Articles under Monastic Life

Liturgical Strangeness

August 4, 2015

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

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

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

Going to the Father 8: God’s Welcome

July 24, 2015

When I was appointed prior of our community in 2004, one of my tasks was to work out realistic plan to build a genuine monastery cloister. We have been living in a former parish rectory and convent for twenty-four years. Most of that time, the space has been quite adequate. But as we have increased in number to ten, the need for better living quarters has become much more apparent. That said, the plan needed to be conceived from a long-range vantage point. The cost of construction is not trifling, and we are still a young community. Renovation and construction are psychologically straining, and we need to prepare ourselves well for this kind of work.

The magnificent choir of Westminster Abbey. Nothing quite so impressive for us! But one sees the architectural significance of the choir in a monastic church.

Thus, it seemed to me from early on that the first priority was the renovation of the church building. Take care of God’s house and let him take care of our house! The church is a public space, the place where most people learn about who we are. Now the structure of our church was conceived for the needs of a medium-sized parish, rather than for a small monastery. While we have been able to use the building profitably, we have long been aware of the ways in which the church’s architecture nudges us away from our professed goal of being a cloistered, contemplative community.

Renovation began in earnest two years ago when we commissioned our iconostasis and began work on the altar. The most important step, however, was certainly going to be the construction of a real monastic choir. Monks can spend over three hours a day in choir, and having a choir that meets the demands of the full Benedictine office would not only be a plus for us, but would also help visitors grasp that this is not a parish anymore, that it fulfills a different ecclesial function.

So we began the discussion of building a new choir. What would be our requirements for this improvement?

We have a beautiful neo-gothic church. The new choir must be appropriate to the space, with a design that doesn’t conflict with the gothic motifs that we already have. We were fortunate to discover New Holland Church Furniture in Pennsylvania, who have designed an absolutely beautiful and noble, yet functional, choir. It fits perfectly in the transept.

Our old choir had nineteen stalls, enough for our daily liturgy, but not enough when we hosted meetings, or when we invited Schola Laudis to join us for Solemn Vespers. The new choir has thirty-two stalls, adequate for both of these recurring needs.

Rood screen in Southwold Church

We needed some sense of separation from the rest of the nave, without giving the impression of being distant or unwelcoming. Some brothers were even interested in a grille or rood screen. Ultimately we decided that this was too much separation. We decided on a low wall for the choir, and two additional low walls separating the choir from the nave. These look like small portions of a communion rail, though they are really stylized versions of a rood screen.

I mentioned in the previous post that our work on the altar and iconostasis, as well as our custom of celebrating Mass ad orientem could cause a kind of theological imbalance, implying God’s distance and undermining a sense of His welcoming immanence. Our design of the choir needed to address this.

Traditionally, the choir is part of the sanctuary. This means that in some monastic churches, for example, most Trappist churches, the sanctuary can end up stretching out over nearly the entire church. We had not capitalized on the possibilities of using the full, extended sanctuary to “close the gap” between clergy and laity. Again, the old parish architecture tended to form our imaginations in such a way so that we thought of the old, narrower sanctuary (all the way to the eastern apse, on the other side of the choir) as the sanctuary proper and the choir as something else. And the choir tended to act as something of a barrier between the laity and the distant sanctuary.

The grille separating the nuns of Regina Laudis from the rest of the abbey church.

Then one of the brothers got a splendid idea. To express it best, let me quote from the General Instruction of the Roman Missal.

The Chair for the Priest Celebrant and Other Seats

310. The chair of the priest celebrant must signify his office of presiding over the gathering and of directing the prayer. Thus the best place for the chair is in a position facing the people at the head of the sanctuary, unless the design of the building or other circumstances impede this: for example, if the great distance would interfere with communication between the priest and the gathered assembly, or if the tabernacle is in the center behind the altar…[emphasis added].

With our new, rather massive choir in the center of the church, putting the presider’s chair in the old sanctuary up near the altar would definitely interfere with communication between the priest and the assembly. So we put the presider’s chair on the west side of the transept, between the choir and assembly, where the priest will sit during the Liturgy of the Word. For the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the priest will make the long walk through the choir, up the old sanctuary steps, up the new predella steps, to the new altar and icon.

