Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with thoughts

Bright Sadness and the Joy of Spiritual Longing

Lent begins today. We distributed ashes at Mass this morning. Shortly afterward, I distributed Lenten reading to each of the brothers. Saint Benedict instituted this practice in his Rule: the superior gives a book to each brother to be read straight through during Lent. I typically give each brother a classic from a Church Father or monastic saint, though occasionally, a brother might receive a book of more recent of theology if I think it might be useful.

At this point in my life I look forward to Lent with a kind of eager trepidation, if I can put it that way. When I was younger, it was a pure eagerness that accompanied this time of spiritual intensification. As I’ve gained experience, I know that, often enough, an unenlightened eagerness is the beginning of disappointment and recrimination. Therefore I now try to approach Lent with more wariness about the spiritual traps that inevitably accompany any effort to cooperate more fully with grace. The eagerness has in no way left me; it has been, I hope, tempered and made more realistic, more attuned to what spiritual warfare is actually like and to what my own temperament permits in the way of change.

My favorite image of Saint Antony’s temptations, by Martin Schongauer. Two things to notice: the demons, externalized thoughts, are hard to distinguish from Antony. We often have difficulty separating from our thoughts, which is why slowing down and not reacting is so important. Secondly, Antony’s stoic resignation is part of the strategy. Rather than impulsively engaging the thoughts, he is simply allowing them to be, but staying mentally detached from them, not assenting, nor over-correcting by a fretful rejection of their presence.

It is often remarked that the word ‘joy’ appears twice in Saint Benedict’s chapter on Lent. This accords well with the Orthodox phrase “bright sadness” that is the desired disposition of the penitent in Great Lent. For this joy and bright sadness to accompany our fasting, it is important that we actually try to experience hunger. This means “moving toward” the perception of being hungry, accepting it without judgment as another experience. Can we sit still, when hungry, accept the lack of energy and the chills, without reacting? Am I inclined to give in to grumpiness? Or to think about how long it is until lunch? Or to complain about outdated, formalistic Church disciplines? Twenty years ago, our whole community experimented with a scientific, low-carb diet. I was impressed at the fact that balancing one’s carbohydrates with one’s proteins and fat intake makes it possible to lose weight without ever feeling very hungry. This would be another temptation against the fast, I think: seeing it merely in terms of eating healthier, losing weight, getting myself back into those pants that haven’t fit for the past few years or more. Weight loss and physical health are all good, to be sure, and we hope that they are results of the fast. But hunger, as we see in the temptation of Christ in the desert, is part of the process. I am hungry, but I accept that I am not going to eat right now.

We will discover, just as Jesus did, that other temptations dutifully follow after we have decisively, for the moment at least, said no to eating. When we are younger and perhaps less disciplined, the physical craving often remanifests itself laterally in the forms of a lustful eye, fantasizing, or seeking out energetic music or distracting entertainments. It would be useful to recognize this displacement and, as we had said no to eating, to say no to substitutes as well, especially the illicit ones. What we want is for the resistance to food to allow us to peer more deeply into the structure of our desires, especially those desires for safety, love, acceptance, power, and so on. A friend once told me that he stopped fasting because he discovered that it made him angry. My response to this is that fasting often reveals that I am an angry person, or at least a person who has habitually given myself over to anger. And I create an illusion of not being an angry person by cheerfully eating whenever something annoys me. So I never encounter the anger underneath the surface that drives my eating.

When anger, or sadness, or suspicion, or any other negative emotion arises, it is useful again to allow it to be, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist. This also precludes giving in and treating anger or sadness as legitimate just because I happen to feel one of them at the moment. The point here is to avoid any “quick fix” by giving up the fast or by a superficial happy feeling that we achieve by rewatching an episode of Police Squad for the hundredth time. If I have made a vice of anger, I might need an occasional distraction like that to avoid losing my temper. But the eventual goal is simple and gentle detachment from the disturbance of anger and negativity. This will eventually allow me to confront the thoughts that drive the anger, thoughts of frustration with a brother or a spouse, fear about war in Ukraine (or Covid–remember those days?). From here I can gently substitute thoughts from Scripture, allowing the Holy Spirit to change my outlook gradually. What I discover at this stage are the ways in which I have bought into a narrative about the world, myself, and God, that is profoundly false and distorting–the serpent’s narrative. Holy reading allows me to enter into the truth about these things, a truth that brings an eventual sense of peace and trust.

Power is the deepest danger. Again, it is quite useful to sit still and tell myself, “I am hungry, and the lack of food means that I don’t have the energy to work as hard as usual.” Overwork and, more generally, overfunctioning, is a way of attempting to dominate my environment. In Saint Augustine’s famous and frightening phrase, it is the corrupting libido dominandi, the drive to dominate. When we get sick or injured, or when we are lethargic because of hunger, we lose a good amount of control over our circumstances. Again, this lack of control most often manifests first as anger or sadness. One benefit of being hungry is that anger and sadness are harder to maintain, and we are confronted eventually with our real powerlessness, the realization that our bodies one day (and every day one day sooner) will fall apart and die. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I will admit to using Drebinisms from time to time to get some distance from angry thoughts.

