to recognize the voice of an angel when Gabriel was sent to her.

Lest this talk of angels and demons sound too fantastical, let’s continue to unpack the phenomenon of thinking. Many of you know that before I entered monastic life, I was a professional songwriter. The first time that I experienced writers’ block, I started wondering about where my ideas for songs came from. Even today, when I walk in a crowded place, I tend to experience melodies arising internally. Sometimes I still wake up with songs going through my head that I’ve never heard before. In the modern world, we often celebrate persons whom we think of as “original” or “creative.” Now, these last two words are slightly dangerous from a theistic perspective, since we technically are not the origin of ourselves. Therefore we are never fully the origin of any product of our own thought or labor. Nor can we create, in the strict sense. So the question arises again, where do “creative” thoughts come from?

Before the notion of creativity became current, Western culture prized “inventors.” An invention is literally something that somebody “found” (Latin inventum, a thing that was found). Inventiveness arises from attentiveness, awareness, and a sympathy for things as they already are. Bach composed a number of “inventions,” and, as a devout Lutheran, he very much understood himself to have been a discoverer rather than a creator. Similarly, Stravinsky did not see himself as creative in the literal sense of the word. Rather, he was a “discerner.” He sorted through his many inspirations, and he kept the good and threw away the bad. Such is our work when we discern our thoughts.

Thomas Edison was an inventor. One of his most important virtues was perseverance in the face of failure. He tried out numerous materials for his light bulb filament before succeeding. Musical “inventors” follow a similar procedure. A great composer of music is someone who has lots of inspirations…and throws away the bad ones (which might be most of them), and keeps the good ones.

“Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”
Thomas Edison

Someone like Edison has an advantage over composers when it comes to separating the good inspirations from the bad. Either the filament lights up, or it doesn’t. How does a composer know when his piece “lights up?” Because a good composer has listened to lots and lots of good music, and he knows whether a piece is good or bad.

Learning to recognize what makes a song, a singer, or a symphony great allows me to apply the same standards to my own inspirations. Two examples: listening closely to the horn arrangements by the band Chicago taught me how to layer melodies within a texture to create depth that the ear might not hear on a first listen, but will be “felt” as more coherent. Paying attention to Joni Mitchell’s earlier songs (“For the Roses” is my favorite album of hers) taught me something similar: how the range and shape of a melody can convey emotional nuance. So, when my own compositions feel stale in some way, it’s often because I haven’t used these layering and shaping techniques to anchor the overall effect. And I recognize that feeling of staleness because I’m comparing my song to good songs.

A good composer, then, trains herself by immersion in good music, to be able to look objectively at her inspirations.

A composer has inspirations, and we have thoughts. The mechanism is, for our purposes, the same. A good composer trains herself to like good music, and to apply the same standards of excellence to her own compositions. We can train ourselves to like good thoughts. We do this by immersion in thoughts of proven worth. For a Christian, this would mean immersion in the world of the Bible (especially the New Testament) and the spiritual classics like Confessions or Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. It also means keeping at arm’s length more damaging influences.

If a reader were to ask me what two practical steps anyone could take today to make progress in the discernment of thoughts, my answer would be: 1) disconnect from the news and social media, and 2) read Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The entire letter is worth your time, but let’s start here:

“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things [Philippians 4: 8].”

I offer this one passage not as a shortcut to a fleeting mood of optimism. Rather, Saint Paul is offering a baseline of good thinking. Compare his exhortation to the actual state of your mind. On what might you reflect in order to find nobility and excellence? Which thoughts might you reject as untrue, dishonorable, or unjust? Why doesn’t Saint Paul urge you to think about your resentments or all the bad things that people do? Is it possible to be aware of evil in the world, take note of it, but not allow it to be the thrust of your thinking? Now you are practicing good interior hygiene.

Like learning to enjoy good music, training ourselves to “refuse the evil and choose the good [Isaiah 7: 14],” requires a commitment to change. What better time to start than in our present circumstances?

In an upcoming post, we will look at how to influence our thinking by changing our behaviors. For now, here’s a remarkable combination of guitar texture, vocal delivery, supple melodic ideas, and ingeniously poignant lyrical imagery. This is a song that has made a big impact on my thinking about musical excellence (though not as much impact as Saint Benedict has had on my thinking about spiritual excellence!).

