Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Monastic Life

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.

The Desert Background to the Rule

Saint Benedict composed his Rule for Monks some time around 540 A.D. Egypt, the cradle of Christian monasticism, had been drastically reduced in the previous 150 years from its high point at the end of the fourth century. Saint Benedict makes explicit reference to the “desert” only once, when describing the anchorites in the first chapter, on the kinds of monks. Since his Rule is written, however, not for anchorites but for “cenobites,” monks who live in communities, we might imagine that this off-hand reference to the desert is a mere nod in the direction of Egypt, without any further thread of connection to the ancient tradition.

There are important hints that Benedict knew the Egyptian tradition well and incorporated it seamlessly into his own proto-European style of monasticism. Finding these clues requires a bit of excavation. The place I would like to begin is in a perhaps unlikely spot, in chapter 64, On the Constituting of an Abbot. The abbot, Saint Benedict tells us, should be chosen “vitae…merito et sapientiae doctrina,” for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine. This sounds common sensible enough, but in fact it encapsulates an entire way of thinking about the spiritual quest in Christian monasticism. It also justifies Fr. Terence Kardong’s contention that the abbot is to be the “perfect” monk.

Merit of life corresponds to the presence of virtue and absence of vice. It is the first step in monastic conversion, a change of outward behavior. One learns to act…as a monk acts. When monks promise “conversion of life” (conversatio morum) according to the formula invented by Saint Benedict in chapter 58, they are promising to change their way of living. This is not a matter of mere “morals” but is implicated in all kinds of habits, preferences, and in personal comportment. This is the minimum observance “for beginners” [RB 73]. For those who are striving for greater advancement, however, as Benedict goes on to show us in chapter 73, there is the inward transformation of doctrine, new habits of thought about the cosmos and insight into God’s ways. It is not enough for the abbot to be worthy by his exterior actions; he must also have the interior virtues that allow him to give spiritual counsel and make wise decisions about the community’s welfare. It is noteworthy that one of the primary sources of doctrine, according to RB 73, is St. John Cassian, the primary link between European and Egyptian monasticism.

In future posts, I hope to demonstrate Saint Benedict’s direct dependence on the Egyptian desert fathers for this two-fold description of monastic spirituality. What the great monastic theologian Evagrius (354-399 A.D.) described as the practical (or “active”) life followed by the theoretical ( or “contemplative”) life is the best way of understanding Benedict’s emphasis on merit of life and wisdom of doctrine.

Taciturnity and Silence

The doctrinal heart of the Rule of Saint Benedict is found in chapters 4-7: The tools of good works, obedience, taciturnity (often significantly mistranslated as “silence”), and humility.

Can anyone doubt the average modern Westerner is tempted to view the combination of obedience, silence and humility as a way of robbing the individual of his maturity (exercised by choice and responsibility), of his voice, and of his selfhood?

Saint Benedict cannot possibly mean this, of course. Yet well-meaning Christians can fall into this trap of misinterpretation. I’ve already pointed out our tendency to render “restraint of speech” as “silence.” Saint Benedict actually urges responsible speech, especially where it is most typically going to be denied in an unhealthy community. Thus the younger members are urged to speak up and be heard at community meetings of the greatest importance, and monks who find tasks beyond their abilities are directed to give reasons to the abbot rather than toil miserably without recourse.

This loss of voice is what concerns me especially. I hear so often, when persons are hurting and in need of prayer, expressions like “I know I shouldn’t pray for this, but…” Even in seminary, when I took a course on Wisdom literature, the prof (himself a monk at the time, though he has since left the life) concluded his lectures on Job by claiming that God’s revelation in chapters 38-42 meant that God has more important things to do than to bother about every little human being’s problems. This is a problematic interpretation, by the way, just on exegetical grounds. But it harmonizes with what I discern as a dangerous tendency in the life of faith, to think that being a good Christian means being bullied into silence and conformity by a God who is too busy for us.

God is not too busy for us. God wants to hear from us, especially whatever is hurting us. “Then they cried to the Lord in their need.”