At this point, we have little left but to turn to God, and this is undoubtedly the best place to be, because God really is in control of everything that matters in the end. “Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will take flight. Draw close to God, and He will draw close to you [James 4: 7].” “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares about you [1 Peter 5: 7].” This is the source of true joy and peace. As creatures of infinite desire, we find our rest in learning to desire the infinite God and His holy will. Recognizing all of the ways in which we settle for lesser goods is the source of compunction, a type of sadness. But it is a bright sadness because through it we are discovering the source and end of all spiritual longing, the love of the God of Jesus Christ.

He Is Not Here! Homily for the Easter Vigil

On the seventh day of creation, God rested.

From a theological and philosophical standpoint, this is quite a statement: philosophers would say that God’s Being is interchangeable with His acting. There is no separation between the two, and for God to rest seems like a contradiction, in one sense. Jesus Himself said that His Father is always at work. But we see two meanings of it in tonight’s liturgy.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened. Enter into my rest.

The first is that it is on the seventh day of the week, that Christ, the Son of God—Who is God—rests in the tomb. And we see even more profoundly that this is the cost to God of creation. God’s willingness—His “permissive will”—to open a space for other creatures of reason and will to act, to be free—this is a great risk that God takes, inviting us to act freely, to act reasonably (one hopes). And the cost of this is shown exactly by Christ’s death. This is the price of giving us freedom.

God is not giving up on us, though: in Christ’s Resurrection, which we celebrate tonight, we see an “eighth day” opening up, a new creation. And we are “recapitulating” this action of God.

The liturgy is the manifest action of Jesus Christ in the world. In the document Sacrosanctum Concilium [par. 7], the first document issued by the fathers of Vatican II, it says that the liturgy is the action of Christ, the High Priest. So what are we doing, then?

Well, we the baptized are members of His Body In acting out the liturgy, we are making visible what Christ is doing. When we participate in the liturgy, by our actions and by our attentiveness, we are conformed, body, mind, and spirit, to Christ Himself, Who is acting through us, impressing the form of His own life upon our own, giving us a new life. In celebrating the mystery of His Passion, Death, descent into hell and Resurrection, we ourselves undergo this same experience, in a mysterious way. As Saint Paul says in tonight’s epistle: “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.”

These are lovely words of comfort and consolation in the midst of, and at the end of, an annus horribilis.

So, how much do we feel—experience—the effects of our resurrection?

Now before you think that I’m trying to give you a guilt trip, implying that we all need to try harder to feel good about our resurrection in Christ, let me assure that I mean no such thing. I’m not here to increase your burdens—I promise you!

For starters, we should never try to engineer our own salvation by works.  And that includes working up happy feelings to prove to ourselves that we are saved. Rather, our salvation mysteriously takes place in the realm of faith, and this may or may not be accompanied by corresponding feelings.

I want to emphasize this particularly because I suspect that many of us have experienced at least a year of ambiguous feelings at best. I imagine that most of us, on the earthly plane, have been feeling helpless, anxious, frustrated, even depressed. And if we associate how we feel with the objectivity of our salvation in Jesus Christ, we probably will end up feeling hopeless besides, judging ourselves unworthy of God’s attention, just at the moment we need God’s solicitude more than ever.

Christ healing the paralytic. Haven’t we all had the experience of feeling paralyzed in the last year?

Most of us have never had quite the opportunity to share in Christ’s death before this year, when we’ve experienced a cascade of sufferings, many of them unforeseen and unpredictable.  The sufferings associated with a pandemic, with quarantines, loss of contact with loved ones, loss of pastimes, travel, and cultural events that lighten our lives, have in turn made the normal sufferings that much harder to bear: the deaths of loved ones, illness, broken relationships, financial hardships, difficulties at work, and so on.

Now with that background, let me return to my central question:

How am I experiencing Resurrection in Christ?

We have been led into the darkened church by the inextinguishable light of Jesus Christ, our brother and our head. We have heard of the empty tomb, and Paul has confirmed what the young man in white told the women inside that empty tomb: He is alive: death is not the end. What will this mean for us when we go forth from this celebration tonight, the celebration of our own resurrection and illumination in faith?

Assuredly, we all have some immediate grasp of what it means to live. I don’t mean merely to be alive and not dead. Rather I mean the experiences of great joy, hope, great encounters with beauty and goodness and love

The best we can say about the life that God gives us after our resurrection is that it in some way fulfills all the best promises that these previous experiences betoken. But we don’t really know what this new life is like until we experience it. There is something incomprehensible—at least at first—about living a resurrected life. Because this is an eternal life, God’s own infinite life, there will always be something about it that is unfamiliar.

