Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Culture

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Human beings, like all animals, are creatures of desire. We desire food and drink, and we have this desire because we need nourishment to stay alive. And again, this makes us akin to other animals. While plants also need nourishment, they lack desire, properly understood, because they lack awareness of their need. Animals not only hunger but deliberately set off to find food.

In this area, what distinguishes us from other animals is that we can use our reason to determine how to satisfy our natural desires. We can even deliberately not eat, enduring hunger pains for some greater goal such as fasting or dieting. We can also use our intelligence to alter the food we get by cooking it, mixing ingredients, and so on, to produce something that tastes good.

We go even further, using meals to symbolize other desires. For example, we desire companionship and community. A decision to eat together is a decision to satisfy that higher desire. What the philosopher Aristotle discovered is that we have a tendency to rank our desires. He explained this at the beginning of his book on ethics.

When we see someone carrying out an action, and we ask him, “What are you doing?”, we expect that the reason he gives will point to a desire that he is attempting to satisfy.

“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”

“To get to work on time.”

Aristotle then points out that we can continue to ask, “Why?” to the answer.

“Why do you want to get to work on time?”

“Because I want to get paid and not laid off.”

“Why do you want money?”

And so on.

These chains of questions will always terminate at the one thing that Aristotle says we seek for its own sake, which is happiness. We don’t normally ask people, “Why do you desire happiness? What good is it?”

We all recognize this is a sufficient answer to any question about someone’s motive. If it makes you happy, go ahead!

Aristotle’s theory is pretty sound, but I also think that it requires some filling out. For example, he did not deal with an interesting phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.

I’m thinking of the prophets. If we were to ask Jeremiah why he was continually criticizing the rulers of Jerusalem, it would be a stretch to show that he did this because he thought somehow it would make him happy. What he desired was something more like proper worship of God. If I could use the words of the Beatitude, he hungered and thirsted for justice.

Alright, with that as background, we look at today’s gospel. We see that, from one perspective, it is all about desire. Both the Samaritan woman and Jesus desire water. Both Jesus and the disciples desire food. And Saint John the Evangelist shows us how these desires point to a higher yearning in the human soul.

Jesus says to the woman, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and you living water.” In other words, if we knew the gift of God, we would desire it.

What is God’s gift?

It is the Holy Spirit. Before the Son of God came into the world, would we even have suspected that it was possible to receive God’s Holy Spirit? I think yes and no.

There are stories from many ancient cultures in which a divine spirit enters a human being, making him or her capable of particular impressive deeds, such as the writing of poetry or the invention of writing itself. We say of the Holy Spirit that He has spoken through the prophets, that in some way, they were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

But what Jesus is promising to the woman at the well is something more profound, a permanent union of ourselves with God. This promise reveals to us that our desires for truth, justice, and beauty are in fact different ways of longing for God. That only God can satisfy, and He intends to do this for us in a way surpassing anything we can imagine.

How are we to respond to this offer from God?

Let’s go back to the gospel reading. When the woman is persuaded that Jesus has something of value to offer, she asks for it outright. And so we, too, should ask. Here, though, we should bear in mind that the gift that Jesus is offering will only be available after His death.

What Jesus does next is surprising: He gently talks the Samaritan woman into an admission of her own serial relationship failures. Is Jesus saying that He will only give the Spirit once she’s fixed all her problems?

No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.

Also bear in mind that the woman still thinks that they are talking about water. Things change, however, when she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. This suddenly prompts her to speak about proper worship of God, a point of sharp dispute between Jews and Samaritans at the time.

Jesus says that God the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and truth. This is where God’s invitation points, that we learn to worship Him properly. What this means in the context of this homily is, once again, that God is the final terminus of desire, God is what we crave in our heart of hearts, whether we are aware of it or not.

And the expression of this desire is literally worship. The word worship is derived from the same root as the word “worth.” Worship is then that activity in which we acknowledge that which has highest value, God Himself.

This is what I said that the prophets like Jeremiah were desiring rather than earthly happiness. And it was, in some sense, the Holy Spirit that both satisfies that desire and inflames it. The reason that Jesus brings up the ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman is to help us see that we can’t obtain satisfaction of this desire for God without correcting our lower desires.

The longing for love that the Samaritan woman manifested in her many marriages was a sign that could have pointed to God but did not. At some level that is why the marriages didn’t work.

Jesus is healing her and recalibrating this desire, and it truly changes the woman. She goes from being someone avoiding the eyes of others to speaking directly and persuasively to them.

