Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with contemplation

The Mystery of Christmas

I have received many positive comments about the article that led our newsletter for Advent, so I would like to share it with a slightly different readership. I will preface this with a few more thoughts of Christmas, and why this celebration led me to my vocation. What gives coherence to the meaning of Christmas for me is the deep mystery of life itself. How is it that we–each of us a self, an “I”–observing the world and “All things counter, original, spare, strange; [Hopkins]” see things similarly, see things differently, see and understand anything at all? How often do we stop and wonder at it all? Something about Christmas always stopped me in my tracks and forced these questions upon me. The answer to this mystery is not the solution to a puzzle, but the sheer gift of love, of shared life and wonder. At the center of all that it, is a God Who wishes to be included in all things with us, our joys, sufferings, our boredom, weariness, excitement, community, loneliness, the whole labyrinth of life that each of us experiences. And in sharing the beauty of all that He created, He does so in most unprepossessing way possible, as a poor child of poor parents in a poor village, but rich in wonder and observation (read any of Christ’s parables and see how He never outgrew the child’s power of noticing things). We need not cross the sea to discover mystery–it is right in front of us and opens the way to participation in the Source of life.

Merry Christmas!

[The article from our newsletter, entitled “Christmas and Everyday Life”]

One of the brothers recently asked me if there was a particular Christmas song that evoked strong memories for me. I couldn’t really answer the question because there are many such carols, in addition to the sublime arias and choruses of Handel’s Messiah and the magical dances of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. I eventually settled on one carol, not because it is my favorite, but because it somehow summarizes the importance of Christmas to me: O Little Town of Bethlehem.

With a bit of imagination, the music of this lovely carol takes me back to decorating the house in preparation for the holidays. I always wanted to help set out the traditional nativity scene as well as the Christmas “village,” a tradition picked up from my father’s Polish family. We had pieced together this village over several years, and it included tiny houses, into the backs of which were inserted bulbs from strings of lights that would shine through the colored film windows. Miniature cars drove down snowy streets and sat in the parking lot next to the village church (which had a detachable steeple that occasionally was knocked over by our Labrador retriever). A mirror served as a skating rink, and a model train traversed the circumference of the town.

And of course, the were the tiny people there to celebrate winter by skating and skiing. In setting them up, we had to thread a tiny “rope” attached to a sled through the mittened hand of a bundled-up and straining adult. And then there were two blanketed children to be perched upon the sled. A thumb-sized collie ran alongside the family.

Perched behind all of this activity was, incongruously, the thatched barn giving shelter to the Christ child in the manger, adored by Mary and Joseph, and a motley band of shepherds. A variety of beasts kept the watch. To my eye, there was nothing quite as beautiful as these figurines, especially the shiny apparel of the Wise Men, the haughty camels, and the one poor shepherd, kneeling and offering a few coins resting in a cap in his hand.

Not only were these scenes separated by two millennia; they were not to scale. And yet, somehow, the ensemble spoke perfectly to me of the mystery of Christmas. The Son of God came, not only for the salvation of persons of the first century, but for every human being, for every human community. Not everyone in the Christmas village was in the church at that moment, but the church was there, its steeple pointing the way to heaven, or, in our humble tableau, to the angels singing above the newborn King.

Bethlehem was much like any other village, with its public spaces, rows of homes, families, children, pets, and other animals. When God sent His Son to redeem us, He came, not with spectacular show of “shock and awe,” but quietly, into a small home, beneath the same stars that we see today in the midnight sky. God thereby demonstrated that to be His child, it is enough to be human like anyone else.

The celebration of Christmas eventually had a profound effect on my own vocation. The beauty of God as a child, as an adolescent and young man, making friends, attending family weddings (I attended many weddings, as best man and as a musician)—the whole lot of everyday human life—made Christ especially present to me and made me want to respond by offering my life to Him as best I could, with the hope that perhaps others could experience what I had intuited: that into the darkness and obscurity of our quotidian existence, has shone the everlasting light. Now all the humble details of human life, the joy and tears, the sweat and rest, sowing and harvest, are illuminated from within by God’s Word. And that Word is Love.