We’ll never exhaust the mystery of God. If we feel out of our depth, that might be a good sign—that we are open to God revealing to us a new way to think, to feel, and experience the world.

All praise to Christ our Light!

In the meantime, we continue to live in an in-between state, remaining in the flesh even as we strive to live according to the Spirit. This means that much of the Christian interior life depends on interpretation—we can interpret in one of two ways: the flesh or the Spirit. We can interpret every single event of our lives in these ways, events like we’ve been experiencing.

Two chapters after tonight epistle, Saint Paul tells us that we can set our minds on the flesh or on the Spirit. And that the effect of setting our minds on the Spirit is life and peace.

In this same eighth chapter of Romans, Saint Paul tells us something that should be very comforting. We are heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with Him. Suffering is not meaningless if it done with Christ. This means that our suffering is not proof of God’s abandonment—far from it.

As the Easter candle went before us into the dark Church tonight, Christ has gone before us into the hell of suffering. He’s gone into the darkness of each of our hearts, and brought His light there. so that when we go into our hearts, and we feel all this difficulty, when we arrive there ourselves, He is there to accompany us, to comfort us, and…to show us the way out.

Christ leading Adam and Eve out of hell, and, in them, all of their children–including you.

Perhaps in years past, when life seemed to be going reasonably well compared to the last few years, we could confuse the good feelings about Easter, natural feelings, not bad in themselves, but still somewhat human and limited, with what a resurrected life of faith feels like. But this year, many of us have had a taste of what death feels like, and consequently, I would think that our experience of the resurrection can undergo two transformations as well.

First of all, it might not feel like previous feelings associated with Easter because we have been more closely conformed to Christ’s Passion. But if this is true, it is also true that we can be more confident this year that Christ has been walking with us through that shadow of death that has been threatening us.

What Pope Benedict XVI said about Christ’s death can be applied both to our deaths and to our suffering:

“Death, the illogical, the unspiritual and senseless…becomes [in Christ’s death] an active spiritual event. Death, the end of communication, becomes an act of communion of Jesus with everyone, and in him, of everyone with everyone.”

We all share the experience of suffering and death.

If we can discover in our recent suffering our communion with Christ’s suffering, we can discover our communion with each and every person who is our neighbor. We can be ambassadors of compassion. And, through suffering in communion with Christ, we can discover our communion with God, which is to say, mysteriously but truly, with our eternal life.  If we can re-enter those places of darkness and find in them waiting for us the lumen Christi, the light of Christ alive and life-giving.

How blessed we are to be together this night, the night of nights, when death was broken and God’s love was poured in our hearts. For the sake of the rest of the church, especially for those not able to be in an assembly tonight, let us welcome God’s love anew. And let us ask the Holy Spirit for to renew our minds, to help us think differently, with the mind of Christ, that we may know how to identify the signs of the resurrection in our lives, to become more and familiar with this inbreaking new life, and to live out of it.

[To listen to a podcast of this homily, click here.]

How to Sort Your Thoughts

My last post ended with a question. Once we get some emotional separation from our thoughts, and we use our newfound perspective to assess our thoughts, how do we determine which ones are good and which ones are bad? To answer this question, I would like to look more closely at where our thoughts come from, and then offer some ideas on how to separate out good thoughts from bad. 

Not only are we not our thoughts, but many of the thoughts we have don’t originate with us. This might sound surprising at first, until you give it a little thought (so to speak). Human beings use language to assist us in our thinking, and the words that we use are not our own. So to some extent, the shape that our thoughts take depends on the language we grow up using, and our facility in using it. We learn a lot about the world from what other people tell us. How we think about politics depends on which sources of news we read, how much we’ve learned about history and civics, and so on. In today’s world of hyperconnectivity, we often passively absorb all kinds of thoughts and feelings from advertising, movies, and social media. 

So the very idea that what I happen to be thinking or feeling at the moment is somehow “me,” or even “how I tend to think” hides from us the important fact that a good deal of our interior life is borrowed from sources external to our minds. Ancient monastic tradition understood this well. The monks of old referred to good thoughts as “angelic” (literally “messages” from God), and darker thoughts as “demonic.”

Our Lady trained herself by meditation on Israel’s scriptures to recognize the voice of an angel when Gabriel was sent to her.

Lest this talk of angels and demons sound too fantastical, let’s continue to unpack the phenomenon of thinking. Many of you know that before I entered monastic life, I was a professional songwriter. The first time that I experienced writers’ block, I started wondering about where my ideas for songs came from. Even today, when I walk in a crowded place, I tend to experience melodies arising internally. Sometimes I still wake up with songs going through my head that I’ve never heard before. In the modern world, we often celebrate persons whom we think of as “original” or “creative.” Now, these last two words are slightly dangerous from a theistic perspective, since we technically are not the origin of ourselves. Therefore we are never fully the origin of any product of our own thought or labor. Nor can we create, in the strict sense. So the question arises again, where do “creative” thoughts come from?