The altar of St. Nicholas’s Basilica in Bari, Italy. Note the three steps. This graded platform is known as the predella.

I describe this movement of the priest quite deliberately. Another strategy we have used for bridging the gap between the lay faithful and the monks is the copious use of processions. For example, when we process from the entrance of the church, through the nave, to the choir, part of what is expressed is our being called forth from the gathered assembly to our particular place in the church as monks. We go forth, as it were, to lead our lay brothers and sisters rather than slipping in from the sacristy and departing without having any ‘communication’ (and I intend this word in its full theological sense) with other members of the Body of Christ.

Most radically, this unusual placement of the presider’s chair helps to illustrate what I take to be the meaning of facing east. Now, when we turn to the East for the Kyrie and Gloria, as has been our custom, the monks will have their backs to the priest! We actually tried this out last Sunday, when the old choir stalls had already been removed and we were making do with wire chairs. The meaning was quite clear. We were all turning to face a common direction, and there was nothing particularly ‘clerical’ about the priest’s orientation, since he was very much in the middle of everything rather than far away.

The construction is finishing up today. We will have many photos available soon, and hopefully these will include photos of the actual liturgy in progress. We welcome any questions or comments!

Going to the Father 6: On Transcendence and Immanence

July 20, 2015

Before we tackle the installation of the new altar, the iconostasis and the choir, we will need to deal with two tensions within monastic life. The first is transcendence versus immanence, and the second, closely related, is between cloister and hospitality. Let’s begin with the latter.

A cloister garden with central fountain and four walkways representing the four rivers of Eden. Courtesy geograph.org.uk

The cloister is the area of the monastery reserved for monks or nuns. It is the concrete sign of withdrawal from the world for the sake of the Kingdom of God. In the stronger parts of our tradition, the cloister is even equated with heaven, or at the very least, with a restored Garden of Eden. Cloisters have traditionally been built with four corners with a fountain at the center, embodying Genesis 2: 10-14. To enter the cloister requires the death and resurrection of monastic vows, and this death has frequently been indicated by the use of a funeral pall to cover the monk while the litany of saints is sung at his profession. Entrance into the cloister involves the renunciation of worldly thoughts, preoccupations, and behaviors, and the embrace of a holy life, even an angelic life, keeping watch like the sleepless angels and joining their constant praise of God in song.

One common misunderstanding of the symbolic value of the cloister conflates withdrawal from the world with mere privacy. Monks have nothing of their own, not even their wills, and so to imagine that the cloister is the private area of the monks where they can ‘be themselves’ and not bothered by guests is missing the point. Monks only leave the cloister (in theory) reluctantly, and out of obedience directed toward the welfare of the church. Nuns who practice papal enclosure almost never leave at all, for any reason. It is not because they “keep to themselves” or are unconcerned with the world. Rather, the world needs reminding that its values are not lasting, and that the things of the world are of value only as the open onto the ultimate realities of God’s coming reign. So the separate, cloistered lives of contemplatives are meant to model for the church and the world the transcendent values of Christ’s kingdom, not a retiring life in this world.

If the cloistered life requires this separation from the world, how is it that “monasteries are never lacking for guests?” In fact, the tension between cloister and hospitality only apparent. We monks and nuns certainly want to welcome others to share in the joy of serving God in the liturgy and in a life that focuses on constant prayer and gratitude. And so monasteries normally have areas for guests to stay and eat, and places where they can meet with the monks, if that is desirable (plenty of our guests in Chicago are happy with silence!). Clear boundaries make hospitality possible, even easy, since mutual expectations can be clear and all involved can relax in the confidence that we are together doing God’s will. Sometimes communities today allow guests more free access to the cloister. I can’t say whether or not this is a good practice in every case. In our particular case, it has not worked in the past because our cloister is so small that any compromise of it tends to flatten the sense of transcendence to which I referred above. Guests who have not undergone monastic formation usually don’t know how to comport themselves within the cloister in such a way as to maintain the atmosphere of prayer and recollection that is the goal of the separation from external anxieties.

Joseph Fiennes as Luther. After his gig as Shakespeare, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow, his rebound tossed him into the slough of despond opposite _deus absconditus_. If you aren’t into geeky theological jokes, just ignore me.

