Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Monastic Life

Salvation Is Not From This World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Living in Isolation

Americans are being asked to spend the next month in relative isolation. I’m not the first to point out that monasteries are a resource for how to deal with this separation from others. I have many thoughts on this, and I hope to share them over the coming days and weeks.

Saint Benedict teaches experienced monks to admonish newcomers that the way to God is “rugged and harsh [via dura et aspera].” We come to the monastery seeking God, and, human nature being what it is, it is tempting to imagine that entry into a monastery will be a crowning moment of arrival rather than the initiation of a trial. But entry into monastic life also requires renunciation of “the world.”

The difficulty in monastic renunciation comes precisely from renunciation. The novice monk or nun is called to go without the usual comforts that smooth over the inevitable rough spots of life. Today, we are all being called, temporarily, to make acts of renunciation of the usual supports that we have in life: meetings with friends, hugs, museums, church, dining out, checking the sports scores, full shelves in the grocery stores …we have all entered a time of deprivation. A monk chooses this; most of you have not sought this out in the same way. I say this up front because we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges that deprivation and renunciation present.

They are not at all insurmountable challenges! If, however, we imagine that renunciation will be painless, well, this will only make the unavoidable pain confusing and anxiety-provoking. With God’s help, especially as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we can look upon this as a moment to take up our Cross alongside our Lord, confident in divine accompaniment.

Now let me say a bit more about the “rugged and harsh” way upon which we’ve set out together. There are four initial things that warrant attention: the pain of grief, the invasion of thoughts, the importance of agency, and a long-term goal that gives us hope. Let us follow the example of the philosophers and Fathers and start with the goal.

Antony the Great being invaded by his thoughts while living in solitude: notice how he calmly accepts the presence of these temptations without engaging with them. Martin Schongauer, 15th century

The monk gives up worldly comforts for the sake of the Kingdom of God. We leave aside lesser comforts so that we may depend entirely on God and thereby be found worthy of His friendship. So monks and nuns willingly allow for painful experiences in the short term, always with an eye to the good that we want in the long term. We also choose to reduce our dependence on worldly comforts so as to acclimate ourselves with the interior world of thoughts. Now: during this time of involuntary renunciation, be ready to do battle with invading thoughts! I will have more to say about this soon, but here let me remind you that you are not your thoughts, and that there are ways to choose our thoughts. Choose wisely! We should especially make sure not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the news and the itch to become an expert on all angles of the situation.

Back to the goal: what good are we seeking together in this time of pestilence? What is our goal? We are looking to safeguard our own lives and health and those of our families and neighbors. We are hoping to do this without undue damage to the infrastructure of our economic life (which would provoke a second round of sufferings for the most vulnerable). The hope of achieving these critical goals can motivate us to take action–hence the “importance of agency,” with which I will deal in a separate post.

There is a subtler set of goals that deserves our focus. When this trial begins to subside, and I look back on my decisions, how will I have comported myself? Am I now striving to act with courage, justice, compassion, generosity, and holiness? We will look back at this time and celebrate the heroes. Without doubt, we will also be aware of failures of virtue. If I have not prepared myself to be courageous, compassionate, or holy, now might be the best time I’ve ever had to learn. Acquiring these virtues involves acting in ways that might feel inauthentic in the moment. But one small act of courage makes the next, greater act easier. We will learn much about ourselves in the coming weeks. In some cases, what we learn will be uncomfortable. That, too, is part of the pain of deprivation–hence the “pain of grief,”–another future post. In this post, I want to emphasize that we do have a choice about our personal behaviors, and this is an opportunity for us to become quite a lot stronger than we thought we could be. The reason to emphasize this is that isolation can make it feel like we are reduced to passivity, that we lack agency. Many critics of monastic life harshly accuse us of “doing nothing.” This accusation derives from a certain bias that equates action with external activism and technological manipulation. Amusing memes of couch potatoes as heroes aside, we Americans are not being called to do nothing, but to change our arena of action toward self-discipline in a way that could bring about a discovery of inner strength.

A last comparison for today with monastic life. The newcomer, one hopes, is greatly consoled by the presence of others around him or her, especially the older monks. These are persons who have come through the trial and become icons of hope for what monastic life can achieve. In our shared isolation, who are our icons of hope for what we might achieve by God’s grace in our engagement with the present crisis? We certainly can look to the saints, particularly martyrs and confessors, for demonstrations of patience and sanctity amidst trials. We also have with us many survivors of illness and survivors of social dislocation. Interestingly on this last point, the immigrants among us and our immigrant ancestors are examples of living with great uncertainty and dislocation (our dislocation being more metaphorical but nonetheless real). Who are the best examples we’ve known of strength amid these adversities, and how can we learn from their experiences?

