Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 1:1

Bəre’shit bara elohim et hashamayim.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens.”  God is not said to have created ‘heavens’ but ‘the heavens,’ meaning the very heavens that we know, that we see today.  God did not create generic heavens from a pre-existing template, as we might infer if the author had written, “In the beginning, God created heavens.”  God was not bound to the “realization” of an idea independent of Himself.  The ideal and real are the same in God, because in creating the real, God created the ideal in the same action.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Finding in the Temple

The Presentation and Finding of Jesus in the Temple both foreshadow Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.  Here, after three days in which He is missing, He is found once more ‘in His Father’s house’.  As Christ grows in wisdom and power and transforms us from within, we often experience this as a loss of ourselves; we no longer quite know what to expect of ourselves, where we ought to turn, how we should act in certain situations.  This mystical dying and rising finds its meaning when we find ourselves in God’s house, either in the liturgy of the Church, or in fervent interior prayer.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Presentation

Inevitably, mission within the Church will require making an offering of ourselves to God.  The Virgin Mary presents the child Jesus in the Temple in order to fulfill the requirement of the Torah that each first-born son must be given to God.  This is a reminder that God spared the first-born of the Israelites, ransoming them from Pharaoh.  In Christ, then, the Church makes each of us an offering to God.  This is perhaps best experienced when the precepts of the Church prove difficult, when fasting or tithing or adhering to moral teachings gives us reasons to ‘go where we do not choose to go’.  This act of faith, the interior oblation of the will, is the ‘obedience and not sacrifice’ that is acceptable to God.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Nativity

Obviously, Christ’s birth corresponds in one clear way to baptism again; but in the images that I have offered so far, we see that a time comes when we are no longer nourished passively within the Church.  We must venture out into the world, still as children, perhaps, but with an eye toward mission.  As the Father sent Christ into the world, so does Christ send us.  This mission does not mean that we are separated from Christ, but it does mean fully accepting our responsibility for the Church, for spreading the faith and giving witness to God’s love.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Visitation

This is perhaps the easiest mystery to interpret ‘ethically’.  Meditations on the Visitation typically offer Mary as a model of selfless service to others in need, even when our own needs are real.  That surely makes for an edifying reflection.  In this series, however, I would like to go to a mystical level.  Where is Jesus Christ in the Visitation, and how do I recapitulate His life?

If we are always being nourished in the womb of Mother Church, do we consent to be carried along with her?  To be identified with her, not only in good works, but even when it seems to be at cost to ourselves?  When others, in the role of Elizabeth and John the Baptist, see us, do they point to us as examples of the Church’s gifts and nourishment?  Or do we merely give the impression of belonging to a voluntary organization, one that perhaps takes the man Jesus as a role model, but does not actually make Christ present?

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Annunciation

Mary, hearing the Word of God as spoken by Gabriel, said, “Yes,” and the result was the Incarnation of the Word within her.  We participate in this mystical reality when, in our baptisms, we say, “I believe.”  The life of Christ is conceived mystically in our hearts, and we are conceived in the womb of the Church.  Like the life of an unborn child, our spiritual life needs the nourishment of the Church’s sacraments and teaching, so that we will eventually grow to maturity in faith.  How does my life change when I truly and inwardly consent to the gift of faith?  How do my actions change when I recognize the presence of Christ within?

Incarnational Meditations on the Mysteries of the Rosary: Introduction

[Today I am embarking on what I hope will be a series of meditations on the mysteries of the rosary, from an ‘incarnational’ viewpoint.  This first post will serve as an introduction to the series.]

What do I mean by an ‘incarnational’ meditation?

In fact, I mean to communicate several interlocking ideas, with the intention of countering a root difficulty in modern spirituality, our struggle with the concept of communion.  We bristle—at some level, at least—at the notion of communion these days, whether it be with God or with the Church.  There are many reasons for this.  I suspect that a main problem is fear:  fear that communion will mean losing ourselves, opening ourselves to ‘inauthenticity’ or, worse, being used by those who would claim to desire communion with us but in fact seek to dominate, to stamp out the uniqueness that each of us possesses by divine grace.

