Monastery of the Holy Cross

Bright Sadness and the Joy of Spiritual Longing

Lent begins today. We distributed ashes at Mass this morning. Shortly afterward, I distributed Lenten reading to each of the brothers. Saint Benedict instituted this practice in his Rule: the superior gives a book to each brother to be read straight through during Lent. I typically give each brother a classic from a Church Father or monastic saint, though occasionally, a brother might receive a book of more recent of theology if I think it might be useful.

At this point in my life I look forward to Lent with a kind of eager trepidation, if I can put it that way. When I was younger, it was a pure eagerness that accompanied this time of spiritual intensification. As I’ve gained experience, I know that, often enough, an unenlightened eagerness is the beginning of disappointment and recrimination. Therefore I now try to approach Lent with more wariness about the spiritual traps that inevitably accompany any effort to cooperate more fully with grace. The eagerness has in no way left me; it has been, I hope, tempered and made more realistic, more attuned to what spiritual warfare is actually like and to what my own temperament permits in the way of change.

My favorite image of Saint Antony’s temptations, by Martin Schongauer. Two things to notice: the demons, externalized thoughts, are hard to distinguish from Antony. We often have difficulty separating from our thoughts, which is why slowing down and not reacting is so important. Secondly, Antony’s stoic resignation is part of the strategy. Rather than impulsively engaging the thoughts, he is simply allowing them to be, but staying mentally detached from them, not assenting, nor over-correcting by a fretful rejection of their presence.

It is often remarked that the word ‘joy’ appears twice in Saint Benedict’s chapter on Lent. This accords well with the Orthodox phrase “bright sadness” that is the desired disposition of the penitent in Great Lent. For this joy and bright sadness to accompany our fasting, it is important that we actually try to experience hunger. This means “moving toward” the perception of being hungry, accepting it without judgment as another experience. Can we sit still, when hungry, accept the lack of energy and the chills, without reacting? Am I inclined to give in to grumpiness? Or to think about how long it is until lunch? Or to complain about outdated, formalistic Church disciplines? Twenty years ago, our whole community experimented with a scientific, low-carb diet. I was impressed at the fact that balancing one’s carbohydrates with one’s proteins and fat intake makes it possible to lose weight without ever feeling very hungry. This would be another temptation against the fast, I think: seeing it merely in terms of eating healthier, losing weight, getting myself back into those pants that haven’t fit for the past few years or more. Weight loss and physical health are all good, to be sure, and we hope that they are results of the fast. But hunger, as we see in the temptation of Christ in the desert, is part of the process. I am hungry, but I accept that I am not going to eat right now.

We will discover, just as Jesus did, that other temptations dutifully follow after we have decisively, for the moment at least, said no to eating. When we are younger and perhaps less disciplined, the physical craving often remanifests itself laterally in the forms of a lustful eye, fantasizing, or seeking out energetic music or distracting entertainments. It would be useful to recognize this displacement and, as we had said no to eating, to say no to substitutes as well, especially the illicit ones. What we want is for the resistance to food to allow us to peer more deeply into the structure of our desires, especially those desires for safety, love, acceptance, power, and so on. A friend once told me that he stopped fasting because he discovered that it made him angry. My response to this is that fasting often reveals that I am an angry person, or at least a person who has habitually given myself over to anger. And I create an illusion of not being an angry person by cheerfully eating whenever something annoys me. So I never encounter the anger underneath the surface that drives my eating.

When anger, or sadness, or suspicion, or any other negative emotion arises, it is useful again to allow it to be, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist. This also precludes giving in and treating anger or sadness as legitimate just because I happen to feel one of them at the moment. The point here is to avoid any “quick fix” by giving up the fast or by a superficial happy feeling that we achieve by rewatching an episode of Police Squad for the hundredth time. If I have made a vice of anger, I might need an occasional distraction like that to avoid losing my temper. But the eventual goal is simple and gentle detachment from the disturbance of anger and negativity. This will eventually allow me to confront the thoughts that drive the anger, thoughts of frustration with a brother or a spouse, fear about war in Ukraine (or Covid–remember those days?). From here I can gently substitute thoughts from Scripture, allowing the Holy Spirit to change my outlook gradually. What I discover at this stage are the ways in which I have bought into a narrative about the world, myself, and God, that is profoundly false and distorting–the serpent’s narrative. Holy reading allows me to enter into the truth about these things, a truth that brings an eventual sense of peace and trust.