 

Our Lady of the Rosary

My mother taught me to pray the rosary. In her family, they had the old custom of praying a decade nightly on their knees, with my grandfather leading the prayer. While that lovely custom didn’t continue into my generation, the rosary continued to be the primary mode of prayer. It was definitely what we turned to when life became anxious for any reason.

The rosary developed over many centuries and through many twists and turns. The pious legend that Our Lady gave it directly to Saint Dominic has helped to cement the connection between the “Domini Canes” (the “hounds of the Lord” as the Dominicans have been playfully nicknamed) and Our Lady as the Vanquisher of All Heresies. The deep history is in the lay spirituality of the high medieval period, when lay brothers in monastic communities used beads to count 150 Paternosters in place of the 150 Psalms that were required weekly of the choir monks (who could read, and thus were expected to digest these extensive texts).

Eventually, these 150 beads came to represent 150 Ave Marias, and these were further divided into 15 decades, to which were assigned the familiar Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Connecting the prayers to the Mysteries seems to have been another monastic innovation, this time from the Carthusian Dominic of Prussia. Confraternities of the rosary became popular in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

But it was the clash of civilizations that culminated in the great Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571 that cemented today’s feast into the liturgy. As the Ottoman fleet prepared to square off against the Holy League of Catholic states, led by the soon-to-be famous Don John of Austria, Pope Saint Pius V urged all Catholics to pray the rosary in defense of Christendom, already tottering in the wake of the Reformation. The League’s decisive victory was attributed to Our Lady’s intercession, and effectively ended the Ottoman threat for another century and a half.

While the contemplative dimension has never been absent from the rosary, this more “militant” aspect also became more typical of the devotion. It is a part of spiritual warfare, as I discovered as a child, learning to ask Our Lady fervently for her protection under duress. The addition of the Fatima Prayer (…Lead all souls into heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy) strengthened the sense of prayer as battle. Pope Leo XIII, in his 1883 encyclical  Supremi Apostolatus Officio, urged Catholics again to take up the rosary in battle, this time a more clearly spiritual battle than at Lepanto, against the incursions of particular evils into modern society.

More recently, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote his own apostolic letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, in which he extolled the contemplative dimensions of this devotion, even adding five new Luminous Mysteries. While I have heard some criticism of these additions (they disrupt the parallel between the 150 Ave Marias and Psalms), they are very much in line with another important document from his papacy, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. In this directory, pastors were urged to help the faithful to draw the connections between popular lay devotions and the liturgy. The 15 original Mysteries of the rosary corresponded to the most important mysteries of the Liturgical Year. John Paul’s introduction of the Luminous Mysteries fills out the traditional mysteries of Epiphany (adding the Baptism of Jesus and the Wedding at Cana), adds the central feast of the Transfiguration and the solemnity of Corpus Christi, and invites us to meditate on the feasts of the Apostles in the third of the Luminous Mysteries.

We happen to live in a most perplexing moment when, as in the times of Pius V and Leo XIII, the demonic spirit of deceit, division, and violence is visibly attacking the Church and humanity. In 2018, Pope Francis issued his own call to Catholics to engage anew the spiritual battle under the banner of the Virgin Mary, “asking the Holy Mother of God and Saint Michael  Archangel to protect the Church from the devil, who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.” It is not a coincidence that the rosary has recently been in the news, albeit with a certain amount of misinterpretation, as a symbol of (spiritual) militancy.

May our celebration this evening be pleasing to Almighty God, and may the Virgin Mother of God once again crush the head of the Serpent, that we may spend our days in peace and conversion of life. And may Christ lead us all to everlasting life. Amen.

 

Saint Scholastica: a model of prayer and charity

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

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

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

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

Jesus in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus

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

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

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

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.