Spiritual Direction and Stories

First, an update from yesterday. An anonymous reader asked about my claim that we can "grow out of" spiritual direction. In fact, the claim is not mine, but that of Blessed Columba Marmion. I had also qualified what I wrote by saying that this was part of the Benedictine tradition. There are other, more recent spiritualities in which spiritual direction plays a major, ongoing part. However, given the fact that good spiritual directors are rare, I would not want to place on the lay faithful a burden that cannot be carried, namely to suggest that authentic discernment cannot take place except in the context of spiritual direction. In the monastic tradition, particularly today in the Carthusian tradition, the emphasis is on the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is a gift to all the baptized, and not merely the religious. This may sound risky to say in public in an age when people too uncritically accept their own authority, but I also, I hope, reasonably clear in saying that our consciences needs formation. It is not so much a matter of 'trusting your feelings' as it is developing a sense and taste for the things of God, so that we almost naturally choose the Godly course.

On to another comment:

Amator Catholicarum said...

"I would be interested in a discussion of how this tension between
conversion and epistemological continuity manifests itself in many Catholics. It
seems that many of them do not seek for the continuity within the context of the
faith, but rather their own lives. That is to say, the result is that the
conversion becomes an isolated part of their lives, but does not convert the
whole person."

It would perhaps be presumptuous of me to attempt to speak of Catholic experience as a whole in this area. I believe that religion in general today tends toward personal and compartmentalized expression, and so we might naturally simply read only our life story in order to find God's presence. The two major correctives for this problem are the liturgy and Scripture. Catholics who regularly attend Mass and other paraliturgical devotions (attendance at the Divine Office is still pretty rare) tend to pick up a sense of being part of a much larger story, the story of the whole of creation and its redemption through the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Catholics probably lag behind Protestants in terms of filling out this sense of the cosmic story by attention to Scripture. In either path, God will eventually touch every part of our lives, if we are listening.

What I am putting forward here perhaps needs a summary, in order to remind readers entering in mid-conversation what exactly is on the table. I have been claiming that A. MacIntyre's idea of an 'epistemological crisis' (a crisis in understanding the world and one's place in it) can illuminate the Christian understanding of conversion. In fact, Scripture and the liturgy should provoke ongoing 'crises' of understanding, such that faith continually moves us to a deeper change of heart and a deeper sense of God's dominion and love, and a profounder determination to give the whole of our lives to God as a gift. A part of this involves the challenge to understand our own lives as falling in the midst of the cosmic story and thus requiring public confession and witness of some kind (just as, say, living in post 9/11 America requires us to take responsibility for political debates about security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth, whether we feel like it or not). The Church's story should open us up more and more to concern for the whole Church and the whole creation.

In terms of our own lives prior to conversion, we can learn to see them in Biblical/liturgical terms (where we might be inclined toward psychological or sociological terms). Thus, instead of finding that Jesus Christ has allowed me to actualize my full potential in life--this understood as doing the things that I really want to do--we instead are persuaded that we are like the Israelites in the desert, being rescued by God, and yet complaining about what we had to give up. Or we see ourselves like David, blessed and yet pronee to the worst sorts of sins of pride and self-will. We see that God treats us in ways similar to the Biblical persons, with corrections, warnings, and such, but ultimately with knowledge of Him and communion with all that is good in creation.

We can take a cue from St. Augustine, who definitely read his own life in a Biblical sense in order to narrate his conversion, but from there, he went on to reading the Bible. He concludes Confessions with a three-chapter incomplete commentary on Genesis. Many have puzzled over this, but perhaps this is just St. Augustine's way of indicating that our personal narratives, important as they are to each of us, are best understood within the cosmic story.

Ask the Prior: July 2008

I mentioned about a week ago that questions, all of them thought-provoking, were piling up in the comment boxes. Since I am not certain how many of you read them, and since I imagine that many questions that you have are shared, and that our combined insight is better than my own, I will try about once per month to catch up on answering such questions or highlighting particularly good insights from your comments. Thank you to all who provide them! They help me a great deal in preparing these posts.

A while back, amidst the posts on autonomy versus Christian freedom, Connie asked,

"When does a person begin to trust their own conscience? I ask because I think all too often we have become so accustomed to hearing our own voice (as opposed to God's) and so partial to our own ego that we can quite comfortably turn an evil into a good (a vice into a virtue) by playing a sort of justification by mental gymnastics. This lack of trust in ones own conscience could be a disaster for a person discerning the religious life, or any major decision, such as marriage, etc. because the person will never make a decision for fear of their own conscience.

"Perhaps it is as simple as spending time getting to know ourselves by getting to know God. It's a bit of a paradox though...kind of...because can we really KNOW God, not know OF Him but really KNOW Him, without knowing ourselves? And can we really know ourselves without knowing God? "

The Desert Father tradition as well as the Ignatian tradition acknowledge three sources of thoughts: our selves, God and the Evil One. Discernment of spirits is the skill of coming to know which thoughts are which. In this way, coming to separate out our thoughts from the thoughts that God places in us indeed demonstrates that we come to know God better by coming to know ourselves and vice versa. I would add only that we need to come to know the devices of our Enemy as well.

From this follows a provisional answer to your question about conscience. Cardinal Newman's teaching that the conscience is the voice of God has been much abused, since today it is so often divorced from the complementary teaching of the Venerable Cardinal, that the conscience must be formed properly. This means immersion in Christ's teaching, the Bible, the liturgy, the public disciplines of Church life and the private disciplines of asceticism.

If one is not sure about one's conscience, I hope that there would be spiritual mothers and fathers around who could hear you lay out your thoughts and then help you to see what God is asking. On the other hand, I think that today thoughtful Christians sometimes over-react to the cultural subjectivism and avoid listening to their thoughts altogether, hoping to receive some kind of outward sign. We should be confident that the Holy Spirit, Who is the real 'spiritual director', dwells in us and helps us to pray and act as we ought. So when in doubt, especially on lesser questions, we should pray for illumination and then proceed with faith in God's help. For bigger questions, or if we find ourselves unusually perplexed, then recourse to an external spiritual director can be of great help. But in the Benedictine tradition, the spiritual director should never be more than a crutch (said Columba Marmion), to assist the directee in learning discernment. Spiritual direction is not therapy, and so we should expect to outgrow it.

