Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with contemplation

A Summons to Encounter in Unhurried Beauty

Prelude 1: Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi)

Imagine a healthy person moving slowly. How can you tell if such a person is hesitant, or dawdling, being sneaky, or being solemn? Where someone is attempting to move at a solemn pace, how might we distinguish between genuine piety, sanctimony, and lumbering?

In almost every wedding rehearsal I’ve attended, the priest or minister has had to instruct the bridal party to walk more slowly. We are not accustomed to the solemnity and dignity of well-executed ritual. What makes a hasty bride appear gauche? I suspect that it is related to what George Steiner called “ceremonials of encounter” in his important book Real Presences. As I suggested in an earlier post, all beauty promises an encounter. Do we miss this encounter because we have lost the feel for ceremony?

With these thoughts in mind, I suggest that you listen to this three-minute piece, which was inspired by the “Acanthus Column.” Debussy was familiar with a replica of this column, which depicts the ritual dance of worshippers of Apollo at the god’s shrine at Delphi. In my hearing, this dance also takes the form of a procession toward the shrine.

[image: by Ricardo André Frantz (User:Tetraktys), editing by User:Jastrow – cropped and colour-adjusted from Image:019MAD Room.jpg taken by Ricardo André Frantz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3370119]

Danseuses de Delphes is to be played slowly and seriously, and the opening measures are also marked “soft and sustained,” or, perhaps, “elevated.” The piece is an imagined accompaniment to a pagan liturgy. Debussy would have had no direct experience of pagan ritual, so it is safe to assume that he borrows from his experience of traditional Catholic liturgy, with its slow processions and deliberate gestures. He was an admirer of the restrained craft of Palestrina, considering it the true sacred music of the Church. This sense of a public liturgy is reinforced by an interesting performance direction at measure 11 (1:12 in the video), doux mais en dehors, which would indicate something like, “soft but outward,” meaning that the quiet dynamic is not a sign of privacy or introversion. It is a sacred hush, as the dancers move nearer the shrine.

The opening melody is played twice, at :02 and at :37. There is an important difference in the second version. After each of the slow notes of the ascending melody, an echo in the upper register is introduced, almost as if the god has heard the prayer of the dancers and is responding from a distance. At 1:12, a new theme is introduced. In this new section, the melody and echo have switched places, with the high carrying the melody, and the middle range responding. Notice too, that the two parts are now moving toward each other, toward an “encounter.” The high notes descend gently and the middle notes ascend in response. It is very much like the ascent of the Catholic priest to the altar, and his prayer that the Holy Spirit might descend upon the gifts presented there.

The arrival or encounter proper takes place at measures 15-17 (1:34-1:50). Such a beautiful moment! The mysterious music in measures 21-24 (2:13-2:38) perhaps represents the withdrawal of the god back into the sky. 

Let me compare this piece to two other “liturgical” pieces. In the work of Palestrina, the careful balance of dissonance and consonance gives the listener a sense of directionality. Whenever a dissonant interval is introduced, it awakens a desire that finds its temporary resolution in the following consonance. This practice develops within a religion that arises out of a certain “problematic,” the question of sin, alienation, and suffering, which have been overcome so as to point the way to a consummation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Debussy’s style in the first Prelude abstains from functional dissonance. He uses clusters of notes, but often in such a way as to deepen musical color rather than to suggest an unfinished desire. This suggests a religion that is a mystical projection of simpler desires, not so obviously concerned with questions of justice and suffering.

The lack of any haste or drive in the piece suits the worship of Apollo. His cult was frequently contrasted in the 19th century (most famously by Nietzsche) with the Bacchic, frenetic, emotionally suffused worship of Dionysus. Three years after the publication of Debussy’s first book of Preludes, Stravinsky shocked the world with his very different depiction of pagan liturgy, the Dionysian Rite of Spring. 

The lack of haste suggests reverence and confident self-possession. How does our fast-paced society not only rob us of our personal dignity, but make it difficult for us to show reverence when it is time to pray? Does our rushing about constrain us by betraying a lack of confidence in God’s nearness? What can contemporary Catholic liturgy learn from Debussy’s imaginative scenario, which borrows from an earlier Catholic sensibility?

Might the addition of ceremony into more areas of life also introduce meaning? Many of my friends and family members who are tea drinkers attest to the importance of ceremony in brewing and drinking tea. Nearly everything in monastic life is ceremonialized. Is this a sign of a nervous, controlling culture? Or the expressed desire to encounter?