Radical Witness and Saint Lawrence

Monks in the modern world are daily confronted with incongruities. We dress in tunics and scapulars that were the workaday clothing of sixth-century peasants. We pray the Psalms, composed some three thousand years ago in a language that does not translate into contemporary idioms very well. Many of our customs date from the early Middle Ages (suddenly a controversial era!), presupposing a worldview that is unfathomable to many of our neighbors in Chicago.

Read More »

Why Monks Sing

Yesterday, I received an email from Jon Elfner, a friend of mine.  The email read, in part:

Read More »

Jordan Peterson and the Life of Faith, Part 1

Professor Peterson

Professor Peterson combines the toughness of small-town Alberta with the intellectual challenge of Nietzsche and Jung.

Recently I gave a talk for Theology on Tap on the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor. He recently published his second book, a kind of self-help book for millennials, especially millennial men. Hundreds of thousands of people watch his Bible study videos, in spite of the fact that he is not a typical believer. I found out about him through a Catholic friend about a year ago, and I immediately recognized his appeal to young men. Let me explain some of that in today’s blog post, which will be the first installment of an expanded version of my talk.

Read More »

Who “Owns” the (English) Augustine?

Fresh takes on towering historical icons like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine are rarer than book publishers would like to claim. This is in part because of the stubborn presence of actual words that any interpreter must confront. Many moons ago, I discovered all of this to my dismay as I labored over a thesis on the Letter to the Romans. I felt decidedly less clever at the end of it all than at the outset. The text of Paul’s epistle had this funny way of funneling my fresh insights back into the common stew of Pauline studies. In other writers, I have sometimes discovered apparently novel interpretations, only to find later on the very same interpretation lodged in a patristic tome of old.

Eventually, one finds this general sense of agreement a comfort, at least if one believes in and is searching for Truth. It would disconcerting, to say the least, to find that the Church has been misreading Saint Paul for nearly twenty centuries, even if one were himself or herself the Vessel of Correction. Most new ideas about the Bible or the Church Fathers have in common a willingness to ignore counter-evidence from those same stubborn texts that rerouted my barque back into harbor.

So it was with no small delight that I read Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People some years ago. Amidst teaching assignments at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, Ruden has been a prolific author and translator for nearly a decade. What makes her work on Saint Paul so compelling is her awareness of classical culture and her sympathy for the earthy realities of life in antiquity. She is able to depict Paul as a great champion of love and freedom by stripping away the anachronisms accumulated over five centuries of interdenominational debate. She writes with a light touch, an assurance that avoids the preachy or polemic tone.

The reader can imagine how excited I was to see that, after tackling Virgil’s Aeneid and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, she turned her Latin skills to a Christian classic, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve begun making my way through it, and so far Ruden’s quirky but compelling take has won me over. I’ve read chunks of Confessions in the original Latin, and I’ve read four or five different translations. Most translations tend to err in the direction of pious seriousness. In my opinion, this is a disservice to Augustine, whose poignant observations on boyhood games and love of puns have slowly charmed me away from the early impression I had of him as a dour, mitered scold. Being not much more of a Latinist than I am an expert in Saint Paul’s Greek, I had been keeping my arriviste opinion to myself. Then I was emboldened by the endorsement of the “unsurpassed biographer of Augustine,” Peter Brown.

Brown’s NYRB review of Ruden’s translation focuses not so much on the changed tone of Augustine himself, but on the effect that this change of tone has on the depiction of God. Since the 1981 publication of previously unknown letters of Augustine by Austrian scholar Johannes Divjak, Brown has made a point of softening the adamantine image of the bishop of Hippo. If you read Brown’s biography (you should!), be sure to read the revised edition that contains Brown’s reappraisal. Browns’ influence is such that scholarly opinion has been following his lead. I want to emphasize here that the interpretation of Augustine as a proto-Puritan with Jansenist scruples is, like the Saint Paul of Luther’s imagination, a modern production. Anyone familiar with Saint Augustine’s “afterlife” in the Western Middle Ages will quickly become aware of the love that both monks and schoolmen shared for Augustine’s prodigious output, and for the man himself. As was the case with Saint Paul, Ruden’s new translation of Confessions is a vindication of the bulk of Catholic testimony regarding Saint Augustine, a genuinely fresh take that succeeds in restoring, in a modern idiom, an older appreciation for his humanity as well as his genius.

