Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Conference on Thoughts

It’s been awhile since I last addressed this subject. Evagrius, Cassian and Maximus offer a good deal of technical advice, and we should make a habit of regularly reviewing their teachings. What I offer tonight is a reflection on my own experience in the spiritual battle, including insights from spiritual direction with many monks, priests and others over the years.

Our thoughts are not ourselves. This can’t be overstated. Just because we have a thought or a feeling, no matter how intense it is, does not make it worth our time or worry. All thought should be subject to discernment.

I say this because I have watched well-intentioned people get very hard on themselves for having certain kinds of thoughts. Yes, sometimes we bring these on ourselves by our earlier choices. But this still doesn’t mean that we will make any progress by getting sad about having them, or getting angry or frustrated with ourselves or others.

Any thought can be let go of, or we can at least loosen its grip on ourselves. It is a good practice, maybe ten minutes a day, just to sit still and watch our thoughts. There are many images for how to do this, and how to learn to disengage from a thought. One is to imagine thoughts as so many boats floating down a stream. It’s alright to look at what is in the boat, but don’t get in the boat yourself; let it float away.

Another way to disengage is to use a word or short phrase. I often use, “Amen,” or “Jesus,” or “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” or “Holy angels of God.” In some ways, the content doesn’t matter. The words are there to place gently upon whatever thought we wish to let go of. Many thoughts recur frequently. The worst thing we can do is get angry because they won’t go away. Again, if I have an angry thought against a brother, I take the word “Amen,” and set it lightly upon that thought and let it go. If it returns, I’m not surprised, I’m not impatient; I simply make the same action of reciting my sacred word and moving on.

Making a habit of doing this intentionally each day is very useful because we learn—slowly, eventually—not to get taken in by thoughts when they surprise us.

Another important habit to cultivate is to question our thoughts, especially if we can notice that a thought has accompanied us into the monastic life from our families, workplaces, or local cultures (for example, urban life, country life, academia, the art world, the military). What was the right way to sweep a floor at home might not be the way the community wants me to do it. If I’m corrected, I am offered the opportunity to let go of another kind of thought.

A particularly pernicious thought is the idea that I have some responsibility to change someone else, to focus on his faults and figure them out. Let’s figure ourselves out first. But we can’t do this, frankly, if we’re always right. All that means is that we never get to the bottom of our prejudices and preferences. If we are always angling to get our way, even if we cloak it under the pretense of helping other to do things “the right way,” we will never question our thoughts. We will never broaden our horizon.

It’s good to ask questions, to be the dumbest person in the room. To be curious about what other people’s experiences are. To notice how others do things differently, especially when they seem to excel in something.

In the best case scenario, we would have holy mentors. But would we even know whether they were holy? That’s another thought, and I’m not sure we’re well-positioned to recognize real holiness or insight. But we can always gain valuable experience by trying out someone else’s method of action. And God will reward us for our self-denial.

The garden of the heart

Spring in Chicago has been unusually chilly this year, and this means that we are only now planting our garden. Last year, we made an effort to include more brothers in the work of cultivating our very small, urban plot. I am of the opinion that this kind of work is very important for monks, especially young monks. We are expecting one postulant in July, and I would very much like for him to be able to spend several hours a week weeding and watering the garden. Not only is it good, honest labor that puts one in touch with the solid realities of material creation, it is work that helps the monk to understand his most important work, the purification of his heart.

For our hearts are very much like gardens: capable of producing many good fruits, but, alas, often overgrown with all kinds of weeds! And our many resolutions to pull up these infestations often make things appear tidy for a short time. Soon enough, however, the stubborn tares spring right back up and start crowding out the wheat. A garden needs tending everyday, and so do our hearts.

Jesus has sown His Word in the soil of our innermost being. Will we cooperate with him each day to keep the yield from being choked by thorns? That is the drama of our lives.

Conference: The Common Good

I will begin with three quotes.

In illo Uno unum (“in that One, one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV)

Pope Leo XIV is widely understood to be a peacemaker and bridgebuilder, who aspires to build up the unity of the Church. He does this by pointing us to our final end and the true common good that we all seek to enjoy: Christ Himself. Because of the Incarnation, we experience this unity first of all in creatures. This is the common world that God gave us, and it is a check on singularity and idiosyncrasy.

A monk is one who is both separated from all and yet united with all. (Evagrius of Pontus)

Our withdrawal from the world does not mean that we monks do not continue to find Christ in our neighbor. It is a recognition that there are other forms of unity which are corrupted by sin. Today, the Church even speaks of “structures of sin”. These give us a false sense of unity. Our true unity in Christ is a transcendent goal that goes beyond what our senses can perceive. It requires a purification of sense and a purification of our relationships by a certain planned abstention from speech, fraternization, and the like.

