Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Discernment

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.

Vocation and Expertise: Homily on Luke 5:1-11

All four gospels tell us the story of the calling of the first apostles. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus walks along the shore and calls, first Peter and Andrew, and then James and John. They immediately leave their nets and follow him. In these cases, we see Jesus, the Son of God, commanding, and others simply dropping everything and following Him, as is proper for One Who is God. Even so, already in the early Church, there were concerns that this seemed unrealistic. Perhaps John and Luke were aware of those concerns, since they fill in quite a few details.

In Luke’s gospel, we’ve already met Simon by the time of the calling of the apostles. After Jesus is rejected by the people of Nazareth, he goes to Capernaum, the city where Simon and Andrew live. He stays for a time at Simon’s house, curing his mother-in-law. Simon has already seen Him work a sign. So it’s interesting that, when Jesus goes to the seashore to preach, He ends up asking Simon for the use of his boat. That morning’s fishing was finished, and the results hadn’t been good. When Jesus tells Simon to put out into the deep and let down the nets, Simon’s first reaction is perhaps typical of an expert whose expertise is being challenged a bit. Aren’t you a carpenter? We’re the fishermen, and we’ve already been out there! No fish, I assure you. But…if you say so!

It’s a bit impudent on Simon’s part. He’s already seen Jesus work a sign of healing on his mother-in-law, but he doesn’t seem to believe that Jesus can just as easily work a miracle in the sea.

So here we have a lesson. It’s often in the places of our own comfort where we are most apt to lose sight of Jesus. Where we are the experts, we don’t see the need for God to interfere and upend our predictions and forecasts. Even when our own efforts produce no fish! We are only fruitful in what matters most when we are obedient to Jesus’s commands and seeking to do His will. The fruits of our labors may be quite unexpected. So while we can be a bit critical of Simon for his resistance, we should ask ourselves, where am I resistant to Jesus’s commands? In what area of my life do I think, “Well, I’ve already tried that, and nothing came of it; so even though I know it’s what God is asking me, I don’t see the point”?

Now Simon’s reaction is quite telling. When he witnesses the sign, he’s completely overcome with a sense of shame and guilt. He sees in a moment just how worldly his thoughts are, how limited is his sense of what is possible with God. So he falls to his knees and asks Jesus to depart. Jesus will have none of it: this sign is about Simon’s true vocation, not to be a fisherman catching fish, but to catch men and women in the nets of the gospel!

And from this vantage point, I want to enter the story and say to Simon, “Hey, stand up! This isn’t about you! Stop focusing on yourself, and listen to what Jesus is saying!”

In relating the call of the first apostles, the gospels give us the pattern of all vocation in the Church. Every one of the baptized has a vocation. This was one of the great teachings of Vatican II that we haven’t internalized enough. The laity have an indispensable vocation to spread the gospel in the workplace. We need this more than ever as work gets more and more specialized. We need the expertise of the various professions to understand what is compatible with the gospel and what needs purification. The priests and religious are partners in this work, needed to help work through some of the more challenging situations of the modern world, but the vocation of the laity is surely of grave importance.

So watching Simon Peter being called today, let’s review what this story tells us about vocation. The first point is that we may already feel like we know the Lord: He’s been to our house, He preached from our boat. But then we may sense that He is asking something a little more difficult, something that perhaps calls into question our expertise. Will we at least go along with it, simply out of obedience, as Simon did, or will we delay, resisting because of the threat to our comfort and know-how?

When we, or even more, the Church, comes to the conclusion that we are being asked to put out to the deep, to rely on God alone, will we focus on ourselves? “Oh, I could never do that. I’m too weak, I have no training, and maybe, at heart, I’m just afraid.” Well, our vocation is not about us; it’s about Jesus Christ and His mission. And if He is calling us, He knows best why and how it’s going to work. Our job is fidelity and trust. As Saint Paul reminded us in the second reading, “Not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Let us call to mind all that God has done for us, and seek to go deeper in our personal vocations.

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.