Calvin College’s James K. A. Smith will have none of it. I found it a bit disheartening when an intellectual of his status and caliber gave up on Ruden literally after one line. He claims to have been chastised by Brown’s review into questioning himself. This probing self-doubt seems to have lasted about two minutes before he’s back trying to burnish the statuesque, seriously pious Augustine. His big beef? Ruden’s decision to translate dominus as “Master” rather than as the (supposedly) traditional “Lord.” Smith seems to concede that “master” is a legitimate option–for a classicist. But the rest of us, he believes, want not accuracy but a “devotional classic.” It is telling that Smith begins his review openly admitting that when it comes to translations his preferences are nostalgiac and emotional and not rational. And, frankly, it is irrational to insist that Augustine say what Smith thinks he ought to say, based on his queasiness with the (modern, American, contextual) connotations of the word “master.”

Smith does ask two important questions: “which afterlife of words is most germane to the project that Augustine himself is engaged in?  Which history of connotation overlaps with Augustine’s endeavor?” This gets at the heart of my difference from Smith on a number of related issues. Different confessional traditions will answer these questions differently. I would like to think that Benedictines, whose Rule of Life is deeply influenced by Saint Augustine’s own experience as a monk, who read large portions of Augustine’s work–ranging across the different genres of treatise, Biblical commentary, homiletic, and personal letters–at the daily liturgy, and whose institutional history includes at least two centuries of direct engagement with international politics, have as good a claim as anyone to bearing the standard of Augustine’s project/endeavor. From my (Catholic, monastic) perspective, Jean Calvin’s interpretations of Saint Augustine are just those sorts of “new” interpretations that can only exist by suppressing counter-evidence and dissenting voices.

And, in fact, English-speaking Catholics readily use the word “Master” to address God, for example, in the misattributed “Prayer of Saint Francis.” “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…” English-speaking Orthodox will be familiar with this translation of the prayer of Saint Ephraim, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth…”

But more to the point, we are arguing about a word choice in a modern language. Before the Reformation, and for plenty of Catholics since, God is Dominus. It is understood, at some level, that whether we use Lord or Master, what we mean is Dominus or Kyrios (perhaps even Adonai). Whatever connotations have attached themselves to Lord or Master in the past five hundred years, a span in which the English language has largely developed apart from direct influence by Rome or Constantinople, they may well be part of the shared distortion that has afflicted the memories of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. More power to Sarah Ruden for inviting us to step back from our allegiances and question ourselves.

Thoughts Determine Our Lives

St. Ignatius of Loyola died on this date 561 years ago. He did not set out at first to be a saint, but a soldier. Then Providence intervened. A cannonball shattered his leg, and as he was recovering from this terrible compound fracture, he underwent this remarkable experience:

He asked for some of these books [of knight-errantry] to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints written in Spanish….When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy.

Ignatius’s circumstances didn’t change. His joy and sadness did not depend on the healing of his leg, or on his future prospects as a soldier and a dandy. In other words, our contentment in life, or lack thereof, is not, primarily, a function of the external circumstances of our lives. What determines the emotional shape of our lives (and therefore, that aspect of our lives that really matters!) is our thinking.

This profound insight of Saint Ignatius comports with ancient monastic wisdom, both in Christian and Buddhist forms. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism, in this regard at least, is that traditional Christianity does not aim at avoidance of suffering by the elimination of the ego. Rather, the Gospel allows the newly, intentionally reborn self [in the image of Christ] to embrace joyfully the suffering that comes from standing out to the full, which is to say, the suffering that comes with sainthood. Our suffering is embraced “for the sake of the joy that was set before” us [Hebrews 12: 2]. We do this by changing the way we think, by the “renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 2].” How is this done? By, among other things, faith in God’s promises.

This future-oriented, eschatological thinking finds yet another interesting corroboration in the insights of Jewish psychotherapists Viktor Frankl and Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Both men asked this question: “Why is it that, under experiences of extreme stress, some persons not only continue to function but even thrive?” It’s good to note that Frankl himself was a Holocaust survivor. Both men experienced quasi-Ignatian moments of insight. Frankl’s very language echoes the experience of Ignatius [my emphases in bold]:

Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the [prisoner] marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

Frankl and Friedman both challenge us to change our thoughts, to substitute thoughts of love, hope, purpose, and meaning for thoughts of hatred, anxiety, frustration, and resentment. I will be returning to Friedman, whose overall insights are especially counter-intuitive in our present world (which, from the perspective I’m adopting here makes them actually more persuasive). For today’s feast of Saint Ignatius, let me offer one more example of a change of thinking, this time a literary one. As Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins trudge their way through the soul-killing terror of Mordor, Sam experiences this moment of insight. It changes nothing of the external horror to which he and Frodo have been consigned. But it does something quieter, yet more radical. It changes Sam’s heart, and, in Tolkien’s story, this small, hidden change of heart changes the world.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Our thoughts determine our lives.