The anchoritic life is somewhat rare, perhaps more so today than at other periods of the Church’s history. Saint Benedict offers us the pedagogy of the cenobium. I will focus on this reality in the second half of my conference.

Where brothers live in unity, they give glory to God, for there the Lord gives His blessing. (Magnificat antiphon, Memorial of Saint Pachomius)

Our prayer in the liturgy will be all the more efficacious and sanctifying to the extent that we come to Mass and the office reconciled to each other through our daily acts of self-denial and patient forgiveness of each of our brothers. We will experience God’s blessings to the extent that we seek this unity. It is not a result of our work, but a gift offered us to be sought out in its fullness. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Our Lord. Saint Benedict would have us seek and strive after this very Pax as our way of seeking God and seeking what is above.

To be in Christ is to be united to all the baptized, and, in some sense, to all creatures infused by the Logos. But I wish to focus on a few specific aspects of the cenobitic life and the common good to be found there as foundational to our sanctification.

The common good is the good that each of us enjoys precisely with the other members of the community. It is our common flourishing. It is a good, which means that we can enjoy it like any other good—to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much we desire it and seek it.

I once visited Gloucester cathedral in Great Britain with a monk of our province who is also an artist. Fr. Stephen could enjoy the stone in a way that I could not. It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy the beauty and holiness of the cathedral, nor that I lacked any ability at all to learn to see the specific beauty and goodness of the stone. But truly coming to enjoy the stone as he did would have required me to want this and then to take steps to educate myself in its appreciation.

Furthermore, as an artist, Fr. Stephen was able to reproduce the goodness of stone in watercolor. Although I couldn’t do this either, I could enjoy his work at its completion, and even enjoy his enjoyment of painting.

So, too, with the common good of the monastic community. Some of us will be better at seeing it, enjoying it, and contributing to it. This doesn’t mean that others do not enjoy the actual common good and do not contribute to it. But the more we seek it—again by self-denial and preferring what is good for my brother, rather than what is good for myself—the more we will enjoy it.

The common good requires that each of us be our true selves in Christ. This is to say that the common good is in no way detrimental to my personal good. In fact, human beings can’t fully flourish unless they belong to communities of some kind, and contribute to the common good of these communities. Nor can communities truly flourish except when the brothers within flourish as themselves. So there is no competition between my good and that of the community.

Similarly, our community will flourish to the extent that we become our corporate selves within the larger communities of our neighborhood, our Province and Congregation, and the Archdiocese.

Homily for Ash Wednesday

During Lent, the Church urges us to pay attention to what we eat. Let’s focus our attention today on a significant fact about food. Almost all of what we eat was either once alive or comes from an animal that is or was alive. We eat plant products, like fruits, vegetables and legumes. We eat animal products like eggs, milk and cheese. And then we also consume animals themselves: fish, cows, pigs, chickens, and so on. We sometimes speak of a food chain, the top of which is inhabited by predators, whether it be lions or humans.

What this reveals to us is that our life is borrowed, in some sense, from other living things. This is true of all animals; plants receive their life from sun and water, but then other animals make use of the life that is in these plants to obtain necessary nutrients and complex molecules necessary for more complex life. While we might see ourselves as the top of the food chain, this reflection also reveals our total dependency on other living things for our own life. We can’t survive without plants and animals reproducing, growing, and, most significantly, dying so that we may sustain our own life.

The Lenten fast should spur us to reflect on the primal need for eating, and the significance that our life is not self-generated. We are dependent on other living things, and ultimately, our life comes from God Himself. We do not generate our lives; we receive them from God, and God sustains our life through His gifts of sun, water, plants and animals. We, of course, are meant to participate in this sharing of life by cultivating the garden of this world. But the sustaining and handing on of life has become toilsome, painful, and in the case of childbirth, where a child’s life is fully sustained by the life of its mother, even dangerous. This toil and pain is a result of sin. Work has become labor, laborious, difficult, refractory.

In the gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly teaches us about food and about work. He does this, though, in order to bring new life and a new notion of work into the world. He has come into the world to share His own life with us. He becomes our food, laying down His life for us on the Cross as the Lamb of God, inviting to His Supper. Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you. In point of fact, Jesus’s own life is not even His own; he receives from the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” This is quite an astonishing statement. As the Son of God receives life from the very Father, we are being invited at the Eucharistic to receive this same life from God through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “Do not work for perishable food, but for the food which endures for eternal life [John 6: 27].” And again, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish His work [John 4: 34].” This work is the harvest of souls, the return of humanity to its rightful Father and God. But idea that the food that sustains Jesus is the doing of the Father’s will is significant for us today on Ash Wednesday. Let me begin to tie up all of these ideas.

