Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for 2020

To Those Who Are Scared

At a press conference yesterday, the President was asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” He didn’t really answer the question. Perhaps, in fairness, this sort of question is one that we should be asking our religious leaders. So I will take a shot at it and let the President focus on policy.

If you are scared, this means that you are human, and this is good. Possessing fear means valuing life and the good things of life like health, children, grandparents, friends, peace and community.

We sometimes mistakenly think that having courage means being fearless. But in fact, lacking fear makes one rash not courageous. Courage means fearing the right things the right amount. Since human beings lack immunity (at this moment) to the novel coronavirus, it threatens our lives. It really should make us cautious. Perhaps it should even enable us to make difficult decisions, painful in the short term, that will preserve life and the good things of life in the long run.

Of course, having too much fear is also a danger, hindering us from acting or moving us to make selfish decisions that cause more damage overall. Courage means taking the most rational action after judging how dangerous the situation really is.

At this moment, we are still learning what sort of danger COVID-19 poses to the things we love and cherish, and so we are called upon not only to be courageous, but patient. Patience is not something that comes easily to the American temperament, and here’s a chance to add a new virtue to our national character. While we wait, we are blessed to have many intelligent, motivated, energetic people working at understanding the nature of the disease and our best strategies to protect ourselves against it. We will not need to wait forever, just long enough to get clarity.

Making rational decisions and being patient requires that we master the thoughts that generate fear. It’s important to learn how to slow the panic response by sitting still and breathing deeply (this can be done in prayer). The next step is describing the situation and our options accurately and focusing on the overall goal. It is important to remember that COVID-19 is not fatal for most who contract the disease. Then, if our goal is keeping our families and neighbors safe, keeping the death count low and healthcare workers well-supported, and ultimately returning to good order and peace, we can focus on the actions that will get us there. Having the long-term goal in sight helps us to deal with potentially irrational fears that move us to counterproductive actions in the short term. For example, knowing that a vaccine will keep me healthy in the long run helps me to confront the pain of a shot in the short term.

Last of all, fearing rightly is a topic addressed by Jesus. Let me begin this final thought by pointing out that he spends much of his ministry reassuring others:

They were frightened, but he said to them, ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Then they were glad to take him into the boat. [John 6: 20-21]

After his resurrection, he continually urged his Apostles not to be afraid because death, that destroyer of all that we love, had been conquered. With that as background, we should note that Jesus also teaches us about fearing the right things in the right way.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.

Lest this sound too ominous, we should note that he adds:

Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. [Matthew 10: 28; 30-31]

The first part of that quote is a restatement, in perhaps hyperbolic terms, of the well-known proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [Proverbs 9: 10].” There are many ways to understand fear of the Lord, and in the Jewish and Christian traditions it is usually understand that this fear undergoes a maturation as we grow in faith. It typically begins as an acknowledgement that God is all-powerful and we are not, which should make us reticent about taking anything for granted in life (I plan to say more about this in a future post). Sobriety and humility are the entryway into understanding the world. But as we grow in virtue, this more servile fear grows to be a fear of losing God’s friendship through carelessness and superficiality.

Our present crisis calls upon all of us to act soberly and humbly, but also with profound desire to do what is truly best for our neighbor, what is truly just and upright. A proper fear of failure in these areas is a good motivation to take courage and make our own contribution to the long-term goal of restoring peace.

An Opportunity?

At the monastery, over the past four or five years, we have received increasingly frequent requests to pray for peace and unity in our country. There’s been a sense that we had, politically, passed a point of no return, and that the very fabric of our republic is now at stake. As followers of Christ, Who broke down all separating walls, we monks are dedicated to a peaceful political order, rooted in true justice and respect for the dignity of all human beings.