Homily for Easter Sunday, 2020

My great-grandmother was born in 1890, and she just missed living in three centuries, dying in 1997. I have fond childhood memories of walking a few blocks south from my grandparents’ house along the Wisconsin River to visit her. She always asked about our education, what did we like to study in school?       Occasionally, she would tell us stories from her childhood. From my perspective now, I wish I had asked her more about what it was like to grow up at the turn of the twentieth century. One of her most-told stories involved her being lost in a snowstorm and the horses knowing the way home. When she was a child, there was no church where her family lived. As the story goes, the German settlers there wanted a church very badly, but in those days, with no telephone and limited transportation options, it was difficult to get an audience with the bishop to secure proper permission. So they went ahead and built the church, then sent a note to the bishop saying that the church was ready to be consecrated.  The bishop was not at all pleased that this project had gone forward without his knowledge, and as he rode the train into town, he was rehearsing the rebuke he would give these impertinent townsfolk.

But when he stepped out, he was greeted by all the townspeople standing on wooden planks laid over the cranberry marshes. They were singing and playing musical instruments. The children were dressed up in their first communion dresses and suits. They were there to greet the risen Christ present in their bishop.

He was so moved by their faith and warm welcome that instead of scolding them, he went with them to the church and consecrated it.

Not only was there a lack of church buildings in those days, there were also very few priests. My great-grandmother only got to Mass several times a year, and, one imagines, Easter Masses were themselves rare occurrences. Among the many questions I wish I had thought to ask her is, “How did you celebrate Easter when you couldn’t go to Mass?”

It must have called for creativity among the simple faithful, as did their sly  plan for even getting a church in the first place. I’ve been in contact with many Catholics this past week. I’ve seen all kinds of creative responses to our stay-at-home orders. This has gotten me thinking about the many odd ways that Christians have had to observe Easter throughout the Church’s history. Someone who is a friend of our community, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, tells the story of the Christian prisoners secretly saying to one another, “Christ is risen.” “He is risen indeed!” to remind each other that it was Easter Sunday.

One of the strangest stories is that of our Holy Father Saint Benedict. When he was still a very young man, he secluded himself in a cave in a mountainous area about fifty miles west of Rome. His biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, tells us that a nearby priest was just sitting down to a sumptuous Easter dinner, no doubt fatigued from his own liturgical duties, when our Lord visited him in a vision. Jesus told him to bring some of the food to his servant Benedict. Our Lord didn’t tell him where Benedict was, so this anonymous priest had to climb around the mountains of Subiaco to find his cave. When he found young Benedict, he greeted him, saying, “Come, let us eat, for today is Easter!” Benedict didn’t realize that it was Easter, and he thought that the priest was using a figure of speech. So he responded, “I know that it is Easter because you have graced me with your presence.” So Saint Benedict sees the risen Christ in this otherwise unknown priest who brings him food, and he has achieved this kind of mystical vision without the benefit of attending the liturgy with any regularity in the preceding years.

I don’t recommend Benedict as a pattern, any more than I would recommend that we celebrate Easter every year the way we are today. But it is another indication that our faith in the resurrection, and the joy that is ours in this faith, can remain in us and even grow stronger when we encounter obstacles.

Perhaps the strangest Easter was the very first. The Apostles were practicing their own stay-at home strategy, fearfully hiding. The women of the group dared to go out to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, but the body is gone. The result is a mixture of confusion, fear, sadness, indignation, and, some glimmer of belief.  It is quite remarkable that the gospel of this morning’s Mass is one of the few in the Church’s liturgical year in which Jesus makes no appearance whatsoever. Even after Jesus does appear to the disciples, they continue to experience fear, disbelief and confusion. It is not until Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit that the full meaning and effect of the Resurrection is felt. Traditionally, the first forty days after Easter were a time when Jesus continued to visit and teach his disciples the mysteries of the faith, which were fully inaugurated in the church’s liturgical life beginning with the Ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps we are being called this year to stay in the upper room with the Apostles and Mary, listening to the teachings of the risen Lord, to stay in the city waiting to receive the power of God from on high, to renew our hearts with saving doctrine, and then to implore God our Father to set our hearts ablaze with the fire of the Holy Spirit’s love. The risen Christ is among us, and we can learn to recognize him as Benedict recognized Him in the priest who brought him food, and as the townspeople did in their bishop. We can learn to recognize Christ in all we meet, in all those who are sick and caring for the sick. And perhaps this year our Easter celebration can break out from a single day, from which we would typically return to life as normal, and be a living reality at all times. Our creative celebration of the resurrection can become a habit of mind and action in which our faith becomes more and more alive in all that we do, and in all that we say, taking every thought captive for Christ, to whom be glory, honor, and praise forever. Amen.

Homily for the Easter Vigil

[The following is Father Brendan’s homily for Holy Saturday.]