As we undertake the fast today, and as we practice various kinds of fasts and abstinence from meat during Lent, let us be conscious of the fact that we are dependent on God. As we experience hunger, let us recognize that this hunger is meant to be a hunger for the true Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, in which we receive true and abiding life. To receive this new life fully, we must consent to die to ourselves, to take up our Crosses daily in imitation of Jesus. This is to share in His work, and so, paradoxically, to be fed by the will of the Father. The ashes that we will receive in a moment are a sign of our consenting to die to sin and the old life. Let us remember especially the catechumens and candidates who will receive the Holy Eucharist for the first time at the Easter Vigil, and who are striving to do the will of God and change their lives throughout this holy time.

And then, as we see around us birds returning, plants gradually coming back to life, let us turn our thoughts to the glorious Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, in which we hope to share. And with these thoughts, let us lay aside every weight and sin that clings to us, and run with a lighter step the race that God has set before us, looking always to Jesus who has opened to us the way to eternal blessedness. May He be praised forever. Amen.

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

Thoughts, prayers, and actions

Shortly after I entered the Monastery, a man approached me after Mass one day. He invited me to join him to sit in protest, praying outside an abortion clinic. Since I was not allowed to leave the cloister without permission, I explained to him that I was not able to join him, but that I would pray for him. He was clearly disappointed. I suspect that he thought I was offering an excuse and simply didn’t care to go.

Episodes like this raise the entire question of the efficacy of prayer. One commonly sees Christians called out in the media for offering “thoughts and prayers” at a time of tragedy. Indeed, it’s painless to post such sentiments on social media, and so it’s perhaps good that Christians are challenged to demonstrate meaningful actions that back up such words. Offering “thoughts” really does open one to criticism. My thoughts accomplish little as long as they remain inside my head.

Prayer, on the other hand, always involves an Other—God. The truth is that prayer is an action. Praying well, with real faith and devotion, is not always easy. By inviting God into a situation, we bring the potential of new types of insights.  And these, in turn, can lead to new types of actions.

The Holy Family

While doing a bit of searching in connection with yesterday’s Feast of the Holy Family, I discovered this striking–and humorous–image by the early 14th century Sienese iconographer Simoni Martini. It shows the finding of 12-year-old Jesus in the temple after Mary and Joseph had been searching for him for three days. Anyone who has parented an adolescent will, I hope, find this depiction amusing:

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to join us for Solemn Vespers tomorrow, Tuesday, December 31 at 5:15 p.m. In addition to exquisite music by Josquin and Willaert, our Schola will reprise a motet I composed for last year’s celebration: Virga Iesse floruit. At the bottom of this post is a sneak preview of the first of Josquin’s antiphon settings for this solemnity. The text, O admirabile commercium, with a translation, is also given below.

Merry Christmastide to all!

–Prior Peter, OSB

 

O admirabile commercium!
Creator generis humani,
animatum corpus sumens,
de Virgine nasci dignatus est:
et procedens homo sine semine,
largitus est nobis suam Deitatem.

O wondrous exchange:
the creator of human-kind,
taking on a living body
was worthy to be born of a virgin,
and, coming forth as a human without seed,
has given us his deity in abundance.

Ritual: Social Control? Or Liberation for Love?

Catholic and Orthodox believers are sometimes criticized because of the weight of ritualized behavior at worship and elsewhere: rote prayers, signs of the Cross, and so on. Ritual appears to be a form of social control that interferes with personal authenticity. Of course, what ‘authenticity’ means or whether it is an unambiguous good is not often examined, in my experience.

The fact is that we depend on ritualized behavior every day. Many, if not most, social interactions depend on ritualized behavior. I arrive at the train station at 7:05 and meet the train there at that time. I use the same desk everyday at work, and I expect that when I go to my superior’s office, he will be there and not someone else. Conversations make use of stock phrases, particularly at the beginning and end, and not to make use of these can be a sign of hostility. I turn on the television at a certain time, and at the same time, the people in the news studio begin to talk into a camera. The range of options for my clothing is limited by ritualistic restraints.

