Monastery of the Holy Cross

Does Saint Benedict Forbid All Laughter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Epiphany: God shines forth

In the Catholic Church, the season of Christmas extends through the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which we will celebrate this coming Sunday. The Baptism, in turn, is connected with the Epiphany, which most Catholics celebrated last Sunday.

We might mistakenly think that Epiphany just happens to be the time to commemorate the long trek of the Magi to Bethlehem: a touch of exoticism, perhaps even multiculturalism. Certainly we have multiple reminders in this week’s liturgy that the Epiphany marks the revelation of the mystery of the inclusion of the Gentiles.  But Church tradition sees in it something more profound, a truth indicated by the very name Epiphany, or “shining forth.”

Imagine that someone deposited a million dollars in your checking account. You would suddenly become a millionaire, but if this benefactor didn’t tell you he was doing this, you wouldn’t know. At some point or other, a lawyer or banker would share with you this good news. Suddenly, you would have the opportunity to live like a millionaire, which you couldn’t really do if you didn’t know you had the money.

At the Incarnation, the Divine Logos, by becoming man, by consenting to our mortal state, really and truly redeemed us. But we could not participate in this regeneration if Christ’s divine nature had not
been revealed to us. We could naturally believe that God is everywhere, we could trust God and hope in God, but in the Epiphany we have something greater than this: we see directly what God is doing, for He appears in our human form.

Much of what He does is what any person does: He’s born, learns to walk and talk under the guidance of His parents, learns a trade, makes friends, eats and sleeps, reads, works, recreates. But now we see God doing all these things, and in turn, all of these human activities become means of sanctification and union with God.

This shining forth extends into the liturgy. We can now observe all aspects of the liturgy and see God at work, using architecture, iconography, song, poetry, vesture, ritualized movements and gestures, bells, incense, wood, marble, silk, wax, oil, water, wine, and bread.

These have all been imbued with spiritual depth because of the Incarnation. But it is the mystery of the Epiphany that unlocks these depths, that invites us to use our senses to mount heavenward upon material scaffolding.

The third traditional mystery of the Epiphany is the changing of water in wine at Cana. Within the water all along was the potency to be wine, but until our Lord responded to Mary’s plea, we couldn’t see it. Now all of the formerly pallid and mundane circumstances of the world can suddenly leap to life, like an old black and white film colorized.

Anyone could have followed the star to Bethlehem. In other words, this appearance and shining forth was not yet like the Second Coming, like lightning flashing across the sky. It was possible to miss the signs.

The Magi, it is often said, were probably astronomers, those tasked with mapping the heavens and predicting the movements of the planets, sun, and moon, and of noting disturbances like comets. These signs were understood to be communications from the gods.

So the Magi were already watching, seeking a sign and communication. And when they received it, they responded by reverent worship and pilgrimage.

How much time do we spend watching for God and listening for His instructions? It is possible that my own distractions have caused me to miss the star, or perhaps my own attachments have kept me from setting off to see where it leads.

That you are reading this suggests you are trying to be attentive. May God send forth His light and truth into our hearts today, that our awareness of His love and salvation may change our lives.

Homily for Christmas Eve

The entrance of the Son of God into the world is the most consequential event in all of history. Whatever we previously thought it meant to be human is fundamentally changed—very much for the better—by the discovery that our nature is completely compatible with God’s nature. Whatever we thought it meant to be God is also changed—and again, this change is for the better—because we now know that God is love, that God is communion. And of course, these discoveries about the two natures of God and man are an improvement over whatever went before simply because they are also true.

We often say that Jesus became like us in every way except for sin. And this is undoubtedly true, well-attested in the Scriptures and in the Tradition. But this qualification about sin obscures something of earth-shattering importance: sin is not natural to human beings; sin is a corruption of human nature. I will return to this in a moment, but for now, let us note that human nature is compatible with the divine nature, so long as that human nature is freed from sin.