Do you remember where you were or what you were doing on St. Valentine’s Day, February 14 1990?  I would be surprised if you did.  I don’t.  It may be a strange question to ask, but it’s related to an event that took place August 20, 1988.

Voyager 1

That was the day NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft.  Its mission was to study Jupiter, Saturn and the moons of these two planets. Thirteen years later, Voyager was 4 billion miles from Earth and on the verge of leaving our solar system.  It would be the first manmade object to go into interstellar space.

That was when the astronomer Carl Sagan, who had a part in planning the project, asked NASA to turn Voyager’s cameras around and snap a goodbye photo of planet earth way in the distance.

The photo became famous as “The pale blue dot”. Caught in the center of a single beam of light from the sun, Earth appears as a tiny blue orb in a vast, dark void.  Just a speck in the immense cosmic ocean.  Somewhere on that speck, the third rock from the sun, you and I were going about our daily lives.  The photo of our planet turning around a medium sized star, in a nondescript neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, brings to mind the words of Psalm 8:

“what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little less than a god,

and crowned him with glory and honor”.

 

We seldom think of it, but there is a cosmic dimension to Easter.  A dimension hinted at in the first reading from Genesis and again in the Easter Gospel.  In the beginning was the first Creation.  The resurrection of Christ was the beginning of the new creation.

First creation, new creation.  Why did God create the world in the first place?  Carl Sagan had no answer.  He told us that every week, for 13 weeks from September to December on PBS.  The program, “Cosmos” was the most widely watch tv series of its time winning two Emmy Awards.

I watched it faithfully back then. It provoked wonder and melancholy in equal amounts. Sagan explored the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it’s all going to end.

But he also told us that the physical cosmos was all that existed: it was just the result of a series of chance occurrences.  It has no meaning or purpose.  We were all destined for extinction.  In all its mystery and vastness, he said, there was no hint that help could come from elsewhere to save us.

Fortunately, there are other are other answers to the question “why creation?”.  One of those is found in the writings of the early Church Father St. Irenaeus of Lyon.

Irenaeus reassures us that the Cosmos is not a meaningless, statistical accident.  He taught that Christ is a savior by his very nature.  The world and human beings in it were created to give him something to save.  What’s the good of being a lifeguard if there’s a beach and water, but no swimmers.

What we celebrate in Easter is the revelation of a hidden plan for the salvation of the fallen human race.  Irenaeus invented a term for this plan:  he called it the “divine economy of salvation”.

This economy is first revealed in Genesis, progressively unveiled in the Law and the Prophets, and reaches full disclosure in the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  His return from the dead as a glorified human body tells us that God has directly entered his creation to rescue us from our fallen nature.

Easter is not merely a date on the calendar, it is the beginning of a new way of understanding of the world and how we should be living in it.  Not as those who have no hope, no purpose or goal to their existence.

Voyager 1 is zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour in deep space 14 billion miles from earth.  It has an appointment with Alpha Centuri, our nearest neighbor, 90,00 years from now.

When it took the photo of earth 20 years ago those without faith saw a pale blue dot in a meaningless void.  The vastness of it all made human life look trivial.  For those with eyes awake to the meaning of Easter, the world is charged with the glory of God.

On this night, the Divine Liturgy reminds us that baptism sacramentally inducted us into Christ’s saving death and resurrection.  We now bear the full weight of Christ’s risen glory.  And on the day of his return we will shine like the stars in the cosmos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily for Good Friday

Genesis tells us that man and woman are made in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps surprisingly, we read later in the same book that Adam and Eve wished to be “like” God in another way, gaining knowledge of good and evil. And this temptation to know what God knows led them to stretch out their hands to the forbidden fruit. The unhappy consequences of this action illustrate something that all of us know, that knowledge is often acquired by painful experience.

We are going through the very painful experience of relearning something that we easily forget, that there are real limitations to our knowledge. This is easy to forget because as our knowledge of the natural world has grown, we have been able to break through many barriers thought impassible.

Fifty years ago, many predicted that by 2020, we would not be able to feed everyone in the world. Yet, discoveries of high-yield technologies, better-quality fertilizers and other techniques allow us to feed almost eight billion people today more effectively than we fed three billion people in 1960.

With the click of a mouse, I can copy an electronic version of Saint Augustine’s City of God where it once took a scribe years to do the same work, at great cost to his eyesight.

But there are two dangers that accompany this increase in knowledge.