Before the notion of creativity became current, Western culture prized “inventors.” An invention is literally something that somebody “found” (Latin inventum, a thing that was found). Inventiveness arises from attentiveness, awareness, and a sympathy for things as they already are. Bach composed a number of “inventions,” and, as a devout Lutheran, he very much understood himself to have been a discoverer rather than a creator. Similarly, Stravinsky did not see himself as creative in the literal sense of the word. Rather, he was a “discerner.” He sorted through his many inspirations, and he kept the good and threw away the bad. Such is our work when we discern our thoughts.

Thomas Edison was an inventor. One of his most important virtues was perseverance in the face of failure. He tried out numerous materials for his light bulb filament before succeeding. Musical “inventors” follow a similar procedure. A great composer of music is someone who has lots of inspirations…and throws away the bad ones (which might be most of them), and keeps the good ones.

“Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”
Thomas Edison

Someone like Edison has an advantage over composers when it comes to separating the good inspirations from the bad. Either the filament lights up, or it doesn’t. How does a composer know when his piece “lights up?” Because a good composer has listened to lots and lots of good music, and he knows whether a piece is good or bad.

Learning to recognize what makes a song, a singer, or a symphony great allows me to apply the same standards to my own inspirations. Two examples: listening closely to the horn arrangements by the band Chicago taught me how to layer melodies within a texture to create depth that the ear might not hear on a first listen, but will be “felt” as more coherent. Paying attention to Joni Mitchell’s earlier songs (“For the Roses” is my favorite album of hers) taught me something similar: how the range and shape of a melody can convey emotional nuance. So, when my own compositions feel stale in some way, it’s often because I haven’t used these layering and shaping techniques to anchor the overall effect. And I recognize that feeling of staleness because I’m comparing my song to good songs.

A good composer, then, trains herself by immersion in good music, to be able to look objectively at her inspirations.

A composer has inspirations, and we have thoughts. The mechanism is, for our purposes, the same. A good composer trains herself to like good music, and to apply the same standards of excellence to her own compositions. We can train ourselves to like good thoughts. We do this by immersion in thoughts of proven worth. For a Christian, this would mean immersion in the world of the Bible (especially the New Testament) and the spiritual classics like Confessions or Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. It also means keeping at arm’s length more damaging influences.

If a reader were to ask me what two practical steps anyone could take today to make progress in the discernment of thoughts, my answer would be: 1) disconnect from the news and social media, and 2) read Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The entire letter is worth your time, but let’s start here:

“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things [Philippians 4: 8].”

I offer this one passage not as a shortcut to a fleeting mood of optimism. Rather, Saint Paul is offering a baseline of good thinking. Compare his exhortation to the actual state of your mind. On what might you reflect in order to find nobility and excellence? Which thoughts might you reject as untrue, dishonorable, or unjust? Why doesn’t Saint Paul urge you to think about your resentments or all the bad things that people do? Is it possible to be aware of evil in the world, take note of it, but not allow it to be the thrust of your thinking? Now you are practicing good interior hygiene.

Like learning to enjoy good music, training ourselves to “refuse the evil and choose the good [Isaiah 7: 14],” requires a commitment to change. What better time to start than in our present circumstances?

In an upcoming post, we will look at how to influence our thinking by changing our behaviors. For now, here’s a remarkable combination of guitar texture, vocal delivery, supple melodic ideas, and ingeniously poignant lyrical imagery. This is a song that has made a big impact on my thinking about musical excellence (though not as much impact as Saint Benedict has had on my thinking about spiritual excellence!).

The Invasion of Thoughts

I appreciate the feedback I’ve received on the last few posts. It seems clear that more attention to thoughts would be helpful. As I wrote earlier, when we are forced into a situation of isolation and many of our usual supports are removed, we often find ourselves flooded with thoughts. This can be quite distressing especially when our minds “race” or when thoughts are so heavy and (apparently) indisputable that there seems to be no escape from their grim logic. These two particular extremes form the material for the bipolar condition, where a person moves back and forth between a mind going too fast (hypomania or mania) and a mind stuck (depression). I would imagine that many of us are going through mild, or even relatively strong, versions of these conditions right now.

The good news is that monks have been dealing with the challenge of thoughts in solitude for centuries. Our traditional disciplines may offer some profit for readers of this blog.