As we move toward the middle of Lent, what desires of ours point away from God, and how can we redirect them? Is there a hidden sin that I’m keeping from God and from my own scrutiny out of shame? And if so, how might Jesus’s gentle example move me to re-examine and heal my own past?

As we cooperate with God’s grace in this process of healing, the Holy Spirit will become more of a conscious companion. And what more could we ask for than that?

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 1

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World.)

In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” This quote helps to situate what we mean when we say that one of the three enemies of the soul is the flesh. Perhaps when we hear “sins of the flesh” we are inclined to narrow down the temptations of the flesh to lust and gluttony, with a nod toward other excesses of alcohol or drug consumption. But the tradition sees the danger here at a deeper level because of the subtle corruptions of our intellect and will that come about from an undue search for pleasure, comfort, and safety.

In our posts last year, we looked at the three traditional enemies of the soul, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. We saw that they correspond to three parts of the human soul. The Flesh is a distortion of the concupiscible part of the soul, that which seeks health, self-preservation and procreation. The World distorts the irascible part of the soul, that which governs anger, sadness, and to a certain extent vainglory. The Devil operates primarily on our intellect, distorting our notion of ourself and of God.

Jesus’s temptations in the desert also typify these three battles. The temptation to turn stones into bread is clearly a temptation of the hungering and fatigued flesh. The temptation to exercise power over all the nations is a world-related one, and the temptation to tempt God, to force God’s hand, is specifically diabolical.

So let’s begin with Jesus’s fast of forty days. The first interesting aspect of this is that Our Lord’s fast was a provocation. He is forcing the battle against the flesh out into the open. Later on, I will be making a brief comparison between the Christian understanding of the flesh versus the Stoic version. One of the important contrasts is here, that Jesus deliberately chooses prolonged hunger in order to get the Tempter to manifest himself on the pretense of the flesh.

Jesus is teaching us that it is a good practice to choose, for a season, what is uncomfortable, whether it be the discomfort of hunger, of a hard chair without a cushion, which is a typical monastic discipline, or hard manual labor. The goal is to get the flesh to mumble and complain against us and then to respond with a simple “no.” This has the eventual effect of freeing us from unthinking sensuality, which often operates at a subconscious level.

When we attempt these things, we can now see that the Tempter will use our discomfort as a pretext. Jesus’s response is interesting: “Man does not live on bread alone.” This is to say that our survival does not depend on comfort and ease.

One of the tempting ideas that the modern world has put into our minds is that these ascetical practices of the great saints of old—wearing hair shirts, sleeping on the ground, eating once every other day—will make us unhealthy, cause us to wither into resentful Feraponts. But in fact the Christian tradition, and more specifically the monastic tradition has always made a distinction between causing pain or discomfort and causing injury and harm. Not all pain is associated with damage.

And indeed, relaxation has its place. A story is told of Saint Antony the Great one of the champions of extreme ascetical practices. A farmer, having heard about Antony incredible feats of self-denial, was scandalized when he saw the great man from a distance, talking and even joking with a group of younger monks. When he confronted the saint Anthony had him string his bow and shoots a series of arrows. After a few bowshots, the farmer objected: if he continued to stretch his bow in this way, it would break. So too, said Saint Anthony, with the monk. It is not healthy to practice asceticism without relaxation.

This is also true when our health is compromised. Sometimes survival and the restoration of health requires treating the body gently. The pain and discomfort of sickness or age, when borne well, are penance in and of themselves.

Dealing with the Lenten malaise

The opening days of Lent are often filled with enthusiasm, a sense of purpose and newness. But Lent is a long season. After a week or two, my own resolutions start to appear more difficult than I had anticipated. What I have found helpful in dealing with this typical Lenten malaise is to focus on simply carrying out the fast, or whatever other resolution I made, without much regard to any tangible “result.”

Aiming at a result is a temptation of Lent. The truth is that we are seeking to grow closer to God, a God who is infinitely greater than anything we can imagine. We can’t really know what a better relationship with God is like. Instead of tracking my weight when I fast, I simply abstain from a meal, or from meat, without asking what it’s for, other than that I pledged to do this for God. Similarly, we can’t know for certain how any alms that we give will be used. Most of all, we can’t know ahead of time what results will come from prayer.

Once we have made the simple resolution to carry out our Lenten penance, we can take a more objective view of how these practices, recommended by Jesus Himself, subtly change us. They challenge me to identify and renounce a tendency toward complaint or victimhood. They help me to discover faults that I hide by eating nice food, buying nice things, and enjoying entertainments instead of prayer. Here is where the real work of conversion takes place. Let’s not waver in our resolutions!