What does this leave us with, spiritually speaking?  Well, there is a tendency to reduce Christian spirituality to a kind of ‘do-gooderism’, a series of ethical exhortations and practices and prayers.  The purpose of these things—when they really do take place—is for God to communicate (just enough?) grace to allow us to do some good in the world, or at least be assured that we are not completely depraved.

Now, good works are not to be disparaged, and Christians are obliged to practice them.  But we stumble when we notice that there are many persons in the world who achieve good works without being Christian.  So if Christianity consists in showing that we are nicer and kinder than others, we founder on the empirical reality that this is, alas, often enough not the case.  Here I should insert, in keeping with the overall goal of this proposed series of posts, that meditations on the mysteries of the rosary tend, in my experience, exactly toward an ethical model:  we imitate Christ or Mary in order to become ‘better people’.  This, in itself, has much to recommend it, but at some point this tack will, I believe, reveal its limitations in bringing us closer to the mystery of what it means to be Christian.  What, then, does actually separate us as Christians from others in the world?

The answer is baptism:  in baptism, we receive the very gift of God’s own life.  In this communion of the divine and human in our own hearts, we recapitulate the reality of the Incarnation of God’s Word in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and indeed all the mysteries of the Life of Christ.  We do not merely ‘imitate’, if we mean by this an effort (often conceived of as our own effort) to do things that we think Jesus would do.  Imitation, in modern parlance, has something of a bad name.  ‘Imitation’ wool or leather means ‘inauthentic’, a rip-off of something of superior quality.  But when St. Paul exhorts us to “become imitators of me, as I am of Christ” [1 Cor 11: 1], we might hear that we are two steps down on the ladder of sanctity even before we begin.  But Paul’s own imitation of Christ was so intense that he was able to become alter Christus, another Christ.  Let me allow St. Gregory of Nyssa to emphasize this point for me:

“[Paul imitated Christ] so brilliantly that he revealed his own Master in himself, his own soul being transformed [my emphasis] through his accurate imitation of his prototype, so that Paul no longer seemed to be living and speaking, but Christ Himself seemed to be living in him.  As this astute perceiver of particular goods says: ‘Do you seek a proof of the Christ who speaks in me?’ [2 Cor 13: 3] and: ‘It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me. [Gal. 2: 20]’”

—On Perfection, FOTC 58, trans. by Virginia Woods Callahan

What we have the privilege of being, already in this life, is the very Body of Christ alive and sanctifying the world.  To do this, good works are necessary, but we also must be ‘renewed in mind’, not that we might be the only persons in the world who do good, but that we “may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” [cf. Rom 12: 2]  Being renewed in mind requires meditation, training the mind to see reality in a way different than we do by the sloth of habit.  The Mysteries of the rosary have proven over many centuries to be a most efficacious means of meditation, especially for the laity.  But meditate we must, not only on what we ought to do to improve ourselves with God’s grace, but to come to the understanding of the hidden growth of Christ within us.  In living out the life of Christ in our imaginations, guided by the tutelage of His glorious Mother, the Virgin Mary, we attune ourselves to the quiet unfolding of grace in our lives, and are thus able to cooperate with grace more readily and gratefully.  We no longer carry out good works to justify ourselves or salve troubled consciences, but truly as co-operators with Jesus Christ, alive in our hearts and present to the world in our actions.

Listening and Literacy

One of the techniques I like to use when teaching chant, especially complex chants that have many notes per syllable, is to simplify the chant by assigning one key note to each syllable, and then building up gradually to the full complement of notes.  The advantage of this is the highlighting of the ornamental (i.e. non-melodic/structural) nature of Gregorian chant.  This keeps things closer to the text and helps us work against the tendency to invest every note with a formal weight that the early monks clearly did not intend.