A book by a fellow Benedictine (with the name Funk–no relation!), available in the monastery gift shop…

We are not our thoughts. This means that it is possible to put distance between our Selves (what the Christian tradition sometimes calls the “true self”) and our thoughts. This in turn allows us some perspective and objectivity regarding our thoughts. Perspective gives us the choice whether to keep the thoughts we have or to replace them with other thoughts. This is extremely significant. Why? Because thoughts determine our worlds. When we are not in control of our thoughts, when they overwhelm us or operate unconsciously, we experience life as beyond our control. Under these circumstances, thoughts can appear to have a kind of necessity about them. But this is, in fact, an illusion that can be dispelled.

While thoughts determine our actions and create our worlds, it is important to note that we are not just our minds. Each of us is an integrated composite of mind, body, and spirit. As it turns out, our bodies can be extremely helpful tools for regaining control of our minds. Anyone who has taken a walk in the last few days has likely felt how much a change in our bodily state can alter our mood and thinking.

One of my favorite movies, Of Gods and Men, tells the true story of the Trappists from Tibhirine, Algeria, during the 1996 Algerian Civil War. Early on in the film it becomes clear that the monks are all likely to die at the hands of extremists if they remain in their monastery. The drama of the story revolves around whether they will stay with their beloved villagers (who are mainly Muslim), or leave (abandon?) the villagers for the safety of France. Once the monks have decided to stay, the superior of the community, Fr. Christian de Chergé, in a voice-over, muses on the importance of routine in the face of growing disorder outside. How were the monks able to face the fear of being kidnapped and eventually being killed without breaking down? The answer is that they simply went about their work each day, praying the office, celebrating Mass, operating a health clinic, and even gardening.

Routines remove a great deal of uncertainty from our lives by eliminating the need to decide over and over again when to rise, when to eat, and so on. Under the influence of routines, the future becomes more predictable and requires less adjustment on the fly, conserving energy for truly important decisions.

Like the monks in the film, we are all under stress right now, and for the next several weeks, routines will be important for managing our thoughts. When the stay-at-home orders first came about, many people seemed to think that this would be like a vacation. All the suddenly available time looked like a gift: a chance to relax, not to shave, and finally to binge-watch that series that we missed the first time around. But if we are really facing at least 4-6 weeks stuck at home, a daily and weekly routine is going to be extremely important. Breaking routine is fun when it’s temporary and when you know that it will return again relatively soon. But weeks without a good routine is a recipe for heightening anxiety and allowing the mind to roam too much. Longstanding monastic tradition requires set times for waking, praying, reading, eating, and cleaning. In our monastery, we’ve found these traditional routines to be particularly  comforting and familiar during the stresses of the pandemic. Perhaps readers would profit from making decisions about waking up at the same time every day, following the same grooming schedule that we have when we are working (maybe even taking the time to dress well), regular times for meals, regular times for prayer, for shared quiet and reading, and regular times for recreation or exercise.

Keeping our bodies healthy and fit is important for controlling thoughts as well. It helps to eat nutritious foods moderately (i.e. avoiding too much grazing or snacking). Be careful about your use of sugar and alcohol. If one chooses to have some, make sure to pay close attention to how your body reacts, and in general to the effect nutrition has on your moods. For example, since I turned 40 or so, sugar depresses me. If I do eat sugar, I know ahead of time that it will give rise to certain kinds of thoughts (one common one is a feeling of hopelessness). Knowing that this thought is the product of sugar allows me to catch the thought at its earliest appearance and set it aside. Sometimes, it’s good for me just to sit still for a few minutes and pay attention to my body as it adjusts to the effects of sugar. This again allows me to recognize certain types of impulse (e.g. being overly critical with a brother) as “not objective,” and I can move on.

Silence and stillness allow us to practice “nepsis,” the work of vigilant watchfulness of our thoughts.

Stillness is extremely helpful for sorting out thoughts. This observation comes with a few caveats. If you have not practiced stillness, your early experiences of trying to sit still might seem unendurable. When we slow down our bodies, we reduce external stimuli, and this allows our thoughts to rise to the surface. Some of the thoughts that invade our minds may be rather unpleasant. As uncomfortable as this might feel at first, this is exactly what we want, and so it should not surprise us or make us afraid. By slowing our bodies down, we give ourselves a chance to identify our thoughts before they engage us emotionally. We experience emotions in our bodies. Think about how your body responds when you are angry or uneasy. Our shoulders rise and get tense, or we might feel a burning sensation in our chests, for example. Our heart rate increases when we are frightened. So we know that emotions tend to arise unconsciously in connection with certain types of thoughts, and produce corresponding bodily reactions. The problem is that once the emotions are engaged, it is much more difficult to get distance from the thought.

Let’s look at a subtler example. If I react with anger to a news report, it is often the case that I am not paying attention to how the information I’m receiving is causing changes in my body. I know from experience how anger manifests itself in my body. If I can slow down and notice my anger getting engaged, I can step back from the information that is giving rise to this response and decide whether I want to get angry about it, whether that’s a helpful response or merely a habitual reaction.