When I said a moment ago that the Incarnation changes our knowledge of God, we should note that it is a change foreshadowed by God’s history with the human race. There are two aspects of this history, at least as I would like to tell it to you this evening. The first is the gradual realization of human beings that God is utterly transcendent. This realization was quite an achievement; most cultures are content to have a provincial idea of God. Ancient peoples were fine with there being multiple gods, and were apt to switch allegiances when one god seemed more powerful than another. It is the genius of two different cultures, the Jewish and the Greek, that they gradually came to understand that for God to be truly godlike, there could only be one, and this God must be somehow greater than the universe. When I mention Greek culture, really mean a small, radical subculture of Greek philosophers who derived the notion of monotheism.

Such a God is terribly powerful, and yet both the Jews and Greeks intuited that God is also just and true and therefore is not given to arbitrary displays of power. Here, though, is where the two cultures diverge. For Greeks like Aristotle, God withdraws into an inaccessible solitary bliss. For the Jews, God is puzzlingly close to the downtrodden, exiles, widows and orphans. They knew this because they experienced it. The Jews were conquered in turn by the Babylonians, the Macedonians (after being liberated by the Persians), then by the Romans. We hear this evening that Joseph and Mary needed to travel to Bethlehem to satisfy the
taxing strategy of Caesar Augustus. They are an occupied people at the moment that God appears as a child of a Jewish woman.

Throughout all of these tragedies and disappointments, God did not abandon His people, and this suggested that God was somehow a God of love. This was abhorrent to the Greeks. Love makes us vulnerable, and gods by apparent definition, can never be weak or vulnerable, and certainly not the supreme God. Love seems to imply that we need someone else, and God cannot need anything.

And so when we peer into the manger tonight and see God, the Son of God, as a vulnerable infant, dependent utterly on His Mother for sustenance and nurturing, this is a radical discovery about God, that He really loves us so much that He is willing to offer Himself to us, to placed in our arms, on our tongues. This is, strangely, who God is, and yet when we think of it, it rings true. It somehow confirms what we had not dared to hope, that all of creation, good as it is, beautiful as it is, is yet gratuitous, a grace a gift from a God Who loves us, and made us for Himself. He is not a God Who dominates, Who pulls rank. He is not first of all a scold, a gaslighter Who claims to love us while pointing out our every flaw. He is love pure and simple, vulnerable and waiting for us to say, “Yes, I love you, too.”

All of these insights we could derive from the Christmas story. But what about our response? Is the Incarnation something we celebrate today because it happens to be the anniversary of Jesus’s birth? Is it something that God did once upon a time, and now He no longer Incarnates Himself? Clearly this isn’t the case, and here is where I return to a thread I left off a few minutes ago. I said that sin is a corruption of human nature, and we know this because the perfect union of the human and the divine is in a sinless man. Jesus is not an isolated example of sinlessness. He is the beginning of our sinlessness, our union with God. In the words of Saint Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God.” We are invited to follow the example of the Virgin Mary, and by the invitation He gives to us in baptism, to welcome the life of Christ in our hearts, to be transformed by love, and, let’s be honest by vulnerability, that sin might be rooted out of us, that we might die to ourselves so as to live the divine life of Christ. This can be a scary proposition for sure, but this night we have this assurance from God: He loves humankind so much that entered completely into our human world, with all its typical concerns, struggles, joys, heartaches,
boredom, insight, whatever we experience as human beings, Christians experience with God as our eternal partner in love.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Second and Third Precautions Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series and the First Precaution.)

The second precaution against the world regards the attraction that temporal goods have for us. A family has certain financial needs that a religious does not.  But for the lay person, as well as for the religious, it is a question of distinguishing needs from desires.

The last precaution against the world is to guard ourselves against thinking about events in the community. “Never be scandalized or astonished at anything you happen to see or learn of, endeavoring to preserve your soul in forgetfulness of all that.” “Even if you should live among [literal] devils you should not turn the head of your thoughts to their affairs, but…strive to keep your soul occupied purely and entirely in God.”

