Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Monastic Life

Bright Sadness and the Joy of Spiritual Longing

Lent begins today. We distributed ashes at Mass this morning. Shortly afterward, I distributed Lenten reading to each of the brothers. Saint Benedict instituted this practice in his Rule: the superior gives a book to each brother to be read straight through during Lent. I typically give each brother a classic from a Church Father or monastic saint, though occasionally, a brother might receive a book of more recent of theology if I think it might be useful.

At this point in my life I look forward to Lent with a kind of eager trepidation, if I can put it that way. When I was younger, it was a pure eagerness that accompanied this time of spiritual intensification. As I’ve gained experience, I know that, often enough, an unenlightened eagerness is the beginning of disappointment and recrimination. Therefore I now try to approach Lent with more wariness about the spiritual traps that inevitably accompany any effort to cooperate more fully with grace. The eagerness has in no way left me; it has been, I hope, tempered and made more realistic, more attuned to what spiritual warfare is actually like and to what my own temperament permits in the way of change.

My favorite image of Saint Antony’s temptations, by Martin Schongauer. Two things to notice: the demons, externalized thoughts, are hard to distinguish from Antony. We often have difficulty separating from our thoughts, which is why slowing down and not reacting is so important. Secondly, Antony’s stoic resignation is part of the strategy. Rather than impulsively engaging the thoughts, he is simply allowing them to be, but staying mentally detached from them, not assenting, nor over-correcting by a fretful rejection of their presence.

It is often remarked that the word ‘joy’ appears twice in Saint Benedict’s chapter on Lent. This accords well with the Orthodox phrase “bright sadness” that is the desired disposition of the penitent in Great Lent. For this joy and bright sadness to accompany our fasting, it is important that we actually try to experience hunger. This means “moving toward” the perception of being hungry, accepting it without judgment as another experience. Can we sit still, when hungry, accept the lack of energy and the chills, without reacting? Am I inclined to give in to grumpiness? Or to think about how long it is until lunch? Or to complain about outdated, formalistic Church disciplines? Twenty years ago, our whole community experimented with a scientific, low-carb diet. I was impressed at the fact that balancing one’s carbohydrates with one’s proteins and fat intake makes it possible to lose weight without ever feeling very hungry. This would be another temptation against the fast, I think: seeing it merely in terms of eating healthier, losing weight, getting myself back into those pants that haven’t fit for the past few years or more. Weight loss and physical health are all good, to be sure, and we hope that they are results of the fast. But hunger, as we see in the temptation of Christ in the desert, is part of the process. I am hungry, but I accept that I am not going to eat right now.

We will discover, just as Jesus did, that other temptations dutifully follow after we have decisively, for the moment at least, said no to eating. When we are younger and perhaps less disciplined, the physical craving often remanifests itself laterally in the forms of a lustful eye, fantasizing, or seeking out energetic music or distracting entertainments. It would be useful to recognize this displacement and, as we had said no to eating, to say no to substitutes as well, especially the illicit ones. What we want is for the resistance to food to allow us to peer more deeply into the structure of our desires, especially those desires for safety, love, acceptance, power, and so on. A friend once told me that he stopped fasting because he discovered that it made him angry. My response to this is that fasting often reveals that I am an angry person, or at least a person who has habitually given myself over to anger. And I create an illusion of not being an angry person by cheerfully eating whenever something annoys me. So I never encounter the anger underneath the surface that drives my eating.