One hesitates to see in an epidemic an answer to one’s prayers, but I have been quite impressed by how Americans have managed, in many cases, to set aside political and ideological differences in order to work together for our common benefit to mitigate the damage of the novel coronavirus. Americans, as a whole, have been remarkably cooperative with the difficult decisions made by politicians at different levels. People are eagerly sharing information, discussing how to deal with children studying at home, offering suggestions for reading and cooking during our “social distancing,” and so on. Perhaps we will look back at this time as an unexpected opportunity to reimagine the humanity in all our brothers and sisters, especially those most vulnerable. If we seek this humbly from God, undoubtedly, He will offer His grace in this potential healing.

I’ve been around long enough to recognize that politicians are, and need to be, opportunists, and so we should be wary of assuming that words will be followed by commensurate action. But any words that indicate solidarity across the aisle open a path for the rest of us to seek our own stance of unity, mutual edification, and reconciliation. As Saint John Paul II demonstrated in his battle against the Communist Party in Poland in the 1970’s, even words spoken cynically by politicians, can, and should, be used by the electorate to seek the goods of justice, good order, and, ultimately, peace.

On Separation from Holy Communion

There has been a good deal of discussion about the decision of Cardinal Cupich and other bishops to suspend the public celebration of Mass. It’s important to note that a “clarification” to the Cardinal’s initial statement has dispensed Catholics of the Archdiocese from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. There are two aspects of this that I would like to unpack a bit.

When we first heard of Cardinal Cupich’s statement, one of the brothers, who had studied Canon Law last year, said, “It’s like we’re under an interdict!” An interdict is a statement that makes illicit the celebration of any sacraments in a certain region. This was a widely used canonical sanction in the Middle Ages, but is not very frequently invoked in the modern world. However, we are not under an interdiction. Mass is still being celebrated, for example, at the monastery. We are just not doing it publicly. The Cardinal has encouraged all diocesan priests to continue private Masses throughout this time of “isolation.”

What is of real importance to understand here is that we are all members of the One Body of Christ by baptism, and that the reception of Holy Communion by priests at their private Masses nourishes all the members of the Body by virtue of our unity. I have encouraged all of our monks to be aware of this, that our reception of Holy Communion during this time be done devoutly and worthily for the sake of the whole Church and the world.

We also continue to pray the divine office as usual. Our voices go up to God on your behalf, on behalf of all government officials who are trying to make the best decisions for their peoples’ welfare, for heroic health-care workers, and, of course, for all who are sick with the coronavirus.

The second aspect of the suspension of public Mass is that this doesn’t dispense us from the mandate of the Third Commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. Sunday should remain a day dedicated to the Lord. One fruitful way of marking Sunday would be a fervent “spiritual communion.” Below I’ve posted a video that offers some good ideas for spiritual communion, and here is the traditional prayer that accompanies spiritual communion:

My Jesus,
I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament.
I love You above all things,
and I desire to receive You into my soul.
Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally,
come at least spiritually into my heart.
I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You.
Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.

Your brother in Christ,
Prior Peter, OSB

 

The Path to Contemplation

[I was invited by the Lumen Christi Institute to lead a discussion on contemplation with a group of students on Saturday night. I composed this text to begin the conversation.]

Human beings have typically made use of metaphors when thinking about the mind. In the last two or three generations, we have tended to imagine the human mind as a computer, a storer of information. The mind certainly is this, but this metaphor is part of a myopic turn in human thought, perhaps begun with Descartes, that has brought about many misunderstandings of the ancient idea of contemplation. Let us note here that a computer, at least as we have built them so far, is not capable of having desires, intentions, or insights into the meaning of things. And this is the heart of contemplation.

I listed desire first because desire is necessarily a trait of an embodied, limited, incomplete being…with intimations of fulfillment. The second quality of human minds that separate us from computers is that of intention, which is another quality that admits of fulfillment. The concept of fulfillment itself is central to the proclamation of the gospel: Christ comes to fulfill the Scriptures and the hopes of God’s people Israel. Internalizing this fulfillment is one way of understanding the Christian tradition of contemplation. There is thus an important continuity between desire, intention, and meaning that leads the human mind properly toward contemplation.