Above all, be bold in asking God's assistance! Don't wait to pray until you have it figured out--pray in order to figure it out!

Scholion on David the King

"David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam. When his brothers and the rest of his family heard about it, they came down to him there. He was joined by all those who were in difficulties or in debt, or who were embittered, and he became their leader. About four hundred men were with him. " 1Samuel 22: 1-2

"All those...who were embittered..." Who can this be but those who, with Qoheleth, see that the world involves us relentlessly in 'vanity of vanities'? And what can it mean that we who suffer this bitterness of heart should seek out David as our leader, but that we should seek our solace in the Psalter?

"I believe that the whole of human existence, both the dispositions of the soul and the movements of the thoughts, have been measured out and encompassed in those very words of the Psalter....For whether there was necessity of repentance or confession, or tribulation and trial befell us, or someone was persecuted, or...someone has become deeply sorrowlful and disturbed...for any such eventuality he has instruction in the divine Psalms."
St. Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus, 30

"If I am disquieted by the urges of anger, avarice, or sadness, and if I am being pressed to cut off the gentlness that I have proposed to myself and that is dear to me, then, lest the disturbance of rage carry me off into a poisonous bitterness, let me cry out with loud groaning, 'O God, incline unto my aid; O Lord, make haste to help me.' [Ps. 60/70: 1]
"We find all of these [human] dispositions expressed in the psalms, so that we may see whatever occurs as in a very clear mirror and recognize it more effectively."
St. John Cassian, Conferences, 10.IX.10, 10.XI.6.

David managed to assemble a disciplined army out of the outcasts of society. We, who are abhorrent to (and thus outcast by) the World, can find a place in the disciplined army of the Son of David, if we allow ourselves to be instructed in self-knowledge and praise of God by David's songbook, the Psalter.

Notes on Conversion of Life

I promised a while back to present some thoughts on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and how his insights offer some material for contemplation in the area of conversion of life, which ought to be dear to Christians.

MacIntyre, today considered a 'traditionalist' Thomist Catholic, underwent a 'conversion' experience around 1972. After having cut his teeth on Marxism and Freudianism, he came to what seemed like a dead-end in his inquiries into moral philosophy. In a recent collection of essays, The Tasks of Philosophy, he writes in the introduction that the problems he was facing in, "were bound to remain intractable so long as they were understood in the terms dictated by those larger assumptions which I shared with many of my contemporaries [x.]."

This led M to embrace the Aristotelian synthesis, especially as handed on to posterity by St. Thomas Aquinas, as a vantage point from which to make sense of the apparently intractable problems of modern philosophy. This in turn culminated with the publication of his best-known book, After Virtue, already considered a classic a few years after its appearance in 1981. He famously ends After Virtue with a call for a 'new Saint Benedict', which has endeared him to some members of my Order.

Underlying this waiting for a new Benedict is a consideration of the importance of culture in any kind of systematic thinking. Philosophers are not the only ones who need this; all of us think systematically when we speak, make plans for the future, and arrange our days. We undertake these activities as members of one or more cultures that provides us certain foundations that we take for granted. In the essay Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science, M points out that when Descartes attempted to doubt everything, he was not able to go without the Latin language in order to pronounce, "Cogito ergo sum," and that writing in Latin already assumes a huge amount of cultural baggage. Experts on Descartes can point out how much of his language is indebted, for example, to St. Augustine, including the famed 'cogito' itself.

So M sets out to critique modern liberalism (and by 'liberalism' I don't mean what is usually meant in political journalism, but rather the enthroning of 'autonomy' that I have been posting on for the past two weeks), by stepping outside of this culture, embracing the cultural assumptions of Aristotle and Aquinas, and then offering his own view of modernism. I find his writing scintillating to say the least. One might immediately object that we can't go back to Paris of 1222, much less Athens of 370 B.C. MacIntyre is no simpleton about such objections, and lacking the means to defend his thesis in the cramped medium of the weblog, I will leave it to readers to discover for themselves how he reasons his way through this dilemma.

What I hope to post on over the coming week or so is this idea of 'conversion'. As M sees it, this requires not merely adapting new information into an existing system (which is what most of us do most days), but opting to be changed by moving into a totally different system, a new system that requires us to re-think the the meaning of the whole of our past, in new terms.

I gave as an example last week the idea that Christians ought to be converted away from 'autonomy' toward 'Christian freedom'. This constitutes no less than a total 'renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 1]', for so much that we take for granted in modern times assumes that autonomy and personal authenticity is a greater good than, say, the salvation of our souls by living the virtuous life. Certainly, entering a monastery ought to provoke some sort of conversion this way: the fact that we do not watch television, that a higher value is placed on mopping the floor according to customary practice than on 'self-expression', that we spend hours a day reciting words of long-dead Hebrew poets; these assume a world-view very much at odds with what exists outside the cloister.

This however does not mean that my life experience before I entered the cloister in meaningless. MacIntyre writes that he was inspired by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that the whole 'paradigm', world-view or cultural stance needs to be questioned in order to move forward at times in systematic inquiry. However, he is also highly critical of the either/or implications of Kuhn's thinking; that embracing a new paradigm necessarily makes the old one completely obsolete. Rather, M wants to show how a coherent human life requires a coherent story or narrative, and that a conversion, in order to be coherent, must not only account for the world according to a new paradigm or world-view, but must also explain how the person could have reasonably held the previous world-view.