Power is the deepest danger. Again, it is quite useful to sit still and tell myself, “I am hungry, and the lack of food means that I don’t have the energy to work as hard as usual.” Overwork and, more generally, overfunctioning, is a way of attempting to dominate my environment. In Saint Augustine’s famous and frightening phrase, it is the corrupting libido dominandi, the drive to dominate. When we get sick or injured, or when we are lethargic because of hunger, we lose a good amount of control over our circumstances. Again, this lack of control most often manifests first as anger or sadness. One benefit of being hungry is that anger and sadness are harder to maintain, and we are confronted eventually with our real powerlessness, the realization that our bodies one day (and every day one day sooner) will fall apart and die. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I will admit to using Drebinisms from time to time to get some distance from angry thoughts.

At this point, we have little left but to turn to God, and this is undoubtedly the best place to be, because God really is in control of everything that matters in the end. “Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will take flight. Draw close to God, and He will draw close to you [James 4: 7].” “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares about you [1 Peter 5: 7].” This is the source of true joy and peace. As creatures of infinite desire, we find our rest in learning to desire the infinite God and His holy will. Recognizing all of the ways in which we settle for lesser goods is the source of compunction, a type of sadness. But it is a bright sadness because through it we are discovering the source and end of all spiritual longing, the love of the God of Jesus Christ.

Saint Scholastica: a model of prayer and charity

Benedict and Scholastica, at their annual meeting outside of Monte Cassino.

Today’s liturgical celebration, the feast of Saint Scholastica, holds an important place in Benedictine monasteries. Scholastica was Saint Benedict’s sister, and, according to Benedict’s biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, she was distinguished as having “greater love” than even our holy patriarch himself. It is a special day for all Benedictine sisters throughout the world—over 20,000 of them, in the “black” Benedictine federations alone—as we honor a woman whose prayer is known to be very powerful. (She once convinced God to send a thunderstorm when her brother was being slightly obstinate…)

In the Benedictine world, there is a sense that Benedict and Scholastica represent something like the “Petrine” and “Marian” aspects of the church as a whole. While the Petrine service of pastoring, legislative, and governing is extremely important (Benedict is often celebrated as our “Lawgiver”), the Marian service of the hidden life of prayer is the true heart of the Church’s secret fecundity. By prayer and contemplation, we open our hearts to experience God’s healing and loving presence within, and we open our minds to discover God’s sanctifying presence in all creation. A life of prayer truly puts God first, gives God the initiative (all prayer starts with the Holy Spirit!), and frees us from the burden of solving problems by our own powers.

The gospel for today’s feast, if you happen to be at Mass in a Benedictine monastery, is the famous passage about Mary and Martha. Our Lord gently chides Martha for being anxious about many things, and perhaps for being slightly annoyed with her sister Mary, sitting at the Lord’s feet and listening. It’s a shame that this story has come to represent the distinction between the active and contemplative life in religious orders. All of us need to be Marys at certain times, and Marthas at other times. But we should all seek to enshrine in our hearts the primacy of the “better part” of Mary.

Jesus in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus

I realize how difficult it is for many of us to get going on the life of prayer. Let me conclude by suggesting that it is a habit like any other habit. When you are trying to form a new habit, it is difficult and even painful at first, as we battle against other habits that need changing. Start small with prayer, and then try to expand from there. As you pray regularly, it will get easier, and as it does, it can be helpful to add a little more prayer. Soon, it will be a part of our day that we can’t do without. I was thinking this morning at lectio divina of the old saying of the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz: “If I skip one day of practice, I notice; if I skip two, my friends notice; if I skip three, the audience notices.” I can tell when I have been lax at prayer for whatever reason, legitimate or not. My sense of God’s presence gets a bit opaque, and my sense of the sacredness of the people I meet becomes occluded. All it takes is to reengage with prayer, and these spiritual sense begin returning.

Gregory the Great tells us that Scholastica and Benedict used to spend days at a time discussing spiritual mysteries. How many of us could actually do such a thing for an hour, much less a whole day? Yet, I know from the great saints of the past and today’s spiritual masters that we can aspire to this spiritual fluency, but only if we pray.

Saint Scholastica, teach all of us, Benedictines and others, to pray as you prayed, that our souls may take flight and follow you on your heavenly journey to Christ!

What to do…

Amid much uncertainty in the world at the moment, we have gone about our monastic business quietly, praying for the nation, our city, the world. We’ve tried to keep our corner of the Bridgeport neighborhood, quiet, safe, and where possible, beautiful. Our garden has been quite fruitful, providing raspberries, blackberries, chard, beans, peppers, tomatoes. The deep green of trees gently waves outside my office window and elsewhere. The cats, domestic and stray, lounge about and are eager to eat when the food is brought out.