The disciplines of obedience, restraint of speech, and humility are necessary–not because God is threatened by us but because we are forgetful of God. God tends to speak in a still, small voice (which is to say, the opposite of the domineering voice that many lectors take on when reading God’s pronouncements at Mass), easily crowded out by noisiness and idle talkativeness. Talkativeness further cheapens words, and God wishes to give us His Word. Let’s not cheapen that exchange! God gives us an astounding palate of freedom, in order that we might freely offer ourselves as a gift in return. Obedience is not about us being so unreliable and depraved that we need to be treated as slaves. Rather, our desires tend to blind us toward the needs of others, and obedience habituates us to an openness to others, an openness that is, one hopes, less patronizing than what we otherwise might produce by do-gooder-ness [see Deus Caritas Est 34*]. And finally humility is a way to open myself to the grandeur of the cosmos (here is a closer approximation of the message of Job 38-42), of which I form a unique and unrepeatable part…as does everyone else.

Faith does not mean allowing my voice to be co-opted by a dominant power structure. Nor is it about a false propheticism that is license to speak self-righteously about everyone else’s problems. I may require taciturnity to restore my true voice, just as physical therapy necessarily includes rest and inactivity for a damaged limb. But the goal is not silence but true speech, accurate speech, healed of both breezy ignorance and of grating pretension.

* “Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.” (emphasis added)

Belief, Behavior, Structure: More from Natural Symbols

“The system of control is validated by a typical bias in the system of belief. These tendencies are the subject of this book, for they make their own typical demands on the media of expression and thus produce natural systems of symbolic behavior.”

So this is as close to a thesis statement as I can find in Mary Douglas’s classic book on cosmology, Natural Symbols. It appears a couple of pages before the end of Chapter 4 “Grid and Group,” on pages 66-67 in my 2001 Routledge edition. Let me spend a moment unpacking this quote, then offer an example from monastic life to show why the ideas in this book are so important.

For any community to function, it must be structured. If structure among human beings is to have any staying power, individual members of communities need to be invested in it. Too much disaffection among too many members leads to a breakdown in cooperation, mutual trust and understanding. In order to be invested in the community structure, individuals must share some kind of belief in what they are doing and how the structure harnesses their individual efforts toward the common goal. This “system of belief” thus “validates” the “system of control,” or what I am here calling by the more benign term structure. This is the gist of the first sentence. Without a common belief, structure will falter.

Let’s apply this to a monastery.  A monastery traditionally is envisioned as a kind of family with the abbot as father and the rest of the community as sons and brothers. The brothers themselves have a pecking order. Saint Benedict’s Rule is quite firm about brothers observing clear rank based on date of entrance to the monastery. I will have much more to say about this aspect of the Rule tomorrow. For now, I merely need to point out that the behavior of individual brothers is limited, guided and structured by a system. In this system, the abbot has final say over everything. Junior members show respect to seniors (by giving place, using honorary titles, and so on), and seniors are to love the juniors (by watching over their spiritual growth, using familiar titles of fondness). This is a monastic “system of control.” Brothers do not usually feel free to act outside of these structured relationships. When they do step outside of this system, there is a long disciplinary code awaiting them and a series of penances to be assigned to bring the erring brother back into a just place within the structure.

For this structure to be legitimate, for it to have validity, Bit must be connected to a plausible common system of belief. At root, this system of belief is just the gospel, but in the specific locale of the cloister, Benedict extends Biblical and liturgical teaching to validate a very particular structure he has legislated. “The abbot is believed to hold the place of Christ.” Note that this places the most stringent demands on the abbot himself, who is repeatedly warned to reflect on whether his conduct and decisions are worthy of Christ. Thus the structure also controls the abbot himself, lest anyone imagine that the notion of control is a ruse for securing maximum latitude for those in power. The abbot is understood to be someone who excels in two areas: righteous conduct and correct teaching, which is to say he is someone who has internalized the ideal system of control and system of belief.

Now let’s apply all of this to the second sentence in the quote.

Human communities tend to structure themselves in a limited number of ways, and to validate these structures with typical types of beliefs. In turn, these structures and associated systems of belief give rise to typical “media of expression.” What are these media? Certainly they include ways of speaking. In the Rule, monks are not to speak until spoken to, and in particular they are to listen to the abbot. When they do need to speak, they must learn to do so humbly and reasonably and at the appropriate time. So beyond the actual words used, monks communicate by signs of humility. They also signal their intentions by making use of correct times and places (monks are not to contend with their abbot, even outside of the cloister, for example). In fact, we can take this much further. Monks communicate in all kinds of silent ways: in the order in which we stand at liturgy and sit at table, in the way we dress and cut our hair, in the way we care for the tools of the community, the way in which we comport ourselves in the oratory, and so on. This is properly symbolic behavior, and Mary Douglas convincingly demonstrates that the type of symbolic behavior depends on (and in turn influences) the community structure and belief.