My sense is that today, 'conversions' are often suspect because we assume that the person who undergoes one has to repudiate what had gone before, rather than explain it. The Fathers of the Church were less certain of this--they expressed a variety of opinions, but I would point out that the view that was eventually embraced as something of a default, at least in the West, was the Benedictine view, one that integrates what is best in the cultures converted by the gospel. Jean LeClerq, in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, demonstrates that the Benedictine way of life, while professing to leave the world behind, in fact was able to purify 'worldly' knowledge and rhetoric by placing it at the service of a comprehensive Christian worldview.

I will end this post today by addressing a comment made by Ascending Incense two weeks ago (and let me insert here that I repent of my infelicitous language that claimed that infants are 'infected' by Original Sin--perhaps I could change this to 'subject to' so as to assert their innocence before God). He noted that Karol Berger located the beginnings of modernism with Rousseau, whereas he thought that Descartes was more normally given that dubious distinction. Berger is operating within a very specific frame of reference, and Rousseau mirrors the changing sensibilities in musical composition in mid-Eighteenth century that separate Bach from Mozart. I agree that Descartes is more typically seen as the breaking point. However, my own personal point of view is that the break begins with Nominalism, the late scholastic philosophy that claims that the objects we encounter in the physical universe do not tell us anything meaningful about the nature of things. Thus, we would not be able to abstract a concept called 'human nature' from observing individual human beings. This sets up what I have long called a 'disjunctive universe', in which things are not related to one another, except in the minds of those who decide to call different things by the same name (hence 'nominalism'--it's all about naming things).

The effects of Nominalism have taken a long time to play out, but I would venture to say that they have reached a certain maximization today. How often are we scolded for trying to generalize about the world by those who wish to be left alone to make their own generalizations, to 'define the mystery of life' according to their own lights rather than by things-as-they-really-are? Postmodernism is defined by just this sort of disjunction, leading people to assert that there is no truth, or at the very least that any claims to truth are ideological and therefore violent and out-of-bounds (we normally say 'offensive' or 'insensitive').

The Thomistic view, which I take to be the Catholic one, rather exercises discretion to 'baptize' pagan cultures, adopting what is good, while defining, explaining and excluding what is bad. Thus there is an emphasis on the fundamental continuity of persons and cultures, even through a conversion experience. On this, MacIntyre interestingly takes issue with Burke's criticism of the French Revolution (note for political junkies).

So I locate the wellsprings of modernism with Scotus and William of Occam, which seems about right for a monk. It happens to coincide with the claims of so-called Radical Orthodoxy, though for somewhat different reasons. At the same time, both Descartes and Rousseau are owed a certain credit/blame for advancing the cause.

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 4

I suggested yesterday that we can become better trained at listening to God and discerning the thoughts that come from Him and the thoughts that do not. Theologically, Christians are confident in this possibility because the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts. We have a divine 'spiritual director'. Blessed Columba Marmion used to tell people that he would assist as a spiritual director for a time, but that his function was to listen and help corroborate what the Holy Spirit was saying to the individual. But, like a crutch, a spiritual director should be discarded when the individual can walk on his own.

What are the signs of spiritual maturity that allow us to be docile to the Holy Spirit's direction, wise about the things of the spirit? Monastic tradition stresses humility: constant awareness of God's presence and anticipation of death and judgment. This practice will help focus us on the fact that we have thoughts, and that these thoughts need to be exposed to the divine light for discernment.

We can also aid this discernment by formation in the Holy Spirit. Let me use an example. A guitar string between two chairs will vibrate, but not make a whole lot of noise. If you string it on the hollow wooden body of a guitar, however, the sound of the vibrations will be greatly amplified and sweetened by the resonance of the wood and its hollow interior. God's voice is like that string: often still and small, easily overlooked. By the imitation of the saints and the practice of the virtues, we form ourselves into a perfectly resonant shape, quick to pick up divine inspiration. We also hollow ourselves out. A misshapen guitar will produce strange sounds, and a guitar packed with mud will stifle them. Well formed, we will also become aware of sounds that 'don't fit'.

So meditation on the teaching of Scripture and the practice of virtue: these will make discernment much easier.

Secondly, I promised to wrap up some conclusions about autonomy, freedom, thoughts and the ego. This will require a somewhat lengthy post, so I will save it for tomorrow.

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 3

It is said of St. Teresa of Avila that a young nun asked her how she knew what God said to her. Aren't the thoughts that we attribute to God only our imaginations? St. Teresa responded, "How else would God speak to us if not in our imaginations?"

Now St. Teresa is using an older, scholastic idea of the imagination as a faculty of the soul. I believe that our modern concept is much less extensive and therefore impoverished. For us, imaginary things aren't real in the end. By contrast, in the Christian psychological tradition and especially in the monastic tradition, the images in the imagination are quite real, and therefore require constant surveilance and attentiveness. The traditional teachings on discernment deal primarily with the thoughts that capture our imagination. Which ones will we allow to linger and 'solidify', so to speak, becoming incarnate in our behavior? And which ones will we purge so as not to allow them to see the light of day?

To pose the question in this way begins to answer it. Christ, the Word of God, became incarnate. This says a great deal about the heart and the imagination of His mother: she was so formed inwardly by God's Word, that He literally took on flesh. Each of us is called upon to imitate her example.

Thus the Word of God should be constantly in our hearts, insofar as this is possible.

But what about ambiguous thoughts? The monastic tradition locates three origins of thoughts and other stimuli: thoughts can come from God--these we hold on to and put into action. Thoughts can come from ourselves--we naturally feel hungry, respond to praise and insult, respond to beauty, and so on. These thoughts need to be measured by the virtues of prudence and temperance. We cannot let appreciation for beauty slide into lust, or hunger drive us to gluttony.

Third, and less popularly appreciated today, thoughts can come from demonic forces: the 'world' and the ruler of this world. These thoughts should be let go of or even driven out, if we can do so by the power of the Cross.