By following ritualized behavior, I help to create and sustain a sense of the ‘normal’, and make social life possible by making my behavior predictable to others in crucial ways. By steady adherence to such behavior, I demonstrate my dependability and make possible deeper levels of interaction by showing my trustworthiness. Ritual, it turns out, is in some measure the condition of commitment to others, even to love. It is a sign of my willingness to put others’ needs and expectations before my own at certain crucial times.

Of course, opening ourselves to this sort of basic love, as is the case with any kind of love, is a risk. Social rituals can be manipulated and the good faith of persons can be preyed upon by those with some control over rituals who do not have the common good at heart.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Benedict

Put on the armor of God. 

This is the language of battle, even of war.  Saint Paul writes about spiritual armor and spiritual warfare in several of his letters.  But here, in today’s second reading from Ephesians, he is referring to the “panoply,” the full armor of a professional soldier.  He explains why this is necessary:  we must be ready to ward off attacks by principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, evil spirits in the heavens.

If you were to read the accounts of the early monks, you would see that this language was common among the fathers of Christian monasticism.  The biography of Saint Antony the Great, who, together with Saint Benedict, is depicted in the deesis above our altar, is filled with all kinds of spiritual battles between Antony and a host of demons.  Saint Benedict, writing almost two hundred years later, alludes to the great hermits like Antony in the first chapter of his Rule, where he says that hermits fight hand-to-hand with the Devil.  Saint Benedict’s own biography, written by Saint Gregory the Great, also has several stories of Benedict going toe-to-toe with the Devil and his underlings.  He shows that the power of Jesus Christ in his saints is far greater than the power of evil.

But the Lord still wants us to fight, to enter the lists of this spiritual warfare.  Over the course of the centuries, the common teaching drifted away from a realistic depiction of demons as having visible bodies and doing physical harm to monks.  Writers came to the realization—or perhaps just preferred to believe—that spiritual warfare happens primarily in the realm of the mind.  Demons test us by means of thoughts.  The principal thoughts include lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, sadness, vainglory and pride.

You might recognize this list as being very similar to the more contemporary list of the seven capital sins.  That represents the latest development in the tradition, bringing us up to the present day.  Perhaps on the feast of Saint Benedict we can take stock of what has been lost amidst these changes.  Perhaps we can ask whether monks and nuns might not have a significant contribution to make to today’s Church in recalling the dynamic of spiritual warfare.

When we talk about battling against vices, I suspect that we tend to think that we are battling ourselves.  But all human action begins with thought.  Often, we simply are not aware of the thought that precedes the action, because we aren’t attentive to our thoughts.  They can seem to have a persuasive force from habit, from social custom, and so on.

In fact, once we start paying attention to thoughts, we might start wondering where they come from.  Do they come from us or from somewhere else, or both?  So it is that monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative orders, have a special role to play in this spiritual battle.

In the best-case scenario, such monks and nuns are on the front lines.  We withdraw from the world and practice self-silencing to clarify what is going on in our minds:  to notice the fact that actions follow thoughts, and to catch thoughts before they become actions.  Then we can ask the question:  does this thought come from God? Or does it come from the Devil, from Principalities, from powers, or from other lower-ranking demons?

Saint Benedict is the patron of Western Europe, which is probably the last distinction he would have anticipated.  Like ourselves, he lived at a time of complete political upheaval.  Ten years before his birth, the last of the Western Roman Emperors abdicated.  This was followed by the terrible Gothic Wars, as the Eastern Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried to take back the Italian peninsula and reunite it with what was left of the old Roman world.  The end result was widespread destruction all around Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino and the beginning of a period of cultural hibernation.

Saint Benedict did not seek a political solution to the grave disorders of his day.  Rather he sought, in all simplicity, a life of solitude where he could focus on his own fidelity to the witness of Jesus Christ.  Where he could meditate day and night on God’s word and put it into practice in the most radical way possible.  Where he could watch his thoughts, purify his actions, and enter into real spiritual struggle by saying “no” to all kinds of temptation.

The first result was that others noticed his holiness and wanted to imitate him.  This led him to write his Rule for monks, but also to take up the work of caring for others, of bringing Christ to the world.  Eventually his way of life became so popular, and his Rule so widely recognized for its practical wisdom and fidelity to the gospel, that by the year 1100, all of Europe was dotted with Benedictine monasteries.

Under their influence, the European Middle Ages as we now know them came to be.  There arose new gospel institutions like the Truce of God, chivalry—which is the knightly warrior code civilized into service of the poor and weak—devotion to our Lady, and prayers for the dead.  All these practices, pervaded by the spirit and rhythms of the liturgy, flourished under the influence of Saint Benedict and his decision to arm himself and do battle for the one True King.