Because she loved more…

Today we conclude our annual retreat, and if you are thinking to yourself that we just did this a few months ago, you would be right. We have moved the time of our retreat back to February from November, where we observed it from 2018 until 2025. Today is an opportune day to end the retreat, since we have the custom of renewing our vows on the final day of the retreat. Today is the Feast of Saint Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict.

We know precious little of the life of Saint Scholastica, which was included by Saint Gregory the Great in his Dialogues, a book about the holy men and women of Italy of his time. We know that she had a convent near the great abbey of Monte Cassino, where he lived the last years of his life, and that she would go out of the convent annually to visit her saintly brother and discuss the joys of the spiritual life.

Gregory also tells us that her prayer was more powerful than her brother’s because she loved more. This should always be a burr in the saddle for the men’s branch of the Benedictines. Our order of monks has much to pride itself on: a 1500 year history during which hundreds and hundreds of monasteries helped to build up Europe, develop the Church’s liturgy, preserve the literary works of ancient Latin scholars, run the first schools for children, and on and on. In uncertain times like our own, there are many who look to monks for the “Benedict Option,” to renew this work of cultural preservation through the current Dark Age. If God wills it, may it be so.

But all of this work can miss the admonition of Saint Scholastica. At one point in the story of her last days, she says to Benedict, “I asked you and would not listen. I asked my God and He listened.” This a good-natured chiding, to be sure, but it contains a sharp point. Benedict begins his Rule with the word, “Listen,” and Saint Scholastica is suggesting to him that he isn’t living by his own teaching. He is forgetting what Saint Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, as I would put it (if you will allow a paraphrase and a bit of hyperbole), “If I have the perfect observance of the monastic way of life, compose great works of theology, and preserve Western civilization, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

So as we monks renew our solemn profession to continue in a life of obedience, stability and conversion of life, we should keep in mind Saint Scholastica’s challenge and example. May we do more—certainly! –not necessarily because we are strong or clever. In God, let us accomplish all that we do because we love.

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.

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.

Triumph of the Holy Cross

Tonight, we begin our fourteenth season of Solemn Vespers at 5:15 p.m. Here are my program notes:

“If you want peace, work for justice.”

This was the title of an address given by Pope Saint Paul VI at the Vatican on the World Day for Peace in 1972. The backdrop for this address was the Vietnam War and the Cold War. The United States had been undergoing unrest internally, with radical groups carrying out bombings and assassinations. It made sense to examine the idea of peace and to discover the means to obtain it. It makes sense for us to do so right now.

The mosaic of Pope Saint Paul VI at the Basilica of Saint Paul-Outside-the-Walls

In his address, the Holy Father was at pains to make sure that peace is correctly understood. It is not something that arises spontaneously. It requires effort and vigilance, and right relationships between people and nations. These right relationships make up what the Catholic tradition calls justice. Saint Augustine defined peace as tranquillitas ordinis, the tranquility that arises from a well-ordered society. Our efforts to make the world more just will increase the likelihood of a peaceful world. By contrast, injustice breeds discord, resentment, and, eventually, violence.

There is one additional factor that the pope knew well, though he did not make it explicit in his address. In this world, peace cannot be fully attained by mere human effort and good will. The years after the Second Vatican Council fostered a kind of humanist optimism that unfortunately overshadowed the reality that our world is fallen. This unsettling fact does not mean that we are completely helpless to achieve peace, however. The New Testament offers a different way:

“For in [Jesus Christ] all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things…making peace by the blood of his Cross [Colossians 1: 19-20].”

“For he is our peace, who has made us both one…that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us to God in one body through the Cross [Ephesians 2: 14-16].”

In other words, true and enduring peace is possible because of the rescue mission of the Son of God. He was sent by the Father to become incarnate in our human flesh. That very flesh was to be nailed a Cross, to suffer the gravest injustice one can imagine. Is there a better illustration of man’s inability to attain peace by his own powers? When presented with the one innocent man in history, we violently put an end to His life…by judicial murder!

Through the Holy Cross, Jesus gives us the gift of peace. To expand the thought of Saint Paul VI, we might say, “If you want justice, receive first the peace of Christ.” This is a peace from a different place: “Not as the world gives do I give peace [cf. John 14: 27].” All worldly peace is a (pale) reflection of the “peace of God which passes all understanding [Philippians 4: 7].” And there is no way to arrive at this peace that bypasses the Holy Cross, whose triumph we celebrate tonight.