Sorting our thoughts into these categories might seem difficult at first, but like anything, we get better at it with practice, and we can learn from the advice of others. The first step is simply to be aware that we are thinking! This is more difficult than it sounds. We tend to identify our 'selves' with our thoughts when in fact, they are separate. We are not our thoughts. If I could urge one mantra for today's young people, that might be it. You are not your thoughts! Separate from your thoughts and examine them! Let God's Word and the teachings of the Church help you to reject thoughts that are not of God: fear and anxiety, anger, sadness, selfishness, party spirit--these sorts of lists are readily available in Paul's letters (see Galatians 6) and in the wisdom literature, as well as in the gospels.

A good inspiration that seems like it comes from God should be tested against the Church's power to discriminate. The devil does appear as an angel of light and never suggests things that are outright harmful to begin with (by the way, this means that most of our obvious inclinations to sin are from our fallen selves--sorry to say! We can't blame the devil for the vices that we have either chosen or slid into by sloth). There is a story of St. Francis staying up and praying all night and then the next day being grumpy and short with his friars. He reflected, "I gave the night to God, and then I gave the day to the Devil." And so he gave up his all-night vigil as being beyond what God was actually asking.

If we feel moved to begin a project for the Church, or to seek to live the religious life, we should check out these movements with our spiritual directors, with our pastors, with religious who have some experience with these things. I believe that Bob's follow-up comment to Connie's question contains some helpful 'caveats' about the good and bad motivations that we all have when we come to serve God. Since none of us hears God perfectly, He has given us the Church to help sort out what is and what is not of God.

Next time, I will conclude my long answer to this question with two observations: first, that we can become better listeners to God through humility and formation; second, that modern 'autonomy' makes the mistake of confusing the ego with thoughts. This is why we should keep repeating to ourselves, "We are not our thoughts!"

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 2

I've decided to answer questions and respond to comments on my previous post, which clearly touched a nerve. I hope to go on to speak about conversion soon, since I believe that there is a link between them.

First of all, Connie asks, "How does one discern Father? Especially a religious vocation? I know that I want to live my life for God, with God, and in God. It is very difficult for me to live in duality, i.e. a secular "life" with a job and its responsibilities and only time for God sandwiched in between. How do I know that my desire to live for, with and in God comes from God and not from me? Or would I even have these desires if they did not come from God?"

There are several questions there, and each of them could inspire a book (some of them have). In the context of my post, I was explaining the difference between a modern preference for autonomy (the ability to define one's own moral goodness and goals in life) and the Christian idea of freedom (in which we are set free to make morally good choices, given in the structure of God's creation and in His law, and to pursue the goals that God sets for us).

So discernment, in the Christian context, means first of all listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit. God speaks to us in many ways: through the moral law, through the sacraments, through our superiors in the Church (this can mean simply one's pastor or it could mean the pope). In any case, the voice comes from outside ourselves, and not infrequently poses a challenge to our sense of identity and comfort. I tell people that I never much thought about being a monk as I grew up, but the various signs that kept coming to me from the Church, from prayer, and from meditation on Scripture eventually led me to inquire into the possibility. When I did enter the monastery, I had no intention of becoming a priest, but in that case, the community asked it of me.

There is no possibility in the end of discerning a religious vocation without speaking to religious communities and letting them help you sort out which signs are from God and which are not. My general advice for anyone who has inclinations in this direction is simply to approach a religious community and begin praying with them, and if possible visiting with them. While the vocation director might be most helpful, it does not need to be someone official. Anyone with some experience of religious life can help interpret what God is saying to you.

What takes place once we open ourselves up to genuine dialogue with God and with others is that our own limited vision of reality and our subjective notion of the world undergo a challenge. The cultural forces that urge us toward autonomy will incline us to depart from dialogue if that dialogue suggests that our own opinions need revising. We might be inclined to say, "That's fine for you, but not for me!" Some of the prophets tried to do that with God, but He insisted that His idea was better. So we must commit ourselves to being disciples and students of the Church's wisdom. This being the case, we will want to entrust ourselves to teachers of good repute, but even poor teachers can mediate God's will if we take a real stance of faith.

Finally, we know that we have a vocation to religious life if the Church allows us to profess vows. Before that, there is always a certain amount of questioning going on, but it is not an existential sort of questioning only (of the sort, "Should I do this? Is it right for me? Am I selling out?"). These are only part of the questions that we should allow ourselves to encounter. The primary question is, "Is this what God wants?" and each religious order has its own criteria for determining whether a candidate is being called by God. In our Benedictine tradition, we look for zeal for the divine office, for obedience and humiliations. If a person does not show signs of having this zeal or a willingness to cultivate it, well, monastic life will probably be too difficult. If a person has all these things but is married, well, that is another sign from God that there is not a monastic vocation but a vocation to married life. And so on. Trust the Church's guidance and submit yourself to it! That would be my principal advice.

The last question is an excellent one: we all have thoughts and desires, too many to count. Which ones are of God and which ones are simply echoes of our own psychology? Are some even off demonic origin. It is a question right up our monastic alley, so to speak, and I will post on this next.

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 4

Ideoque hac dispositione credimus utraque tempore ordinari: id est ut a Pascha usque kalendas Octobres a mane exeuntes prima usque hora paene quarta laborent quod necessarium fuerit.
And thus we believe that this arrangement should be followed regarding the times for each [i.e. manual work and reading]: from Easter until the first of October, going out after the first hour until just before the fourth, they will labor at whatever work is necessary. [RB 48: 2-3]

On aspect of the Rule which has been almost universally ruled out in today's world is the common method of telling time that was used before mechanical clocks were perfected. Benedict's day consisted of the daylight, divided into twelve hours. In summer, these hours were rather long. In southern Italy an hour would be something like 70 of our minutes each. Likewise, the hours of night in the height of summer would have been closer to 50 of our minutes. This would mean, among other things, that the time for sleep in summer would be barely seven hours, given the time alloted to Compline and Vigils, both prayed in the dark. On the other hand, even 'rising at the eighth hour of the night' [RB 8] in the winter, the monks would still manage to have a solid nine and a half to ten hours in which to sleep.