The first we all know. The human heart being what it is, any knowledge that can be used for good can almost certainly be used for destructive purposes. If we so wish, we can inflict more harm more efficiently than ever before.

The second danger is more elusive. With increased knowledge comes a sense of increased responsibility.

As we struggle to face the threat of COVID-19 together, it is tempting to point fingers. Someone should have known that this was coming, and they should have known how to stop it.

This isn’t the only example, just the one most ready to hand. We can point to other anxieties that come with increased knowledge. A hundred years ago, expecting mothers paid quite a bit less attention to diet, alcohol consumption, and other behaviors that potentially affect prenatal development. Today, mothers are sometimes reluctant to trust their own instincts and experiences when rearing a child, when there is so much literature on child development to be sifted through.

Even the doctors dealing with COVID-19 can face a similar problem. How responsible are you to stay on top of the fast-developing literature on treatment of COVID patients while dealing with the already-stressful situation of present patients? In the direction of this thinking, which is a kind of second-guessing, we start down that old path, desiring to possess the foreknowledge that only God enjoys, wanting to be like God in a way of our own desiring. However well-intentioned, however much we wish to protect ourselves, those whom we love, and our way of life, this attempt to control the world will eventually bring us to grief, a return to thorns and thistles.

Today upon the Cross, we see a different image. We see a man, but a man who is not merely the image and likeness of God, but is God. The contrast between Christ and Adam is one that continually exercised Saint Paul. In the chant that we sang just before the Passion (Christus factus est pro nobis obediens), we see Christ undoing the disobedience of Adam by his own obedience. Christ became obedient even to the point of death. This passage, from the second chapter of the letter to the Philippians points out that Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Instead he emptied himself and took the form of a servant.

This is what God looks like.

If we were to have the mind of Christ, if we were to consent to this self-emptying, we would become more godlike than we do with our efforts to control the world through our knowledge. In fact, we are all being invited to this today, to empty ourselves. Not only are we suffering the uncertainty of dealing with a novel disease, but we must confront this without being able to gather together as a Church, another hollowing out. If we can accept these invitations to self-emptying in faith, then we will be practicing the faith of Jesus Christ, the faith that brings true salvation—an eternal salvation.

This invitation is offered to us anew and in an especially poignant way this Pascal Triduum. It is extended to all the faithful, and to all humankind, in the example of Christ crucified. Let us then have the mind of Christ, to become truly like God, like the Son of God, in our willingness to entrust ourselves to the Father. And “let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help [Hebrews 5: 9].”

 

 

 

Homily for Holy Thursday

[The following is the text preached by our deacon Brother Joseph at the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper.]

On a late November morning in 2004, I got up at 5 a.m., stopped at Starbucks for coffee and a pumpkin scone just as they opened, and blazed my way up the winding ascent of the Ute Pass into the Front Range of Colorado, where I was living at the time.  I spent several hours hiking up to the snowy, wind-scoured heights of Bison Peak in the Lost Creek Wilderness, seeing no one until almost halfway back down the mountain.  On the way home, I picked up a take-and-bake pizza from Papa Murphy’s, which I ate alone in my apartment.  And that was how I celebrated Thanksgiving.  It was not a Norman Rockwell slice of Americana with generations of family members gathered around a table groaning under a roast turkey and all the trimmings.  Neither was it a despondent, lonely day.  It was the fourth consecutive Thanksgiving I had spent in Colorado, and in previous years I had celebrated with friends who were also unable to make it back home.  But I was moving back to Michigan in just over a month to be closer to my family, and Thanksgiving alone was not the most lonely option.  I knew where I was from, where I was going, and where I belonged, even if I wasn’t actually there.  And while I was still eating a mediocre pizza by myself, I knew that 1500 miles away there was a table in my father’s house with a place for me.  I expect that we all have had these experiences of gatherings that were incomplete, whether we were the one absent or it was someone else.

We are gathered tonight to celebrate the institution of the Eucharist, the great festal family banquet of the Church.  But this year is different.  The church is decorated as usual and ablaze with light.  The brothers have entered with incense and chant.  But I stand here at the ambo and look out over empty pews, and I know the doors of the church remain locked.  It threatens to cast a pall over the celebration.

But this overlooks the important fact that we only miss what ought to be present.  We don’t miss strangers who aren’t at Thanksgiving dinner with us: we miss our absent family members.  The very sense of absence and loss we feel tonight is proof that we all have been called to the Supper of the Lamb.  We all belong here, where God has prepared a place for us, his beloved children.  It is a place that was created for us from before time began, that became ours in baptism, and has become ever more our own by our past participation in the Mass.