When we arrived thirty years ago, our properties featured a lot more concrete and less greenery. This meant, perhaps, less work cutting grass, weeding, and trimming trees. But the quiet reminder of God’s plentifulness that we see in the slow and sure maturation of the plants, fed by the rhythm of life-giving rain and sun, is worth a little extra work. So much anxiety comes of forgetting that reality does not depend on us. All that we receive in this world from God is a sign of His love and a pledge of the greater and permanent gifts He has promised. Are we watching for the clues He is leaving us each day?

I should add that I am in no way an isolationist or a fideist, advocating a willful ignorance of the challenges that we face at the moment, seemingly on all fronts.  But in any action we might take to encourage one another, to right wrongs and seek justice, for this to be more than desperate bluster, we should want it to spring from an authentic encounter with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. First of all, this will this mean that we are not reactively engaging out of pressurized fear and anxiety, but out of a sense of calling or vocation. This will help us avoid be manipulated by circumstances. We will tend to address problems that we know that we can solve, or at least ones to which we can offer competent pieces of a solution. But more importantly, we will be reminded of what the goal is. Like Sam Gamgee calling up sweet pictures of the Shire and Rosie Cotton amid the industrialized evil of Mordor, we will be fortified against bitterness and blind anger when our actions have the purpose of cooperating with, and restoring truth, goodness, and beauty.

More to come.

The Light of Christ in an Earthen Vessel: in Memory of Thomas Levergood, 1962-2021

I met Thomas at a graduate student party at the University of Chicago in 1994. I’ve never forgotten his first two questions to me. He began with, “Aren’t you the cantor at St. Thomas [the Apostle parish]?” When I replied in the affirmative, he immediately followed that up with, “Have you ever thought of being a priest?” I hadn’t…

“Le Barberousse” [Redbeard] as he was fondly known by Hyde Park francophones.

So began an intense three-year period of our friendship, during which we toured around virtually every men’s religious community in the Archdiocese and spoke, often with greater zeal than discernment, about the mystical life, Church history, founding our own monastery, etc. I had never before had such intellectually gratifying discussions about faith. Our great shared passion was mysticism, though as we walked this path together, he tended toward the Carmelite tradition and I toward the Desert Fathers. He and I would end up working at the monastery I eventually joined, helping out with cleaning the guesthouse and maintaining the grounds. It was during this time that he conceived the idea for a “Catholic think tank” at the university. Just before I entered monastic life, I was able to help out at some of the first meetings of what would become the Lumen Christi Institute.

As anyone who knew Thomas can attest, his was a most fecund mind. Some years later, I visited him at Calvert House, at what was serving as his office for Lumen Christi. He told me that some corporate leadership guru had given him advice to engage in “one act of creative destruction at the beginning of each day.” I think that the idea was to avoid procrastination by characterizing a difficult phone call as a challenge rather than as an existential crisis. The advice struck me as slightly absurd on his lips. He needed little encouragement for initiating new projects! The difficulty was always about finding adequate help. Thanks be to God, he managed, through many years of dogged work and with much competent assistance, to build up an impressive group of board members and staff who will carry on his vision.

Lumen Christi came to be so identified with Thomas that it is easy to forget just how multitalented he was. When we met, he was, among other things, contemplating becoming a poet, becoming a priest, and running political campaigns. Lest we forget, he was ostensibly working on a PhD. as a student in the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, that quirkiest program at the quirky university that he and I both loved. Most of his ideas were serious, but his imagination allowed for plenty of oddball humor, too. He once suggested that I compose a country song cycle on the ecumenical councils and even offered a melody for “Good Pope Leo and His Tome.”

Friends of Thomas will also attest that he was a complex person. His impressive resume made it easy to overlook the many obstacles he encountered throughout life. If mysticism had been our shared passion in the early years, I believe that the Incarnation became the firmer foundation for our shared reflections as we grew older. Age has a way of bringing home the limitations of our bodily existence, all the better, one hopes, to hand the reins to Christ.

These memories have been flooding my mind in recent weeks as, during his final illness, Thomas and I were able to spend more time together than we had in many years. My first thought, on hearing that he had died yesterday was that Christ had chosen the Feast of the Transfiguration as the day to call him home. It was a mystery that Thomas greatly revered. This is the day on which we are dazzled by the Uncreated Light somehow–improbably–shining through our lowly human body. What a triumphant hope this breeds in those who know its secret! Our frail human nature is absolutely no obstacle to the purifying and transforming Light of Christ. May God in His mercy send the angels to receive him, that his eyes may be opened anew to the deifying light. Rest in peace.

No One Was Greater Than John the Baptist

Think about all of the things you know, not by experience, but by testimony. Virtually everything we know about history, for example, we know because others have written down descriptions of past events. I had an art teacher who liked to say that if we learned everything from experience, most of us would die from poison mushrooms. How do we know that some mushrooms are poisonous? Because someone told us, and we trusted them.