This aside about devils opens up an interesting clue to the meaning of this precaution. If you call to mind the famous drawing by Martin Schongauer of Saint Antony’s temptations, you will remember that the demons are poking at the saint, pulling his beard and so on. And he is completely tranquil and serene in the center of all this mischief. We are familiar with interpreting this in terms of thoughts. For example, when we pray, are we not immediately pushed and pulled in all directions by distractions? And does not the monastic tradition teach us that these distracting thoughts are, much more often than not, the product of demonic intrusion? The remedy is simply to return to the Psalms, or whatever meditation we have undertaken.

Now, Saint John Cassian says that the hermit fights the devil one on one. But the cenobite, the monk in community, fights the devil in his brothers. Does not this suggest that the distracting behavior of my brother is an occasion for the devil to turn my thoughts away from God? John of the Cross agrees: “There is never a lack of devils who seek to overthrow the saints; God permits this [state of affairs] in order to prove and try religious.”

John makes it clear that one of the most problematic temptations is to speak about what we’ve seen with another monk. He says that we should never do this. When we fail in this way, do we not often excuse ourselves ahead of time by claiming that we are acting out of love and concern? At a minimum, before we say anything, we might ask these questions. If the brother is truly in danger or is truly endangering others, who should know about it? Who would have the authority to address it? And then, how likely is it that the person in authority, abbot or novice master or whoever is the overseer in this case, doesn’t know what’s happening? How motivated am I, really, by love for the brother? Is it likely that I am in fact motivated by my own demand for others not to impinge on my peace of mind?

Now apply all that I’ve said to the hyper-reactive world of social media!

Once again, we see that the “worldliness” in this case is about a certain level of comfort, safety and self-insulation, a need to control my environment rather than adapt. We see also a way of identifying the three enemies of the soul with the three parts of the soul. The flesh clearly refers to temptations that arise from the concupiscible part of the soul. The devil, who we said earlier is connected to the intellect, refers to temptations that afflict the rational part of the soul. And the middle part of the soul, the irascible, is that part that deals with danger, discomfort and so on. Is it not often the case that when we feel the need to speak about something scandalous or merely annoying that we are moved by anger or sadness? God gave us anger to drive away true temptations, not to drive a wedge between ourselves and other. And sadness is a sign that something that we valued is being taken away. It is an invitation to let go of identifying myself with that imagined good, to open within myself a space for the True Good, Jesus Christ Himself. The world would encourage our false self to just such identifications, and the false self by its nature wishes to separate from others. Thus the devil puts us at odds, labeling others as either friends or enemies, depending on whether they can provide us with the goods to which we are accustomed or which we feel are our due. The true self, the life of Christ within, grows by constantly opening itself to a divine perspective, a boundless love that gives without counting the cost and has compassion on all.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First Precaution Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series.)

I have already noted that the world, which shows itself an enemy through the middle part of the soul, especially afflicts the will.  This is our ability to choose goods based not on immediate desire, but on an apprehension of a future benefit or danger. The will is also the faculty that loves—love being a choice rather than a rational thought or a base desire.

And indeed, in his short work The Precautions, Saint John of the Cross immediately identifies love as the arena of the combat with the world. His first question to those who would do battle with the world is, “Whom shall we love?”

John recommends loving no one person more than another, and forgetfulness of all particular affections or hatreds. Do not think about others, neither good things nor bad.

This is sound monastic doctrine, though difficult in practice. Let’s begin with the very challenging teaching that we should not love one person more than another. This derives directly from the gospel. Jesus says that if we do not approach Him without hating father and mother, we cannot be His disciples. So John is channeling one of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.

Part of the difficulty is that there are relationships whose very nature incurs a certain debt, often mutual, but sometimes in one direction. For example, children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers. This must be done whether one loves one’s parents or not. We show honor not because we love our parents more than others (though that may be the case), but because honor is the correct disposition toward a parent. This discipline of honor allows us to follow the teaching of Saint Peter, who says in his First Letter that we should honor all. By practicing honor toward certain persons, we can learn to transfer that honor to all persons.