The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires the singers to put their books down and learn by listening and repetition.  I say that this is a disadvantage because when I say to most people, “Alright, listen and repeat after me,” they are simply lost, no matter how simple (in my mind, at least) is the phrase that I am giving them.  Yes, sometimes it is a problem of Latin; but from watching how people from all walks of life dearly resist putting down the book—the authority!—in order to enter into an oral mode of acting, I think that the problem is at least heightened by our emphasis on literacy.  As I say, the book is the authority, and I am merely one interpreter, who obviously just learned this from the book.

Literacy is a great gift, of course, and allows us access to all kinds of cultural riches that are denied those who cannot read.  But as we move further and further away from oral modes of learning and interacting, the disadvantages to a strictly text-based mode emerge.  We can easily fool ourselves, by our reliance on texts, into thinking that we have learned something, when we have learned a simulacrum instead.  We all know how a good professor can make a subject come alive; I’ve encountered persons recently who dismiss out of hand great philosophers simply on the basis of having read them and not liked them.  There is no sense of the cultural embeddedness one needs to have to appreciate certain authors.  This embeddedness is greatly enhanced by having it modeled by another human being.  Someone who speaks passionately about Plato or Beethoven or Botticelli or the varieties of birdsong or human dialect can suddenly make an abstract idea one of real flesh and blood.

Literacy gives us the illusion of being self-sufficient, particularly as more and more texts become more available on the internet and elsewhere.  Oral learning stresses our dependence on the experience of another.

In this way, the loss of music in school curricula is particularly to be lamented.  My own love of oral/aural learning certainly comes from my musical background, which while literate, makes use of a lot of oral tradition.  I learned German/American folk dances from simply playing along at family gatherings in my grandparents’ house.  I learned guitar from friends (“Here is how you do the left hand for the opening chord in “Purple Haze”), and from listening to the radio and old vinyl albums.  I played in a number of bands where learning a song meant sitting across from the songwriter, having him say, “OK, after that chord, this one for three beats, then a hit over here…”  Even in classical music, I have long stressed the important sense of tradition that one must have.  You can pick up a book of songs by Fauré and sing them correctly, note-for-note, and very easily miss the whole point of singing songs by Fauré.  To really understand them requires some kind of mentorship, listening to a master sing and imitating what he or she is doing (in this case, Elly Ameling and Gérard Souzay, if you were wondering!).

This difficulty is an important one for us as Benedictines to be aware of.  While we like to boast of the emphasis that Saint Benedict places on literacy in his Rule, we should always remember the word with which it opens: “Listen!”

Of Vacations and Vocations

At a discussion with university students and others this past Saturday, the young daughter of the man overseeing the event asked me if monks ever go on vacation. I answered, as I normally do, that, no, we are always monks even when we travel. We get this question frequently, normally from adults. Hearing the question from a youngster, however, brought out for me the inadequacy of my pat response. So, in the hopes that her father may share this more considered response, and that it may be of some use to others who may happen upon it, I set down here what I would have liked to have said to her then.

When your family goes on vacation, your father may be taking time away from work, and so is on vacation from his job. But he is not on vacation from being your father. In fact, he takes you and the whole family with him, and he serves you as a father wherever you go. And if he should have to travel without the family, it is not really a vacation because he is not with his family any more. Yet, as he is traveling, he is still your father, thinking about you, doing the things he needs to do to support you and the whole family. And he does this because he loves you, and your mother, and your brothers and sisters.

So it is that we never take a vacation from serving those whom we love. And so it is with the monk, whose love has been pledged to God instead of to a family. No matter where a monk travels, he does not take a vacation from serving God Whom he loves. If he has to travel somewhere in support of the monastery, to do business with worldly men and women for the sake of the monastery, he is still a monk, thinking about God, doing the things he needs to do to support his brothers who are also pledged to the love of God.