Here’s a more troubling example: what we know about current events is from the reports of anchormen and journalists. This raises an important point. The knowledge that we have from testimony is only as good as the trustworthiness of the source. When assessing someone’s testimony, we check carefully to see whether that person is reliable. In other words, the character of the person testifying is important.

John the Baptist is one of the most important persons in the New Testament precisely because he bears testimony to Christ as the Messiah. And what we discover, when we look more closely at John’s career, is that he was widely known to be trustworthy. His character was unassailable. He spent a lifetime meditating on the Scriptures and living a manifestly holy life. People of all kinds were fascinated by him. Roman soldiers went out to hear him speak and ask his advice. Herod’s career was jeopardized by John’s public criticism. The historian Josephus tells us that John’s arrest happened because Herod feared that John’s popularity could lead to an uprising.

John insisted on personal integrity and drew to himself bands of disciples. And he did this not for personal gain, but for the sake of God’s kingdom—this detachment was part of his integrity. This meant that when the Lamb of God appeared, John was ready to point to Him and to send his own disciples to follow Jesus. These disciples included Saint Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter.

John thus prepared a people ready to receive Christ, and He testifies to Christ so that others can see and follow. In this, John provides an important example for us.

In his years in the wilderness, meditating on God’s prophecies, John learns, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, how to live an upright life in the truth, and how to recognize the signs of Christ’s coming and His presence.

In our world, many people have forgotten about Jesus Christ and His message of redemption, forgiveness, and the promise of eternal life. When we lament this reality, often our first response is to think about organizing some kind of movement or program, or joining such a movement. But the start of any renewal, as we see in monastic history, time and again, is first to check our own reliability as witnesses. Christ hasn’t gone anywhere—but do we see Him in His daily coming? Do we see Him in our neighbor, in the guest, in the poor, in the superior of the monastery? If we don’t, perhaps we can ask John to point to Him. What John tells us is that we can prepare ourselves for Christ’s daily advent by withdrawing into the desert of our hearts and there meditating on God’s prophecies, purifying our own hearts and clearing away distractions.

When it does come time to point others to Christ, how strong will I be as a witness? Am I truthful, disinterested? In a word, am I a reliable witness, a credible source of information? Or do I risk making the gospel less credible by my sins or imprudence? Perhaps John is exactly the saint we need today to prepare again a way of the Lord. Maybe we can leave behind the unreliable information we get from the media and go out to the wilderness where John will teach us again to see Christ passing by. We can learn to say with John, “Christ must increase, and I must decrease.”

One last important example of John’s witness is that John tells us that he rejoices when he sees Christ as the friend of the bridegroom rejoices to see the groom receive his bride. This narrow path of self-denial and witness to Christ will eventually be a path of joy. It will make us fearless witnesses after the pattern of John the forerunner and herald of salvation. Blessed are we to celebrate the life of this great man today!

Life in the Spirit

“For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?” [1 Corinthians 2: 11]

When Beethoven was a young man, one of his principal patrons, Count Waldstein, predicted that he would inherit the spirit of Mozart. Music historians will often make statements to the effect that the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe was dominated by the spirit of Beethoven himself, and that the second half was strongly informed by the spirit of Wagner. The negative expression of this latter reality belongs to the iconoclastic composer Claude Debussy, who said that his task was the exorcism of the “ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner.”

Beethoven’s spirit is often connected to the rise in democratic movements following the French Revolution. He famously erased Napoleon’s name from the manuscript of the Eroica symphony when he heard that Napoleon had  crowned himself as emperor.

To what does all of this refer? Two aspects come to light. The music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner was experienced by many of their near-contemporaries (and many of us today) as touching on something profoundly true and beautiful. The crystalline perfection of Mozart’s symphonies and the heroic pulses of Beethoven’s symphonies inspired (in-spirited!) many young composers to take up the quill and try their own hand at composing. Musical composition is always a process of interior listening, testing to see how musical ideas imply other musical ideas, and how these in turn touch ineffably on the meaning of the human and divine. When one is immersed in the music of a Mozart, one learns from him how to listen and how to discern the true from the false, the profound from the trivial.

The first practical effect of this discernment is that early Beethoven sounds very much like Mozart’s music. Wagner’s earliest compositions sound eerily similar to Beethoven’s middle and late periods. Notice that Wagner’s music would almost never be mistaken for Mozart’s though. Something has changed with the appearance of Beethoven. This fact points us to the second important idea of the “spirit” of a man. However much Beethoven inherited Mozart’s spirit, as this spirit entered into another  unique individual, Beethoven’s own creativity was quickened into life, an unrepeatable life. Thus emerged Beethoven’s own spirit that he bequeathed to the varying compositions of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, and Wagner.