When anger, or sadness, or suspicion, or any other negative emotion arises, it is useful again to allow it to be, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist. This also precludes giving in and treating anger or sadness as legitimate just because I happen to feel one of them at the moment. The point here is to avoid any “quick fix” by giving up the fast or by a superficial happy feeling that we achieve by rewatching an episode of Police Squad for the hundredth time. If I have made a vice of anger, I might need an occasional distraction like that to avoid losing my temper. But the eventual goal is simple and gentle detachment from the disturbance of anger and negativity. This will eventually allow me to confront the thoughts that drive the anger, thoughts of frustration with a brother or a spouse, fear about war in Ukraine (or Covid–remember those days?). From here I can gently substitute thoughts from Scripture, allowing the Holy Spirit to change my outlook gradually. What I discover at this stage are the ways in which I have bought into a narrative about the world, myself, and God, that is profoundly false and distorting–the serpent’s narrative. Holy reading allows me to enter into the truth about these things, a truth that brings an eventual sense of peace and trust.

Power is the deepest danger. Again, it is quite useful to sit still and tell myself, “I am hungry, and the lack of food means that I don’t have the energy to work as hard as usual.” Overwork and, more generally, overfunctioning, is a way of attempting to dominate my environment. In Saint Augustine’s famous and frightening phrase, it is the corrupting libido dominandi, the drive to dominate. When we get sick or injured, or when we are lethargic because of hunger, we lose a good amount of control over our circumstances. Again, this lack of control most often manifests first as anger or sadness. One benefit of being hungry is that anger and sadness are harder to maintain, and we are confronted eventually with our real powerlessness, the realization that our bodies one day (and every day one day sooner) will fall apart and die. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I will admit to using Drebinisms from time to time to get some distance from angry thoughts.

At this point, we have little left but to turn to God, and this is undoubtedly the best place to be, because God really is in control of everything that matters in the end. “Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will take flight. Draw close to God, and He will draw close to you [James 4: 7].” “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares about you [1 Peter 5: 7].” This is the source of true joy and peace. As creatures of infinite desire, we find our rest in learning to desire the infinite God and His holy will. Recognizing all of the ways in which we settle for lesser goods is the source of compunction, a type of sadness. But it is a bright sadness because through it we are discovering the source and end of all spiritual longing, the love of the God of Jesus Christ.

Saint Scholastica: a model of prayer and charity

Benedict and Scholastica, at their annual meeting outside of Monte Cassino.

Today’s liturgical celebration, the feast of Saint Scholastica, holds an important place in Benedictine monasteries. Scholastica was Saint Benedict’s sister, and, according to Benedict’s biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, she was distinguished as having “greater love” than even our holy patriarch himself. It is a special day for all Benedictine sisters throughout the world—over 20,000 of them, in the “black” Benedictine federations alone—as we honor a woman whose prayer is known to be very powerful. (She once convinced God to send a thunderstorm when her brother was being slightly obstinate…)

In the Benedictine world, there is a sense that Benedict and Scholastica represent something like the “Petrine” and “Marian” aspects of the church as a whole. While the Petrine service of pastoring, legislative, and governing is extremely important (Benedict is often celebrated as our “Lawgiver”), the Marian service of the hidden life of prayer is the true heart of the Church’s secret fecundity. By prayer and contemplation, we open our hearts to experience God’s healing and loving presence within, and we open our minds to discover God’s sanctifying presence in all creation. A life of prayer truly puts God first, gives God the initiative (all prayer starts with the Holy Spirit!), and frees us from the burden of solving problems by our own powers.

The gospel for today’s feast, if you happen to be at Mass in a Benedictine monastery, is the famous passage about Mary and Martha. Our Lord gently chides Martha for being anxious about many things, and perhaps for being slightly annoyed with her sister Mary, sitting at the Lord’s feet and listening. It’s a shame that this story has come to represent the distinction between the active and contemplative life in religious orders. All of us need to be Marys at certain times, and Marthas at other times. But we should all seek to enshrine in our hearts the primacy of the “better part” of Mary.