This opens a way to understand what it might mean to love everyone with the same intensity. Loving a specific person is not necessarily the obstacle that it at first appears to be. The question is: will this love I feel and then exercise toward this person, who is God’s gift to me, will this love instruct me on how to treat everyone else? When I have discovered what it means to love one person, can I discipline myself to treat others as if I loved them? When I interact with someone whom I find disagreeable, I can ask, “How would I treat this person if I loved him or her the way I love my best friend?”

I believe that parenthood has a built in pedagogy here. Parents know that it is impossible to love every child the same way. But one must love each child in some sense equally. This requires a deep interest in knowing their nascent personhood, the specific needs of each child. In other words, parents must learn how to love the correct way for each child.

When we begin to open up this love toward others, I want to offer one of my own precautions. We are not talking about letting other persons determine us, and certainly not toxic persons. Love for someone making very poor choices can take the form of “tough love,” letting the person experience the pain that comes from poor choices. Even the incarceration of a criminal can be seen, if done properly, as an act of love, for it prevents the criminal from committing further acts that damage the soul. In any case, I am advocating for a clear-eyed love, not enmeshment with everyone else’s failings. This is why John also says that we must have equal forgetfulness of all persons. We must know where our feelings end and theirs begin, where we can reasonably be expected to help, and where our help means getting drawn into responsibility for unhealthy behavior.

It is interesting that we are commanded to honor our parents rather than to love them. On the other hand, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus famously reinterprets the idea of a neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is a person who incurs a certain type of debt, actually a kind of “reverse debt,” something owed to another who is the one in need, and who happens to be near me. In such a circumstance, I am invited to become the tangible mercy and compassion of God toward the poor, the sick, and the abandoned, simply because God put me there.

Let’s note in completing this meditation that every person we meet each day has experienced hurt, disappointment, injury—the list could go on and on. We can’t really know the extent to which that person needs compassion, a kind word, maybe just forbearance. And so he is my neighbor, the one to whom I owe love.

In what sense is the world the enemy in these expressions of honor and love? The world has fallen under the domination of the devil, the diabolos, the one who divides. Particular love and honor, as I have hinted, is given to us by God as a part of His pedagogy. It is when we want to hold onto that love and use it for our own purposes of comfort, pleasure, safety, or whatever, that it causes us to become possessive and to separate. We can attempt to build up a world centered on ourselves, based on our preferences. This is the hostile face of “the world”:  when we seek division based on our own judgments and not God’s.

The second part of John’s exhortation tells us not to think about others. Do we not again need to do this sometimes? Doesn’t a novice master or a teacher need to think about the character of the novice or student in order best to love him and serve his needs for conversion and growth? Do we not need to think about others any time we engage in a cooperative action?

Here is where John’s exhortation to think neither good nor bad comes in. He is exhorting us to evaluate the person not in a moral sense. Any such judgment will be ill-informed and biased. Rather, there are situations where love indeed requires us to make prudential judgments about the best way to interact with specific persons. Here’s the rub: it is extremely difficult to parse the difference between the moral judgment and the practical judgment.

I believe that the distinction arises from how the thought affects me. Does the thought of the other person’s character and assumed motivations move me to change my own approach and dispositions to adapt myself to that person? Or is my first thought to demand that the other person change?

Saint Benedict confirms this approach when he teaches that the abbot must adapt himself to each monk’s character and intelligence. An abbot is someone who really must think about others, as any father must think about his children. But the result of this thought, in the case of an abbot, is not first of all a demand that the monk change, but rather is a discovery of inadequacy in oneself. Or if we put this positively, it is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge and wisdom.

Homily for Gaudete Sunday

If you have a feeling of déjà vu at this morning’s liturgy, what might be the cause? Obviously, it’s not the rose vestments, which we haven’t worn since March.

Do you remember what the gospel was last week? It was John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert, and, Matthew says, “All Judea and the whole region around the Jordan were going to him.” Today, John is no longer in the desert, but is in prison. And it is in prison that he hears about the works of Christ, which he had predicted last week.