And if we monks are not able to maintain this sense of recollection, of God’s immanent presence in all things, we will not be able to communicate to others. And so we see how it can be that the apparent tension between transcendence and immanence is also only apparent, once properly understood. We need ways to symbolize God’s transcendence for ourselves so that His immanence does not become something bland and taken for granted. And we need ways of symbolizing His immanence that avoid taming God or reducing His presence to something this-worldly. God’s presence everywhere should be a routine surprise, and this requires an alertness and special discipline. The cloister is set up in such a way as to make this discipline possible.

I have mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that our monastery church is robustly ‘vertical’, and an emphasis on the verticality of the architecture means an emphasis on God’s transcendence. When theologians argue about God’s transcendence, there is commonly today a certain fearfulness that this majestic God will retreat into a faraway place, leaving us all but orphaned, anxiously sending up prayers in the blind hope that they will somehow reach him in spite of our feebleness. There is reason to think that this kind of theology was present, even dominant, in the Western Church from the end of the Middle Ages until recently (this is a very complex question!), and certainly the distance between God and ourselves has been felt by figures like Martin Luther and Cornelius Jansen. The reforms of the liturgy that began in the nineteenth century and culminated after Vatican II, were meant, in part, to address this imbalance.

And so when we began celebrating Mass facing the East and began talking about restoring the high altar, a few of our knowledgeable friends expressed concern, and understandably so. The task facing us as monks was to find a way to communicate, in symbol, the reality that a robust sense of God’s transcendence can very much be at the service of a joyful, felt experience of God’s loving and merciful nearness. This complementarity needs to be kept in mind as I describe, in the next few posts, how we came to commission our beautiful iconostasis, restore the high altar, and help design a new choir, installation of which begins today!

Going to the Father 5: The Full Benedict Option

July 18, 2015

Our community began life living according to the charism of the Community of Jerusalem. This new religious order began in Paris and spread to many major European cities and to Montreal. We were going to be their foundation in Chicago, and in a filial sense we were. When the brothers arrived in Chicago in 1991, however, there were canonical obstacles in the way of an official affiliation.

Palmisano Park and Saint Barbara’s parish in Bridgeport. It looks a lot nicer in the summer! For a terrific gallery, click on the photo.

This meant that our continued existence depended upon the local Archbishop. Cardinal Bernadin had invited us, and was a strong supporter of our work, but by the mid-90’s, he was experiencing serious health problems, including the cancer that would eventually claim his life in 1997. So we were looking for a way to strengthen our community canonically, perhaps by affiliating with a different monastic community. Another factor in this discernment process was the strain of translating what was then a _very_ French, even Parisian, religious ideal into the blue-collar, multi-ethnic, South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. These were the days before Bridgeport became the new Bohemia (or for locals, the new Wicker Park/new Pilsen…), but even now, I don’t see the Jerusalem model working here.

We began looking for something more stable and at the same more flexible. The idea of becoming Benedictine had been tossed around, but most of the Benedictine communities we knew were operating schools or involved in other active ministries. Our mission from the Cardinal was to be contemplative. One of the monks went on retreat to Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, and there learned that they had recently entered into a congregation of Benedictines that was more oriented toward contemplation. Formerly known as the Cassinese Congregation of the Primitive Observance, in 1997 the newly-christened “Subiaco Congregation” numbered nearly seventy communities, spread over six continents.

Christ in the Desert has its own very interesting history, which you can read about here. Make no mistake, this is a place of contemplation. Fourteen miles down a gravel road into the Chama canyon, it’s pristinely quiet and just rustic enough to keep you alert (e.g. rattlesnakes). The community there very generously offered to adopt us city boys as a dependent house, if we so chose. After consultation with Cardinal Bernadin, who enthusiastically supported the change, we entered into the Benedictine family.

Christ in the Desert, a place of extraordinary beauty and prayer.

During one of the abbot’s first visits, he got rid of the community money box and pointed out that we needed to pray the office of Vigils. We began to visit there more frequently, often returning with new ideas. We noted how traditional practices like statio (brothers lining up in ‘battle rank’ and processing into the choir) and penances for latecomers at the liturgy helped to create an atmosphere of recollection and purpose. We also discovered that once we would adopt a new practice from the Rule, we would begin to see how it connected to other practices in the Rule. Many disciplines that seemed silly or outdated when we began, gradually came into focus, and the wisdom of the Rule understood as a whole, and within the larger monastic tradition, began to invigorate us. We became evangelists for Saint Benedict’s monastic vision.