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” [Romans 5: 5]

Wagner’s spirit led him to reconnect with a heroic past in mythology, a similar intuition to that of J.R.R. Tolkien in a later generation.

All the baptized partake of an analogous reality. But instead of inheriting the spirit of a fellow creature, we have received the Spirit of Christ, the Son of God. This is a true inheritance: “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” Being led by the Spirit does not mean in any way that we become marionettes, any more than Wagner robotically reproduced Beethoven’s music. The Spirit quickens what is latent in us, and we develop into ourselves. This is why Scripture speaks of the Spirit as both our inheritance, and a pledge of a future inheritance into which we have yet to enter. “[You] were sealed with the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it.” [Ephesians 1: 13-14] Led by the Spirit, we are already God’s children and yet something still greater awaits: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be.” [1 John 3: 2]

Who among us is as free as the saint of God?

Just as a composer infused with the spirit of Beethoven learns from studying the master’s work, we will grow in the Holy Spirit to the extent that we accompany Jesus Christ in our daily lives, make Him our model and learn from Him how to discern the true from the false. We do this by participation in His mysteries in the liturgy, by meditating on Holy Scripture, and by recognizing Christ’s presence in His Body the Church. Many of us resist this with a false understanding of what it means to take responsibility for our own lives. Critics of religion will claim that the Church’s morality deadens our individuality, infantilizes us by scripting our own lives for us. But as my examples of composers demonstrate, the spirit of Mozart did the opposite for Beethoven. It freed Beethoven to develop into the great light for so many who came after him. If this is so with the spirit of a man, how much more will the Spirit of the Creator God free us to mature into true individuals, as articulated members of Christ’s Body? As C.S. Lewis well expressed the freedom of those led by the Spirit, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”

Come Holy Spirit!

Prior Peter Funk
Pentecost, A.D. 2021

He Is Not Here! Homily for the Easter Vigil

On the seventh day of creation, God rested.

From a theological and philosophical standpoint, this is quite a statement: philosophers would say that God’s Being is interchangeable with His acting. There is no separation between the two, and for God to rest seems like a contradiction, in one sense. Jesus Himself said that His Father is always at work. But we see two meanings of it in tonight’s liturgy.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened. Enter into my rest.

The first is that it is on the seventh day of the week, that Christ, the Son of God—Who is God—rests in the tomb. And we see even more profoundly that this is the cost to God of creation. God’s willingness—His “permissive will”—to open a space for other creatures of reason and will to act, to be free—this is a great risk that God takes, inviting us to act freely, to act reasonably (one hopes). And the cost of this is shown exactly by Christ’s death. This is the price of giving us freedom.

God is not giving up on us, though: in Christ’s Resurrection, which we celebrate tonight, we see an “eighth day” opening up, a new creation. And we are “recapitulating” this action of God.

The liturgy is the manifest action of Jesus Christ in the world. In the document Sacrosanctum Concilium [par. 7], the first document issued by the fathers of Vatican II, it says that the liturgy is the action of Christ, the High Priest. So what are we doing, then?

Well, we the baptized are members of His Body In acting out the liturgy, we are making visible what Christ is doing. When we participate in the liturgy, by our actions and by our attentiveness, we are conformed, body, mind, and spirit, to Christ Himself, Who is acting through us, impressing the form of His own life upon our own, giving us a new life. In celebrating the mystery of His Passion, Death, descent into hell and Resurrection, we ourselves undergo this same experience, in a mysterious way. As Saint Paul says in tonight’s epistle: “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.”

These are lovely words of comfort and consolation in the midst of, and at the end of, an annus horribilis.

So, how much do we feel—experience—the effects of our resurrection?

Now before you think that I’m trying to give you a guilt trip, implying that we all need to try harder to feel good about our resurrection in Christ, let me assure that I mean no such thing. I’m not here to increase your burdens—I promise you!

For starters, we should never try to engineer our own salvation by works.  And that includes working up happy feelings to prove to ourselves that we are saved. Rather, our salvation mysteriously takes place in the realm of faith, and this may or may not be accompanied by corresponding feelings.

I want to emphasize this particularly because I suspect that many of us have experienced at least a year of ambiguous feelings at best. I imagine that most of us, on the earthly plane, have been feeling helpless, anxious, frustrated, even depressed. And if we associate how we feel with the objectivity of our salvation in Jesus Christ, we probably will end up feeling hopeless besides, judging ourselves unworthy of God’s attention, just at the moment we need God’s solicitude more than ever.

Christ healing the paralytic. Haven’t we all had the experience of feeling paralyzed in the last year?