***

Note: I’ve linked Barenboim’s performance because his observance of Debussy’s instructions is the most scrupulous of the performances that I could find. However, it is always worthwhile to hear others’ interpretations. We should bear in mind that the performed piece is the best interpretation, and that my written comments are only meant to open the ear to the performers’ interpretations, and the eye to the world that inspired (in-spirited) both Debussy and his interpreters.

If you have the time, I recommend listening to each piece two or three times, perhaps in different versions.

 

Here is Palestrina’s most famous motet, on the text (apt, for this post) “As the hart desires after fountains, so my soul desires after You, O God.” The use of dissonance to suggest desire and resolution is clearest where the text anima mea (my soul) appears at 2:13. If you can read the music, you will see that the first syllable of anima is often tied over a barline. When the barline hits, a new note, dissonant with the one being held on anima, creating that sense of tension. Note that the resolution of anima is downward, creating a sense of rest and repose.

And here is Stravinsky’s “Dionysian” ritual. Notice how restraint is gone, and ceremony has been transformed into something fearsome, especially at 3:00. This ritual will end with human sacrifice:

 

Learning Contemplation With Debussy

After Vigils ends around 4:30 each morning, I make my way from the sacristy through the monastery courtyard toward the cloister. At that dark hour, it is an enchanted place, and the quality of the light changes with the phases of the moon and the cloud cover. Quiet rustlings betray the presence of cats and, sometimes, raccoons or possums. Most mornings, the birds are not yet awake. I enter the cloister, retire to my cell with a mug of black coffee (a caffeinated “sacrament” as a friend and fellow monk from Mexico once put it to me), and begin reading the Scriptures. All the while, I am aware of the slow dawning of the new day, as the morning star appears, the horizon begins to turn grey, and the birds begin their songs. An enterprising squirrel might scamper by on the mulberry tree outside my window.

God’s mysterious beauty is all around. We need not travel far to find it, even in an urban environment. It’s good to be reminded of this. Observing beauty is an urgent task in times of crisis, such as we have been experiencing here in Chicago. I propose this not as a distraction. Rather, as we respond to the pandemic and to violence, it is important to remind ourselves what our hopes are, and few things generate hope like an encounter with the beautiful. How we understand our situation depends on what we choose to occupy our attention. To the extent we delay our encounter with the beauty that God has built into His cosmos, we risk giving ourselves up to despair.

The contemplative life teaches us to notice beauty in places where others haven’t seen it yet. From our own attentiveness, we can learn to point beauty out to others. This is part of my hope in this series, that I can share with you some of the fruits of this attentiveness.

In the first set of reflections, I will enlist the skills of a great listener, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) to assist us. In 1909, he began composing a set of twelve piano preludes. They are masterful evocations, often of everyday settings. Each has a descriptive title, drawing our attention to the wind, evenings scents, footsteps in the snow, cathedral bells, and amateur musicians, busking in the park, serenading at windows.

Until recently, I had been reluctant to admit Debussy’s profound influence on my own musical sensibilities. His style can strike the new listener as intoxicating, perhaps hedonistic. Quotes from the composer himself seem to reinforce this initial impression:

“Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

It’s almost as if Debussy was intending to alienate someone like me, who is suspicious of decadence and who, as an aspiring composer, once spent hours learning theory. Yet, his music has attracted me again and again. And it’s grown profounder as I’ve learned to listen more closely.

“Water Lily Pond and Bridge” by Claude Monet, 1905. Monet’s visual techniques are often compared with Debussy’s musical effects.

Here is a more sympathetic reading of the above quote. When Debussy says that his goal is to “render what [he] can hear,” we should bear in mind that the man speaking is widely regarded as a musical genius, someone who is likely able to hear things that the rest of us cannot. His wish to render what he hears is akin to what a painter does for us visually. A great painting can make the familiar seem new and strange. Monet, a painter whose art is similar to Debussy’s in many ways, could make a haystack seem beautiful by his ability to capture the light around it in varying ways. In a similar way, Debussy will call our attention to nuances in our surroundings. His musician’s ear catches aspects of life that most of us would miss. He invites the listener to reflect on the beauty present in everyday experience.

The older I’ve gotten, the more sympathetic I am to Debussy’s critique of rules. I’ve learned through experience the importance of rules and also their insufficiency for many tasks in life. Wisdom discerns those moments when the rules can be dismissed.