For the sake of simplicity, I like to summarize this whole nexus of ideas with a diagram, which I will attempt to render within the limits of blogging software:

media of expression/symbolic communication

⇑                                     ⇑

⇓                                     ⇓

system of control/structure        ⇔            system of belief

So we have three mutually influencing ideas, from the most interior and intellectual (belief), through the exterior and bodily (symbolic communication), to the most public and collective (structure). Tinkering with any one area will change the others in subtle ways, though Dame Mary strongly suggests that we can predict relatively well just how these changes will play out.

Let me offer one insight that we have had here in our monastery from reflecting on this schema. Much of our interior monastic work involves battling sinful thoughts. I have discovered that many brothers find this spiritual warfare very difficult and discouraging. From a bit of digging and creative rethinking of various aspects of the broadest tradition, we’ve discovered that the exclusive dwelling on thoughts, without attention to how we comport ourselves bodily (and express ourselves, often unwittingly), and without attention to how we maintain community structure, will often lead to exactly this frustration. This is because our bodily behaviors (my pet peeve in this area is monks rushing about–the quickest way to get a rebuke from the superior in Chicago) are undermining our beliefs.

Another vast area of potential cognitive dissonance arises in the area of community structure. Brothers enter the monastery from a world where we believe in a distinction between the public and the private. But this is very much at odds with Benedict’s structure. If we were completely strict in this area, we would not have individual rooms. We would instead all sleep in a common dormitory. Even more, seniors would regularly inspect the beds for any items that monks have stashed away for private use. Now, to be fair, common dormitories have almost never worked in our tradition. But this is a major problem for modern monks, for whom the cell is not intuitively a place of emptiness and pure prayer. From habit, the cell tends to devolve into a simple bedroom, a place to go to be alone, rather than to go to be with God. But if this is so, is it any wonder that at the time of prayer, we are hounded by self-serving thoughts and the fear that God is distant? We’ve encoded this into a space where we spend perhaps half of our day.

So often enough the answer to obsessive thinking is a change of behavior in the areas of bodily comportment and submission to community structure. This takes a lot of the heat off of the individual brother, who can relax a bit into allowing the practices of the life to change him from the outside in.

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.

You might be an emotivist if…

…you use intention to trump action.

What do I mean by that? When I began as Prior, I noticed that when some brothers failed to do something I had asked, they would reply with a chuckle or confused look at say something like, “Oh, I didn’t mean to do that…” or “I had intended to do that, but then I thought…” The expectation was that if a monk’s heart is in the right place, then if he sins or fails in his duties, I should be quick to forgive. What was often missing was a genuine apology. I don’t write this to shame my brothers; I think that this is the default mode of many people today. Certainly it’s a temptation for me.

If we believe the great sociologist Mary Douglas, this appeal to an inner state (good intention) and lackadaisical approach to formal, external actions (duties to one’s superiors), is a product of a certain kind of social organization. If my place in society is very clear and determined, when I am connected by ties of blood and marriage, hierarchical chains of binding authority, and so on, then external ritual (including obligatory actions mandated by authority, apologies, formal recognition of persons, etc) becomes more important. If I am free to change jobs, move around, lose touch with cousins, and keep my options open, then internal states become more important.

It is common today for people to claim that a focus on internal states is a more advanced form of religion, but Mary Douglas demonstrates that the Congolese pygmies had a similar approach to religious matters, when ethnographers studied them in the early 20th century. This has more to do with the mobility of a hunting and harvesting group than with any kind of cultural advancement or primitivism.

It is common today for people to claim that the more advanced the form of religion, the more its adherents focus on internal (“emotional”) states. Mary Douglas demonstrated that the Congolese pygmies had a peculiarly “modern” approach to religious matters, when ethnographers studied them in the early 20th century. They used no discernible ritual or magic and were more interested in a feeling of personal well-bring or joy. This preference has more to do with the mobility of a hunting and harvesting group than with any kind of cultural advancement or primitivism.