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

What To Do When There Are No Good Choices

“But come! With hope or without hope we will follow the trail of our enemies. And woe to them, if we prove the swifter! We will make such a chase as shall be accounted a marvel among the Three Kindreds: Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Forth the Three Hunters!”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Chapter I

The speaker in the excerpt is Aragorn, fated to be king, but, at this point in the story, merely the failed leader of the Fellowship of the Ring. Earlier in the chapter, he observes, “All that I have done today has gone amiss. What is to be done now?” The Ring and its Bearer have vanished, the stout Boromir lies slain, and two other hobbits of the Fellowship have been captured. Aragorn has no good choices in front of him: “An evil choice is now before us.” There is good reason to fear the worst, that the evil Sauron will regain the Ring and use it to exercise totalitarian rule over Middle Earth. 

We face a perplexing situation as the pandemic drags on. How shall we proceed? Tolkien, Shakespeare and other great authors offer us lessons in just such choices. Aragorn ultimately decides to proceed on the basis of the virtues, particularly the virtues of honor, courage, and nobility. He and the other two remaining members of the Fellowship first give proper commendation to the fallen Boromir, which is the just and honorable thing to do. Next, they resolve to rescue and avenge their captured friends. Such is the context of the opening quote above. There seems to be little or no hope. Readers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion will be familiar with this type of predicament. Tolkien is borrowing it from a widespread trope in the literature of heroic paganism. Pagan heroes such as Hector, Siegfried, Beowulf, and perhaps even Anakin Skywalker, are faced with lose-lose situations. Heroism is obtained by accepting one’s fate courageously, honorably, and nobly.

“I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?”–Mr. Spock acts decisively when there are no apparently good choices.

Is this not how our lives feel right now under the dual threats of a pandemic and economic disaster? There are no good choices. It’s important to admit this because if we imagine that there is a right choice, we may well fall prey to finger-pointing, polarization, and a self-defeating victimization narrative. The great pagan heroes were not victims. Aragorn himself had no time to point fingers. “It is I that have failed.” What is especially important is that Aragorn also does not collapse into paralysis: “We that remain cannot forsake our companions while we have strength left.” He chooses an honorable and courageous course, well aware that it is a long shot. But if he fails, he will at least fail doing something excellent, attempting to honor his friendship with the missing hobbits.  

What is more, the author of this story is not a pagan, but a Catholic. This means that no situation is ever truly hopeless. Christian hope is a theological virtue, a gift from the God Who has proven Himself faithful and more powerful than death and despair. This allows us to go beyond even what is just, courageous or noble. We should still choose this, of course, but we add to this natural virtue the horizon of hope. God can see all kinds of possibilities that we can’t yet. Welcoming the gift of hope is largely a matter of cooperating with the divine.

Hope allows us to remain active participants in the drama that is our lives. A large part of the fear, anxiety, and depression that have been affecting us reflect a sense that nothing we can do will change the situation. It is true that most of us will not make a big difference in, say, public policy at the federal, state, or even city level. But this is true at all times, and not just in times of crisis. We can make a big difference in our outlook and the outlook of our families and friends. And hope, like all virtue, is contagious. If enough of us are re-empowered to take action, who knows what breakthroughs we might discover? When we hope, we open ourselves to God’s perspective, a greater vista than that offered by typical politics or science.

So what can you do today for someone you love? What do you owe your family today? What do we owe ourselves? What ignoble behaviors can we identify in our lives that we can resist? These and other questions like them are always good to ask, but we easily overlook them when a situation feels beyond our control and the future feels suddenly uncertain.

The truth is that our future has always been uncertain. On January 1, 2020, our future was just as uncertain as it is today because it was exactly the same future. We just didn’t know certain things four months ago that we know now. In this life, circumscribed by our births and our ultimate deaths, things are always uncertain. The successes of science and sociology have tended to obscure this fundamental truth. However, being reminded of it is not a bad thing, though we might wish that it had become clearer without the intervention of a potential disaster. 