It is significant that the evangelists Luke and John record Jesus, after the Resurrection, greeting His Apostles with the words, “Peace be with you.” To my knowledge, Jesus does not use this greeting before His death. The peace that Jesus gives, He gives because He has already reconciled us to each other and to the Father.

There is one more connection worth noting, this time between justice and the Cross. In tonight’s responsory, we will sing, “The sign of the Cross will appear in heaven when God comes to judge.” Thus, the definitive establishment of justice will happen at the judgment, under the sign of the Cross. The barbaric symbol of man’s injustice will be transformed into a sign of God’s love and Christ’s triumph. The Cross has become our standard, under which we fight against the injustices in the world.

Will we accept this gift of peace along with the Cross and its inverted triumph? That is a question that we Christians should always be asking ourselves, especially in our tumultuous times. If we fail to do this, we will be unwitting conspirators with the forces that would usher in an era of enforced, false peace (which is in fact fearful silence) by means of violence and the threat of violence. As we celebrate Christ’s victory tonight, let us earnestly entreat God to renew in us a commitment to “seek peace and pursue it [Psalm 34: 14]!” Let us take up our share in the Cross of Christ that we may one day share in His triumph.

 

 

Conference on Consumerism and Patience

There were many striking observations in William Cavanaugh’s book Being Consumed, which we recently finished reading at table. This evening, I would like to focus on one observation which helps us to see how consumerism, as understood by Cavanaugh, subtly undermines the monastic life.

The observation has two points. The first is that consumerism works by stoking desire but never satisfying it in any definitive way. This gives rise to a chronic dissatisfaction with life. Even when we get what we want, we are already desiring the next object or experience.

The corollary to this chronic dissatisfaction is that we prize the experience of desire more than the quenching of desire. Were we ever satisfied, we would cease, at least for a time, to desire more, and then the consumerist cycle would grind to a halt. There are various means of conditioning us to accept this reality. The most obvious is advertising, but the values revealed in newscasts, movies, and the like also reinforce the desirability of desire itself.

Our sense of incompleteness gives rise to feelings of personal inadequacy, even self-loathing. There’s something wrong with us because we are never satisfied, but we sense that just around the corner we will strike gold and figure it out. But seeking peace in the world never brings the true peace that only Christ can give.

Perhaps Saint Teresa of Avila intuited a certain change, a restlessness that accompanied the great expansion of territory and wealth in the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century, when
she composed her great poem:

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Where God suffices, all dissatisfactions can be accepted and borne patiently. In other words, we don’t need to satisfy them necessarily. Think of Saint Benedict’s advice to bear patiently the weaknesses of body or character of every brother. Patience seems to me to be the monastic antidote to the experience of chronic dissatisfaction, whereas restlessness and self-criticism are the signs of chronic dissatisfaction going to seed.

So let’s begin with patience. Saint Benedict first uses the word to indicate that God Himself is patient, and this is good to bear in mind. God does not intervene immediately when we act contrary to His positive will. We imitate God when events go against our wills and we accept them patiently. My contention in this conference is that the dynamics of chronic dissatisfaction are such that not only is patience difficult, which it always has been, but that bearing difficulties patiently is seen as a moral failure. And more than that: we go out of our way to find things to be dissatisfied about, because we have been conditioned to feel uneasy about being satisfied and quietly tolerating things as they are.

By contrast, Saint Benedict places the patient monk at the highest level of praktike. The abbot sets himself against monks who are restless (there’s that word—the Latin is inquietos, the “unquiet”).  He is to argue with them very firmly and directly (durius is the Latin here). And he also opposes the negligent and disdainful, who are subject to rebuke. But the patient are grouped with the obedient and docile. The abbot is to urge them to greater virtue, which is to say that they are already in the position of mastering the active life.

Sick brothers must be borne patiently. This is an interesting idea from our perspective, I think. With modern medicine, we have come to expect that there is some treatment that will fix whatever ails us. We can become impatient with brothers who are dealing with health issues especially we feel that the brother has brought it upon himself. In this case, we grow impatient with his inability or unwillingness to take the steps that we think he should to obtain healing and better health. But often enough our very impatience can be an obstacle to a brother taking that step. I will return to this when I speak about self-criticism in a moment.

In the ladder of humility, the word patience appears twice, unsurprisingly both times in the fourth step, in which obedience takes place under difficult unfavorable, or even unjust, conditions. Not only are we being asked to bear the difficulty of going against our own will, but we have added reasons for dissatisfaction. Why me? Why not that brother? It’s not fair. If I obey, this will cost me in the long run. We have all kinds of reasons to be resistant. But Saint Benedict (and really the whole monastic tradition) insists that this is a means of spiritual growth: to forego the satisfaction of our own desires in order to carry out God’s wishes as communicated through the lawful superior.