Jesus in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus

I realize how difficult it is for many of us to get going on the life of prayer. Let me conclude by suggesting that it is a habit like any other habit. When you are trying to form a new habit, it is difficult and even painful at first, as we battle against other habits that need changing. Start small with prayer, and then try to expand from there. As you pray regularly, it will get easier, and as it does, it can be helpful to add a little more prayer. Soon, it will be a part of our day that we can’t do without. I was thinking this morning at lectio divina of the old saying of the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz: “If I skip one day of practice, I notice; if I skip two, my friends notice; if I skip three, the audience notices.” I can tell when I have been lax at prayer for whatever reason, legitimate or not. My sense of God’s presence gets a bit opaque, and my sense of the sacredness of the people I meet becomes occluded. All it takes is to reengage with prayer, and these spiritual sense begin returning.

Gregory the Great tells us that Scholastica and Benedict used to spend days at a time discussing spiritual mysteries. How many of us could actually do such a thing for an hour, much less a whole day? Yet, I know from the great saints of the past and today’s spiritual masters that we can aspire to this spiritual fluency, but only if we pray.

Saint Scholastica, teach all of us, Benedictines and others, to pray as you prayed, that our souls may take flight and follow you on your heavenly journey to Christ!

Monastic Life As an Essential Service

[The following is a slight edited version of a newsletter article from last summer. I am republishing it because of the positive response it generated at the time.]

I had just returned from a Provincial Council meeting a year ago on March 13 when alarms began pulsing through the media about the looming pandemic. We had Solemn Vespers scheduled for Saturday evening the 14th, but as I spoke to the pastor of the local parish and to the brothers, it became clear that we would need to close our doors for the time being and cancel public services. As local and state governments got up to speed with executive orders meant to regulate the quarantine, churches, mosques, and synagogues received the somewhat dismissive label of “non-essential services.”

Monastic life revels in essential tasks like cooking and clean-up–and prayer.

What this label obscured about our cloistered life is that, in fact, little changed in our day-to-day schedule, especially in that which is most essential about monastic life: our dedication to prayer, devout celebration of the Church’s liturgy, and the intensive search for God. If anything, these activities received greater prominence during this time when our guesthouse and Bed and Breakfast were closed, and we didn’t have to attend to the demands of hospitality [N.B. we’re back open!].

As I wrote on our website at the very beginning of the pandemic: “we are all members of the One Body of Christ by baptism, and the reception of Holy Communion by priests at their private Masses nourishes all the members of the Body by virtue of our unity. I have encouraged all of our monks to be aware of this, that our reception of Holy Communion during this time be done devoutly and worthily for the sake of the whole Church and the world.”

So while many Catholics were separated from Holy Communion, we monks had an especially essential service, to celebrate the Mass and be fed by Christ’s Body and Blood on behalf of the whole.

To outsiders then, it may have appeared that the monastery was just another one of the non-essential services shuttered to the public. But in fact, the monastery was the institution within the Church where business went on as usual, precisely because the monastic vocation is essential.

Shortly after entering the monastery, I read a classic book of pre-Vatican II spirituality, The Right to Be Merry, by Poor Clare author Mother Mary Frances. One idea that I found there that truly gripped me was that the powerful of this world often understand the Church better than we do. Proof of this is that hostile regimes typically go after the contemplative monasteries first. In recent times, we have seen examples of this in the Soviet Union and communist China.  The contemplative life is the foothold of the Church militant in our true homeland of heaven. When the contemplative vocation is stamped out, there’s a sense in which the Church can be properly subdued and channeled toward secular ends. As long as monasteries exist, they serve as a reminder that the state is never all-powerful, that we are all answerable to God, the Just Judge.

As we gradually reopen, it is a great blessing once again to be with our friends. I hope that the lockdown experience, though, will be a spiritual goad for us monks to tenaciously hold to the core of our calling, that persistent and uncompromising search for God, the radical desire to empty ourselves entirely that grace may illuminate the Church. Let us together pray for the whole Church, that our sufferings may strengthen the life of Christ in each of us, that we may be voices of consolation, peace, and mercy for all those laboring under the uncertainty of the present.

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.

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Why Monks Sing

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

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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.

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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.