Except there is a difference.

Last week, when speaking of one mightier than he, John said of the Messiah, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand….the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So, it’s interesting that this week, when he asks Jesus whether He is one, Jesus doesn’t quite answer directly.

And it’s not an invalid question. After all, we don’t see—or we seem not to see—Jesus with a winnowing fan in his hand, even metaphorically. Where is the wheat and the chaff?

Instead, Jesus responds with a strong paraphrase of Isaiah chapter 35, today’s first reading. And this is interesting. Who is effecting these cures in Isaiah? The first two verbs are in the passive voice: eyes will be opened, ears will be cleared. This is what is sometimes known as the divine passive. Isaiah does not specify who is opening the eyes of the blind. It magically happens.

But we know that this happens when God comes to save His people. “Here is your God…he comes to save you.” That’s when eyes get opened.

So that’s Jesus’s response: if eyes are opened and the lame are walking, then God must have come to save His people. So, was John wrong? Did he have the wrong Messiah?

Of course, this can’t be the case, because the gospels go out of their way to underline the Baptist’s importance as the one who prepares the people and gives witness to Jesus.

The Fathers of the Church struggled with this passage, where John doesn’t seem to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Did he not hear the voice from heaven pronouncing Jesus the Son of God at His baptism? What they noticed about this episode is that John is not asking Jesus a question directly; he is sending his disciples with the question.

Is it possible that they were the ones who were taking offense? That the Messiah appears bearing mercy, healing, and forgiveness rather than condemnation? This is a good explanation, I think, but it just shifts the burden.

If Jesus is the one who is to come, when are we going to see the winnowing fan, the wheat gathered and the chaff burned?

This is the second surprise. If the first is that the Messiah is not only a human king, but is God Himself, the second is that baptism by the Holy Spirit makes us not only human, but sons and daughters of God by adoption.

The chaff that is to be threshed out and burned is our sins, our worldliness, all that would make us unfit to be God’s heirs.

What about the wheat? Would this not be everything good that God has given us, and every effort, however small, that we have made to say, “Yes,” to do God’s will?

Oftentimes it feels as if our good deeds go unnoticed. Or when they are noticed, others respond with mild cynicism or outright cynicism.

We do good, hoping to build up all that is good in the world, and it seems like evil goes on its way unconcerned. It is as if our good deeds limp, a good word meets a deaf ear. God’s beautiful creatures are obscured, eyes are blind to the stars hidden behind streetlights, living things perish and decay.

This is where Jesus comes to set things right. In His kingdom, which is not of this world, he will have gathered up all those efforts at fidelity. They will no longer Iimp, but will dance before us, and all good words that were uttered will become a song of joy and praise. The dead will be raised, and there will be no tears or pain in that new world, which God wishes to be ours, that world in which even the least is greater than John the Baptist.

Why would we take offense at this? Why would John’s disciples have taken offense?

I believe they were hoping to divide the world between the good people, namely the people of the covenant, and the bad people, like the Romans and their collaborators. Would we not at times also like to see our opponents get burned—at least a little bit—for causing suffering to others?

If we do not see ourselves as lame and blind, at least in some sense, are we not prone to rancor when the undeserving receive mercy and healing? We will answer this with the words of Saint James: “Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged.”

If we can welcome each other as Christ has welcomed the least deserving, we will have that much more wheat to bring to God and that much less chaff to be burned away.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction

Saint Paul writes to the Ephesians:

“You [Christ] made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lives in the passions of our flesh.”

This is the most immediate scriptural citation behind the traditional formulation of the three enemies of the soul, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This is one of the traditional means of distinguishing between the spirits opposed to God and the Holy Spirit, and by the High Middle Ages, we see this triad quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something widely known and accepted in Catholic moral theology.

Saint Paul says that we once walked in the course of this world, the first enemy. The second, the prince of the power of the air, refers to a belief that demons inhabited the air between earth and heaven, and prevented our ascent there. We see this in icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, where monks are attempted to climb to heaven, but are being pulled at, and even at times pulled down by flying demons.