We can also overlook the reality that at times God withdraws from us, not to punish us, but because in his love he desires to rekindle and stir up our longing for him.  “Familiarity breeds contempt,” says the proverb, but “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  This is a time of absence and spiritual hunger, but even that proves that our true food is in Christ.

And while to the disciples the Last Supper was complete in their small group, Jesus saw beyond to all those who would ever be members of the Church.  In that small gathering he saw everyone who would ever come to believe through the message they would proclaim, a message that would spread and bear fruit throughout the whole world, across all time.  Even there in the upper room he saw you and prayed to the Father for you, even as tonight be sees you and prays for you, for he sees not only what is, but what will be, when he has gathered us all to himself in heaven.  The words of Shakespeare’s sonnet could be our Lord’s own when he says, “Thyself away are present still with me, For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move, And I am still with them, and they with thee.”

The Invasion of Thoughts

I appreciate the feedback I’ve received on the last few posts. It seems clear that more attention to thoughts would be helpful. As I wrote earlier, when we are forced into a situation of isolation and many of our usual supports are removed, we often find ourselves flooded with thoughts. This can be quite distressing especially when our minds “race” or when thoughts are so heavy and (apparently) indisputable that there seems to be no escape from their grim logic. These two particular extremes form the material for the bipolar condition, where a person moves back and forth between a mind going too fast (hypomania or mania) and a mind stuck (depression). I would imagine that many of us are going through mild, or even relatively strong, versions of these conditions right now.

The good news is that monks have been dealing with the challenge of thoughts in solitude for centuries. Our traditional disciplines may offer some profit for readers of this blog.

A book by a fellow Benedictine (with the name Funk–no relation!), available in the monastery gift shop…

We are not our thoughts. This means that it is possible to put distance between our Selves (what the Christian tradition sometimes calls the “true self”) and our thoughts. This in turn allows us some perspective and objectivity regarding our thoughts. Perspective gives us the choice whether to keep the thoughts we have or to replace them with other thoughts. This is extremely significant. Why? Because thoughts determine our worlds. When we are not in control of our thoughts, when they overwhelm us or operate unconsciously, we experience life as beyond our control. Under these circumstances, thoughts can appear to have a kind of necessity about them. But this is, in fact, an illusion that can be dispelled.

While thoughts determine our actions and create our worlds, it is important to note that we are not just our minds. Each of us is an integrated composite of mind, body, and spirit. As it turns out, our bodies can be extremely helpful tools for regaining control of our minds. Anyone who has taken a walk in the last few days has likely felt how much a change in our bodily state can alter our mood and thinking.

One of my favorite movies, Of Gods and Men, tells the true story of the Trappists from Tibhirine, Algeria, during the 1996 Algerian Civil War. Early on in the film it becomes clear that the monks are all likely to die at the hands of extremists if they remain in their monastery. The drama of the story revolves around whether they will stay with their beloved villagers (who are mainly Muslim), or leave (abandon?) the villagers for the safety of France. Once the monks have decided to stay, the superior of the community, Fr. Christian de Chergé, in a voice-over, muses on the importance of routine in the face of growing disorder outside. How were the monks able to face the fear of being kidnapped and eventually being killed without breaking down? The answer is that they simply went about their work each day, praying the office, celebrating Mass, operating a health clinic, and even gardening.

Routines remove a great deal of uncertainty from our lives by eliminating the need to decide over and over again when to rise, when to eat, and so on. Under the influence of routines, the future becomes more predictable and requires less adjustment on the fly, conserving energy for truly important decisions.

Like the monks in the film, we are all under stress right now, and for the next several weeks, routines will be important for managing our thoughts. When the stay-at-home orders first came about, many people seemed to think that this would be like a vacation. All the suddenly available time looked like a gift: a chance to relax, not to shave, and finally to binge-watch that series that we missed the first time around. But if we are really facing at least 4-6 weeks stuck at home, a daily and weekly routine is going to be extremely important. Breaking routine is fun when it’s temporary and when you know that it will return again relatively soon. But weeks without a good routine is a recipe for heightening anxiety and allowing the mind to roam too much. Longstanding monastic tradition requires set times for waking, praying, reading, eating, and cleaning. In our monastery, we’ve found these traditional routines to be particularly  comforting and familiar during the stresses of the pandemic. Perhaps readers would profit from making decisions about waking up at the same time every day, following the same grooming schedule that we have when we are working (maybe even taking the time to dress well), regular times for meals, regular times for prayer, for shared quiet and reading, and regular times for recreation or exercise.