Desire and intention–where we begin–belong to a life of action, and it is significant that the active and contemplative life are often paired together. Unfortunately, this pairing is frequently one of opposition, rather than sympathy. The monastic tradition harkens back to a time when these two types of activity were seen not as exclusive, but linked in an important hierarchy. The active life, or–as I would prefer that we call it, the practical life–is the necessary condition for the contemplative life. We see this hierarchy in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle in their distinction between practical reason and theoretical reason. Practical reason is aimed at goals, the satisfaction of desires. As rational beings, many of our desires partake of a higher type of fulfillment than that of simpler bodily desires. In addition to desiring bodily nourishment, we desire understanding. Each of these desires is connected to different types of practical responses, that is to say, different sets of practices.

Let me offer an example of how practices lead naturally into contemplation. To do this, I would like to use a concept related to that of practices. Instead of speaking about practices, which tend to denote simple types of activities, let me introduce a word that denotes a somewhat more complex set of activities, the notion of a craft.

As a former musician, the idea of craft interests me, and it is something familiar. For my illustration, however, let me use a rather different craft, that of accounting.

The active life of an accountant requires a rigorous training in double-entry techniques, learning from masters of the craft how to interpret human action in quantifiable terms, how to prepare different types of reports, how to maintain proper files for audits. In other words, there are standards of excellence in the craft, but these only become clear to the student of accounting after she has learned how to carry out many routine actions internal to the craft itself. At a certain point, the mind is freed from earlier misconceptions about what accounting is. This is the transition from student (or disciple) to master, and it parallels the transition from active to contemplative practice.

At the point of transition, the newly minted accounting professional may begin to notice ways to characterize human behavior that are more accurate than previous standards of the craft. She may realize that certain practices pose a danger to ethical standards, and so need to reflect on how to train future accountants to identify those dangers and deal with them in a way that upholds the important ethical component of the craft. She may also begin to see more correlations between the work of accounting and the work of management, or of distribution, marketing, and so on. In other words, the master accountant begins to see how her craft fits into a larger and larger perspective.

It is this reason that the contemplative life is traditionally characterized as higher, but not separate from the active life. Contemplation makes possible the perception of necessary connections between crafts, how to understand their contributions to the common good. But this understanding and wisdom is only available after one has apprenticed in some disciplined activity, which serves as an induction into a set of practices by which one can come to understand the commonly held standards of excellence, have one’s mind changed and formed by these standards of excellence, and so have the mind freed more and more from a merely local and subjective set of concerns.

Before I conclude, I would like to make a few last suggestive remarks. First of all, I introduced the notion of “standards of excellence” as something desirable within a craft, something toward which we intend. Excellence, as you may well know, is an acceptable translation of the Greek word arete, which is more normally translated as “virtue.” Thus the practical life is a training in virtue, and once again, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention Saint Paul, assume that there is no rational life without a prior training in virtue.

Second, the ancient monastic tradition included a third term in our ascent to contemplation proper. Between praktike, the practical life, and theoretike, or the “theoretical” or contemplative life, was physike or “natural contemplation.” This notion has been almost entirely lost, and I believe it to be of some importance that we recover its meaning.

We are hampered in this recovery by a novel meaning of the word “nature.” Most people today, when using the word “nature,” tend to mean our earthly environment as a whole, perhaps the material world considered as separate from “spirit” or “the supernatural.” This distinction is entirely modern, with roots in the break from Aristotle that took place gradually throughout the fifteenth century and definitively in the sixteenth. What Aristotle meant by nature is physis, the set of characteristics specific to actual species of things. So humans have a nature determined by our animality, political organization, and rationality. We are, by nature, rational and political animals. A dog has a different nature, as does a starfish. Clouds, stars, nebulae, and quarks have natures in their own domains. Natural contemplation is a deepening understanding of the natures of different species of creatures, seen more and more from the perspective of the Creator Himself. What I am suggesting here is that actual human practices initiate us into understanding the natures of things, by seeing their interconnections. We climb the ladder of significations by making a kind of scaffolding of these interconnected concepts in our own minds and hearts, and gradually the face of God is revealed in His creatures. And by habituation to His presence in created things, we come to know God as God is in Himself. This is the practice of contemplation in its deepest meaning. While there are practices specific to this highest level of contemplation, we must prepare for it by a grounding in the cardinal virtues, gained from our participation in craft, and by a training in wisdom by an initial contemplation of natures. We partake of contemplation proper at each step of the way, by our initial desire for the goal and our intention to reach it, so any of us can begin now on this road, if we so desire.