The Historical Saint Benedict

After a few weeks densely populated with solemnities, we enter into the heart of summer with the Feast of Saint Benedict next Tuesday. Benedict has been receiving a certain amount of attention recently, thanks to the publication of The Benedict Option by journalist Rod Dreher. The current issue of Regina Magazine also features an article called “Benedict and Scholastica,” by Bill Schulz. It’s a fine introduction to some of the questions surrounding the historicity of the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, our only source for the biography of these saint-founders. I’m personally grateful for the attention given to our founders!

I’m somewhat less skeptical than Schulz. We actually have an abundant resource for reconstructing the personality of the historical Saint Benedict if we pay close attention to his Rule for Monks. I would also note that the Rule of Saint Benedict is the source of much, perhaps most, of the legislation on religious life in the West. Thus, while it is accurate to say that the Rule “still in use today by some orders,” this doesn’t quite do justice to the significance of Saint Benedict, who is, after all, the patron of Western Europe! Saint Benedict’s wisdom is fundamental to all religious orders in the West today, and every religious novice will have spent time with Saint Benedict in his or her study of the history of religious life.

The historicity of Saint Scholastica is admittedly a sticky subject. In my experience, a lot depends on how much exposure one has to Italian monasticism. I’ve had the opportunity to spend more time in the last two years in Italian monasteries, and I’ve encountered a lot of oral history that substantiates the Dialogues. Of course, this oral history could have been invented after the fact, to embroider the biographies of Saints Benedict and Scholastica. But it’s also at least possible that there are genuine memories of these saints, particularly at Monte Cassino, whose history goes back quite close to the lifetime of Saint Benedict.

We will be having our regular schedule of services for the liturgy of Saint Benedict beginning with First Vespers at 5:15 p.m. on Monday. We hope that many can join us to celebrate one of the most important post-Apostolic saints in the West, one whom Dante placed in the highest level of contemplatives!

 

Of Solitude and Contemplation

In my previous post, I noted that behind the Rule of Saint Benedict, there lies hidden the influence of the Desert Fathers. Benedict recommends that the monk eager for advanced pursuits in monastic spirituality should read the “Institutes” and the “Conferences.” Universal tradition as well as common sense asserts that he is referring to St. John Cassian, who spent nearly two decades in the Egyptian desert learning the monastic life. You can find indices to Cassian’s two most important works, the Institutes and the Conferences at the Order of Saint Benedict website.

What I wish to emphasize here, and in keeping with my aim to write brief and manageable posts, is one key connection between these two books and the two-fold path to spiritual maturity. I wrote last time that Saint Benedict is primarily concerned with the correction of behavior in his Rule for monks, but that he also acknowledges, in quiet ways, that beyond the cultivation of virtue and the elimination of vice, there is the further contemplative aspect of monastic (and Christian) life, what Benedict calls “wisdom of doctrine.” The Institutes correspond to the “active” life of conversion, and the Conferences are concerned with the “contemplative” life of adepts.

The first stage of spiritual growth, the correction of behavior, is therefore the primary concern of Cassian’s Institutes. Note that Cassian does not give us what we would consider “morality.” Rather, he is interested in teaching the times of prayer, the style of dress for monks, and the organization of communal life. This is exactly parallel to Saint Benedict’s Rule.  The connection is not just one of a common culture. The Rule of the Master, an Italian monastic rule from the generation before Benedict, and Benedict’s primary source, cribs from Cassian’s Institutes, so that we can say that St. Benedict’s Rule is a kind of grandchild to the Institutes. Cassian goes somewhat beyond communal organization, and spends the last eight books of the Institutes on the eight vices and how to identify the thought patterns that go with them. So again, we are not so much in the realm of morality as moderns understand it. Cassian is interested in psychology, how our thoughts influence our behavior.

This emphasis on psychology is the link between the active and contemplative stages of Christian spiritual growth. Before we can properly understand doctrine, we must first work against behaviors that are not consonant with Christian doctrine, but then we must also go after the thought patterns that underlie wrongful behavior. This cleansing of the mind of wrongful thinking allows us to receive true “theology,” knowledge of God. This is the focus of Cassian’s Conferences.

In the next several short posts, I hope to walk with you through the two stages with more attention to the particular battles with behaviors and thoughts, along with recommended reading in monastic spirituality.