Keeping our bodies healthy and fit is important for controlling thoughts as well. It helps to eat nutritious foods moderately (i.e. avoiding too much grazing or snacking). Be careful about your use of sugar and alcohol. If one chooses to have some, make sure to pay close attention to how your body reacts, and in general to the effect nutrition has on your moods. For example, since I turned 40 or so, sugar depresses me. If I do eat sugar, I know ahead of time that it will give rise to certain kinds of thoughts (one common one is a feeling of hopelessness). Knowing that this thought is the product of sugar allows me to catch the thought at its earliest appearance and set it aside. Sometimes, it’s good for me just to sit still for a few minutes and pay attention to my body as it adjusts to the effects of sugar. This again allows me to recognize certain types of impulse (e.g. being overly critical with a brother) as “not objective,” and I can move on.

Silence and stillness allow us to practice “nepsis,” the work of vigilant watchfulness of our thoughts.

Stillness is extremely helpful for sorting out thoughts. This observation comes with a few caveats. If you have not practiced stillness, your early experiences of trying to sit still might seem unendurable. When we slow down our bodies, we reduce external stimuli, and this allows our thoughts to rise to the surface. Some of the thoughts that invade our minds may be rather unpleasant. As uncomfortable as this might feel at first, this is exactly what we want, and so it should not surprise us or make us afraid. By slowing our bodies down, we give ourselves a chance to identify our thoughts before they engage us emotionally. We experience emotions in our bodies. Think about how your body responds when you are angry or uneasy. Our shoulders rise and get tense, or we might feel a burning sensation in our chests, for example. Our heart rate increases when we are frightened. So we know that emotions tend to arise unconsciously in connection with certain types of thoughts, and produce corresponding bodily reactions. The problem is that once the emotions are engaged, it is much more difficult to get distance from the thought.

Let’s look at a subtler example. If I react with anger to a news report, it is often the case that I am not paying attention to how the information I’m receiving is causing changes in my body. I know from experience how anger manifests itself in my body. If I can slow down and notice my anger getting engaged, I can step back from the information that is giving rise to this response and decide whether I want to get angry about it, whether that’s a helpful response or merely a habitual reaction.

The goal in slowing down is to choose the thoughts that influence my mood and behavior rather than being at the mercy of thoughts I just happen to have at the moment (or for the past several days, for that matter). Deep breathing and the recitation of a mantra or a short prayer while sitting still or lying in bed will gain us perspective–eventually–on our thoughts. And this will allow us to choose our thoughts rather than be determined by them.

Choosing thoughts also requires choosing my influences. Here it’s good to notice the connection I’ve made between the effects of mood-altering substances like sugar and the mood-altering consumption of information. In both cases, we might experience that a short-term surge in good feeling (even if that means righteous anger at the news) gradually gives way to a dangerous emotional logjam. One way I have dealt with this is by deciding ahead of time how much news I intend to read (I bear some responsibility for the monastery’s safety and financial well-being, so some engagement with current events seems prudent). Once I’ve used up the allotted time, I turn off the internet and immerse myself in something life-giving: the Psalms and gospels, a great novel or a great movie, beautiful poetry or beautiful music. What type of influences ground you and recharge you? Make time for these.

One last external discipline is charity and compassion toward others. In a monastery, this typically means no mind reading. If a brother seems distracted or upset, I needn’t take it personally, nor need I criticize him or rescue him. If I see a brother behaving in a manner that annoys me, I can go to the next room and ignore it. If I’m criticized, I can try to take it in a good and generous spirit.

Once we get some distance from our thoughts, how do we tell the good ones from the bad ones? This is where I will begin in the next post.

Living in Isolation

Americans are being asked to spend the next month in relative isolation. I’m not the first to point out that monasteries are a resource for how to deal with this separation from others. I have many thoughts on this, and I hope to share them over the coming days and weeks.

Saint Benedict teaches experienced monks to admonish newcomers that the way to God is “rugged and harsh [via dura et aspera].” We come to the monastery seeking God, and, human nature being what it is, it is tempting to imagine that entry into a monastery will be a crowning moment of arrival rather than the initiation of a trial. But entry into monastic life also requires renunciation of “the world.”

The difficulty in monastic renunciation comes precisely from renunciation. The novice monk or nun is called to go without the usual comforts that smooth over the inevitable rough spots of life. Today, we are all being called, temporarily, to make acts of renunciation of the usual supports that we have in life: meetings with friends, hugs, museums, church, dining out, checking the sports scores, full shelves in the grocery stores …we have all entered a time of deprivation. A monk chooses this; most of you have not sought this out in the same way. I say this up front because we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges that deprivation and renunciation present.