As a young composer, Debussy demonstrated that he could work within the conventions of the time, but he was also willing to dispense with rules of musical theory in order to capture the unpredictable reality of life observed. He also was no dilettante. The Preludes especially are the work of a perfectionist. There are no notes out of place.

The variety and unfamiliarity of Debussy’s individual pieces are responses to the variety and unfamiliarity of life’s experiences. In the Preludes, we hear this strangeness refracted through Debussy’s highly refined ability to hear and notate what he hears. In other words, Debussy had cultivated a kind of contemplative approach to music-making. He is giving us the opportunity of seeing and hearing the world around us with greater precision and insight. 

Before diving into the Preludes, let me leave you with a much earlier and more famous piece, his youthful masterwork, Clair de Lune (moonlight). As you listen, see how the music uses different dynamics (volume levels), registers, and textures to suggest different facets of the moon’s appearance, and the dreamlike traits of moonlight. How do the different textures of music depict the moon’s movement through the night sky? When was the last time we carefully observed the moon, or familiar objects made mysterious by its diffuse illumination? Is Debussy also drawing our attention to clouds or wind or other celestial objects? What does the experience of moonlight say about God?

The Path to Contemplation

[I was invited by the Lumen Christi Institute to lead a discussion on contemplation with a group of students on Saturday night. I composed this text to begin the conversation.]

Human beings have typically made use of metaphors when thinking about the mind. In the last two or three generations, we have tended to imagine the human mind as a computer, a storer of information. The mind certainly is this, but this metaphor is part of a myopic turn in human thought, perhaps begun with Descartes, that has brought about many misunderstandings of the ancient idea of contemplation. Let us note here that a computer, at least as we have built them so far, is not capable of having desires, intentions, or insights into the meaning of things. And this is the heart of contemplation.

I listed desire first because desire is necessarily a trait of an embodied, limited, incomplete being…with intimations of fulfillment. The second quality of human minds that separate us from computers is that of intention, which is another quality that admits of fulfillment. The concept of fulfillment itself is central to the proclamation of the gospel: Christ comes to fulfill the Scriptures and the hopes of God’s people Israel. Internalizing this fulfillment is one way of understanding the Christian tradition of contemplation. There is thus an important continuity between desire, intention, and meaning that leads the human mind properly toward contemplation.

Desire and intention–where we begin–belong to a life of action, and it is significant that the active and contemplative life are often paired together. Unfortunately, this pairing is frequently one of opposition, rather than sympathy. The monastic tradition harkens back to a time when these two types of activity were seen not as exclusive, but linked in an important hierarchy. The active life, or–as I would prefer that we call it, the practical life–is the necessary condition for the contemplative life. We see this hierarchy in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle in their distinction between practical reason and theoretical reason. Practical reason is aimed at goals, the satisfaction of desires. As rational beings, many of our desires partake of a higher type of fulfillment than that of simpler bodily desires. In addition to desiring bodily nourishment, we desire understanding. Each of these desires is connected to different types of practical responses, that is to say, different sets of practices.

Let me offer an example of how practices lead naturally into contemplation. To do this, I would like to use a concept related to that of practices. Instead of speaking about practices, which tend to denote simple types of activities, let me introduce a word that denotes a somewhat more complex set of activities, the notion of a craft.

As a former musician, the idea of craft interests me, and it is something familiar. For my illustration, however, let me use a rather different craft, that of accounting.

The active life of an accountant requires a rigorous training in double-entry techniques, learning from masters of the craft how to interpret human action in quantifiable terms, how to prepare different types of reports, how to maintain proper files for audits. In other words, there are standards of excellence in the craft, but these only become clear to the student of accounting after she has learned how to carry out many routine actions internal to the craft itself. At a certain point, the mind is freed from earlier misconceptions about what accounting is. This is the transition from student (or disciple) to master, and it parallels the transition from active to contemplative practice.

At the point of transition, the newly minted accounting professional may begin to notice ways to characterize human behavior that are more accurate than previous standards of the craft. She may realize that certain practices pose a danger to ethical standards, and so need to reflect on how to train future accountants to identify those dangers and deal with them in a way that upholds the important ethical component of the craft. She may also begin to see more correlations between the work of accounting and the work of management, or of distribution, marketing, and so on. In other words, the master accountant begins to see how her craft fits into a larger and larger perspective.