This patience is obviously connected to the Dominical teaching that we should bear wrongs rather than react, even in righteous anger. When forced to go a mile, go two. We think of the Desert Father who returned to his cave to find robbers making off with his precious goods, and how he chased them down…to give them an item that they overlooked. One of the tools of good works is to bear wrongs patiently. Not just inconveniences, but actual wrongs. Then we really are Christlike, and His mysteries will begin to reveal themselves to us.

Martha, Mary, and monasticism

This year, at Sunday Mass, we have been reading through Luke’s gospel. Two weeks ago, we heard the famous story of Jesus’s visit to Martha and Mary, where Jesus chided Martha, “You are anxious and worried about many things!” Is this not the case for so many of us today? We are indeed anxious about many things. Jesus goes on to offer Mary’s actions as a contrast. She has chosen the “better part,” listening at the feet of Jesus.

For many centuries Martha and Mary were seen as types of the active life and the contemplative life. This interpretation is controversial today. But we are surely right to see a connection between Mary’s choice and monasticism. By withdrawing from the anxieties of the world, contemplative monks and nuns should become icons of peace, focusing all attention on Jesus.

Yet the reality is more complex. Today’s monks bring with themselves into the cloister all those worries that afflict modern persons. In this way, monasteries become places where our faith is truly put to the proof. Can we truly let go of those worries and put all our trust in God? Here, anxiety tends to arise not from the dense web of responsibilities that modern life poses for the laity, but from the dread of feeling useless in the face of today’s cultural challenges. The only remedy is the belief that God suffices for all things.

May this reality be a source of “the peace which the world cannot give” for all our friends!

 

Conference on the Priority of Persons over Rules

Tonight, I would like to follow up on a topic that I spoke about during Chapter last week, and that is the priority of persons over rules. I asked Br. Anthony to look up some examples of this contrast in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Some of the examples I will use tonight are the ones he found.

It occurred to me that a major source of the appeal of the Desert Fathers as spiritual teachers is precisely that they refuse to formulate rules. In fact, they seem to be better known for finding all kinds of exceptions to rules. Here’s an example:

A directive was once issued at Scete: “Fast this week.” It came about that some brothers from Egypt visited Abba Moses and he cooked them a little gruel. Seeing the smoke, his neighbors told the clergy: “Here, Moses has broken the directive of the fathers and cooked himself some gruel.” “We ourselves will speak to him when he comes,” they said. When Saturday came round, the clergy, well aware of the great discipline of Abba Moses, said to him before the company: “Oh Abba Moses, you have broken men’s directive but fulfilled God’s.”

The priority of persons is often very explicitly taught by the Fathers. Here is a saying of Antony the Great:

Life and death depend on our neighbor: for if we win over our brother, we win over God, but if we offend our brother, we sin against Christ.

Here, I will note that we do not typically win someone over by quoting the rule book to him. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes an act of charity for someone to state the Church’s teaching clearly. Among the spiritual works of mercy are instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner. Saint Benedict clearly wants the abbot to intervene when a brother is acting disobediently or contrary to the community’s customs.

But notice that here, it depends in another way upon persons: the abbot is the one who determines when and how to intervene, and this can’t be predicted ahead of time by rules. Our current Abbot Visitor, Abbot Cuthbert, once quoted another abbot, I believe an abbot of Solesmes, saying that in a monastery there should be many strict rules, and many dispensations from those rules. But there are not rules for when to grant a dispensation. That depends on the abbot’s personal judgment.

The abbot according to Saint Benedict is a master of virtue. And we know that the virtuous action cannot be legislated ahead of time and out of context. I believe that Alasdair Maclntyre, in the book Dependent Rational Animals, has also demonstrated that we cannot learn virtue apart from the concrete situations that involve us in the lives of others, and involve them in our lives.

What this means in practice is that virtue can only be learned by faith. In other words, we learn the virtuous action by imitating the one who already possesses virtue, which means that we trust that person’s example, and we act without fully knowing what we are to learn by that action. And then, one hopes, through consenting to that action by an act of trust, observing the consequences of that action, and sympathetically observing how it affects others, we gain insight into what is truly virtuous.

So again, the Desert Fathers embody this principle very strictly. We have example after example of virtuous actions and the responses of the other monks, usually edified, but occasionally scandalized. Typically those who are scandalized are so either because they insist on a rule, or because they insist on the action fitting their understanding of the situation, rather than trusting in the example of a wiser monk.