Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Formation

How to Keep from Being a Cult

My blog isn’t particularly about the Benedict Option, but I have paid attention to the discussion that blogger and journalist Rod Dreher has occasioned by his efforts to unpack the last page of Alasdair MacIntyre’s important book After Virtue. He’s linked to me again (thank you!), and so I need to put out some more product. Years ago, I resisted reading MacIntyre, mostly because I didn’t have a lot of confidence in cultural conservatives to instigate a genuine moral reform of society, much as I felt that we needed it. And I figured that MacIntyre’s book was part of the conservative virtue brigade, a la William Bennett (it’s not). I’ve never been keen to the liberal/conservative divide that is woven into the general fabric of the modern world since the French Revolution. I’ve often felt about conservatism as I do about classical music (much as I like it). Whatever the merits of Mozart–and there are many, many of these–repeating Mozart over and over again will not revive the ancien regime. We may even distort our minds and waste valuable time pining for something totally imaginary, and not all that desirable in the end.

The social world that made Mozart possible is gone, and this is not entirely a bad thing. The social world that made the composition of Gregorian chant possible is almost gone, and this is definitely not a good thing.

How to revive monasteries? This is the question that Benedictines and others have been scrambling to answer since the suppressions of the Reformation and the Revolution. Just as we seemed to have answered it, as vocations were pouring into monasteries in the 1950’s, we discovered that the Western social milieu, that seemed so open to deep religious sentiment and observance, turned out not to have the goods after all. Large proportions of those vocations left the monasteries once the glow wore off and the 70’s got going.

The two options usually held out for religious life parrot the conservative/liberal divide: either return to strong, traditional observances (usually ones from the 1950’s, which were the same ones that failed to win the hearts of the droves who left in the 1970’s), or figure out ways to accommodate to a new cultural situation. Let me examine each option using the tools that Mary Douglas offers us in Natural Symbols.

First, let’s dismiss the accommodation possibility. Accommodate to what? Douglas begins her book with a withering review of the attempts of English bishops after the Second Vatican Council to update Friday abstinence and replace its dense symbolism (participation in the Passion, clear social demarcation from non-Catholics) with something more internal, “moral,”–perhaps we might say “sincere.” I will have a lot more to say about the social conditions that determined the bishops’ preferences for dumbing-down ritual and hyping up “heart religion.” Let me just note here that Dame Mary misses no opportunity gently to chide those who imagine that this heart religion is more advanced and progressive than the magical world of the lower-class “Bog Irish” for whom Friday abstinence was a matter of fidelity to a beleaguered homeland and the grandeur that was Rome. Anthropologists of the 1950’s could provide myriad examples of “primitive” African pygmy societies whose religion played more or less the same tune as the highly educated clerics who imagined themselves on the cutting edge.

What accommodation amounts to, If Prof. Douglas is correct, is the willing, albeit unwitting, suicide of the sacramental cosmic worldview of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy. So it’s not a road we can take if we are serious about belonging to a Mystical Body that includes Saint Paul, St. Basil, St. Benedict, St. Gertrude the Great, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, St. Symeon the New Theologian, etc.

But what does non-accommodation look like? Critics of the Benedict Option challenge advocates to demonstrate that communities opting out will not become ingrown and cultish. Dame Mary has advice on this score, too.

In social arrangements that she calls “small group,” we see just these characteristics: strong boundaries separating the group from the external world, and fear of contamination by a world dominated by maleficent forces lurking everywhere outside and threatening to infect the group. She doesn’t spend a lot of time on these groups, but what she has to say contains more than enough information to know how to avoid becoming a cult (or, for that matter, how to become one, if that’s what you’re gunning for).

The small group is one in which the numbers are genuinely low. More importantly, authority is weak, and therefore internal structure is confused. Because authority is weak and structure is confused, the group is in constant danger of disintegrating, and generates for itself a fear of evil influences and a high premium on internal purity (both in terms of the group and the individual). This is a congregation of the saved, and they are saved by their own efforts of purification and prophylactic measures against a corrupted world.