It is this reason that the contemplative life is traditionally characterized as higher, but not separate from the active life. Contemplation makes possible the perception of necessary connections between crafts, how to understand their contributions to the common good. But this understanding and wisdom is only available after one has apprenticed in some disciplined activity, which serves as an induction into a set of practices by which one can come to understand the commonly held standards of excellence, have one’s mind changed and formed by these standards of excellence, and so have the mind freed more and more from a merely local and subjective set of concerns.

Before I conclude, I would like to make a few last suggestive remarks. First of all, I introduced the notion of “standards of excellence” as something desirable within a craft, something toward which we intend. Excellence, as you may well know, is an acceptable translation of the Greek word arete, which is more normally translated as “virtue.” Thus the practical life is a training in virtue, and once again, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention Saint Paul, assume that there is no rational life without a prior training in virtue.

Second, the ancient monastic tradition included a third term in our ascent to contemplation proper. Between praktike, the practical life, and theoretike, or the “theoretical” or contemplative life, was physike or “natural contemplation.” This notion has been almost entirely lost, and I believe it to be of some importance that we recover its meaning.

We are hampered in this recovery by a novel meaning of the word “nature.” Most people today, when using the word “nature,” tend to mean our earthly environment as a whole, perhaps the material world considered as separate from “spirit” or “the supernatural.” This distinction is entirely modern, with roots in the break from Aristotle that took place gradually throughout the fifteenth century and definitively in the sixteenth. What Aristotle meant by nature is physis, the set of characteristics specific to actual species of things. So humans have a nature determined by our animality, political organization, and rationality. We are, by nature, rational and political animals. A dog has a different nature, as does a starfish. Clouds, stars, nebulae, and quarks have natures in their own domains. Natural contemplation is a deepening understanding of the natures of different species of creatures, seen more and more from the perspective of the Creator Himself. What I am suggesting here is that actual human practices initiate us into understanding the natures of things, by seeing their interconnections. We climb the ladder of significations by making a kind of scaffolding of these interconnected concepts in our own minds and hearts, and gradually the face of God is revealed in His creatures. And by habituation to His presence in created things, we come to know God as God is in Himself. This is the practice of contemplation in its deepest meaning. While there are practices specific to this highest level of contemplation, we must prepare for it by a grounding in the cardinal virtues, gained from our participation in craft, and by a training in wisdom by an initial contemplation of natures. We partake of contemplation proper at each step of the way, by our initial desire for the goal and our intention to reach it, so any of us can begin now on this road, if we so desire.

A Crisis of Symbolism

Ten years ago, an old friend, now a committed atheist, invited me to participate in an online discussion between atheists and Christians. As rancorous as some of the “discussions” were, I miss the tough back-and-forth probing of my own positions.

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The Transfiguration

“He did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid [Mark 9: 5].” With this little detail, Saint Mark reveals quite a bit about the character of Saint Peter and the human condition in general. Under normal circumstances, we are unprepared to behold the full glory of God, and when suddenly God’s grandeur “flame[s] out, like shining from shook foil,”  it can be a terrifying, disorienting experience.

We have many testimonies of this encounter. One early, telling encounter was that of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was a priest and probably had entered God’s temple countless times to offer sacrifice. One day, he suddenly saw in reality what he had been celebrating in shadowy, symbolic ways. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up….And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips…for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts [Isaiah 6: 1, 5]!” Isaiah is rendered voluntarily speechless until his lips are cleansed by a coal from the altar.

Similarly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of his earthly life, was celebrating the Eucharist as he had many times before. This time was different. Like Isaiah, he glimpsed something of the reality that he had celebrated in the half-veil of sacramental mystery. The author of the Summa Theologica, perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of all time, wrote no more after this, leaving the Summa unfinished. “All that I have written seems as so much straw,” he confided to a friend.

Saint Peter suffers no such scruples. Beholding Christ transfigured, he was properly afraid. Not knowing what to say, however, he said whatever came to mind. In this, he seems to be of a kindred mindset to modern man. Is it not the case that our incessant talking, the swarming proliferation of words, is so much nervous chatter to cover over our anxiety and alienation? We hardly know what to say, yet we can’t stop talking. In our case, I suspect that silence doesn’t occur to us because our fear is not the result of an encounter with the living God, but with the dreadful possibility of His utter absence.