Most of us have never had quite the opportunity to share in Christ’s death before this year, when we’ve experienced a cascade of sufferings, many of them unforeseen and unpredictable.  The sufferings associated with a pandemic, with quarantines, loss of contact with loved ones, loss of pastimes, travel, and cultural events that lighten our lives, have in turn made the normal sufferings that much harder to bear: the deaths of loved ones, illness, broken relationships, financial hardships, difficulties at work, and so on.

Now with that background, let me return to my central question:

How am I experiencing Resurrection in Christ?

We have been led into the darkened church by the inextinguishable light of Jesus Christ, our brother and our head. We have heard of the empty tomb, and Paul has confirmed what the young man in white told the women inside that empty tomb: He is alive: death is not the end. What will this mean for us when we go forth from this celebration tonight, the celebration of our own resurrection and illumination in faith?

Assuredly, we all have some immediate grasp of what it means to live. I don’t mean merely to be alive and not dead. Rather I mean the experiences of great joy, hope, great encounters with beauty and goodness and love

The best we can say about the life that God gives us after our resurrection is that it in some way fulfills all the best promises that these previous experiences betoken. But we don’t really know what this new life is like until we experience it. There is something incomprehensible—at least at first—about living a resurrected life. Because this is an eternal life, God’s own infinite life, there will always be something about it that is unfamiliar.

We’ll never exhaust the mystery of God. If we feel out of our depth, that might be a good sign—that we are open to God revealing to us a new way to think, to feel, and experience the world.

All praise to Christ our Light!

In the meantime, we continue to live in an in-between state, remaining in the flesh even as we strive to live according to the Spirit. This means that much of the Christian interior life depends on interpretation—we can interpret in one of two ways: the flesh or the Spirit. We can interpret every single event of our lives in these ways, events like we’ve been experiencing.

Two chapters after tonight epistle, Saint Paul tells us that we can set our minds on the flesh or on the Spirit. And that the effect of setting our minds on the Spirit is life and peace.

In this same eighth chapter of Romans, Saint Paul tells us something that should be very comforting. We are heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with Him. Suffering is not meaningless if it done with Christ. This means that our suffering is not proof of God’s abandonment—far from it.

As the Easter candle went before us into the dark Church tonight, Christ has gone before us into the hell of suffering. He’s gone into the darkness of each of our hearts, and brought His light there. so that when we go into our hearts, and we feel all this difficulty, when we arrive there ourselves, He is there to accompany us, to comfort us, and…to show us the way out.

Christ leading Adam and Eve out of hell, and, in them, all of their children–including you.

Perhaps in years past, when life seemed to be going reasonably well compared to the last few years, we could confuse the good feelings about Easter, natural feelings, not bad in themselves, but still somewhat human and limited, with what a resurrected life of faith feels like. But this year, many of us have had a taste of what death feels like, and consequently, I would think that our experience of the resurrection can undergo two transformations as well.

First of all, it might not feel like previous feelings associated with Easter because we have been more closely conformed to Christ’s Passion. But if this is true, it is also true that we can be more confident this year that Christ has been walking with us through that shadow of death that has been threatening us.

What Pope Benedict XVI said about Christ’s death can be applied both to our deaths and to our suffering:

“Death, the illogical, the unspiritual and senseless…becomes [in Christ’s death] an active spiritual event. Death, the end of communication, becomes an act of communion of Jesus with everyone, and in him, of everyone with everyone.”

We all share the experience of suffering and death.

If we can discover in our recent suffering our communion with Christ’s suffering, we can discover our communion with each and every person who is our neighbor. We can be ambassadors of compassion. And, through suffering in communion with Christ, we can discover our communion with God, which is to say, mysteriously but truly, with our eternal life.  If we can re-enter those places of darkness and find in them waiting for us the lumen Christi, the light of Christ alive and life-giving.

How blessed we are to be together this night, the night of nights, when death was broken and God’s love was poured in our hearts. For the sake of the rest of the church, especially for those not able to be in an assembly tonight, let us welcome God’s love anew. And let us ask the Holy Spirit for to renew our minds, to help us think differently, with the mind of Christ, that we may know how to identify the signs of the resurrection in our lives, to become more and familiar with this inbreaking new life, and to live out of it.

[To listen to a podcast of this homily, click here.]

Monastic Life As an Essential Service

[The following is a slight edited version of a newsletter article from last summer. I am republishing it because of the positive response it generated at the time.]