They are not at all insurmountable challenges! If, however, we imagine that renunciation will be painless, well, this will only make the unavoidable pain confusing and anxiety-provoking. With God’s help, especially as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we can look upon this as a moment to take up our Cross alongside our Lord, confident in divine accompaniment.

Now let me say a bit more about the “rugged and harsh” way upon which we’ve set out together. There are four initial things that warrant attention: the pain of grief, the invasion of thoughts, the importance of agency, and a long-term goal that gives us hope. Let us follow the example of the philosophers and Fathers and start with the goal.

Antony the Great being invaded by his thoughts while living in solitude: notice how he calmly accepts the presence of these temptations without engaging with them. Martin Schongauer, 15th century

The monk gives up worldly comforts for the sake of the Kingdom of God. We leave aside lesser comforts so that we may depend entirely on God and thereby be found worthy of His friendship. So monks and nuns willingly allow for painful experiences in the short term, always with an eye to the good that we want in the long term. We also choose to reduce our dependence on worldly comforts so as to acclimate ourselves with the interior world of thoughts. Now: during this time of involuntary renunciation, be ready to do battle with invading thoughts! I will have more to say about this soon, but here let me remind you that you are not your thoughts, and that there are ways to choose our thoughts. Choose wisely! We should especially make sure not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the news and the itch to become an expert on all angles of the situation.

Back to the goal: what good are we seeking together in this time of pestilence? What is our goal? We are looking to safeguard our own lives and health and those of our families and neighbors. We are hoping to do this without undue damage to the infrastructure of our economic life (which would provoke a second round of sufferings for the most vulnerable). The hope of achieving these critical goals can motivate us to take action–hence the “importance of agency,” with which I will deal in a separate post.

There is a subtler set of goals that deserves our focus. When this trial begins to subside, and I look back on my decisions, how will I have comported myself? Am I now striving to act with courage, justice, compassion, generosity, and holiness? We will look back at this time and celebrate the heroes. Without doubt, we will also be aware of failures of virtue. If I have not prepared myself to be courageous, compassionate, or holy, now might be the best time I’ve ever had to learn. Acquiring these virtues involves acting in ways that might feel inauthentic in the moment. But one small act of courage makes the next, greater act easier. We will learn much about ourselves in the coming weeks. In some cases, what we learn will be uncomfortable. That, too, is part of the pain of deprivation–hence the “pain of grief,”–another future post. In this post, I want to emphasize that we do have a choice about our personal behaviors, and this is an opportunity for us to become quite a lot stronger than we thought we could be. The reason to emphasize this is that isolation can make it feel like we are reduced to passivity, that we lack agency. Many critics of monastic life harshly accuse us of “doing nothing.” This accusation derives from a certain bias that equates action with external activism and technological manipulation. Amusing memes of couch potatoes as heroes aside, we Americans are not being called to do nothing, but to change our arena of action toward self-discipline in a way that could bring about a discovery of inner strength.

A last comparison for today with monastic life. The newcomer, one hopes, is greatly consoled by the presence of others around him or her, especially the older monks. These are persons who have come through the trial and become icons of hope for what monastic life can achieve. In our shared isolation, who are our icons of hope for what we might achieve by God’s grace in our engagement with the present crisis? We certainly can look to the saints, particularly martyrs and confessors, for demonstrations of patience and sanctity amidst trials. We also have with us many survivors of illness and survivors of social dislocation. Interestingly on this last point, the immigrants among us and our immigrant ancestors are examples of living with great uncertainty and dislocation (our dislocation being more metaphorical but nonetheless real). Who are the best examples we’ve known of strength amid these adversities, and how can we learn from their experiences?

Celebrating the Unmaking of the One Ring; a Homily for Annunciation

[The following is the edited text of my homily for March 25, 2020. This is the traditional date of Good Friday and of the Annunciation, and it is the date that J.R.R. Tolkien gives as the date upon which Gollum fell into the fires of Mount Doom, thereby destroying the One Ring and ending the terror of Sauron.]

In our scientific age, atheists demand evidence for the existence of God. For me, among the weightiest bits of evidence is simply the prevalence of belief. Many persons claim not only to believe in God, but to know Him. This requires an explanation. And it’s not enough, I think, just to claim it as some mass delusion—that’s simply kicking the can down the road. Why this particular mass delusion?