There were two other significant events in this movement toward a stronger, more integral observance of the Rule.

First was another article in Worship magazine, this one by Monsignor Francis Mannion. The article discussed the blessings for brothers leaving and returning to the cloister. These are minor exorcisms. This being the case, use of these blessing generates a certain disposition of the monk toward the world. It is not hostile, mind you. But it is cautious and realistic about the importance of the discipline of silence and withdrawal for the monk or nun. We live in a bustling city with many potential dangers to one’s spiritual health, especially for those who cultivate a contemplative openness to God’s quiet communication through His creatures. So we began to use the blessings.

A profession at St. Walburga’s Abbey. Note the abbess’s crosier.

Secondly, we struck up a friendship with the nuns at St. Walburga’s Abbey in Virginia Dale, Colorado. We used to go there regularly on community retreats as a way to experience a bit of distance from the city. They are another contemplative community, and even have a mitered abbess (meaning, among other things, she has the canonical right to carry a crozier and to preach). It was there that the idea of doing all 150 Psalms in a week took shape in our minds. We had felt that the peculiar circumstance of the city required us to have less Psalmody and more silence, but the sisters’ example worked away at us. There was something about their joyful, matter-of-fact acceptance of the requirements of the Rule that moved us deeply. We began chanting the full Psalter in the year 2001, and once more, the immediate effect was that many other aspects of the liturgical code of the Rule suddenly made sense. They seemed rational.

Now I recount all this because it is parallel to our experience with the larger tradition of the liturgy. Our typical experience tends to narrow of thinking about the liturgy to: 1) the Mass; 2) Tridentine vs. Novus Ordo; and 3) political leanings of those who favor one of the two options. But the liturgy is celebrated by all Christians, and has been for two millennia. It includes the whole panoply of the Mass, Divine Office, Processions and Litanies, blessings of persons and holy items, and all the accoutrements that go with: vestments, buildings, music and so on. Once we began to discover the ancient Benedictine rite of the Divine Office, for example, other aspects of the liturgy seemed less odd, less tied to contemporary political positions, more laden with potential for spiritual growth, more full of joy. This is the broader background of our use of the ad orientem posture at Mass. There is a whole world of thought that created the liturgy under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and working our way back into this stream of life brought insight into theology and prayer that we had not obtained through newer, more locally restricted practices.

The more we discovered, the more we hungered for discovery in the Church’s broad experience of the Kingdom of God, inbreaking in the the Divine Liturgy, to which we will return in the next post.

Going to the Father, Part 1: Liturgy as Evangelization

July 6, 2015

We are preparing to have a new choir constructed and installed in our church. I have been invited by Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB, at Pray Tell Blog, to offer some explanation of the theology behind the shape and placement of the choir. As a prelude to this project, and to give the fullest possible context, I would like to tell the story of our liturgical development, from the foundation of the monastery to the installation of the choir.

This story begins with our three founders working as missionaries in Haiti and Brazil

Unmasking Emotivism

June 26, 2015

Thanks to Ariadne’s thread, Theseus was able to escape the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. In the Middle Ages, the Church saw Theseus as a type of Christ, descending into the dissolution of hell, slaying death, and leading the lost souls from darkness to light.

“[I]t’s time for the LGBT community to start moving beyond genetic predisposition as a tool for gaining mainstream acceptance of gay rights. . . .For decades now, it’s been the most powerful argument in the LGBT arsenal: that we were “born this way.” . . .Still, as compelling as these arguments are, they may have outgrown their usefulness”

I begin with a quote from dancer and writer Brandon Ambrosino,

Which Questions Should We Ask?

June 19, 2015

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

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

Back to School

June 17, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prima Theologia

June 6, 2015

Key concept #1: Liturgy is theology. In fact, it is primary theology.