In fact, there is a kind of ongoing vacation that we all experience when we are together with those whom we love. The word “vacation” simply means “making space,” being free of manual work. The monk makes space for listening to God every day, as we should for those whom we love. When we love someone, we want to know how they feel, what happened in their day, and we want to share ourselves with them as well. As often as a family sits down to dinner and shares time together, they are sharing a miniature “vacation” (at least until it’s time to do dishes!). Everyone at the table is making time to be together and to relax a bit away from work. When we go away for vacation, this is to remind ourselves that we need this time each day, that our routine should never dull us to the great gift we have of each other, which often needs rediscovering. Now the monk, having been called out of the world to a life in solitude with God, is, in some ways, always on vacation, for he is striving to clear away as much as he can of anything that separates him from God. He is trying to make as much space in his day and in his heart as he can, for the Friend he is hoping to welcome, Whose voice he is seeking, exceeds all that we can love and desire. But, as I have already shared with you, I believe that family life has many of these same qualities, when we are striving to love one another. This is not always easy–believe me, I know this! But I also know that that love of our parents, sisters, and brothers is very much like the love of God–Jesus Himself said so! And so we are all, each in our own way, striving to grow in love by making space for others in our lives, and being welcomed by them into their hearts as well.

The Holy Triduum

We have arrived again at the holiest time of the Church’s Year, the annual celebration of the Paschal Mystery, our Lord’s Passover. It’s hard for me to believe that this will be my 27th Triduum at the monastery. The liturgy for this holy time can be bewildering when we first encounter it, but also exhilarating–and for the same reason. Everything is new, slightly disorienting. Time is suspended. Melodies and rituals suddenly appear that remind us of our first childhood memories of Easter.

Over time—and this is especially true for monks who must study the liturgy and practice it regularly—the ceremonies become more familiar, even if they remain special to this time of year. For some of us, there is a temptation to a bit of boredom—the old feelings no longer emerge with the same intensity. Every Triduum features a liturgical blunder or two–sometimes the same one many years running, and this can tempt us to cynicism. But these temptations should be dealt with in the same way that we deal with every temptation: with resistance. When we begin to understand the liturgy, not as a prompt for good and edifying feelings, appropriate as these might be, but as central to our permanent identity as children of God, we can transition into a deep sense of belonging to Jesus Christ and His Church. This identification and belonging will remain with us and inform the rest of our lives as Catholics throughout the year.

Once again, this applies especially to monks and nuns, who have espoused themselves to Christ. The transition of which I am speaking is analogous to one that we see in certain married couples. They begin their lives together with excitement, expectation, even a kind of infatuation with each other, and the joy of having been loved and accepted. There are new experiences of owning a home, of pregnancy, childbirth, school, in-laws, new family rituals at Christmas, and so on and so forth. This gives way eventually to routines, and as the new and exciting becomes the familiar and dull, there is a risk of each spouse focusing on the small annoyances of any relationship with inherently limited and even flawed persons. There are heartaches with children who suffer health problems, disappointments with careers and there are compromises. The temptation is to boredom and even a sense of resentment. But if this temptation is resisted, what emerges is the beauty of belonging to one’s spouse, of totally identifying with that person with whom I have made a lasting covenant, and struggled to live those vows in fidelity. These are the couples who can sit together for long periods of silence, simply content to be with their “better half,” appreciating the presence of the long-beloved.

The Holy Triduum is like the Church’s wedding anniversary, the annual reminder that we have been espoused by the great Bridegroom Who laid down His life for us, Who poured out His Blood to cleanse us and make the Church a worthy Bride for Himself, spotless and beautiful. When this reality is newly embraced, it can move us to great torrents of emotion. It can so move us even after many years. But it can also carry us away to a different kind of experience, that of profound and peaceful contemplation, the silent adoration of the Holy Trinity, to Whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

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