Thoughts on Advent

Advent is a beautiful time in the monastery.  Several brothers have remarked to me how beautiful the season is, with its mysterious chants and various traditions.  We have the advantage of not having much contact with the commercial aspect of Christmas at this time of year, and the theme of watching for the Lord's coming accords well with the activities of the monk.

This year, I have been working hard at a translation of the new Antiphonale Monasticum, the 'official' book of the Benedictine liturgy.  The revision of this book called for by Vatican II is just now being completed.  One volume for the office of Vigils is still in the works.  The books are all in Latin, of course, and it is our house custom to use English, thus my task of translation and adaptation of the chant.  It has been quite an effort, but in the end a tremendous privilege to grow in familiarity with the theology of Advent.  In particular, the traditional antiphons for the divine office display a kind of 'virtuoso lectio divina' on the part of the anonymous monks who compiled and composed them over the years (most of these antiphons date back at least to the eleventh century).   Lines from the Old Testament that would pass by our imaginations opened up the mysteries of God for these inspired monks.  Over the next few days, I will share some examples, beginning with this one:

The second antiphon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent reads: Ecce veniet desideratus cunctis gentibus: et replebitur gloria domus Domini, alleluia.  This is more or less a quotation from Haggai 2: 8, with a slight change in speaker, so that the monks can more easily place it on their own lips (originally the speaker is God).  Following the RSV, the translation would read "Lo, the treasures of all nations shall come in, and the house of the Lord will be filled with glory, alleluia."  

The key word here is desideratus.  I can't say why this is exactly, but here the Vulgate follows more closely the Hebrew than the Septuagint Greek in rendering the Hebrew chemddah, "delight," "desire."  Normally, this is understood as a prophecy of 'precious things' or 'treasure' pouring into the temple, and this is corroborated in this same verse of Haggai by references to silver and gold, which are obviously things desired and delightful for those who own them.  

In the context of the Advent liturgy, with its emphasis on the world's longing to be redeemed from the slavery of sin and death, and the theme of the opening of salvation to the Gentiles, this antiphon is now referring to Jesus Christ as the One longed-for by all nations.  This is not easy to capture in English in a way that both gets at this broader meaning and is faithful to the current norms of translation (the lectionary uses 'treasures').  In any case, doing lectio divina in English we would not be likely to see Haggai's prophecy as a prediction of the coming of Christ, but I'm glad that some monk did!  

Pope Benedict on Saint Benedict

This address of the Holy Father is worth the time to read it.  Enjoy!

h/t to Dave B

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 3

Ideo certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum, certis iterum horis in lectione divina.
Therefore, at certain times, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual labor, and during the remaining hours, in lectio divina.
RB 48: 1

Thus, Saint Benedict legislates for three activities during the day: 1) The Opus Dei, the liturgy, the times of which have already been established earlier in the Rule; 2) 'manual labor'; 3) lectio divina, 'divine reading'

Elsewhere, St. Benedict allows for personal needs between Vigils and Lauds, and later in this chapter he admits the possibility of a midday nap. Later Benedictine tradition adds in other personal activities that we would not normally think of as work: practicing a musical instrument, light reading, flower gardening, and so on. I suspect that this falls under St. Benedict's heading of work, but I will wait until later in the chapter to discuss that. Finally, community recreation is a venerated part of most, if not all, monastic schedules. St. Benedict has an analogous time, during which the Conferences or other edifying reading is listened to by the brothers, but in any case, it is a non-liturgical informal gathering of the community before Compline.

What emerges is St. Benedict's famous balance and moderation. We will see that he affords a great amount of time for reading, and that manual labor is generally kept to a very merciful amount. It is also significant that St. Benedict deals with reading primarily in this chapter under the heading of work. While he has qualifying adjectives for the two other types of 'work': The work of God in the liturgy, and the manual work for physical exertion, we can probably extrapolate from these and see reading as another component of work.

Work requires exertion, and not infrequently lectio divina takes effort. We may prefer to read the Bible in snippets, culling the Good Book for our favorite passages, the things that comfort us. St. Benedict instructs his monks to read books 'entire and straight through' [RB 48: 15], not being 'daunted' and 'running away' [cf. Prol. 48] when we encounter sections that makee us squirm a bit. Reading is work. Understanding takes time and effort. But this is work of central importance to the monastic project. In the fields we must turn the soil of the ground in order to plant the seeds that will produce the food we eat. At lectio, we must turn the hardened ground of our hearts and minds so that the Sower Who sows the Word will find good soil there. Reading challenges us constantly to think differently with God's thoughts and not our own. Reading Scripture conditions us to see things from God's perspective and get out of our own small worlds. This is work of the highest order, and as we shall see, in this chapter it is of equal importance to the work of our hands.

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!

Acts of the Apostles

Editorial note: for some reason I haven't been receiving notifications of comments, and so I have only today published a series of them on recent posts. Hopefully, I will have this resolved today. I do very much appreciate your words.

I have been doing lectio divina on the Acts of the Apostles, and over the coming months (or years? It took me two years to finish Matthew!), I will jot down observations that I have in my journal that seem to be worth sharing.

