Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for April 2024

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Visitation

This is perhaps the easiest mystery to interpret ‘ethically’.  Meditations on the Visitation typically offer Mary as a model of selfless service to others in need, even when our own needs are real.  That surely makes for an edifying reflection.  In this series, however, I would like to go to a mystical level.  Where is Jesus Christ in the Visitation, and how do I recapitulate His life?

If we are always being nourished in the womb of Mother Church, do we consent to be carried along with her?  To be identified with her, not only in good works, but even when it seems to be at cost to ourselves?  When others, in the role of Elizabeth and John the Baptist, see us, do they point to us as examples of the Church’s gifts and nourishment?  Or do we merely give the impression of belonging to a voluntary organization, one that perhaps takes the man Jesus as a role model, but does not actually make Christ present?

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Annunciation

Mary, hearing the Word of God as spoken by Gabriel, said, “Yes,” and the result was the Incarnation of the Word within her.  We participate in this mystical reality when, in our baptisms, we say, “I believe.”  The life of Christ is conceived mystically in our hearts, and we are conceived in the womb of the Church.  Like the life of an unborn child, our spiritual life needs the nourishment of the Church’s sacraments and teaching, so that we will eventually grow to maturity in faith.  How does my life change when I truly and inwardly consent to the gift of faith?  How do my actions change when I recognize the presence of Christ within?

Incarnational Meditations on the Mysteries of the Rosary: Introduction

[Today I am embarking on what I hope will be a series of meditations on the mysteries of the rosary, from an ‘incarnational’ viewpoint.  This first post will serve as an introduction to the series.]

What do I mean by an ‘incarnational’ meditation?

In fact, I mean to communicate several interlocking ideas, with the intention of countering a root difficulty in modern spirituality, our struggle with the concept of communion.  We bristle—at some level, at least—at the notion of communion these days, whether it be with God or with the Church.  There are many reasons for this.  I suspect that a main problem is fear:  fear that communion will mean losing ourselves, opening ourselves to ‘inauthenticity’ or, worse, being used by those who would claim to desire communion with us but in fact seek to dominate, to stamp out the uniqueness that each of us possesses by divine grace.

What does this leave us with, spiritually speaking?  Well, there is a tendency to reduce Christian spirituality to a kind of ‘do-gooderism’, a series of ethical exhortations and practices and prayers.  The purpose of these things—when they really do take place—is for God to communicate (just enough?) grace to allow us to do some good in the world, or at least be assured that we are not completely depraved.

Now, good works are not to be disparaged, and Christians are obliged to practice them.  But we stumble when we notice that there are many persons in the world who achieve good works without being Christian.  So if Christianity consists in showing that we are nicer and kinder than others, we founder on the empirical reality that this is, alas, often enough not the case.  Here I should insert, in keeping with the overall goal of this proposed series of posts, that meditations on the mysteries of the rosary tend, in my experience, exactly toward an ethical model:  we imitate Christ or Mary in order to become ‘better people’.  This, in itself, has much to recommend it, but at some point this tack will, I believe, reveal its limitations in bringing us closer to the mystery of what it means to be Christian.  What, then, does actually separate us as Christians from others in the world?

The answer is baptism:  in baptism, we receive the very gift of God’s own life.  In this communion of the divine and human in our own hearts, we recapitulate the reality of the Incarnation of God’s Word in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and indeed all the mysteries of the Life of Christ.  We do not merely ‘imitate’, if we mean by this an effort (often conceived of as our own effort) to do things that we think Jesus would do.  Imitation, in modern parlance, has something of a bad name.  ‘Imitation’ wool or leather means ‘inauthentic’, a rip-off of something of superior quality.  But when St. Paul exhorts us to “become imitators of me, as I am of Christ” [1 Cor 11: 1], we might hear that we are two steps down on the ladder of sanctity even before we begin.  But Paul’s own imitation of Christ was so intense that he was able to become alter Christus, another Christ.  Let me allow St. Gregory of Nyssa to emphasize this point for me:

“[Paul imitated Christ] so brilliantly that he revealed his own Master in himself, his own soul being transformed [my emphasis] through his accurate imitation of his prototype, so that Paul no longer seemed to be living and speaking, but Christ Himself seemed to be living in him.  As this astute perceiver of particular goods says: ‘Do you seek a proof of the Christ who speaks in me?’ [2 Cor 13: 3] and: ‘It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me. [Gal. 2: 20]’”