Finally, Paul mentions the passions of the flesh.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will be meditating on these three enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh, and the devil. I will be making use of the thinking of Saint John of the Cross, who does a brief exposition of them in a short work called The Precautions. This is written for cloistered religious, and I plan to follow it pretty carefully, making some suggestions about how we might adapt it to the lay state, and I hope that our later discussion can be an opportunity to flesh out how best to make this adaptation.

In this work, he says that the world is the enemy least difficult to conquer, and so we will happily begin our reflection there. But by way of introduction, I will say a bit more in general about the three enemies.

John of the Cross goes on say that the devil is the hardest to understand, and the flesh is the most tenacious.

In his formulation, we can see that defeating the devil requires purification of the intellect, and battling the flesh the purification of the lower appetites, which leaves the higher appetite of the will as the field of combat against the world.

In traditional monastic spiritual theology, which follows on that of Plato and Aristotle, the soul is divided into three parts. The highest is the rational, and the lowest is called the concupiscible. In the middle is the irascible. If we work our way up, we discover that the concupiscible appetites are those of pleasure and a sort of mindless self-preservation, the interior physical needs of the body. The thoughts connected with this part of the soul are primarily gluttony and lust, though avarice is partly connected to this lower part of the soul.

The middle part of the soul regards our relationships to persons and to good and evil. This irascible part used anger to fend off danger and sadness to remind us of previous mistakes and losses. Under the power of sin, we mistakenly use anger against other persons and sadness against others who we feel deprive us in some way. It culminated in sloth or accedia, a kind of abandonment of any spiritual ideal. This is the area we will be looking at in the next post.

Finally, the rational part manifests itself in pride and vainglory.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

The Book of Genesis starts off on a very high note. God creates all things and finds them good, even very good. Adam and Eve, our first parents, are given paradise for their home. It is a vision of a world in which evil does not exist: plants spring up from the well-watered ground, animals help the man and woman to keep the garden.

As we all know, this does not last very long.  I believe Dante suggests that it lasted about half an hour.

In today’s first reading, we hear the tail-end of the story of man’s transgression, the attempt to attain wisdom in a manner contrary to God’s intentions. This begins a dismal series of chapters in which humankind goes from bad to worse, to the point that God laments ever making man because the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil continually.

It feels like that line from Genesis describes much of our world today. God never gave up on us, and so he began His great plan of redemption by calling Abraham to leave the world of idolatry. There was a long road ahead for Abraham’s progeny. We see that every time God sends a blessing, there is a corresponding resistance, even rebellion.

Eventually, the people of Israel go into exile, and the temple is destroyed. This marks a new approach: more and more, the people of Judah look to respond to God by a humble submission to His law, not seeking the power of kings, but seeking renewal interiorly.

Instead of having thoughts entirely on evil, meditating on God’s law, day and night. This was a good strategy, since God had promised blessings to those who kept His law in their hearts.

What I am describing here is the gradual training of the people of Israel to cooperate with God’s grace. This was a challenge because the rest of the world didn’t know God and went about with its wars and industries, measuring success by worldly standards while Israel became more and more negligible.

But this was all a part of God’s plan. He was seeking one person who would truly say, “Yes,” with a pure heart. And so, to an aging couple, whom we call Joachim and Anne, God gave the gift of a daughter who would be that perfect response to God’s invitation to know Him and love Him.

The covenant with Abraham, that agreement between two parties, is brought to fruition through one who will say, “May it be done to me according to your word.” It is at this moment God finally enters His creation to save it from within.

Today’s solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is not just a celebration of this event, but a reminder that each of us through baptism is part of the same drama of salvation. Each of us, in saying “Yes” to God’s invitation and pledging ourselves to Him in baptism, has brought Christ into the world in our own hearts. We are now striving to bring Him to birth by becoming saints. As Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception was prepared for by generations of humble, anonymous men and women, we are beneficiaries of generations of Christians who have striven to be faithful to Christ.