When brothers enter our monastery, they come from a very loose culture in terms of stability, mutual obligations, and so on. An entry into a monastery from this perspective might seem to be a personal choice, a way to maximize internal joy and freedom. And the monastic life can, at times, serve these purposes if we choose to pursue them. Most monks in a contemplative community have very little contact with the outside world, and what contact they do have tends to be with devout, supportive persons who are often inclined to praise our way of life. Which of course feels good if we’re looking for that kind of thing. When a superior corrects or criticizes, it’s tempting to think, “Who is this guy? Everybody thinks I’m pretty swell. I don’t know why he’s picking on me for failing–in his eyes–in jobs that aren’t that important anyway.” And the rest.

Mary Douglas notes a major problem with the attempt to import this loose structure into the monastery. Loose communities lose the ability to understand the heavy ritual component that makes sense of the monastic life and the Christian life in general. “The perception of symbols in general, as well as their interpretation, is socially determined. [Natural Symbols (1996), p. 9]” She goes on to show that loosely articulated social structures make it impossible to understand the full range of meanings of symbols that were at home in a more clearly articulated structure. Monastic life has always been highly regimented, based in clear lines of authority and obligation, and therefore has generated a wealth of symbols. Men entering today, however, usually can’t read them correctly right away, and part of our conversion of life involves learning how to do this. And this in turn requires us to discover our new identity through the roles that are given to us in the life: novice, junior, priest, cantor, prior, cook.

In an icon, every detail fits into an elaborate cosmology. Touch one point of Catholic or Orthodox doctrine, and you set the whole vibrating. Von Balthasar had something like this in mind when he described truth as "symphonic."

In an icon, every detail is symbolic and fits into an elaborate cosmology. Touch one point of Catholic or Orthodox doctrine, and you set the whole vibrating. Von Balthasar had something like this in mind when he described truth as “symphonic.”

Now the Catholic liturgy is also the product of a highly articulated social body, the Church. The world being what it is today, most of us struggle to make sense of dense symbols like the Eucharist, the priesthood, a church building, an icon, and papal vestments. If Prof. Douglas is correct (and there is good reason to suppose that her general theses in Natural Symbols are correct), then the cure for our liturgical mystification is something like commitment. We must make our own the roles suggested (or even given) to us by the Church and by the locale we happen to inhabit. This means getting involved in a parish, treating one’s pastor like a pastor, as someone who has authority over one’s spiritual life. It might mean recommitting to certain formal structures in one’s family (and explicitly in a climate of faith): common meals with assigned seating, traditional celebrations of holidays. It might mean taking more seriously days of abstinence and fast, holy days of obligation, and so on,–anything that requires us to order our internal experience by the external ritualized and moral demands of Church discipline, and, importantly, not letting ourselves off the hook by appeal to good intentions.

Which one did his father's will? Talk and intentions are easy to come by; deeds can be hard and may require a change of heart.

Which one did his father’s will? Talk and intentions are easy to come by; deeds can be hard and may require a change of heart.

What is the Liturgy?

At one point in yesterday’s Oblate meeting, we discussed the difference between devotional pictures and icons. This discussion took place in a conference based on Pope Benedict XVI’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. And so it was noted that icons and devotional pictures might share themes, and composition. Pictures might even be of  icons. But icons are always liturgical. The way an icon is prepared, the fasting that an iconographer undergoes, the forty days that an icon traditional rests upon a consecrated altar, and the final blessing of the icon by an ordained priest using holy water marks this object as part of the liturgy. A reproduction of an icon, such as those that adorn our home page, are not liturgical objects in this sense, but are devotional. As such, they extend from the liturgy and should lead us back to the liturgy. Reverence for an icon is a liturgical act, pious thoughts and prayer before a devotional picture is not–though these are perfectly good, even necessary, activities when one is not able to attend the liturgy itself.

Corpus Christi Procession: the liturgy goes out into the world.

Corpus Christi Procession: the liturgy goes out into the world.

I open with this reflection to draw attention to the breadth of what we mean by the liturgy. In the previous post, I noted that I needed to say something about what the liturgy is. I’ve spent a good amount of time explaining the liturgy’s interior, spiritual reality. From this vantage point, the liturgy is the work of Christ the high priest, bringing us to the Father in the Spirit, mediating for us and by means of us, His Body, for the salvation of the whole of the cosmos.