A scientist such as Richard Dawkins may well answer that ancient persons were trying to explain the natural world and lacked science, and so posited gods as causes of natural phenomena like lightning. In other words, ancient persons were failed versions of himself. Other more political versions of this attempt at explanation claim that the invention of the gods was a cynical ploy by authority to consolidate power over an awestruck populace.

Contemporary atheists are hardly the first to speculate on this. The Biblical book of Wisdom already gives other explanations for the origin of the gods–or what the author would call “idols.” He notes a longing for beauty in all peoples, and that the beauty of the cosmos moves the observer to imagine that the mysteriously remote magnificence of the stars betokened divinity; or that the power of fire or water signified the presence of the divine [see Wisdom 13: 1-3]. Elsewhere, the Biblical author speculates that a grieving father would make a statue of a recently lost young child, and that his attachment to this statue would grow into a kind of piety, and that the dead child would undergo a kind of apotheosis, a divinization [Wisdom 14: 15-16].

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires”–Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

In the last two hundred years, learned explanations have become more and more sophisticated (though, alas, I must exclude Mr. Dawkins from any claim to sophistication on this point). In the early nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach saw God as an outward projection of humanity’s inward nature, in some sense representing the infinite desire for order, meaning, and goodness that we observe in human nature. Later, Emile Durkheim applied this insight anthropologically so that God becomes a representation of collective society. The most ambitious, and, to me, the profoundest attempt to account for the origin of the gods is that of René Girard (1923-2015). Girard, whose work drew him back to his childhood Catholic faith, noted not only the widespread belief in the gods, but the near-universal connection of the gods and violence, encoded in the ubiquitous practice of sacrifice in the ancient world. He drew attention to the catharsis that takes place when a tense and fearful community focuses its anxiety and violence unanimously on a victim, that is, when a community chooses a scapegoat. The killing or banishment of this scapegoat brings about peace and restores order to the community. Since peace and order are desirable for both the community and the individual, the scapegoated victim paradoxically becomes a benefactor to the community and gradually becomes a god in the community’s mythological imagination. The connection with authority comes about because kings and others in positions of governance are extremely convenient scapegoats, easy to blame for everyone’s problems. There is an important exception to this mechanism. The prophets of Israel, that fiercely monotheistic nation, are constantly alerting the people to the arbitrary injustice at the heart of human society, this need to generate peace and order by generating victims. Because of God’s championing of the victim, the idea of a true God begins to distance itself from the “gods.”

“Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.”–Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Now I bring all of this up, and I hope that it’s interesting, because the constant in all of this is human desire. We all have desires, some of them not so good, but all of them leaving us in need of fulfillment in some way. Unfulfilled desire leaves us vulnerable, even anxious and fearful. Perhaps worst of all, the noblest things that we desire: justice, truth, beauty, are always just out of reach. This is that infinite desire that Feuerbach rightly noted.

What we proclaim today is that the Great Desire of earth [cf. Haggai 2: 6-7), what all human beings long for in some way, is no longer out of reach. Not because we have figured out finally how to attain the truth, but because the Truth Himself came to us. The Son of God validates the best of human desire by becoming human, sharing these desires with us. Jesus hungers and thirsts, has friends, attends wedding banquets and public festivals. He restores children to bereaved parents, he feeds the multitude, he quiets threatening waves, he relieves lepers of “social distancing” by cleansing them. But profoundest of all, he desires to do His Father’s will as the one thing necessary; he desires justice for all; he desires that all men see in the beauty of the cosmos God’s great love for those made in His image and likeness. He desires that all be set free by knowing the Truth. In the Incarnation, which we celebrate today, Truth Himself has come down from heaven, and in taking human nature to Himself, has made justice spring up from the earth [see Psalm 85: 10-11].

The idols of the nations are an image of distorted desire, stuck in the infernal logic of “the world.” Jesus is recognized, even in His lifetime, as the true fulfillment of all that is best in what we desire. The Apostle Philip found Nathanial and said, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote [John 1: 45].” After the Resurrection, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus unwittingly said to Jesus himself, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel [Luke 24: 21].” In other words, we hoped that he would vindicate the one true, transcendent God and the devotion to the true God shown by His chosen people Israel–which He has by His resurrection in our nature.

My brothers, what is it that we desire? How has our Lord Jesus Christ offered us fulfillment or purification of this desire in His Incarnation? How has he invited us to be patient in awaiting this fulfillment by learning to be his Cross-carrying disciples? In this moment of anxiety, how can we follow the prophets in pointing to Jesus and away from the danger of choosing scapegoats for our suffering? Let us, like Mary and her Son, begin by saying to our common Father, “Thy will be done.”