The goal in slowing down is to choose the thoughts that influence my mood and behavior rather than being at the mercy of thoughts I just happen to have at the moment (or for the past several days, for that matter). Deep breathing and the recitation of a mantra or a short prayer while sitting still or lying in bed will gain us perspective–eventually–on our thoughts. And this will allow us to choose our thoughts rather than be determined by them.

Choosing thoughts also requires choosing my influences. Here it’s good to notice the connection I’ve made between the effects of mood-altering substances like sugar and the mood-altering consumption of information. In both cases, we might experience that a short-term surge in good feeling (even if that means righteous anger at the news) gradually gives way to a dangerous emotional logjam. One way I have dealt with this is by deciding ahead of time how much news I intend to read (I bear some responsibility for the monastery’s safety and financial well-being, so some engagement with current events seems prudent). Once I’ve used up the allotted time, I turn off the internet and immerse myself in something life-giving: the Psalms and gospels, a great novel or a great movie, beautiful poetry or beautiful music. What type of influences ground you and recharge you? Make time for these.

One last external discipline is charity and compassion toward others. In a monastery, this typically means no mind reading. If a brother seems distracted or upset, I needn’t take it personally, nor need I criticize him or rescue him. If I see a brother behaving in a manner that annoys me, I can go to the next room and ignore it. If I’m criticized, I can try to take it in a good and generous spirit.

Once we get some distance from our thoughts, how do we tell the good ones from the bad ones? This is where I will begin in the next post.

Living in Isolation

Americans are being asked to spend the next month in relative isolation. I’m not the first to point out that monasteries are a resource for how to deal with this separation from others. I have many thoughts on this, and I hope to share them over the coming days and weeks.

Saint Benedict teaches experienced monks to admonish newcomers that the way to God is “rugged and harsh [via dura et aspera].” We come to the monastery seeking God, and, human nature being what it is, it is tempting to imagine that entry into a monastery will be a crowning moment of arrival rather than the initiation of a trial. But entry into monastic life also requires renunciation of “the world.”

The difficulty in monastic renunciation comes precisely from renunciation. The novice monk or nun is called to go without the usual comforts that smooth over the inevitable rough spots of life. Today, we are all being called, temporarily, to make acts of renunciation of the usual supports that we have in life: meetings with friends, hugs, museums, church, dining out, checking the sports scores, full shelves in the grocery stores …we have all entered a time of deprivation. A monk chooses this; most of you have not sought this out in the same way. I say this up front because we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges that deprivation and renunciation present.

They are not at all insurmountable challenges! If, however, we imagine that renunciation will be painless, well, this will only make the unavoidable pain confusing and anxiety-provoking. With God’s help, especially as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we can look upon this as a moment to take up our Cross alongside our Lord, confident in divine accompaniment.

Now let me say a bit more about the “rugged and harsh” way upon which we’ve set out together. There are four initial things that warrant attention: the pain of grief, the invasion of thoughts, the importance of agency, and a long-term goal that gives us hope. Let us follow the example of the philosophers and Fathers and start with the goal.

Antony the Great being invaded by his thoughts while living in solitude: notice how he calmly accepts the presence of these temptations without engaging with them. Martin Schongauer, 15th century

The monk gives up worldly comforts for the sake of the Kingdom of God. We leave aside lesser comforts so that we may depend entirely on God and thereby be found worthy of His friendship. So monks and nuns willingly allow for painful experiences in the short term, always with an eye to the good that we want in the long term. We also choose to reduce our dependence on worldly comforts so as to acclimate ourselves with the interior world of thoughts. Now: during this time of involuntary renunciation, be ready to do battle with invading thoughts! I will have more to say about this soon, but here let me remind you that you are not your thoughts, and that there are ways to choose our thoughts. Choose wisely! We should especially make sure not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the news and the itch to become an expert on all angles of the situation.

Back to the goal: what good are we seeking together in this time of pestilence? What is our goal? We are looking to safeguard our own lives and health and those of our families and neighbors. We are hoping to do this without undue damage to the infrastructure of our economic life (which would provoke a second round of sufferings for the most vulnerable). The hope of achieving these critical goals can motivate us to take action–hence the “importance of agency,” with which I will deal in a separate post.

There is a subtler set of goals that deserves our focus. When this trial begins to subside, and I look back on my decisions, how will I have comported myself? Am I now striving to act with courage, justice, compassion, generosity, and holiness? We will look back at this time and celebrate the heroes. Without doubt, we will also be aware of failures of virtue. If I have not prepared myself to be courageous, compassionate, or holy, now might be the best time I’ve ever had to learn. Acquiring these virtues involves acting in ways that might feel inauthentic in the moment. But one small act of courage makes the next, greater act easier. We will learn much about ourselves in the coming weeks. In some cases, what we learn will be uncomfortable. That, too, is part of the pain of deprivation–hence the “pain of grief,”–another future post. In this post, I want to emphasize that we do have a choice about our personal behaviors, and this is an opportunity for us to become quite a lot stronger than we thought we could be. The reason to emphasize this is that isolation can make it feel like we are reduced to passivity, that we lack agency. Many critics of monastic life harshly accuse us of “doing nothing.” This accusation derives from a certain bias that equates action with external activism and technological manipulation. Amusing memes of couch potatoes as heroes aside, we Americans are not being called to do nothing, but to change our arena of action toward self-discipline in a way that could bring about a discovery of inner strength.