The Presentation

About twenty years ago, when I was a junior monk, Abbot Lawrence O’Keefe, a noted scripture expert, preached our annual retreat. At one point, he made a curious remark. The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Presentation, but he said that it really ought to be classified as a Sorrowful Mystery. Understanding why requires a bit of excavating of this interesting episode from Luke’s gospel.

The tenth plague, the one that finally convinced Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to flee Egypt, was the killing of the first-born. All throughout Egpyt, all offspring that “opened the womb,” including those of livestock, fell prey to the Angel of Death. God made a distinction, however, between the Egyptians and the Israelites, and spared the first-born of the enslaved people. Before that fateful night, God gave an indication about one important consequence. Since God spared the first-born of the Israelites, these all belonged to Him. “Whatever is first to open the womb…is mine [Exodus 13: 2].” Later, at Mount Sinai, God’s claim becomes even stronger: “The first-born of your sons you shall give to me [Exodus 22: 29].” As the great Jewish scripture scholar Jon Levenson has pointed out, this is clearly a commandment to sacrifice the first-born son, after the pattern of Abraham’s testing in Genesis 22. Later still, God mitigates the harshness of this command, allowing first-born sons to be redeemed rather than sacrificed. “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem [Exodus 34: 20].”

Saint Luke is actually combining several events in his recounting of the Presentation (this is the reason that feast was previously known as the Purification of the Virgin; mothers underwent a period of ritual impurity after childbirth). Let me return to focus on the “sorrowful” aspect of this mystery. Jesus Christ is not only the Virgin Mary’s first-born Son; He is God the Father’s first-born Son. From His conception, He belongs to God, and the redemption that Joseph and Mary offer merely delays the final gift that Jesus will make to Father by offering His life on the Cross. Today’s celebration foreshadows Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion and consecrates the child Jesus to the Father.

Let’s turn to another aspect of this mystery. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was removed from the temple. What happened to it remains an unsolved riddle–Indiana Jones notwithstanding. When the temple was rebuilt, the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies (when the Roman general Pompey entered the Holy of Holies after taking Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he was puzzled to find it empty of any idols or statues). God was not entirely absent; nor had He fully returned after His dramatic departure narrated at the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophecy, dating from the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Malachi, writing perhaps in the fifth century B.C., indicated the God would suddenly appear in the temple. In the arrival of the Virgin Mary and the boy Jesus, the early Church saw the return of the true Ark of the Covenant (the Mother of God, whose womb was God’s resting place for nine months), and the sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment that holy Simeon and Anna had awaited with such love for God.

The Wedding of the Lamb

In the first antiphon of First Vespers,* this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel. Now, if we remember back to the Exodus, and God’s claim on all first-born sons, we see that this espousal is intimately connected with Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. He returns to claim His bride, at the cost of His own blood. There is indeed a certain sorrow to this, but it is that of those who sow in tears, only to reap in joy. In the Presentation is encapsulated the whole of the story of salvation. God the Father, in receiving back the Son of Mary, liberates not only Israel, but through her all humanity, and not from political slavery in Egypt, but from spiritual slavery to sin. It is significant that, at Mass tomorrow, we will bear candles in procession, just as we will at the Easter Vigil. It is one and the same Passover that we celebrate, from differing perspectives. As such, today’s feast marks the perfect nodal point between the Incarnation and Christmas, and the Paschal Triduum that looms in the future.

 

* This antiphon begins (in translation): “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king…”

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