I began by saying that we are not normally prepared to meet God in the unmitigated power of His limitless Being. What the Transfiguration begins to teach us is that, under the dispensation of grace, in the afterglow of the Resurrection and Pentecost, we live under a “new normal.” We live in the in-between time, the time of the holy Liturgy, after the shadows of animal sacrifice but not yet at the full consummation of the world. The Kingdom of God is breaking into the world that itself is passing away. The baptized, as God’s adopted children, are being trained to “see [God] as He is [1 John 3: 2].” The training of our senses and their elevation to the spiritual realm takes place in the liturgy.

This past June, we were blessed to be able to unveil our two newest icons, the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, flanking the Mother of God and John the Baptist. Gradually, our sanctuary is being populated with the communion of the saints. Icons are not mere representations of model believers. The iconographer truly receives the image from the inbreaking realm of heaven. Iconography is, therefore, an ascetical craft, a discipline of visual listening and receptivity, a training of the interior vision to see beyond the sacramental into the reality of God’s holy court. At the same time, icons train the worshipper to attune his or her senses to this new reality. The icons are a central part of the liturgical act, and as conduits of grace, help to elevate the sense of sight to its proper spiritual register.

Similarly, sacred music is much more than pleasing ornamentation of holy words. As Kevin Allen and I have discussed at various time in our decade of collaboration, the composer of sacred music must, like the iconographer, exercise a discipline of spiritual listening. The aim is, through purification of hearing, to catch something of the overwhelming beauty of the perpetual song of heaven. At Solemn Vespers this coming Saturday evening (August 5, 5:15 p.m.), the First Vespers of the feast of the Transfiguration, Kevin and I humbly offer two new motets in this spirit. We pray that our double motet will be a similar conduit of grace, to prepare our hearts to hear God’s Word in its fullest transformative power.

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.

Who Is Running the Renewal?

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about George Weigel’s recent post “Catacomb Time?” doesn’t sit right with me. I suspect that it is first of all due to an accumulation of fuzzy complaints with someone-or-other not quite specified. Who inhabit those “Catholic circles” who have “a passion for writing Build-It-Yourself Catacomb manuals”? I honestly have no idea who is meant by this. I suppose that he is referring to the Benedict Option, for which there is no shortage of critics, despite the fact that no one seems to know what it is exactly. The reference to “lukewarm, pick-and-choose” Catholics is always a dangerous one. Who of us doesn’t fall into the “pick-and-choose” category from time to time, even often?

Then there is this larger quote, expressing what seems to me a common enough sentiment, but one I just can’t get behind personally:

This same judgment—Catholicism by osmosis is dead—and this same prescription—the Church must reclaim its missionary nature—are at the root of every living sector of the Catholic Church in the United States: parish, diocese, seminary, religious order, lay renewal movement, new Catholic association.

George Steiner in my dream study. He proposes "cortesia" (courtesy) as a mode of mutuality as a partial antidote to a critical and wordy discourse that empties language of its theological import.

George Steiner in my dream study. He proposes “cortesia” (courtesy) as a mode of mutuality as a partial antidote to a critical and wordy discourse that empties language of its theological import. In this, he comes remarkably close to Benedictine “hospitality” as a mode of encounter, and perhaps a way to reinterpret “mission” away from the excessive freight of unidirectional conquest toward a humble acknowledgement of the potential contributions of potential converts.

“Every living sector” of the Church in a country of almost 70 million Catholics? That’s a big claim. I think what troubles me most about this sort of language is the absence of any feint in the direction of the work of the Holy Spirit in animating the Church. Then there is the question of whether my own religious community qualifies as a “living sector” and whether we actually share that judgment and prescription. One reason I balk at that way of phrasing the “judgment” that “Catholicism by osmosis is dead,” is that it privileges what Mary Douglas refers to as “elaborated speech code” (the language of academia, personal commitment and conviction, related to what George Steiner calls out at the beginning of Real Presences) at the expense of “restricted speech code,” the more passive communicative modes of ritual and symbol. Much of what we learn in the Church is at least somewhat osmotic. Yes, we should pay attention at the liturgy, but often times it takes all kinds of exposure at various levels of awareness and engagement before connections are made. Perhaps I sense here, fairly or unfairly, a neglect of the fundamentally receptive nature of faith, prior to any genuine engagement in mission. St. Paul, the greatest missionary of all, spent well over a decade anonymously living the life of a Christian before the Holy Spirit set him apart as the Apostle of the Gentiles. During that time, what was he doing? Praying? Re-reading the Scriptures? I don’t know, but it was certainly a life of withdrawal, maybe not to the catacombs, but a withdrawal nonetheless.