A last comparison for today with monastic life. The newcomer, one hopes, is greatly consoled by the presence of others around him or her, especially the older monks. These are persons who have come through the trial and become icons of hope for what monastic life can achieve. In our shared isolation, who are our icons of hope for what we might achieve by God’s grace in our engagement with the present crisis? We certainly can look to the saints, particularly martyrs and confessors, for demonstrations of patience and sanctity amidst trials. We also have with us many survivors of illness and survivors of social dislocation. Interestingly on this last point, the immigrants among us and our immigrant ancestors are examples of living with great uncertainty and dislocation (our dislocation being more metaphorical but nonetheless real). Who are the best examples we’ve known of strength amid these adversities, and how can we learn from their experiences?

To Those Who Are Scared

At a press conference yesterday, the President was asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” He didn’t really answer the question. Perhaps, in fairness, this sort of question is one that we should be asking our religious leaders. So I will take a shot at it and let the President focus on policy.

If you are scared, this means that you are human, and this is good. Possessing fear means valuing life and the good things of life like health, children, grandparents, friends, peace and community.

We sometimes mistakenly think that having courage means being fearless. But in fact, lacking fear makes one rash not courageous. Courage means fearing the right things the right amount. Since human beings lack immunity (at this moment) to the novel coronavirus, it threatens our lives. It really should make us cautious. Perhaps it should even enable us to make difficult decisions, painful in the short term, that will preserve life and the good things of life in the long run.

Of course, having too much fear is also a danger, hindering us from acting or moving us to make selfish decisions that cause more damage overall. Courage means taking the most rational action after judging how dangerous the situation really is.

At this moment, we are still learning what sort of danger COVID-19 poses to the things we love and cherish, and so we are called upon not only to be courageous, but patient. Patience is not something that comes easily to the American temperament, and here’s a chance to add a new virtue to our national character. While we wait, we are blessed to have many intelligent, motivated, energetic people working at understanding the nature of the disease and our best strategies to protect ourselves against it. We will not need to wait forever, just long enough to get clarity.

Making rational decisions and being patient requires that we master the thoughts that generate fear. It’s important to learn how to slow the panic response by sitting still and breathing deeply (this can be done in prayer). The next step is describing the situation and our options accurately and focusing on the overall goal. It is important to remember that COVID-19 is not fatal for most who contract the disease. Then, if our goal is keeping our families and neighbors safe, keeping the death count low and healthcare workers well-supported, and ultimately returning to good order and peace, we can focus on the actions that will get us there. Having the long-term goal in sight helps us to deal with potentially irrational fears that move us to counterproductive actions in the short term. For example, knowing that a vaccine will keep me healthy in the long run helps me to confront the pain of a shot in the short term.

Last of all, fearing rightly is a topic addressed by Jesus. Let me begin this final thought by pointing out that he spends much of his ministry reassuring others:

They were frightened, but he said to them, ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Then they were glad to take him into the boat. [John 6: 20-21]

After his resurrection, he continually urged his Apostles not to be afraid because death, that destroyer of all that we love, had been conquered. With that as background, we should note that Jesus also teaches us about fearing the right things in the right way.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.

Lest this sound too ominous, we should note that he adds:

Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. [Matthew 10: 28; 30-31]

The first part of that quote is a restatement, in perhaps hyperbolic terms, of the well-known proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [Proverbs 9: 10].” There are many ways to understand fear of the Lord, and in the Jewish and Christian traditions it is usually understand that this fear undergoes a maturation as we grow in faith. It typically begins as an acknowledgement that God is all-powerful and we are not, which should make us reticent about taking anything for granted in life (I plan to say more about this in a future post). Sobriety and humility are the entryway into understanding the world. But as we grow in virtue, this more servile fear grows to be a fear of losing God’s friendship through carelessness and superficiality.

Our present crisis calls upon all of us to act soberly and humbly, but also with profound desire to do what is truly best for our neighbor, what is truly just and upright. A proper fear of failure in these areas is a good motivation to take courage and make our own contribution to the long-term goal of restoring peace.

Thoughts Determine Our Lives

St. Ignatius of Loyola died on this date 561 years ago. He did not set out at first to be a saint, but a soldier. Then Providence intervened. A cannonball shattered his leg, and as he was recovering from this terrible compound fracture, he underwent this remarkable experience:

He asked for some of these books [of knight-errantry] to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints written in Spanish….When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy.