But how does this happen, and how do we know that it is happening? The liturgy also has an exterior, incarnated reality, in that it takes place by means of certain types of persons (the baptized generally, the ordained ministers in a more specific sense), at certain times, in certain places (mainly churches, but also anywhere that the faithful gather in Christ’s name), by means of certain texts and ritual actions, and with certain instruments (bread and wine, water, oil, stone, incense, vestments, icons, crosses, candlesticks, wax, etc.).

Catholics are apt to the of the Mass when someone says, “liturgy.” And this is a good impulse, though a truncated one. The liturgy’s center is indeed the Eucharist, but to reduce the liturgy to Mass is quite problematic. The liturgy includes all of the sacraments. It also includes the whole Divine Office. This is not an obligatory part of the liturgy for the laity. However, since it is the liturgy, the Divine Office possesses an efficacy for uniting us in spirit to God that non-liturgical prayer does not have (I plan to write about how to pray the rosary in a ‘liturgical’ manner, and why this is the deeper spirit of this beautiful–almost indispensable–devotional prayer).

But…I’m still not finished listing the events that make up the liturgy. Blessings pronounced by a priest are part of the liturgy, and blessed objects retain a connection to the liturgy. So what I said above about icons falls in here. So do meals (!). Exorcisms, processions, religious professions, oblations and promises are all part of the liturgy. The marriage act itself is liturgical, since it is intrinsic to the confection of the sacrament of matrimony (this is also why same-sex marriage, whatever merits there might be to bestowing recognition on a stable partnership of love, cannot be considered Christian marriage).

The anointing of the sick, another action of Christ the mediator.

The anointing of the sick, another action of Christ the mediator.

So the liturgy is actually quite extensive. In the West, we have had a tendency to shorten and narrow what we mean by the liturgy, as I mentioned above. This has some problematic effects. The good news, however, is that recovering the richness of the liturgy can be a life-altering project, a real point of foundational renewal for the Church, and the basis any genuine ecumenical effort. As I mentioned in the last post, the corporal works of mercy are not therefore dispensable. They will be efficacious, I would suggest, to the extent that those ministering in this way are clearly grounded in the liturgy. The acts of healing and love, the active life, will be seen to be the work of Christ Himself and not simply that of human do-gooders. In fact, we can throw ourselves into all kinds of activities, without fear of falling into Pelagianism, if our source of energy and strength is Christ Himself, uniting us to Him and to each other in the liturgy, He “Who has made the two one.”

From this standpoint again, we have a way of understanding the Church’s traditional teaching on the centrality of the consecrated life, especially the contemplative life. Contemplatives have the duty to live the liturgical life to the fullest, to invite others to the vision of the liturgy, and to give witness to Christ’s triumph and mission of reconciliation. “A monk is he who directs his gaze towards God alone, and who, being at peace with God, becomes a source of peace,” said St. Theodore the Studite. Christ made peace by the blood of His Cross [Colossians 1: 20], that is, by the unique sacrifice which is extended and re-presented at every liturgical event. And immersion in this reality changes us into eschatological persons. 

Mass is often seen merely as an obligation, and the notion that even the laity would benefit from regular attendance at yet more of the liturgy is, in my experience, often shrugged off as an inconvenience, taking them away from more pressing concerns. From the perspective that I am outlining here, I hope that it is clear that this dismissal is skewed somewhat. Yes, Mass is obligatory for a baptized Catholic, but if we knew the gift of God that is the liturgy, we would welcome opportunities to participate more frequently, as our state in life permits. We would also learn to connect all of our prayer to the liturgical celebrations, to the vocabulary, priorities, and sentiments of the “work of God.” Then all of our prayer would be transforming us into women and men of Christ, into saints. Thus it is that the liturgy is the foundation for one of the most crucial insights of Vatican II, the universal call to holiness.

Liturgical Strangeness

I’m spending the week at my mother’s and stepfather’s farm, working on my book. I do hope to post somewhat regularly during this time, and continue to do so when I return.

I’ve written in the last two posts that our baptisms invite us to become different kinds of persons, not simply better persons, but truly different persons. Reborn persons. I also suggested that this process will keep us out of our comfort zones, that we can’t even be quite sure what kind of persons that God intends us to be, until we have developed the capacity to recognize what this otherness looks like and feels like. I finally suggested that if the liturgy disorients us, we should be cautious of “fixing” it by making it more rational.