Benedict seems to expect that the brothers will be working outdoors, even if he feels obliged to give them some reason for doing this humble work (remember that a sun tan in his day was not a sign of wealth and leisure, but a sign of a 'blue-collar' laborer!). Midday in Italy is and was too hot for heavy work at midday, so the monks were to work in the cooler morning hours. The above schedule probably allows for work from about 6:00 a.m. until 9:30 a.m.

This sort of foresight is what gives Benedict such a good reputation. He is not interested in pushing his monks for all their worth. His army is not about 'boots on the ground' toughness but about the tough self-emptying that charity requires. The fantastic penances of the desert monks seem to cast Benedictines in a weaker light, and yet it is the Bendictines that have persevered while Egyptian-style monasticism has only made fleeting reappearances throughout history. In any case, St. Benedict is not interested in working for the sake of work. In this, I suggest that he has his precursor in the great Father of desert monsticism, Antony the Great. I close with two anecdotes about Antony's famous discretion.

Cassian writes of a meeting of abbas in which the various old monks gave opinions on which virtue is most important in monastic life. Different monks proposed vigils, fasting, hospitality, or solitude. And finally Antony spoke, "All the things you mentioned are indeed necessary....But...we often see that those who keep fasts and vigils most rigorously [etc]...are so suddenly deceived that they are unable to bring to a satisfactory conclusion the work that they have begun, and they cap off the highest fervor and a praiseworthy life with a disreputable end....For although the works of the aforesaid virtues abounded in them, the lack of discretion by itself did not permit those works to endure to the end." [Conferences 2:2.3-4--tr. Boniface Ramsey]

from the Apophthegmata:
"A hunter in the desert saw Abba Antony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, 'Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.' So he did. The old man then said, 'Shoot another,' and he did so. Then the old man said, 'Shoot yet again,' and the hunter replied 'If I bend my bow so much I will break it.' Then the old man said to him, 'It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.' When he heard these words the hunter was pierced by compunction and, greatly edified by the old man, he went away. As for the brethren, they went home strengthened." [Antony 13--tr. Benedicta Ward]

The Mitchell Report: Follow the Money

Bear with me on what might appear to be a tangent from my usual monastic concerns. I promise that I will get to the relevance as quickly as I can. Also bear in mind that I was a sports enthusiast as a young man, to the point where I managed to get a press pass by becoming a sports announcer on a Green Bay radio station.

Yesterday, the "Mitchell Report" on steroid use in baseball was released, naming over 80 players, some superstars. It is a sad story all around and probably will get worse.

In today's Chicago Tribune, most of the reporters responded with outrage, which I understand. However, I think that it is misplaced. I would like to suggest that we as a society are all implicated by this scandal, and here is why.

When faced with the prospect of making 5-25 million dollars a year playing a game versus getting a real job like being an auto mechanic or insurance salesman, is it any surprise that some men would choose to bend the rules in their favor? When a megastar like pitcher Roger Clemens loses a step and is fading into irrelevance, can we really be surprised and outraged when he allegedly decides to rescue and prolong his career by doing what countless other men around him are doing?

I will not comment on the motive of glory and fame for now, and focus simply on the money. Major League Baseball players are automatic millionaires these days. A guy barely good enough to make a roster is almost assured of seven figures. That is a whole lot of money, enough to set a clever investor for a long time. And they make it every year. Who of us wouldn't be enticed?

This raises the question: all this money for what? Where does this money come from? Most of us would bark out the answer, "Ticket prices inflated by those greedy owners," and this answer would be incorrect. The huge revenues actually come largely from television contracts.

But where does television money come from? Here is the link that is almost never talked about in our world. One would think that the omnipresence of television would spawn more intelligent commentary about the meaning of the phenomenon itself. Instead, what passes for intelligent analysis are stories about how many episodes of Gunsmoke are out on DVD and who will win Dancing With the Stars. The very important question, "Why watch television at all?" is almost never asked, except when people encounter monks who dont' have one.

The fact is that millions of people take television for granted. And if the stakes are high for baseball, how much higher are they for television in general. I forget exactly how much money a Super Bowl ad costs these days, but it's not the $18 my old radio station used to charge for a thirty-second spot (and we were FM!).

Advertisers are willing to fork out this money because...advertising works. I must admit that this is one of the single biggest mysteries for me in the modern world. Why we should be swayed by self-interested promoters of products baffles me. The documented effectiveness of advertising suggests that the larger part of Americans are perfectly willing to turn off their God-given faculties of critical judgment, even when their own money is at stake. How many people buy more expensive brand name things simply because they are brand name? I will admit that Pepsi and Coke taste different, but why should the sales of one or the other change because of advertising? Are people's taste preferences really altered by, say, images of women on the beach?

Well, yes, apparently. And here we arrive at the crux of my long-winded argument. Advertising works, it seems to me, because television really does disable our rational ability to discern the movements of our passions (there is the monastic connection). Advertising stokes the fires of our passions (lust, gluttony and vainglory are probably the most typical) in order to override our reason. The subjection of reason to the passions is one of the effects of sin. It is not reasonable to spend our money on products simply because advertisers appeal to our vanity and we feel that we will be 'cool' or 'the first on our block' to own a pet rock. But we do this. If we didn't, then advertisers would not seek out television. Television would have less money to give to baseball owners, and baseball owners less money to dangle in front of players tempted by steroids.

It is possible that revenues might be just as high if sporting events were all pay-per-view. In this case, it would be our worship of sports figures that would be to blame, and indeed this is not absent as a problem in the previous scenario. What all of this suggests to me is that sports fans in some measure and television viewers in some smaller measure, have colluded with major league sports to contribute to the steroids scandal.and that we turn a blind eye to the connections because we like having our passions stoked. If this is the case, then there is a much larger sickness to this whole story, and it implicates a whole culture. Outrage is out of place when it is coming from individuals and aimed at the men who have been tempted beyond their strength--by our money.