And then let us not forget who is the patroness of the Church’s missions.

Behind the Church's missionary activity is St. Therese's little way of complete faith in all things.

St. Therese, patroness of the missions. Behind the Church’s missionary activity is St. Therese’s hidden little way of complete faith in all things.

I will leave it to reader to think about the connections between the contemplative life and missionary effectiveness.

Let me end with a little more explanation from Mary Douglas. In the first chapter of Natural Symbols, she relates asking her progressive clerical friends (in 1970) why they think it’s a good idea to move away from the Friday abstinence to more personally meaningful acts of charity–like working in a soup kitchen on Friday.

I am answered by a Teilhardist evolutionism which assumes that a rational, verbally explicit, personal commitment to God is self-evidently more evolved and better than its alleged contrary, formal, ritualistic conformity.

I will admit to nitpicking here a bit, but I think that it is worth watching our language very carefully on these points, lest we saw off the branch upon which we sit. The overall tone of the article supports an individualistic and activist mode of Church life that has the potential to undermine the communal, receptive, gratuitous, gracious, and humble life of faith and hope. Surely one of the points of the young Josef Ratzinger’s “Future Church” article is precisely that we are being called away from “edifices…built in prosperity,” as part of an invitation to leave behind triumphalism. Weigel comes uncomfortably close to a triumphalism-minus-edifices. It is striking that after the long quote from the future pope, a quote that ends with an emphasis on “faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world,” Weigel never again mentions faith, Jesus Christ, or even God. Again, I will admit that finding such lacunae in a blog post runs the risk of straining justice. But as a monk, I am inclined to be watchful on these counts.

More than anything, this serves as an introduction to Mary Douglas, whose work I have put off writing about for long enough…

UPDATE: Recall that the relationship between mission and contemplative life is the crux at which our community began. Also, that while it is hard not to agree that practicing one’s faith will require great resolve and strength in the coming years, maybe decades, this must be a practice rooted in repentance and joyful humility, grounded in the sacrifice of Calvary, celebrated daily in the liturgy. Finally, while Fr. Ratzinger did say that the future Church will make “bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members,” [emphasis added] this mention of individual members needs to be read in the context of the future pope’s voluminous writings on the liturgy and the Church. The initiative he is calling for surely must be greater fidelity to the reality of the ongoing Incarnation in the local church (including a high mystical “Ignatian” vision of the bishop as Christ and priests as the bishops’ vicars). Otherwise, Weigel might be heard to be inviting individuals to greater creativity, initiative in a maverick kind of sense, rather than in a sense of responsive answerability toward the gospel. And the first step may well be admitting that I’m part of the problem with the contemporary Church.

Going to the Father 7: Icon and Altar as Ascension

The Ascension of Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father is the founding moment of the liturgy. The Good Shepherd went off in search of His lost sheep–us–by laying aside His dignity and prerogatives as Son of God and becoming flesh for our sake. Becoming obedient to the Father even unto death, He won our salvation and returned to the Father as the pioneer of our salvation. In our baptisms, we are united with Christ, and in the liturgy, we participate, really experience our own ascensions to the Kingdom of Heaven, as daughters and sons of God in the Holy Spirit.

Christ's Ascension is the founding movement of every liturgical celebration. Now He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father [Romans 8: 34].

Christ’s Ascension is the founding movement of every liturgical celebration. Now He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father [Romans 8: 34].

What an astonishing claim! And yet, it is our faith, the faith we profess every time we enter a church, recall our baptisms by signing ourselves with holy water in the form of the cross, and enter into the everlasting dialog of love between Father and Son. Yet because it is such an astonishing claim, we need practice in order to continually realize the Truth into which we have been received. Our minds need constant renewal, lest we fall back by a preoccupation with the earthly appearance of things. As I mentioned in the previous post, this vigilance requires us to hold in tension God’s transcendence, the goal toward which we move in our ascension in Christ, with God’s immanence, His real presence to us in all things through the eyes of faith. Thus the things of the world are transformed by contemplation, a gaze informed by faith, and this informing faith is oriented toward the Father “who is above all and through and in all [Ephesians 4: 6].”