Pope Benedict XVI at the Regensburg Address

Pope Benedict XVI at the Regensburg Address

This may sound like a recipe for complete nonsense. If we don’t know what kind of persons we are going to be until we get there, but we can only get there by being different kinds of persons, how can we proceed? One temptation in modern times is to understand the virtue of Faith as the engine that gets us where we are going. And faith in this sense is understood as a blind stab in the dark. God, in this model, takes pity on our helplessness and responds by mysteriously enlightening us.

This could happen. And it does. But it also is fraught with potential problems. I don’t find evidence of this dynamic in the early Church (with the possible and notable exception of Tertullian). Persons like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen borrowed from themes in the writings of the Apostles John and Paul to stress the objective rationality of the Christian gospel over against the superstition of pagan piety. Pope Benedict XVI dwelt with this profoundly in his much-misunderstood Regensburg Address, titled “Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization.”

Furthermore, this is not a model that commends itself either to separated Protestant brethren or to most non-believers. From a Protestant perspective, the notion of blind faith might actually make sense, but then to make such an act of faith within the Catholic Church appears self-defeating. For critical thinkers outside Christianity, we would seem to be asking them to leave reason at the door.

Finally, such an act of blind faith contradicts the Magisterium, the teachings of the First Vatican Council and of Pope Saint John Paul II.

So what am I getting at? The paradox that I am describing was one recognized by Socrates. How can one discover justice when one is not just? The same way one learns to be a pianist without being born a pianist. One makes an act of faith in a teacher who already knows the craft, the kind of person that the student must become, and how to get train the student to become a real pianist.

Thus, if we are called to become eschatological persons, citizens of the Kingdom of God and fellow citizens with the saints, we must apprentice ourselves to those who already are the kinds of persons who know what this feels like. To some extent, this is all of us who attend the liturgy together, since at the liturgy we really are trained by the combined wisdom of a tradition molded by the experience of prayer and the presence of Christ.

Let me take this one step further, at some risk to myself. Even within the Church, there are those who spend more time and focus their lives more intently on living the life of the Kingdom now (or at least should be doing this). These are monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative type. This is why, historically, the liturgical books in the East have been crafted by monks, and in the West, up until around 1300 or so, the Benedictine Rite is almost indistinguishable from the Roman Rite in general. This is also why, after this link in the West was weakened, the liturgy has become shorter, and more ‘rational’ (meaning less mysterious and baffling). The changes that came after the Council were simply a continuation of a trend centuries in the making.

The incorrupt body of St. John Vianney

The incorrupt body of St. John Vianney

This is a shame because the Council’s teachings are actually quite lovely and traditionally orthodox. We as a Church were simply not prepared to implement them well in 1970. This has been changing. Our last three popes have all been profoundly shaped by the documents of Vatican II and have been finding creative ways to correct some misunderstandings. What I am thinking about here is how central the liturgy ought to be in our lives, for example. On the train up to Wisconsin on Sunday, I prayed the Roman Office from the community cellphone. It’s easy to find. Anyone can pray the Office, and many people are. The notes on the website were excellent. When I arrived, my stepfather shared with me his fondness for the publication This Day, which is Liturgical Press’s answer to the popular Magnificat publication. Both have shortened versions of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, based in the Psalms and the rest of Scripture, the daily readings from Mass, reflections on the saints in the calendar. These are beautiful examples not only of the centrality of the liturgy, but of the way in which the liturgy can connect to the increasingly important role of the laity to evangelize in the world. At the heart of our shared identity as the Body of Christ is our shared work of the liturgy, in which we see clearly how we relate as members of the Body, and we allow ourselves to be incorporated into this Body, lifted up with Christ to the right hand of the Father.

So…to wrap up:

Become a different kind of person, an eschatological person.

Live the Kingdom now, and train for this by praying the Church’s liturgy, even if on your smartphone in your room.

If monks and nuns require you to do strange things at the liturgy, don’t neglect them on the grounds that they are irrelevant rituals except to these strange contemplative types. We might not be able to explain right away why certain precepts need to be observed at the liturgy. You will get it once you’ve done it a bunch of times.

Imitate the lives of the saints. Of every era, not just recent ones or those who fit your definition of sanctity. Learn to be catholic in your tastes.

Never despair of God’s mercy.

“My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us.”–St. John Vianney