Our choices are always made in the face of an uncertain future. Often enough, choices that seemed to be correct at one point in our life look terrible in hindsight, and vice versa. What we always need in the face of such choices is hope that no matter how bad things get, God is accompanying us in the persons in our lives, especially those imbued with virtue. When there are no good choices, we are still free. In fact, we are freed precisely from the burden of having to be “right” in a narrow technocratic or utilitarian sense. We are free to ask the more important question, “What kind of person, city, and nation do we want to be in the midst of our suffering?”

Tolkien answers for Aragorn in his actions. “On and on he led them, tireless and swift, now that his mind was at last made up.”

How to Sort Your Thoughts

My last post ended with a question. Once we get some emotional separation from our thoughts, and we use our newfound perspective to assess our thoughts, how do we determine which ones are good and which ones are bad? To answer this question, I would like to look more closely at where our thoughts come from, and then offer some ideas on how to separate out good thoughts from bad. 

Not only are we not our thoughts, but many of the thoughts we have don’t originate with us. This might sound surprising at first, until you give it a little thought (so to speak). Human beings use language to assist us in our thinking, and the words that we use are not our own. So to some extent, the shape that our thoughts take depends on the language we grow up using, and our facility in using it. We learn a lot about the world from what other people tell us. How we think about politics depends on which sources of news we read, how much we’ve learned about history and civics, and so on. In today’s world of hyperconnectivity, we often passively absorb all kinds of thoughts and feelings from advertising, movies, and social media. 

So the very idea that what I happen to be thinking or feeling at the moment is somehow “me,” or even “how I tend to think” hides from us the important fact that a good deal of our interior life is borrowed from sources external to our minds. Ancient monastic tradition understood this well. The monks of old referred to good thoughts as “angelic” (literally “messages” from God), and darker thoughts as “demonic.”

Our Lady trained herself by meditation on Israel’s scriptures to recognize the voice of an angel when Gabriel was sent to her.

Lest this talk of angels and demons sound too fantastical, let’s continue to unpack the phenomenon of thinking. Many of you know that before I entered monastic life, I was a professional songwriter. The first time that I experienced writers’ block, I started wondering about where my ideas for songs came from. Even today, when I walk in a crowded place, I tend to experience melodies arising internally. Sometimes I still wake up with songs going through my head that I’ve never heard before. In the modern world, we often celebrate persons whom we think of as “original” or “creative.” Now, these last two words are slightly dangerous from a theistic perspective, since we technically are not the origin of ourselves. Therefore we are never fully the origin of any product of our own thought or labor. Nor can we create, in the strict sense. So the question arises again, where do “creative” thoughts come from?

Before the notion of creativity became current, Western culture prized “inventors.” An invention is literally something that somebody “found” (Latin inventum, a thing that was found). Inventiveness arises from attentiveness, awareness, and a sympathy for things as they already are. Bach composed a number of “inventions,” and, as a devout Lutheran, he very much understood himself to have been a discoverer rather than a creator. Similarly, Stravinsky did not see himself as creative in the literal sense of the word. Rather, he was a “discerner.” He sorted through his many inspirations, and he kept the good and threw away the bad. Such is our work when we discern our thoughts.

Thomas Edison was an inventor. One of his most important virtues was perseverance in the face of failure. He tried out numerous materials for his light bulb filament before succeeding. Musical “inventors” follow a similar procedure. A great composer of music is someone who has lots of inspirations…and throws away the bad ones (which might be most of them), and keeps the good ones.

“Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”
Thomas Edison

Someone like Edison has an advantage over composers when it comes to separating the good inspirations from the bad. Either the filament lights up, or it doesn’t. How does a composer know when his piece “lights up?” Because a good composer has listened to lots and lots of good music, and he knows whether a piece is good or bad.