I had just returned from a Provincial Council meeting a year ago on March 13 when alarms began pulsing through the media about the looming pandemic. We had Solemn Vespers scheduled for Saturday evening the 14th, but as I spoke to the pastor of the local parish and to the brothers, it became clear that we would need to close our doors for the time being and cancel public services. As local and state governments got up to speed with executive orders meant to regulate the quarantine, churches, mosques, and synagogues received the somewhat dismissive label of “non-essential services.”

Monastic life revels in essential tasks like cooking and clean-up–and prayer.

What this label obscured about our cloistered life is that, in fact, little changed in our day-to-day schedule, especially in that which is most essential about monastic life: our dedication to prayer, devout celebration of the Church’s liturgy, and the intensive search for God. If anything, these activities received greater prominence during this time when our guesthouse and Bed and Breakfast were closed, and we didn’t have to attend to the demands of hospitality [N.B. we’re back open!].

As I wrote on our website at the very beginning of the pandemic: “we are all members of the One Body of Christ by baptism, and 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.”

So while many Catholics were separated from Holy Communion, we monks had an especially essential service, to celebrate the Mass and be fed by Christ’s Body and Blood on behalf of the whole.

To outsiders then, it may have appeared that the monastery was just another one of the non-essential services shuttered to the public. But in fact, the monastery was the institution within the Church where business went on as usual, precisely because the monastic vocation is essential.

Shortly after entering the monastery, I read a classic book of pre-Vatican II spirituality, The Right to Be Merry, by Poor Clare author Mother Mary Frances. One idea that I found there that truly gripped me was that the powerful of this world often understand the Church better than we do. Proof of this is that hostile regimes typically go after the contemplative monasteries first. In recent times, we have seen examples of this in the Soviet Union and communist China.  The contemplative life is the foothold of the Church militant in our true homeland of heaven. When the contemplative vocation is stamped out, there’s a sense in which the Church can be properly subdued and channeled toward secular ends. As long as monasteries exist, they serve as a reminder that the state is never all-powerful, that we are all answerable to God, the Just Judge.

As we gradually reopen, it is a great blessing once again to be with our friends. I hope that the lockdown experience, though, will be a spiritual goad for us monks to tenaciously hold to the core of our calling, that persistent and uncompromising search for God, the radical desire to empty ourselves entirely that grace may illuminate the Church. Let us together pray for the whole Church, that our sufferings may strengthen the life of Christ in each of us, that we may be voices of consolation, peace, and mercy for all those laboring under the uncertainty of the present.

The “Crisis” of Candlemas

The month of February, despite its brevity, is full of critical liturgical celebrations. I use the word “critical” in a precise sense: “of, relating to, or being a turning point…” according to Webster’s. These turning points were somewhat more transparent in the old calendar, before the invention of “Ordinary Time.”

Giotto’s rendering of the Presentation

I invite you to consider the feast of the Presentation (or, as it is often traditionally called, “Candlemas”), which we just celebrated this past Tuesday. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas and is rich in symbolic associations. It is the Incarnate Word’s first visit to the temple—his temple. In the hymn at Lauds on February 2, we sang,

“Parentes Christum deferent,
in templo templum offerunt.”

”His parents carry the Christ;
in the temple, they offer the [true] Temple.

Aside from the obvious paradox in this poetic line, there is a quiet allusion to Christ’s Passion. Christ is brought to the temple as an offering, to be redeemed on the same mount where Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac to God. Not only that, but in referring to Christ as the Temple, the hymnist surely is reminding us of a different exchange. The new Temple of Christ’s Body is inaugurated and revealed through His death and resurrection [cf. John 2: 19-22].

The Magnificat antiphon at Vespers this evening (taken from the Benedictine lectionary for the office of Vigils) once again uses the word temple, but in yet a different sense. Here is the text in full, from 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

According to the traditional four senses of Scripture, Herod’s temple is the “literal” temple, and Christ’s body is the temple in the “allegorical” or Christological sense. In this quotation, Saint Paul shows us the “tropological” or moral sense. “You are the temple of God! And the Holy Spirit dwells in you!” Thus, the procession on Candlemas, accompanying Christ to the temple, is, in a sense, a procession inward, to the temple that we are. We carry lighted candles, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts where Christ wishes to abide.

Candlemas at the Monastery, February 2, 2020

Again, the beauty of this theological reality is accompanied by a serious challenge for us: that we strive to be more and more faithful to our baptismal vows. After all, in our baptisms, we died to ourselves, and we were conformed to Christ’s own Passion, that we might also be conformed to His Resurrection. If we are, with Christ, the temple of God, then we are also an offering to God. Let us, then, today, rededicate ourselves, to “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God [Romans 12: 1].” In making this effort, we will undoubtedly discover various resistances to this spiritual renewal, and this in turn will help us to craft a realistic and effective ascetical plan for Lent, only eleven days away.