Seeing God’s hand in this history and recognizing His many gifts to us, let us respond to His invitation and say, “Yes,” with our whole heart.

Homily for the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we celebrate the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the temple. Our knowledge of this event is taken not from the canonical Scriptures, but from an important text, called the “Protoevangelium of James,” written in about the year 150. The Protoevangelium also gives us the names of Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna. The book is an excellent witness to the importance of the Blessed Virgin in the earliest decades of the Church. We see the earliest Christians reflecting on her role in God’s plan, requiring her to be set apart. Like the prophet Samuel, she is dedicated by her parents to God, to live in the temple and serve the priests who ministered at God’s altar. One of young Mary’s tasks was to weave the temple veil, the veil that would be rent at Jesus’s death.

The Church has always seen in this dedication of the Virgin Mary a foreshadowing of consecrated life. Those called by God to leave the world are to live, like Mary or the apostles after Pentecost, in the temple, praising God at all times. There, we wait upon God’s will, and following the pattern of Mary’s motherhood, we dedicate ourselves to welcoming the life of Christ given at baptism. With the help of God’s grace, we aim to bring that divine life to term by a life of sanctity and purity of heart.

Today we also conclude the monastery’s annual retreat. As it happens, this year’s retreat is shorter than usual, as we are planning to move it back to February. But it has been unusual in many other ways, and perhaps not as quiet and reflective as most of us would have chosen. This might be a reminder from God that no life of sanctity comes without a struggle to accept what is. It might be a reminder that as monks, we can’t afford to use the retreat as a time to “refuel” before we get back to work. We have to be the ones in the Church who say “no” to whatever distracts us from our primary purpose of serving God alone. Is there a difference in kind between withdrawal from the world and retreat? I think that they are both the same thing, differing only in degree. If God has seen to it that we haven’t had as much time for spiritual exercises this week as we would have hoped, this is perhaps a reminder that, for us, spiritual exercises must come first at all times, and not just on retreat.

I don’t want to be too elliptical for our guests: Fr. Edward is doing fine after having surgery on Wednesday night, and while he has a lot of rehab ahead of him, we have reason to expect him back. Other distractions have been more elective, and, as I say, a spur to imitate more fully the example of Our Lady: to put our own plans to the side and say, “Let it be done to me according to your will,” so that we may be a true sign to the Church that God’s will is our peace and not any accomplishment of our own. For whoever does the will of Jesus’s heavenly Father is His brother, sister, and mother, kindred of all the saints in heaven and destined for eternal life.

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the subject of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology means the study of the ecclesia, the Church.

What is the Church? What does it mean to be a member of the Church? These questions are not as easy to answer as we might think at first blush.

For example, when we ask what the Church is, the answers that we get from theologians vary, depending on the perspective from which we view the Church. It is the mystical Body of Christ. It is the sacrament of salvation for the world. It is the People of God, or the Perfect Society, through which we, the members, receive grace and are sanctified and perfected in union with our shepherds, the bishops, under the special care of the Holy Father, Christ’s vicar on earth. And of course, any one of these “models” is itself a mystery, and therefore open to ongoing reflection.

I would like to offer the idea of the Church as a kind of fractal, just to make things at first even more mysterious and perhaps overly complicated.

What is a fractal? In certain popular usages of the term, it refers to a shape that is made up of several connected versions of the same shape on a smaller level. Imagine, for example, a snowflake, with it six points. Now imagine taking six of the same snowflakes and connecting them around a center so that it makes a new hexagonal snowflake. And imagine that this new snowflake has the same shape as each of the six smaller snowflakes. That’s what I mean by fractal in the case. As we zoom our or zoom in, we see the same shape emerge each time. That shape is repeated at different levels.

So, there is one Church, as we say in the Creed. That is because Christ Himself is the One mediator between God and Man, and the Church is His Body and His Bride. There can only be one Bride for Christ and that is the Church.