Learning to recognize what makes a song, a singer, or a symphony great allows me to apply the same standards to my own inspirations. Two examples: listening closely to the horn arrangements by the band Chicago taught me how to layer melodies within a texture to create depth that the ear might not hear on a first listen, but will be “felt” as more coherent. Paying attention to Joni Mitchell’s earlier songs (“For the Roses” is my favorite album of hers) taught me something similar: how the range and shape of a melody can convey emotional nuance. So, when my own compositions feel stale in some way, it’s often because I haven’t used these layering and shaping techniques to anchor the overall effect. And I recognize that feeling of staleness because I’m comparing my song to good songs.

A good composer, then, trains herself by immersion in good music, to be able to look objectively at her inspirations.

A composer has inspirations, and we have thoughts. The mechanism is, for our purposes, the same. A good composer trains herself to like good music, and to apply the same standards of excellence to her own compositions. We can train ourselves to like good thoughts. We do this by immersion in thoughts of proven worth. For a Christian, this would mean immersion in the world of the Bible (especially the New Testament) and the spiritual classics like Confessions or Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. It also means keeping at arm’s length more damaging influences.

If a reader were to ask me what two practical steps anyone could take today to make progress in the discernment of thoughts, my answer would be: 1) disconnect from the news and social media, and 2) read Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The entire letter is worth your time, but let’s start here:

“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things [Philippians 4: 8].”

I offer this one passage not as a shortcut to a fleeting mood of optimism. Rather, Saint Paul is offering a baseline of good thinking. Compare his exhortation to the actual state of your mind. On what might you reflect in order to find nobility and excellence? Which thoughts might you reject as untrue, dishonorable, or unjust? Why doesn’t Saint Paul urge you to think about your resentments or all the bad things that people do? Is it possible to be aware of evil in the world, take note of it, but not allow it to be the thrust of your thinking? Now you are practicing good interior hygiene.

Like learning to enjoy good music, training ourselves to “refuse the evil and choose the good [Isaiah 7: 14],” requires a commitment to change. What better time to start than in our present circumstances?

In an upcoming post, we will look at how to influence our thinking by changing our behaviors. For now, here’s a remarkable combination of guitar texture, vocal delivery, supple melodic ideas, and ingeniously poignant lyrical imagery. This is a song that has made a big impact on my thinking about musical excellence (though not as much impact as Saint Benedict has had on my thinking about spiritual excellence!).

The Invasion of Thoughts

I appreciate the feedback I’ve received on the last few posts. It seems clear that more attention to thoughts would be helpful. As I wrote earlier, when we are forced into a situation of isolation and many of our usual supports are removed, we often find ourselves flooded with thoughts. This can be quite distressing especially when our minds “race” or when thoughts are so heavy and (apparently) indisputable that there seems to be no escape from their grim logic. These two particular extremes form the material for the bipolar condition, where a person moves back and forth between a mind going too fast (hypomania or mania) and a mind stuck (depression). I would imagine that many of us are going through mild, or even relatively strong, versions of these conditions right now.

The good news is that monks have been dealing with the challenge of thoughts in solitude for centuries. Our traditional disciplines may offer some profit for readers of this blog.

A book by a fellow Benedictine (with the name Funk–no relation!), available in the monastery gift shop…

We are not our thoughts. This means that it is possible to put distance between our Selves (what the Christian tradition sometimes calls the “true self”) and our thoughts. This in turn allows us some perspective and objectivity regarding our thoughts. Perspective gives us the choice whether to keep the thoughts we have or to replace them with other thoughts. This is extremely significant. Why? Because thoughts determine our worlds. When we are not in control of our thoughts, when they overwhelm us or operate unconsciously, we experience life as beyond our control. Under these circumstances, thoughts can appear to have a kind of necessity about them. But this is, in fact, an illusion that can be dispelled.

While thoughts determine our actions and create our worlds, it is important to note that we are not just our minds. Each of us is an integrated composite of mind, body, and spirit. As it turns out, our bodies can be extremely helpful tools for regaining control of our minds. Anyone who has taken a walk in the last few days has likely felt how much a change in our bodily state can alter our mood and thinking.