Centering Prayer

People seeking advice on prayer frequently ask about Centering Prayer, and others frequently refer to it (or variations of it) without being aware of it. So it might be worth putting my opinion on line, as the whole question seems topical.

The general idea of Centering Prayer is becoming aware of God as the center of one's being, the principle of life in us. For the baptized, seeking God is not exclusively to be done outside oneself, after all. The awareness of God's sustaining life comes about from detachment from all thoughts. Generally speaking, one chooses a quiet time of day and sits for twenty minutes. As one becomes aware of thoughts or other stimuli, the pray-er notes them, but then allows the thoughts to pass on, uninspected, usually by use of a 'sacred word', itself not to be 'meditated' upon, but simply to help loose our attention from the thoughts that inevitably enter the mind.

First of all, we should be clear that Centering Prayer as taught especially by the Cistercians Thomas Keating and the late Basil Pennington, is fairly nuanced. When I wrote above of people referring to Centering Prayer without being aware of it, often they speak of trying to empty their minds of all thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is more Buddhist than Christian (in fact, it probably more closely related to the state of Nirvana than any normally acknowledged states of mind in most forms of Buddhism). Centering Prayer is perfectly comfortable with thoughts being present. It is normal for our brains to generate thoughts. The question is what we do with them. Monastic practice in Christianity has always had an acute interest in thoughts, and to examine one's thoughts first requires one to become aware of them. In this regard, I find Centering Prayer as potentially very helpful. But we should be clear that those who speak of emptying the mind are giving a distorted view of Centering Prayer.

A second thing that CP is not is a means of attaining high states of consciousness. Again, the sacred word is not meant to induce a trance or some kind of transport. CP is not even aimed at any particular affective result, which puts it in good company in terms of Christian prayer in general. We pray because we are human and need to pray, not because it feels good every day. God is not a drug, but it the Almighty and Infinite Creator. The Desert Fathers considered prayer to be a battle (as does the Catechism--see para. 2275). "War against us is proof that we are making war," taught St. John Climacus. By this he means that most of the time, when we start praying, demonic forces immediately attack us to get us to stop, normally by means of distractions. Centering Prayer assists us so that the one praying pays no particular attention to any thoughts, good or bad. This trains our minds to let go of thoughts when we need to and helps us in the battle against distractions.

So I've mentioned some good points about Centering Prayer. With those as a background, let me now say that I don't normally recommend CP except for those who are fairly advanced in the life of prayer. Why not? In my opinion, the principal missing factor in the writing of Fr Keating and Fr Pennington is asceticism. I don't fault them for the omission, but we as monks should perhaps be attentive to the fact that we tend to live a fairly ascetic life by default and take for granted such helpful givens as community recitaiton of Psalms, lectio divina, spiritual reading at table and elsewhere, fasting, customary works of charity (serving at table, doing dishes) and humility (sitting in statio), obedience, silence, and so on. As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once wrote, there is no authentic contemplative prayer without asceticism. The Catechism says this:

"There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle [2015]."
"If we do not want to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ, neither can we pray habitually in his name. The 'spiritual battle' of the Christian's new life is inseparable from the battle of prayer [2725]."

Centering Prayer, it seems to me, risks losing sight of these realities. By contrast, in lectio divina, one is constantly confronted with challenges to reform one's life and live according to the gospel, often in disconcertingly direct ways. Fr Michael Casey writes, “We who pray ‘forgive us as we forgive’ cannot afford to live in a state of conflict with others.”

Secondly, I believe that one needs to have a very strong personal relationship with God before one can jump to the level of awareness of God as the Ground of Being. God is one who has love affairs with His people, who knows us intimately before we are even conceived in the womb. There is an infinite amount to know about God. Again, I find prayer centered on Scripture and Liturgy brings us closer to God as a Three-Personed divinity, not merely as The Divine Source.

This brings me to the last point about Centering Prayer, that it seems not to take the Trinity into account, particularly the Person of Jesus Christ. "There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ [CCC 2664]." While I don't believe that it is the intention of Fr Keating and Fr Pennington to omit Christ, the technique involved does not sufficiently acknowledge His central place, that we pray in His name.

If there are these problems, do I ever recommend Centering Prayer? I do, in fact, and I even practice it from time to time myself. The reason for this relates to the aim of detachment mentioned above, as well as awareness of thoughts. Often times our minds are so busy that we simply are unaware of the fact that we are thinking. Thoughts go directly to being imperatives without our reflecting on it. As Mother Maria-Thomas Beil once taught me, monks should aim to 'put a deliberate distance between themselves and their thoughts'. We slow down so as to intercept thoughts before we act upon them. CP helps a great deal in this effort.

Secondly, detachment even from good thoughts is part of the Evagrian method of prayer, validated by Cassian. I mentioned above that we do not pray in order to receive spiritual favors from God. Noting our attraction to such favors can help dispose us toward detachment in this realm, prepaing us for potential dryness and even dark nights (though I personally think that genuine Dark Nights are much rarer than many think; usually periods of dryness are just that: the normal valleys that affect any long-term relationship, even a relationship with God, with dullness).

Finally, I only would recommend Centering Prayer as an element within a total discipline that includes more standard types of prayer. Often times, vocal prayer and meditation bring us to a place that seems to be a dead end. CP can help illuminate the way forward. On the other hand, the practice of detachment, assisted by CP, prepares us to re-enter traditional styles of prayer with a larger tool chest, more deeply grounded in the range of possibilities in prayer, more ready to respond to difficult challenges that God has prepared for us.