I’ve pointed out to the brothers that the Rule of the Master gives us a perfect description of “small group.” And it is part of Saint Benedict’s great genius and sanctity that he corrects these tendencies of the Master in order to produce a community structure that it clear, articulated by ritual and symbol, discerningly open to the world, flexible and sure of itself (because based in Christ, the Logos, whose ordering principles are seen to inhere in the cosmos daily redeemed in the Holy Eucharist and Divine Office). Here is an example of the counter-intuitive fruits of taking Mary Douglas seriously: when a brother is struggling with thoughts, his first attempts to deal with them often involves an attempt to purify himself inwardly by an effort of will, coupled with a feeling of shame and guilt for having this inward impurity. My advice: definitely work against the thought, but often enough these troubling thoughts are a product of an unwillingness to observe clear roles within community life, to confuse structure and therefore to act inadvertantly as if we were a cult obsessed with internal purity. We desire internal purity, but we achieve it by accepting joyfully the roles that Providence has given us through the medium of the Church. So: keep your place in rank, honor those senior to you, love those junior to you, show up for things on time, follow Benedict’s Rule as literally as you can. This takes the heat off of the spiritual battle and involves the whole structure of the Church in the fight, and it offers the brothers the confidence of having a special place within the Church, a confidence that our spiritual foes really can be overcome by the power of Christ animating His Body.

Mary Douglas offered this advice to millennial movements: learn to organize! She died before she could watch movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street get undermined because of their steadfast refusal to organize. Benedictine Option pioneers should work to avoid the related fate of the irrelevant sectarian movements by learning to organize. There is a direct connection between the kind of social body we live in and the beliefs that we hold and behaviors that we legitimate. The connections between these three levels of 1) mind, 2) body, and 3) society I hope to explore in the next post on Natural Symbols.

The Experience of Emotivism, Virtue, and Rationality

What d’ya say? Let’s move the discussion about emotivism out of the abstract and into the concrete. What is it like being an emotivist? How do I know when I’m acting like one?

I decided to take up this topic once again because of three separate instances in the past week or so. The first one directly involves me. I was preparing to go to the sacrament of confession. During my examination of conscience, I came upon an old, all-too-familiar sin. I’m tired of battling against it, occasionally discouraged by my inability to make much apparent progress. But what happened next was interesting. I noticed that there was a very subtle stirring inside that suggested to me that what I needed to do was feel worse about this sin. And feeling really, really sorry, really upset with myself…well, I suppose the idea is that my behavior will magically change if I change my feelings.

Well, it doesn’t actually work for me. Does it work for you?

One of the looks of ritualized contrition.

One of the looks of ritualized contrition.

Once you start thinking about this meme, you find it all over. We try to convince each other of our sincerity (especially when we let each other down) by furrowing our brow, biting our lip, getting bleary-eyed. The template for this in my world will always be President Clinton. This is not a criticism of the ex-President. When he felt our pain and acknowledged “not feeling contrite enough,” he was doing what a leader should do–in an emotivist world. Media figures and fellow politicians wanted to make sure that he felt bad, and he needed to make sure that we knew that he felt bad. And it’s become something of a public ritual ever since. When a celebrity (Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Paula Deen) messes up, he or she is expected to go on camera and exhibit signs of sorrow.

What other route might there be? Keep in mind that contrition is a condition of absolution in the sacrament of penance. So there is nothing wrong with the feeling itself. It can be a sign of a healthy conscience. The difficulty is that these feelings may or may not actually have an effect on future behavior. If you’ve ever dealt with (or are an) an alcoholic, you know this. Caught lying, the addict may well feel completely miserable and sorry. But the lure of alcohol and drugs typically overrides the feelings eventually. So generating correct feelings is insufficient for changing behavior.

What I recommend instead is truth and preparation. By truth, I mean what twelve-step programs mean by steps four and five: making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and stating the exact nature of our wrongs. By preparation, I mean that we learn what situations trigger our disobedience, and make a decision to act contrary to our inclinations when temptation presents itself.

Let me give another concrete example of emotivism.