One of my favorite movies, Of Gods and Men, tells the true story of the Trappists from Tibhirine, Algeria, during the 1996 Algerian Civil War. Early on in the film it becomes clear that the monks are all likely to die at the hands of extremists if they remain in their monastery. The drama of the story revolves around whether they will stay with their beloved villagers (who are mainly Muslim), or leave (abandon?) the villagers for the safety of France. Once the monks have decided to stay, the superior of the community, Fr. Christian de Chergé, in a voice-over, muses on the importance of routine in the face of growing disorder outside. How were the monks able to face the fear of being kidnapped and eventually being killed without breaking down? The answer is that they simply went about their work each day, praying the office, celebrating Mass, operating a health clinic, and even gardening.

Routines remove a great deal of uncertainty from our lives by eliminating the need to decide over and over again when to rise, when to eat, and so on. Under the influence of routines, the future becomes more predictable and requires less adjustment on the fly, conserving energy for truly important decisions.

Like the monks in the film, we are all under stress right now, and for the next several weeks, routines will be important for managing our thoughts. When the stay-at-home orders first came about, many people seemed to think that this would be like a vacation. All the suddenly available time looked like a gift: a chance to relax, not to shave, and finally to binge-watch that series that we missed the first time around. But if we are really facing at least 4-6 weeks stuck at home, a daily and weekly routine is going to be extremely important. Breaking routine is fun when it’s temporary and when you know that it will return again relatively soon. But weeks without a good routine is a recipe for heightening anxiety and allowing the mind to roam too much. Longstanding monastic tradition requires set times for waking, praying, reading, eating, and cleaning. In our monastery, we’ve found these traditional routines to be particularly  comforting and familiar during the stresses of the pandemic. Perhaps readers would profit from making decisions about waking up at the same time every day, following the same grooming schedule that we have when we are working (maybe even taking the time to dress well), regular times for meals, regular times for prayer, for shared quiet and reading, and regular times for recreation or exercise.

Keeping our bodies healthy and fit is important for controlling thoughts as well. It helps to eat nutritious foods moderately (i.e. avoiding too much grazing or snacking). Be careful about your use of sugar and alcohol. If one chooses to have some, make sure to pay close attention to how your body reacts, and in general to the effect nutrition has on your moods. For example, since I turned 40 or so, sugar depresses me. If I do eat sugar, I know ahead of time that it will give rise to certain kinds of thoughts (one common one is a feeling of hopelessness). Knowing that this thought is the product of sugar allows me to catch the thought at its earliest appearance and set it aside. Sometimes, it’s good for me just to sit still for a few minutes and pay attention to my body as it adjusts to the effects of sugar. This again allows me to recognize certain types of impulse (e.g. being overly critical with a brother) as “not objective,” and I can move on.

Silence and stillness allow us to practice “nepsis,” the work of vigilant watchfulness of our thoughts.

Stillness is extremely helpful for sorting out thoughts. This observation comes with a few caveats. If you have not practiced stillness, your early experiences of trying to sit still might seem unendurable. When we slow down our bodies, we reduce external stimuli, and this allows our thoughts to rise to the surface. Some of the thoughts that invade our minds may be rather unpleasant. As uncomfortable as this might feel at first, this is exactly what we want, and so it should not surprise us or make us afraid. By slowing our bodies down, we give ourselves a chance to identify our thoughts before they engage us emotionally. We experience emotions in our bodies. Think about how your body responds when you are angry or uneasy. Our shoulders rise and get tense, or we might feel a burning sensation in our chests, for example. Our heart rate increases when we are frightened. So we know that emotions tend to arise unconsciously in connection with certain types of thoughts, and produce corresponding bodily reactions. The problem is that once the emotions are engaged, it is much more difficult to get distance from the thought.

Let’s look at a subtler example. If I react with anger to a news report, it is often the case that I am not paying attention to how the information I’m receiving is causing changes in my body. I know from experience how anger manifests itself in my body. If I can slow down and notice my anger getting engaged, I can step back from the information that is giving rise to this response and decide whether I want to get angry about it, whether that’s a helpful response or merely a habitual reaction.