Discernment, Part 2

We noted in our first post in this series the importance of a regular conscious exercise of our wills. If we are in the habit of acting deliberately in our lives, then the occasion of major decisions is less frightening. First of all, we are accustomed to using our wills and so the prospect of having to decide is itself less unfamiliar. Secondly, these day-to-day decisions produce in us a 'character': we 'co-create' ourselves, as it were. God gave us the body, mind and soul that we have, but by our own decisions, we have crafted this raw material into a more or less coherent person. The more we work to make rational decisions, the more our lives will be coherent and tend to be pointed toward goals. The less we consciously decide our actions, the more we will be driven by external forces to choose actions that are at odds with one another, and our lives will lack coherence. Lacking coherence in our lives, we will find the future unpredictable and perhaps frightening as well.

This points to the need to manage our thoughts and feelings rationally to the extent we are able. So often, when I speak with persons who are thinking about religious life, I hear the following sorts of reasons given for decisions: "I just feel at home here." "I think I need more activity." "I really enjoy the academic world and think I should do that instead." "I feel God's presence here."

These reasons/feelings make up raw data for decisions, to be sure, and we do need to pay attention to them. But then we need to ask: why do I feel the way I do? Why do I feel at home here and not there, and is this really an objective sign that God's want me to stay? Our feelings are often the product of many hidden sources, and (I hate to say it!) they are often not very sensible when we stop and think about it. The reason we don't feel at ease might be as trifling as the fact that Br. So-and-so happens to look like my father, with whom I don't get along. Is this a reason to leave a community and discern elsewhere, or an invitation to mature in love of strangers who have done us no wrong? Will we even have the chance to identify this dynamic if we simply do what our feelings tell us and never examine them?

In the case of rationalizations for action like "I just feel like I need more activity," we should be similarly critical. Do I really need this, or am I just afraid that my self-esteem will suffer if I can't be proud of some project? (This is a special problem for American men, in my opinion.) In so many of these cases, we are not the most qualified judges of our own motives. For this reason, we need outside input. Generally, I recommend this from two sources: prayer and the Church. I will end this post with a word about prayer, and pick up with the Church next time.

If we really pray as we ought, we will encounter, perhaps obliquely, perhaps directly, the Living God whom we all seek as whose will we seek to do. Unfortunately for us, as St. Paul says, "We do not know how to pray as we ought." Thankfully, we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit to assist us, and so we must learn to test the spirits and know how to follow the Holy Spirit and not some other spirit.

What this means is that we need to have some reliable formation in prayer. In other words, we need to learn to pray from the Tradition (anticipating here something about the necessity of the Church). In particular, the Word of God in Scripture and the parameters given us in Church teaching help to form us in prayer. Scripture is especially important, and this is why monks spend hours a day chanting Psalms and Canticles and doing lectio divina.

I strongly recommend praying with Scripture in our time because we no longer can take for granted a cultural formation in the basics of Christian history and doctrine. In fact, we are de-formed by cultural pressures antithetical to Christianity. We get funny ideas from the world about God, about Jesus Christ, about the Church, about human happiness, and these ideas need to be weeded out of our subconscious set of assumptions about the world and replaced with the good solid truths in tradition. Once this has happened, then we will have a clearer sense of when God is speaking to us and when not. We will know something more about the character of God and have a kind of sixth sense for what are things of God and what are not. We should end with a clear example.

Let's say that I have a sense of being called to the priesthood, but because of past sins, I feel unworthy of it or that God could not possibly call me. One morning, I open the Bible and happen upon the passage of the Prodigal Son. At once, I am moved by the compassion shown by the Father to the wayward son, and I sense that this is the answer to my dilemma: I really should begin the process of looking at the priesthood. After a brief moment of euphoria and joy, a tiny doubt creeps in: but I've never really been sorry (in my own estimation!) for my sins. I am afraid that I would be a disgrace to the priesthood. I've never really fit in. I turn to God and apologize again and decide I will just do more penance or try to find some worthwhile charity to help out instead of becoming a priest.

Notice that the second set of thoughts had nothing whatsoever to do with the objective information coming through Scripture. Almost everything I describe in the second portion is based on feelings and not on reason or on God's love and fidelity. The sorts of thoughts and feelings I am relating here are usually habitual: we grow accustomed to them and even dependent for the stability of our lives on them. God is trying to reach us and call us out of our unexamined feelings and suspicions, to grow in trust of him and in freedom of heart in following Jesus Christ. We have to be willing to hear God's Word as a challenge at times. In fact, when we really read the Bible (and as Christians, we should always relate what we read to the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament), we should be shocked regularly. The Good News that Christ brings is truly radical! If what we read ends up fitting too snugly with what we always thought to be the case, one wonders if we are hearing God or hearing ourselves.

This is another reason why I am fond of recommending lectio divina. Some of the more modern forms of meditation and devotion, while beautiful and salutary in many circumstances, can sometimes lead the less experienced of us into a place where we simply hear ourselves. This happens more subtly when, say, we have a good experience at devotional prayer, but when we hear it broadened in some way, we resond coldly or even with hostility. I have seen this happen, for example: a zealous young person has a profound experience of God's presence during Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He even has a kind of inward vision of Christ's Body sacrificed for us. The following Sunday, this same person hears a perfectly good homily on the Church as the Body of Christ. The person gets angry and dismisses Fr. X as a liberal and as suspicious of the Real Presence. Father of course said no such thing (he was even working on starting a Forty Hours devotion!). The person getting upset is not following reason or Church teaching; he is instead resisting following the voice of Christ into a deeper understanding of His presence under other forms because to do so might jeopardize the good feelings and mystical signs he has come to expect in Adoration. Reading St. Paul would clear this up in a hurry!

So enough for today. Next, we will return to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
Peace to you!

The Economics of Vocations

I apologize for the pause in postings again. My father is recovering from a rather serious illness, and I was with him at the hospital a couple of times last week.

I received a phone call from an old friend of the community yesterday. He mentioned to me that he recently began serving the Laboure Society, a group dedicated to assisting those who would like to discern a calling to religious life or the priesthood, but are saddled with prohibitive educational debt. Kudos to those serving this worthy cause!