Now, a brief side note on the Lateran Basilica. Just over two thousand years ago, in the City of Rome, there was a family that had recently become a part of the wealthy class in pagan Rome, and their name was the Lateran family. They built a palace on the site of what is today the Lateran Basilica. This palace was confiscated by the Emperor Nero and became part of the government’s property. Three hundred years later, when the Emperor Constantine became Christian, he donated that former palace to the pope at the time, Pope Miltiades, and it became the seat of the bishop of Rome. The building was destroyed several times, and the current building was built over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourteenth centuries, the building was destroyed by two fires while the pope had moved his administration to the city of Avignon in France. When Saint Catherine of Siena persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, he found the Lateran Basilica completely in ruins. So he moved his administration to Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill, and this is where the pope continues to exercise his governance of the Church. However, the Lateran remains the cathedral church of Rome, and therefore is the Mother Church of the entire Roman Catholic world. Hence our celebration today. It is a sign of the unity of the Church under one pope, and a sign of the Incarnation, inasmuch as there can be only one Mother cathedral, and for God’s purposes, He chose Rome to be the home of this church.

Now, let’s return to the idea of a fractal. So, you remember that I said that when either zoom in or zoom out, we see the same shape emerge. This is what we find in the ecclesiology, when we look at the Church. When we zoom all the way out, we see the universal Church, with billions of members all around the world and in heaven and in purgatory. A glorious sight to be sure.

But when we zoom in, we don’t find an isolated “piece” of the larger Church. We find a diocese. And at the head of the diocese is the Bishop. And by dint of his ordination as bishop, he is just as much a successor of the Apostles as is the bishop of Rome. One of the principles vigorously enunciated at the Second Vatican Council is that each bishop receives his power and authority directly from Christ, not from the pope. The pope receives particular powers reserved to him, but the normal powers of a bishop, to teach and preach, to celebrate the sacraments, and to govern the Church, comes directly from Christ. This means that each diocese is, in some way, the fullness of the Church in a local, miniature setting. The whole, single, Church is present, and this is especially visible when the bishop celebrates the sacraments. For Christ is acting in the fullness of His power through the bishop.

Now, if we zoom in yet another level, we get to the parish. Again, the parish is not simply a piece of the diocese. There is, again, a sense that the fullness of the Church is present locally, through Christ’s ministry, now through the instrument of the priest. Now, we should say that the parish is a more inadequate symbol or instantiation of the universal Church. For example, a priest cannot celebrate the sacraments without the permission and mandate of his bishop, and certain sacraments are reserved to the bishop, such as ordination or the consecration of an altar. Certain decisions belong to the bishop. But even if the picture is slightly dimmed, this does not mean that the fullness of the Church is not actually present when the priest acts in the person of Christ, whether teaching governing or sanctifying.

This fractal nature of the Church is denoted by the fact that we celebrate three church dedications each year. Today we celebrate the Church’s unity at the highest level. On October 11 each year, we celebrate the dedication of the diocesan cathedral, in our case the archdiocesan cathedral of Holy Name downtown. And last but definitely not least, we celebrate the dedication of each parish or religious church. In our case, this is on October 24. And this celebration at the most local level is the highest-ranking, liturgically speaking, of the three.

This means that while today’s celebration is a feast in this church, in Rome it is a solemnity, the highest-ranking category of a liturgical celebration. This once more connects us to the Incarnation. It is God who has chosen to consecrate this place to Himself, and it is likewise God Who chose to consecrate the Lateran basilica. He does this to deepen His relationship with the actual people who come here. But we are never, for that reason, isolated from the other churches. We recall on this day each year that our small community is not just a piece of the universal Church, but in some way makes present the entirety of the Church, which is best understood from the perspective of the ministry of unity given to Saint Peter and his successors.

So, we can give thanks to God this day for calling us to be members of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and for reminding us that what we see here, however humble it may appear, is in fact an opening to the grand and glorious city of the redeemed, an opening to the kingdom where we hope to enjoy God’s glory forever. Amen.

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