The goal in slowing down is to choose the thoughts that influence my mood and behavior rather than being at the mercy of thoughts I just happen to have at the moment (or for the past several days, for that matter). Deep breathing and the recitation of a mantra or a short prayer while sitting still or lying in bed will gain us perspective–eventually–on our thoughts. And this will allow us to choose our thoughts rather than be determined by them.

Choosing thoughts also requires choosing my influences. Here it’s good to notice the connection I’ve made between the effects of mood-altering substances like sugar and the mood-altering consumption of information. In both cases, we might experience that a short-term surge in good feeling (even if that means righteous anger at the news) gradually gives way to a dangerous emotional logjam. One way I have dealt with this is by deciding ahead of time how much news I intend to read (I bear some responsibility for the monastery’s safety and financial well-being, so some engagement with current events seems prudent). Once I’ve used up the allotted time, I turn off the internet and immerse myself in something life-giving: the Psalms and gospels, a great novel or a great movie, beautiful poetry or beautiful music. What type of influences ground you and recharge you? Make time for these.

One last external discipline is charity and compassion toward others. In a monastery, this typically means no mind reading. If a brother seems distracted or upset, I needn’t take it personally, nor need I criticize him or rescue him. If I see a brother behaving in a manner that annoys me, I can go to the next room and ignore it. If I’m criticized, I can try to take it in a good and generous spirit.

Once we get some distance from our thoughts, how do we tell the good ones from the bad ones? This is where I will begin in the next post.

Celebrating the Unmaking of the One Ring; a Homily for Annunciation

[The following is the edited text of my homily for March 25, 2020. This is the traditional date of Good Friday and of the Annunciation, and it is the date that J.R.R. Tolkien gives as the date upon which Gollum fell into the fires of Mount Doom, thereby destroying the One Ring and ending the terror of Sauron.]

In our scientific age, atheists demand evidence for the existence of God. For me, among the weightiest bits of evidence is simply the prevalence of belief. Many persons claim not only to believe in God, but to know Him. This requires an explanation. And it’s not enough, I think, just to claim it as some mass delusion—that’s simply kicking the can down the road. Why this particular mass delusion?

A scientist such as Richard Dawkins may well answer that ancient persons were trying to explain the natural world and lacked science, and so posited gods as causes of natural phenomena like lightning. In other words, ancient persons were failed versions of himself. Other more political versions of this attempt at explanation claim that the invention of the gods was a cynical ploy by authority to consolidate power over an awestruck populace.

Contemporary atheists are hardly the first to speculate on this. The Biblical book of Wisdom already gives other explanations for the origin of the gods–or what the author would call “idols.” He notes a longing for beauty in all peoples, and that the beauty of the cosmos moves the observer to imagine that the mysteriously remote magnificence of the stars betokened divinity; or that the power of fire or water signified the presence of the divine [see Wisdom 13: 1-3]. Elsewhere, the Biblical author speculates that a grieving father would make a statue of a recently lost young child, and that his attachment to this statue would grow into a kind of piety, and that the dead child would undergo a kind of apotheosis, a divinization [Wisdom 14: 15-16].

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires”–Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

In the last two hundred years, learned explanations have become more and more sophisticated (though, alas, I must exclude Mr. Dawkins from any claim to sophistication on this point). In the early nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach saw God as an outward projection of humanity’s inward nature, in some sense representing the infinite desire for order, meaning, and goodness that we observe in human nature. Later, Emile Durkheim applied this insight anthropologically so that God becomes a representation of collective society. The most ambitious, and, to me, the profoundest attempt to account for the origin of the gods is that of René Girard (1923-2015). Girard, whose work drew him back to his childhood Catholic faith, noted not only the widespread belief in the gods, but the near-universal connection of the gods and violence, encoded in the ubiquitous practice of sacrifice in the ancient world. He drew attention to the catharsis that takes place when a tense and fearful community focuses its anxiety and violence unanimously on a victim, that is, when a community chooses a scapegoat. The killing or banishment of this scapegoat brings about peace and restores order to the community. Since peace and order are desirable for both the community and the individual, the scapegoated victim paradoxically becomes a benefactor to the community and gradually becomes a god in the community’s mythological imagination. The connection with authority comes about because kings and others in positions of governance are extremely convenient scapegoats, easy to blame for everyone’s problems. There is an important exception to this mechanism. The prophets of Israel, that fiercely monotheistic nation, are constantly alerting the people to the arbitrary injustice at the heart of human society, this need to generate peace and order by generating victims. Because of God’s championing of the victim, the idea of a true God begins to distance itself from the “gods.”

“Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.”–Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Now I bring all of this up, and I hope that it’s interesting, because the constant in all of this is human desire. We all have desires, some of them not so good, but all of them leaving us in need of fulfillment in some way. Unfulfilled desire leaves us vulnerable, even anxious and fearful. Perhaps worst of all, the noblest things that we desire: justice, truth, beauty, are always just out of reach. This is that infinite desire that Feuerbach rightly noted.

What we proclaim today is that the Great Desire of earth [cf. Haggai 2: 6-7), what all human beings long for in some way, is no longer out of reach. Not because we have figured out finally how to attain the truth, but because the Truth Himself came to us. The Son of God validates the best of human desire by becoming human, sharing these desires with us. Jesus hungers and thirsts, has friends, attends wedding banquets and public festivals. He restores children to bereaved parents, he feeds the multitude, he quiets threatening waves, he relieves lepers of “social distancing” by cleansing them. But profoundest of all, he desires to do His Father’s will as the one thing necessary; he desires justice for all; he desires that all men see in the beauty of the cosmos God’s great love for those made in His image and likeness. He desires that all be set free by knowing the Truth. In the Incarnation, which we celebrate today, Truth Himself has come down from heaven, and in taking human nature to Himself, has made justice spring up from the earth [see Psalm 85: 10-11].

The idols of the nations are an image of distorted desire, stuck in the infernal logic of “the world.” Jesus is recognized, even in His lifetime, as the true fulfillment of all that is best in what we desire. The Apostle Philip found Nathanial and said, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote [John 1: 45].” After the Resurrection, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus unwittingly said to Jesus himself, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel [Luke 24: 21].” In other words, we hoped that he would vindicate the one true, transcendent God and the devotion to the true God shown by His chosen people Israel–which He has by His resurrection in our nature.

My brothers, what is it that we desire? How has our Lord Jesus Christ offered us fulfillment or purification of this desire in His Incarnation? How has he invited us to be patient in awaiting this fulfillment by learning to be his Cross-carrying disciples? In this moment of anxiety, how can we follow the prophets in pointing to Jesus and away from the danger of choosing scapegoats for our suffering? Let us, like Mary and her Son, begin by saying to our common Father, “Thy will be done.”

Vocation and Community

A friend asked me an important question yesterday. How does one form men in a monastery into a common cause, if a vocation is addressed uniquely to an individual? We might be tempted to a short cut in answering such a question. Obviously, one might say, God calls the individual to a community, and it is the individual’s responsibility to make the goals of the community his or her own. This is true, but such a simple and direct answer papers over a number of challenges.

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Jordan Peterson and the Life of Faith, Part 2

A less-than-favorable review of Dr. Peterson’s recent book Twelve Rules for Life called it a “self-help book from a culture warrior.” Were this an accurate summary, I doubt that I would have finished chapter one, much less the entire book. This description is inaccurate in two ways, both of which expose the corrosive cultural narrative (one that, I think, the Right and Left hold, for the most part, in common) that distorts what Peterson is saying. Let me deal with the idea of a “culture war” first. I propose to do this by comparing Dr. Peterson to one of the West’s most influential authors whom you’ve (probably) never read, Peter Lombard. This comparison will illuminate the reasons why I consider Dr. Peterson’s appearance on the scene to be mainly a hopeful development.

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