The world needs spiritual pioneers more than ever. Let us accept God’s invitation and join the saints’ procession to the final temple (the “anagogical” temple), the Church Triumphant in heaven.

Salvation Is Not From This World

[The following is the homily that I preached at the Solemn Profession of Br. Anthony Daum, OSB, on Sunday, January 17, 2021]

At the moment, in the midst of so much uncertainty, even turmoil, there would seem to be nothing more irrelevant than a solemn monastic profession in a small monastery. Of course, anyone who knew Abraham as he set off from the city of Ur [Genesis 12; first reading today] would have felt that his life was irrelevant to the fate of the superpowers of the day, Babylon and Egypt. For that matter, scarcely any first-century Roman of any importance would have seen a group of a dozen Jewish ex-fishermen being of any relevance to the future of the Roman Empire.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus warns us not to judge events and persons by worldly standards: “What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God [Luke 16: 15].”

So what might be the meaning of our Brother Anthony’s intention to abandon himself to God in the monastic life, and its relevance to us who are gathered here as witnesses?

God made us for Himself, and this means that we have a capacity for God, the capax Dei, as the Latin theologians would put it. This is an amazing, almost unbelievable reality. But it does correspond to our deepest longings. Saint Augustine says that because we are made for God, our hearts are restless until we rest in Him.

Our capacity for God means that our desire is potentially infinite. Any attempt to satisfy ourselves through material comfort, political power, or even good health will fail at some level. Not only that, but any finite thing or condition I obtain still leaves an infinite distance between my desire and its satisfaction.

The temptation for many of us today is to double down on our efforts to secure finite goods, or to fear their loss. This produces no small amount of anxiety; we encounter the interior abyss meant to be filled with divine life and try to fill it with perishing things. In our present world, we have no lack of perishable things dangled before us, promising a relief to our anxiety. And not only that; politicians promise safety, prosperity, and civility. Or, in our contemporary situation, it is perhaps just as likely that politicians warn us that we will lose safety, prosperity, and civility if we vote for the other side.

But whatever is promised to us as a salve for our infinite desire, this promise is ultimately vain. And so it is that our Lord, as well as His disciple Saint Paul, urge us to rethink, to reassess our priorities and desires, to be renewed in our minds and see as God sees.

Far from urging us to a safe and prosperous life, Jesus teaches us that we must lose our lives in order to gain them [Matthew 16: 24-27; today’s gospel]. Just before He gave this teaching, our Lord rebuked Saint Peter for clinging to a worldly mode of thought: “Get behind me, Satan!…you are not on the side of God, but of men [Matthew 16: 23].”

What had Peter done to deserve this rebuke? He expressed a sense of scandal in the idea that the Messiah must suffer many things from the authorities, and to be put to death. And are we not all tempted to think like Peter? We often don’t like to think about the renunciations that God asks of us. Sometimes they seem entirely too difficult.

And yet, from another perspective, is not this truly the gospel, a word of hope and renewal? After all, if we were to rely on our own efforts to solve our present political problems, would we not be on the brink of despair?

What the gospel proclaims is that our salvation, the fulfillment of our desires, comes entirely from outside the flailing pandemonium of our world. All that God asks of us is to live in accordance with the promises we made at baptism, that moment when God’s infinite life was poured into our hearts from outside the world. In today’s Collect, the opening prayer after the Gloria, the Church shows us that solemn monastic profession is a sign that the sanctifying grace of baptism has been and is flourishing mysteriously in the life of this man. His yes to God is a sign of God’s quiet power at work in the world, calling us out of the world.

We will symbolize this dramatically when Brother Anthony lies prostrate beneath a funeral pall as we sing together the litany, invoking the presence of God’s saints who have triumphed before us and are united with us as members of Christ’s Body.

But let me again quickly shift perspective, that this way to God through self-abandonment is only open because God first entered our world as one of us. God comes from outside of this world to reveal to us that our homeland, that yearned-for place of rest and peace, is not found in this world. And if we seek peace, we must turn our eyes again and again to Jesus Christ and His saints. And we must have men and women willing to leave everything behind to show us how this is done, and to lead the way.

Thus our celebration today will move each of us closer to this new and purified world, mysteriously replacing the old world that is passing away, that world to which we cling so desperately as to make life miserable! Freed from the compulsion to seek satisfaction in things of this world, we will be fortified against the temptations to sin that come from anxiety about the world, the temptation to skimp on justice, to give in to anger and sadness, to seek escape in pleasures of the flesh. And as we point others toward our true home, toward genuine rest and peace, may we learn to embrace the sufferings that come with being in this land of exile, that our faith may bring us joy and consolation, and may win many others to Christ.