In Gothic church buildings, this symbolism of ascent is signified by the long “vertical” shape of the nave. One enters at the baptismal font, the gateway to life in Christ, and moves toward the altar through stages, not necessarily “closer to God,” Who is in any case not at all bound to the sanctuary, but through the purification of the soul, the understanding and the will, so as to be more and more conformed to God. Christ the Mediator is symbolized variously by the direction East (from whence He shall come at the parousia), the altar (incised with five crosses, the five wounds by which the risen Christ is recognized), the priest (whose initial movement to the altar is a representation of Christ’s Ascension), and finally by the Blessed Sacrament Itself.

Christ goes forth from the sanctuary at two crucial moments in the liturgy. The first is the gospel procession, where the Word becomes flesh, as it were, in the human voice of the priest of deacon who proclaims it. The gospel book is carried in procession  from the altar to the people. The second movement “outward” is the carrying of the Body and Blood of Christ from the altar (again!) to the people, who now receive Christ Incarnate in Holy Communion. In this latter case, there is a complementary movement of the faithful toward the altar, “caught up together with [those who have died in Christ]…to meet the Lord [1 Thessalonians 4: 17].”

Christ in glory represent the Lord both ascending and returning (see Acts 1: 11), note the two interlocking four-pointed stars and white rays, representing the divine energies radiating in and through the Son.

Christ in glory represents the Lord both ascending and returning (see Acts 1: 11). Note the two interlocking four-pointed stars and white rays, representing the divine energies radiating in and through the Son.

Here I am describing a dynamic liturgy, with a lot of movement. It is not what most Catholics think of when they think of liturgy, which unfortunately seems to bring to mind standing and sitting in one pew and watching while the priest does a bunch of things far away. What I have described is quite possible, even desirable in the present “ordinary” form of the Mass, and to a certain extent the reforms that followed Vatican II have made this latent dynamism more obvious (and this represents a restoration of certain elements of the Mass that had fallen away in the Tridentine period, which I personally consider to have been a bit ‘bureaucratized’, with a liturgy too much influenced by the Roman Curia and not enough by monks!). Orthodox liturgy tends to display this dynamism more openly, and often Orthodox liturgists will draw connections between the in-and-out motion of the priests and deacons with the mysterious energies of God, that go forth and return to Him [cf. Isaiah 55: 11]. And this connection in turn is sometimes reinforced with references to Eastern theologians like Gregory Palamas (1296-1359). But this dynamism is everywhere evident in Catholic sources, especially through the thirteenth century. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is entirely patterned on what is called the “exitus-reditus” movement of God’s creative and restorative Word and Spirit, breathing outward into creation and gathering inward toward salvation and exaltation.

Our monastery church is a neo-gothic structure. The first altar that we had built for the church was slightly larger than four feet square and stood in the center of the sanctuary, at the eastern end of the building. Though it served us well, it was slightly small both for the space and for the number of concelebrants typical at our Eucharistic liturgy. After a benefactor came forward to commission the great iconostasis that you see on our home page (and above), we knew that it was time to commission as well a new altar. Present liturgical discipline favors a stone mensa or “table” on the altar. If we were to do have a stone altar constructed, we had two choices, necessitated by the weight of the potential structure. We could first of all restore it as a ‘high altar’ against the easternmost wall of the church. This would be easier and more cost effective, since there was already an iron and brick support in place there, and since we were already celebrating Mass ad orientem. The other option was keeping it in place and building a new support. This would have been quite costly. Moreover, the building itself calls for the altar to be at the very head of the structure, as the “Head” Who is Christ.

Our new iconostasis and altar, with four concelebrating priests. One gets a sense of the size of the church that we received from the Archdiocese and its orientation.

Our new iconostasis and altar, with four concelebrating priests. One gets a sense of the size of the church that we received from the Archdiocese and its orientation.

When the iconostasis and altar were installed last year (and I will have much more to write about the icons, so stay tuned!), the architecture of the church really came into strong focus. I can say with some assurance that all of the brothers have found this new arrangement to be a tremendous blessing and aid to prayer. The danger of such an arrangement is that the very strong vertical thrust might lead guests to feel faraway from the action and left out, as if God had retreated somewhere relatively inaccessible and only peeked out for communion. How could we help newcomers to feel more welcomed, to have a sense of God’s nearness without undoing the brilliance of the transcendent recaptured in our high altar and iconostasis? This was the challenge that we took up when we began to plan the last phase of our renovation of the church, the construction of the new choir.

Back to School

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

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.

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.

Bl_Columba_Marmion

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.