—On Perfection, FOTC 58, trans. by Virginia Woods Callahan

What we have the privilege of being, already in this life, is the very Body of Christ alive and sanctifying the world.  To do this, good works are necessary, but we also must be ‘renewed in mind’, not that we might be the only persons in the world who do good, but that we “may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” [cf. Rom 12: 2]  Being renewed in mind requires meditation, training the mind to see reality in a way different than we do by the sloth of habit.  The Mysteries of the rosary have proven over many centuries to be a most efficacious means of meditation, especially for the laity.  But meditate we must, not only on what we ought to do to improve ourselves with God’s grace, but to come to the understanding of the hidden growth of Christ within us.  In living out the life of Christ in our imaginations, guided by the tutelage of His glorious Mother, the Virgin Mary, we attune ourselves to the quiet unfolding of grace in our lives, and are thus able to cooperate with grace more readily and gratefully.  We no longer carry out good works to justify ourselves or salve troubled consciences, but truly as co-operators with Jesus Christ, alive in our hearts and present to the world in our actions.

Listening and Literacy

One of the techniques I like to use when teaching chant, especially complex chants that have many notes per syllable, is to simplify the chant by assigning one key note to each syllable, and then building up gradually to the full complement of notes.  The advantage of this is the highlighting of the ornamental (i.e. non-melodic/structural) nature of Gregorian chant.  This keeps things closer to the text and helps us work against the tendency to invest every note with a formal weight that the early monks clearly did not intend.

The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires the singers to put their books down and learn by listening and repetition.  I say that this is a disadvantage because when I say to most people, “Alright, listen and repeat after me,” they are simply lost, no matter how simple (in my mind, at least) is the phrase that I am giving them.  Yes, sometimes it is a problem of Latin; but from watching how people from all walks of life dearly resist putting down the book—the authority!—in order to enter into an oral mode of acting, I think that the problem is at least heightened by our emphasis on literacy.  As I say, the book is the authority, and I am merely one interpreter, who obviously just learned this from the book.

Literacy is a great gift, of course, and allows us access to all kinds of cultural riches that are denied those who cannot read.  But as we move further and further away from oral modes of learning and interacting, the disadvantages to a strictly text-based mode emerge.  We can easily fool ourselves, by our reliance on texts, into thinking that we have learned something, when we have learned a simulacrum instead.  We all know how a good professor can make a subject come alive; I’ve encountered persons recently who dismiss out of hand great philosophers simply on the basis of having read them and not liked them.  There is no sense of the cultural embeddedness one needs to have to appreciate certain authors.  This embeddedness is greatly enhanced by having it modeled by another human being.  Someone who speaks passionately about Plato or Beethoven or Botticelli or the varieties of birdsong or human dialect can suddenly make an abstract idea one of real flesh and blood.

Literacy gives us the illusion of being self-sufficient, particularly as more and more texts become more available on the internet and elsewhere.  Oral learning stresses our dependence on the experience of another.

In this way, the loss of music in school curricula is particularly to be lamented.  My own love of oral/aural learning certainly comes from my musical background, which while literate, makes use of a lot of oral tradition.  I learned German/American folk dances from simply playing along at family gatherings in my grandparents’ house.  I learned guitar from friends (“Here is how you do the left hand for the opening chord in “Purple Haze”), and from listening to the radio and old vinyl albums.  I played in a number of bands where learning a song meant sitting across from the songwriter, having him say, “OK, after that chord, this one for three beats, then a hit over here…”  Even in classical music, I have long stressed the important sense of tradition that one must have.  You can pick up a book of songs by Fauré and sing them correctly, note-for-note, and very easily miss the whole point of singing songs by Fauré.  To really understand them requires some kind of mentorship, listening to a master sing and imitating what he or she is doing (in this case, Elly Ameling and Gérard Souzay, if you were wondering!).

This difficulty is an important one for us as Benedictines to be aware of.  While we like to boast of the emphasis that Saint Benedict places on literacy in his Rule, we should always remember the word with which it opens: “Listen!”

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