Ignatius’s circumstances didn’t change. His joy and sadness did not depend on the healing of his leg, or on his future prospects as a soldier and a dandy. In other words, our contentment in life, or lack thereof, is not, primarily, a function of the external circumstances of our lives. What determines the emotional shape of our lives (and therefore, that aspect of our lives that really matters!) is our thinking.

This profound insight of Saint Ignatius comports with ancient monastic wisdom, both in Christian and Buddhist forms. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism, in this regard at least, is that traditional Christianity does not aim at avoidance of suffering by the elimination of the ego. Rather, the Gospel allows the newly, intentionally reborn self [in the image of Christ] to embrace joyfully the suffering that comes from standing out to the full, which is to say, the suffering that comes with sainthood. Our suffering is embraced “for the sake of the joy that was set before” us [Hebrews 12: 2]. We do this by changing the way we think, by the “renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 2].” How is this done? By, among other things, faith in God’s promises.

This future-oriented, eschatological thinking finds yet another interesting corroboration in the insights of Jewish psychotherapists Viktor Frankl and Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Both men asked this question: “Why is it that, under experiences of extreme stress, some persons not only continue to function but even thrive?” It’s good to note that Frankl himself was a Holocaust survivor. Both men experienced quasi-Ignatian moments of insight. Frankl’s very language echoes the experience of Ignatius [my emphases in bold]:

Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the [prisoner] marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

Frankl and Friedman both challenge us to change our thoughts, to substitute thoughts of love, hope, purpose, and meaning for thoughts of hatred, anxiety, frustration, and resentment. I will be returning to Friedman, whose overall insights are especially counter-intuitive in our present world (which, from the perspective I’m adopting here makes them actually more persuasive). For today’s feast of Saint Ignatius, let me offer one more example of a change of thinking, this time a literary one. As Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins trudge their way through the soul-killing terror of Mordor, Sam experiences this moment of insight. It changes nothing of the external horror to which he and Frodo have been consigned. But it does something quieter, yet more radical. It changes Sam’s heart, and, in Tolkien’s story, this small, hidden change of heart changes the world.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Our thoughts determine our lives.

Of Solitude and Contemplation

In my previous post, I noted that behind the Rule of Saint Benedict, there lies hidden the influence of the Desert Fathers. Benedict recommends that the monk eager for advanced pursuits in monastic spirituality should read the “Institutes” and the “Conferences.” Universal tradition as well as common sense asserts that he is referring to St. John Cassian, who spent nearly two decades in the Egyptian desert learning the monastic life. You can find indices to Cassian’s two most important works, the Institutes and the Conferences at the Order of Saint Benedict website.

What I wish to emphasize here, and in keeping with my aim to write brief and manageable posts, is one key connection between these two books and the two-fold path to spiritual maturity. I wrote last time that Saint Benedict is primarily concerned with the correction of behavior in his Rule for monks, but that he also acknowledges, in quiet ways, that beyond the cultivation of virtue and the elimination of vice, there is the further contemplative aspect of monastic (and Christian) life, what Benedict calls “wisdom of doctrine.” The Institutes correspond to the “active” life of conversion, and the Conferences are concerned with the “contemplative” life of adepts.

The first stage of spiritual growth, the correction of behavior, is therefore the primary concern of Cassian’s Institutes. Note that Cassian does not give us what we would consider “morality.” Rather, he is interested in teaching the times of prayer, the style of dress for monks, and the organization of communal life. This is exactly parallel to Saint Benedict’s Rule.  The connection is not just one of a common culture. The Rule of the Master, an Italian monastic rule from the generation before Benedict, and Benedict’s primary source, cribs from Cassian’s Institutes, so that we can say that St. Benedict’s Rule is a kind of grandchild to the Institutes. Cassian goes somewhat beyond communal organization, and spends the last eight books of the Institutes on the eight vices and how to identify the thought patterns that go with them. So again, we are not so much in the realm of morality as moderns understand it. Cassian is interested in psychology, how our thoughts influence our behavior.

This emphasis on psychology is the link between the active and contemplative stages of Christian spiritual growth. Before we can properly understand doctrine, we must first work against behaviors that are not consonant with Christian doctrine, but then we must also go after the thought patterns that underlie wrongful behavior. This cleansing of the mind of wrongful thinking allows us to receive true “theology,” knowledge of God. This is the focus of Cassian’s Conferences.

In the next several short posts, I hope to walk with you through the two stages with more attention to the particular battles with behaviors and thoughts, along with recommended reading in monastic spirituality.

Belief, Behavior, Structure: More from Natural Symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

media of expression/symbolic communication

⇑                                     ⇑

⇓                                     ⇓

system of control/structure        ⇔            system of belief

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

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

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

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