The “Benedict Option” as exercised by actual Benedictines, is not a rejection of the world, but of regnant worldviews that distort and obscure the gospel. Which is to say such worldviews obscure reality. This is because Christ the Truth came from the Father to free us from sin and error. Worldviews are not so easy to change. They are generally the whole background of everything we think and do. To subject our worldview to a systematic examination can be profoundly disorienting. We should recall that it took Saint Paul many years to sort out the full implications of his conversion (he doesn’t specify, but note the passage of seventeen years in Galatians 1: 18–2: 1, some of which was certainly spent rethinking everything). Saint Antony the Great retreated to the desert around the age of 20 and emerged as a public figure again at 50. Things take time.

Paul’s early career was a series of reversals. Here is depicted his stealth escape from Damascus, the city where he had gone to persecute Christians.

But it helps when others can point out something of the goal, something of the discrepancy between what we had been taking for granted and what our new worldview-in-Christ should look like.

In the early Church, theology was roughly the equivalent of contemplative prayer, a first-hand, personal knowledge of God. This is to be distinguished from knowledge about God or from mere knowledge that God exists, hearsay accounts of God. But contemplative prayer took for granted the Church and the Church’s regular engagement in liturgy. Liturgy is our participation in the exercise of Christ’s high priesthood, the lifting up of our hearts and minds to God, our mystical encounter with God.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the word ‘theology’ began to undergo a certain transformation, becoming the more familiar academic concept. This wasn’t entirely bad; in fact, there were many good things that came about from the more systematic application of philosophical methods to the common fund of the knowledge of God.

Blessed Columba Marmion, OSB

But this new idea of theology is at a second remove from the encounter with God. At least it can be performed that way. This began to be felt as a problem in the early nineteenth century, as the effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt even within the Church. The roots of the liturgical movement are found in the efforts of Dom Prosper Gueranger and the Wolter brothers at Beuron. In both cases, an effort was made to experience a fuller liturgical celebration. The movement gained greatly in the twentieth century and bore real fruit in the Second Vatican Council (even if it’s taken us time to sort of the wheat from the tares in the intervening years). The liturgical reforms of Vatican II were meant to help re-open the font of theology to everyone, to make available the insights of Benedictines like Odo Casel, Lambert Beaudoin, and Blessed Columba Marmion, for the whole Church, especially those outside the cloister.

Joseph Bottum relates a telling anecdote in An Anxious Age. He is discussing contemporary Catholicism with students in California. One tells him, “I just go to church for confession, to pray, and to take Communion.” The gist of the story, in Bottum’s version, is that young people tune out the homilies and don’t expect much from priests, other than that they show up and dispense the sacraments. What strikes me in this quote is the lack of any sense that Communion, confession, and prayer are all liturgical acts, couched in a whole world, strewn with Biblical vocabulary, thick symbolic gesture, and so on. Rather than living an entirely new life in Christ, the sense is that we go on living in the old world, the one that’s passing away, and from time to time we get our sacramental immunization shot a church, then return to that old world, hopefully not to lose too much fervor along the way. This is better than skipping church! But is it adequate to the New Evangelization that we are being challenged to undertake?

We all know (thanks to Vatican II and Saint John Paul II) that the Eucharist is the source and summit or our baptismal lives. But how do we make sense of it? The Church has given us a whole liturgical discipline to assist us in unpacking the life-altering content of Christ’s gift.

Acclimating ourselves to this “Liturgical Asceticism” (I use here Notre Dame prof David Fagerberg’s term) takes time. And so often when I mention this idea of liturgy as primary theology, the concern is that we need something more immediate, effective, engaged! Something slimmed down for a jet-set generation.

But this was part of my point in mentioning Paul and Antony. Learning to see with spiritual eyes does take time. Yes, there are prodigies like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who benefit from saintly parents and a strong Catholic culture in general. But for most of us, in most ages of the Church’s history (we conveniently forget that the first thousand years were not always so resoundingly successful in the West!), divinization is a long, and sometimes arduous process. And why not? Isn’t the God of all peace worth the finite struggles of this temporal life? More to come.

The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

June 5, 2015

In the hands of a genius or a saint, or, even more so , a man who, like Bernard, is both, the artificial, the factitious, and art become natural, or, rather, nature yields itself unrestrainedly to art and its laws.

The specific type of cultural engagement of monasticism does not simply dissolve culture. It creates a new culture. Few have illustrated this with such erudition and passion as did Fr. Jean LeClercq, OSB. I opened with his description of the high art of St. Bernard’s prose and poetry.