Religious communities love to welcome persons with good educations, of course, but in recent decades the risk is precisely that someone will join, get huge debts paid off by the community, then leave for a career. While this is a sad and too-often repeated scenario, the dynamic is perfectly understandable. Someone leaving college with a debt of $40,000 or grad school with a debt of $80,000+ is in a bind. If the degree is in the humanities especially, one can hardly find a job for which one is qualified that will pay back the debt in any reasonable time. On the other hand, humanities degrees are attractive for religious communities, and many in the humanities are drawn to community life and service by dint of their professional interest and training. While it is tempting to point fingers at those who apparently abuse the system and get religious communities to pay off the debt, we should be aware that there is a huge temptation to 'discern' a religious calling when one is in the bind described above. Someone with a Masters in English, for example, can take a job at a bank and earn real money or wallow in academia or teach in primary school. Either way, you have to fork over $250-$400 a month (or more) to the government or private agency that financed the loan. This kind of burden must be a factor in any life decision at that point: who wouldn't think of throwing it all on God? And who wouldn't have second thoughts once the albatross of debt starts to fade into the receding horizon of the past?

Behind this all is a bit of a conspiracy theory I have held for some time. The astonishing rise in the cost of a college education is often explained by rising costs of endowments and what not. Well, maybe so. On the other hand, the government is happy to toss out loans with more-or-less guaranteed returns in interest over many years. So colleges have a certain freedom to increase tuition, figuring that the government will float the cash and then force young graduates to enter the rat race of debt relief by assuming the patriotic duty (as articulated from the demand side by President Bush) of frantic production to keep the American machine lubricated. I haven't seen anyone tie this reality into the dearth of religious vocations, but surely this is a huge factor.

I was very blessed to have gone to school on a scholarship that paid almost the entirety of tuition, room and board. This left me free to pursue first the artistic life of a gigging musician and composer, then the poverty of religious life. Most 23-year-olds today do not have this option. It is any wonder that music is rotten and vocations are down?

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 2

Although the life of a monk ought to have about it at all times the character of a Lenten observance, yet since few have the virtue for that...
Chapter 49: 1-2a (RB1980 translation)

St. Gregory the Great, in his "Life and Miracles of St. Benedict," praises the saint for his discretion and moderation. Here, his moderation is on display for us. So often in the Rule, St. Benedict lays down an absolute rule ("We ban grumbling with a perpetual ban!") and then gives the humane exceptions (the abbot must make sure there are no justifiable grounds for grumbling). Here, hearkening back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we see that Benedict expects monks to be about fasting and praying at all times. Experience shows that most people can't do this. Does this mean that only a few are called to monastic life?

There are always some who would answer 'yes' to that last question. Superhuman feats of fasting and vigils are impressive and, when yoked to charity, produce genuine saints. However, all of these are graces and of them charity is the most important. There are numerous cautionary tales in the Apophthegmata and in Cassian of monks who were champions of fasting and ceaseless prayer and became proud to their downfall and the scandal of others. On the other hand, there were abbas known to break their fast and eat five times a day if they had five separate visitors.

In these days of suffering for the Church, there are many who believe that the answer to our malaise is better discipline. From my previous post on St. Benedict and Lent, I hope one sees that I favor discipline and practice. However, I do so only in the service of love. We often hear things like, "if we went back to Friday abstinence year long..." or "if we went back to the old rite...[etc] everything would be better in the Church." This may be true if we change out of love and not out of fear. On the other hand, sharing meat with our 'enemies' in the Church, celebrating the new liturgy with love, care and reverence would mean much more than a forced observance of a 'tougher' discipline. To be sure, we often also hear things such as "if we go back to Latin, all will be lost!" and this is simply another form of discernment from fear and not from love (it also lacks trust in the Holy Spirit's guidance of the Church, since liturgical documents clearly promote the use of Latin).

"That the strong have something to strive for and the weak are not discouraged;" this Benedictine axiom should govern all of us in the Church. We should rejoice in the strength of the strong and bear the burdens of the weak, and all bless God together. May this Lent see in us an increase in our daily offering to God and an increase in charity.

True love casts out fear.

Visitation

I am in England right now to assist at two 'canonical visitations'. These visitations are legislated by the Constitutions of the Subiaco Congregation, to which the Monastery of the Holy Cross belongs. During the visitation, the Abbot Visitor (an elected office, presently held by Fr. Anselm Atkinson of Petersham, Mass.) and the co-visitor (presently yours truly) meet with each brother at another monastery of our province. We hear their vision for the monastic life and the particular house they are in, we hear their concerns, and we attempt to draw up a report that will strengthen our brothers in their efforts to follow Christ in the monastery.

The Monastery of the Holy Cross had its visitation this past August. It was an upbuilding time for us, and I hope that I can return the favor by assisting here at St. Michael's and next week at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucester, England.

We have finished the interviews, save for one with a brother whose age and health have made it necessary for him to live outside the cloister with professional assistance. Also a part of the visitation is the reading of the community's Chapter minutes and votes and the financial reports. All of this could sound rather intrusive and controlling. In fact, the visitors have a very limited canonical power; I can say with real assurance that the goal is nothing of the centralizing sort that might be envisioned, say by the Apostolic visitations of American seminaries and Mother Angelica's monastery a few years ago (I don't believe these are meant to be assertive of Roman control, either, though they tend to have more of that feeling, since Rome has more authority than either Abbot Anselm or I). I just finished an hour's visit with the Bursar of St. Michael's, discussing the ins and outs of financing not-for-profit ventures such as ours, including the tricky points of insuring priceless objects (their vestment collection here is eye-popping!) adn how to draw up a realistic balance sheet for public records. With my limits accounting ability, I was actually able to suggest some changes to the reporting scheme they presently have, and he was able to advise me similarly.

There are cases when visitations reveal real abuses and irregularities, but how much better to have friendly advice on a regular schedule than to wait for potential scandal to erupt! It is a real privilege to be a part of this, and a joy to be a part of a monastic confederation that has such helpful tools for building up our common life.

Peace be to you all!