A common complaint about liturgy is that those attending “don’t get anything out of it.” This sort of rhetoric tempts pastors to make the liturgy more interesting, to see it as a service that they provide to consumers whose desires need to be accounted for. And what are the consumers hoping “to get out of” the liturgy? I can’t say for certain in every instance, but I can speak from my own youthful experience. I thought that church ought to make me feel better about myself, others and the world, that it should inspire me to be a better person. I should walk away from the liturgy with different feelings. This is how many of us gauge the effectiveness of many, if not most, public and private encounters. Success means feeling good, and feeling crummy means that we are doing something wrong.

But does it? This is a highly questionable idea.

Marsalis with another consummate pro, Renee Fleming. There are many hours of dull, hard work behind their effortless musicality.

Marsalis with another consummate pro, Renee Fleming. There are many hours of dull, hard work behind their effortless musicality.

When I was studying to be a professional musician, I typically practiced three or four hours at the piano every day by myself. I did not enjoy this for the most part. Wynton Marsalis likes to refer to practice as The Monster. Every day, musicians have to get out of bed and confront the monster and slay it. The payoff comes when, after years of slaying monsters, one plays the trumpet like Wynton Marsalis or sings like Renee Fleming. In the meantime, though, one must act contrary to one’s feelings, rather than taking feelings as any kind of objective measure of one’s moral state.

Similarly, in a marriage, when a spouse becomes debilitatingly ill or a child develops a major behavioral issue, dealing with this situation will often require mastering one’s immediate feelings of disgust at sickness, resentment at having to set aside personal goals, and fear that things may spiral out of control. These feelings must be opposed because to give in to them would be to act wrongly, to fail in one’s duties and responsibilities to others. Nursing an ailing loved one can be exhausting, no fun at all. But it is beautiful. When we witness this kind of sacrifice, we recognize it as true and good as well. But to accomplish this sacrifice, we must be prepared to act contrary to our feelings, rather than having our feelings somehow demand of others some kind of compliance (as is the case when we want to “get something out of the liturgy”).

These kinds of routine decisions to act in accord with the truth, with the demands of beauty and goodness, change us into different persons. Our identities become completely wrapped up in the repeated good action, and we become virtuoso trumpeters or faithful spouses, beloved brothers. We have become virtuous, having the ability (Latin: virtus) to choose the truly good, the truly beautiful even when others can’t see it. Here’s the hitch. As we are changing, we are likely at times, perhaps often, to feel “inauthentic.” That is to say, we will miss our old selves. What it’s actually like to be a virtuoso or a faithful spouse is at first an unfamiliar experience and requires us to act in ways that feel insincere.

In an emotivist world, the great sins are inauthenticity and insincerity, the great virtues sincerity and authenticity. Thus, it is difficult for an emotivist to make any headway in any kind of human excellence. Let me end with a quote from Lionel Trilling on what this might mean [emphasis added]:

“At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.”

 

Which Questions Should We Ask?

Why a blog on a monastery website? It could be used to share monastic spirituality, and I do hope to cover that. The seniors in our community teach monastic spirituality to the novices and juniors regularly. Thus, not only our own experience of prayer, work and silence should offer some fresh insights on Christian discipleship, but we should also be somewhat experienced in teaching this perspective to others.

What I have discovered, however, is that the spirit of monasticism can be misunderstood,

Read More »

Back to School

As many of you know, I am working on a memoir. This was first suggested to me by an editor at Paulist Press after a short interview I gave appeared in the Sun-Times few years ago. From January 1994 until July 1997, I performed in a jazz/rock sort of band called OM. And the transition I made, from playing at the Taste of Chicago, then five months later beginning my novitiate, has generated some interest. This band was not so typical. As I was working on the book on Monday, I noticed the fact that in some way or other, most of the significant persons who went through the band (our line-up had up to six people, including horns and violins) are now educators. I include myself in that group, since I am the prior of what Saint Benedict calls “a school of the Lord’s service.”

One of the interesting points of the memoir has to do with parallel themes in my former work as a musician and my life now as a monk. One such parallel has to do with the marginal status of both monks and artists in the world. Artists are often restless until they can pry open some hidden aspect of reality and show it to others. But then, not everyone has eyes to see what is uncovered, at least right away. Some ‘fusion of horizons’ needs to take place, to introduce others to the language of poetry, art and music, and then the unique perspective of the artist.

Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah. [Bruegel the Elder's depiction of Icarus unmourned]--"Not an important failure," as told by Auden.

Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of Icarus unmourned and unnoticed…a splash at the lower right… Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah; I wasn’t paying attention —“Not an important failure.”

At some point, my bandmates and I realized that for the average listener to take an interest in what we were doing, we needed to undertake some efforts at teaching. We took our cue from Wynton Marsalis, who was then teaching young people how to listen to jazz. In music, any effort to educate runs into serious problems, since musical interest is usually considered a matter of personal taste. The idea that one might deliberately change one’s taste because of someone else’s expertise smacks of snobbery. Yet any musician worth hearing ought to be passionate about the quality of the music she or he is performing. And this passion depends on the music being more than a personal predilection–somehow the it must be true, and this truth must be urgent. It doesn’t really belong to the performer at all. The performer is at most a conduit, maybe a conjurer. At least the performer is a witness.

Any good teacher is in a similar position. Henri Nouwen suggested many years ago that the model of education today is based in a kind of violence that is competitive (students competing for scarce recognition of achievements), unilateral (the transference of a commodified knowledge from strong teacher to weak student), and alienating (marking the gap between the material to be mastered and the real life that comes once one gets the degree). We’ve all had good teachers, though. What were they like? One of the best classes I took in college involved working through Newton’s Principia.

Noel Swerdlow, who taught initiated me into the magical world of Isaac Newton

Noel Swerdlow, who initiated me into the magical world of Isaac Newton

What was fantastic about the class was that the professor wrote out, and actually worked out, Newton’s proofs on the blackboard, inviting us to work through them with him. I will never forget his enthusiasm, as if he were the one discovering this and not Newton…rather that we were discovering the beauty of nature’s patterns together, with Newton as quirky guide, friends on an amazing journey past the veil of sense to the mathematical harmony of physics.

Sometimes a learning experience of this sort can be so powerful that it requires a reordering of our old way of thinking. Learning to like jazz or to understand calculus takes time and a kind of ‘conversion’ (Newton had to invent calculus to figure out the moon’s orbital math!). The early Christians called this metanoia.  Metanoia means literally to change one’s mind. This idea is also expressed as repentance. When Jesus began His ministry, he preached, “Repent [Metanoeite!] and believe the gospel [Mt. 4: 17].” Learn to think differently! We must undergo a kind of education–note that Jesus spends much of His public life teaching. He teaches not so much a series of facts. Nor does He just impart information. Repentance involves learning to think anew about old facts, seeing from a new perspective, noticing things that had always been there, but discovering in them God’s presence and transforming love. It requires something like contemplation.

Monastic formation is perhaps the most radical instance of this Christian conversion, but it is simply what all Christians pledge to do at baptism. The thought patterns of the old Adam must give way to the new Adam, to the mind of Christ [Phil. 2: 5; 1 Cor. 2: 16]. Recognizing how exactly the old Adam thinks is not so easy, for our cultural upbringing lingers in unsuspected ways. What’s more, we live in a peculiarly blind kind of culture, that no longer recognizes its own dependence on tradition. Freud thought that he discovered a universal psychological law in the Oedipal complex, but in fact, he was merely noticing the modern Western tendency to want to do away with one’s fathers. This habitual refusal to recognize our intellectual and cultural debts causes disruptions and discontinuities in our background tradition, and therefore in our thinking.

In our monastery, we are trying to counteract this situation with different approaches to teaching. One test case, upon which I will dwell more at length in a future post, would be the following question. Can a modern Christian learn to read the Scriptures from the profound spiritual sense that guided the formation of theology from St. Paul until Rupert of Deutz? We live in a scientific age, and Catholic Biblical scholars have been celebrating their freedom to engage in historical-critical method for the past sixty years. Should we even bother to go back to allegory?

But what if the historical-critical method and our enthusiasm for it would turn out to be an unhealthy preoccupation with the world that is passing away? What if it locks us into the very worldview that a conversion is meant to leave behind? Given the present struggles of the Catholic Church in her historic lands, this kind of question bears asking and patient and careful response. It also may call for metanoia. Repent and believe!