By withdrawing from the world, Saint Benedict and his disciples were able to replace the founding assumption of the previous world, the old Roman world founded in paganism and a drive for power, with a new vision of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

May God help us to be worthy disciples of this great man.  And may his example light a fire in the hearts of many young men and women, who might choose to fight the ills of this age not by becoming internet influencers or political operatives, but by humbly submitting all thoughts to Jesus Christ.

The Mystery of Christmas

I have received many positive comments about the article that led our newsletter for Advent, so I would like to share it with a slightly different readership. I will preface this with a few more thoughts of Christmas, and why this celebration led me to my vocation. What gives coherence to the meaning of Christmas for me is the deep mystery of life itself. How is it that we–each of us a self, an “I”–observing the world and “All things counter, original, spare, strange; [Hopkins]” see things similarly, see things differently, see and understand anything at all? How often do we stop and wonder at it all? Something about Christmas always stopped me in my tracks and forced these questions upon me. The answer to this mystery is not the solution to a puzzle, but the sheer gift of love, of shared life and wonder. At the center of all that it, is a God Who wishes to be included in all things with us, our joys, sufferings, our boredom, weariness, excitement, community, loneliness, the whole labyrinth of life that each of us experiences. And in sharing the beauty of all that He created, He does so in most unprepossessing way possible, as a poor child of poor parents in a poor village, but rich in wonder and observation (read any of Christ’s parables and see how He never outgrew the child’s power of noticing things). We need not cross the sea to discover mystery–it is right in front of us and opens the way to participation in the Source of life.

Merry Christmas!

[The article from our newsletter, entitled “Christmas and Everyday Life”]

One of the brothers recently asked me if there was a particular Christmas song that evoked strong memories for me. I couldn’t really answer the question because there are many such carols, in addition to the sublime arias and choruses of Handel’s Messiah and the magical dances of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. I eventually settled on one carol, not because it is my favorite, but because it somehow summarizes the importance of Christmas to me: O Little Town of Bethlehem.

With a bit of imagination, the music of this lovely carol takes me back to decorating the house in preparation for the holidays. I always wanted to help set out the traditional nativity scene as well as the Christmas “village,” a tradition picked up from my father’s Polish family. We had pieced together this village over several years, and it included tiny houses, into the backs of which were inserted bulbs from strings of lights that would shine through the colored film windows. Miniature cars drove down snowy streets and sat in the parking lot next to the village church (which had a detachable steeple that occasionally was knocked over by our Labrador retriever). A mirror served as a skating rink, and a model train traversed the circumference of the town.

And of course, the were the tiny people there to celebrate winter by skating and skiing. In setting them up, we had to thread a tiny “rope” attached to a sled through the mittened hand of a bundled-up and straining adult. And then there were two blanketed children to be perched upon the sled. A thumb-sized collie ran alongside the family.

Perched behind all of this activity was, incongruously, the thatched barn giving shelter to the Christ child in the manger, adored by Mary and Joseph, and a motley band of shepherds. A variety of beasts kept the watch. To my eye, there was nothing quite as beautiful as these figurines, especially the shiny apparel of the Wise Men, the haughty camels, and the one poor shepherd, kneeling and offering a few coins resting in a cap in his hand.

Not only were these scenes separated by two millennia; they were not to scale. And yet, somehow, the ensemble spoke perfectly to me of the mystery of Christmas. The Son of God came, not only for the salvation of persons of the first century, but for every human being, for every human community. Not everyone in the Christmas village was in the church at that moment, but the church was there, its steeple pointing the way to heaven, or, in our humble tableau, to the angels singing above the newborn King.

Bethlehem was much like any other village, with its public spaces, rows of homes, families, children, pets, and other animals. When God sent His Son to redeem us, He came, not with spectacular show of “shock and awe,” but quietly, into a small home, beneath the same stars that we see today in the midnight sky. God thereby demonstrated that to be His child, it is enough to be human like anyone else.

The celebration of Christmas eventually had a profound effect on my own vocation. The beauty of God as a child, as an adolescent and young man, making friends, attending family weddings (I attended many weddings, as best man and as a musician)—the whole lot of everyday human life—made Christ especially present to me and made me want to respond by offering my life to Him as best I could, with the hope that perhaps others could experience what I had intuited: that into the darkness and obscurity of our quotidian existence, has shone the everlasting light. Now all the humble details of human life, the joy and tears, the sweat and rest, sowing and harvest, are illuminated from within by God’s Word. And that Word is Love.