"concerning Judas who was guide to those who arrested Jesus" [1: 16]

The word 'guide', oddly enough, is used mostly in a negative way in the New Testament, usually to lampoon the Pharisees and scribes who styled themselves as "guide[s] to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness" [Rom 2: 19]. Ironically, Judas indeed is guiding the blind and those in darkness to the one who is Truth and Light. But they come, not with the intention of submitting to Truth, but of 'arresting', of putting an end to the proclamation that Jesus brings.

How often do we, especially the academically inclined among us, seek the truth not for the sake of submission and understanding, but to empower ourselves? Or do we even go so far as to seize the truth in order to lock it away. How different the 'guiding' shown by Andrew and Philip in the first chapter of John. "Come and see!" They are not content to seize truth for themselves, or to co-opt the efforts of others into suppressing the truth, but lead others to the one who says, "Follow me." Ultimately, our guide is Jesus Christ acting through the Holy Spirit, who guides us into all Truth.

"Send forth your light and your truth/let these be my guide." --Ps 43: 3

Lectio Divina, Part 6 (Conclusion)

A few more suggestions for improving your lectio divina:

6) Read the Fathers, and don’t skip the quotes

The Fathers were naturals at lectio, and we can learn a lot from them. Again, a regular exposure to them will give us tools for reading the Bible spiritually. In this case, I suggest making friends with one or other congenial Father, staying with him for a year or two. I just finished a year with Gregory of Nyssa, and I am planning to read Augustine this year. By reading larger portions of one Father, we get to know him personally, and his style of exegesis is easier to understand. We see how other spiritual masters understood Scripture and allowed it to interpret their lives.
Another important piece of this is to read how they quote Scripture. It is so easy and typical to skim over the italics and think that they are add-ons to the gist of the argument. We admit the folly of this especially when we have a gut feeling that these 'add-ons' aren’t particularly topical. When this happens, and before, it is important to try to understand carefully what the quote is doing in the argument.

7) Read some scholarship

Last but not least, I do think that it is helpful to read good modern commentators. We shouldn’t turn to them too quickly, but they do often open our eyes to aspects of the text that we would otherwise miss. I felt that Raymond Brown’s books on the Infancy Narratives were very helpful, in part because they brought me back to the text and away from the many overlayers of pious interpretation. There is nothing wrong with pious interpretation, but again, I suspect that such interpretation is not finally satisfying for a monk. We probably need to do this kind of reading outside of lectio, and this implies actively seeking a life of divine leisure, to have time to study in addition to work and prayer.

As a last suggestion, I return to the admonition that we must not depend on any one method. We should be ready at an instant to throw out any old habit if we are moved by the Holy Spirit to approach Scripture in a different way, or if we are moved simply to sit in quiet adoration and intimacy with the Lord. This is the goal, and these suggestions are meant to lead to that goal. They should be left behind when the goal seems to be in reach.

We must end here. I hope that in one or two of these suggestions, you find a way to renew your own lectio. If we are true to lectio and allow it to change us, our community will certainly be strong and will attract others by its holiness. On the other hand, if we ever coast and place lectio in the second slot, we can be sure that our sense of the supernatural will fade and be replaced by mere ethics and hard work. Let us allow Christ to be more and more, all in all.

Lectio Divina, Part 5

More helpful hints for lectio divina, continued from yesterday:

3) Memorize
One of the reasons we lag behind the Fathers in the efficacy of our lectio is that we don’t commit much to memory. John Chrysostom famously memorized the whole New Testament in two years. It shows! We need not set such lofty goals, but our lectio can bear more fruit if we take away a passage that we can recite at work during the day. A five to ten word phrase recited each day adds up to a lot of Scripture packed away, if we do this every day for ten, twenty, fifty years. What this does, is that when we encounter those difficult parts of Scripture, instead of turning to a commentator to explain them, we can allow a phrase in our memory to take us to another place in the Bible that can explain.

I recently had this occur in Colossians, where Paul speaks of hearing and understanding. It occurred to me that that endless Thursday Psalm 77 begins with the Psalmist singing of the things we have heard and understood. This in turn caused me to reflect on understanding as central to the Hebrew spirituality. It is often overlooked. This centered me Biblically on Paul’s letter, which is often tossed aside as Greek-influenced and not by Paul at all. My memory helped me to locate his teaching well within the usual biblical worldview.

4) Become a critical reader
Two weeks ago I mentioned Abbot Anselm’s question about why we do not find answers for our problems in lectio. I think the reasons are legion. One reason is that we all like at times to read to confirm our opinions rather than to have our world broadened and even overthrown. We can learn a good deal about how to read if we regularly expose ourselves to challenging literature in different fields: poetry, history, fiction, science, and so on. When we return to the Bible, we have a whole new set of ideas with which to interpret what we read.

5) Read the Bible just as a book
Again, we often lack the skills to recognize where the Bible is intertextually active because we simply don’t know the stories well enough yet. We can fix this by simply reading the Bible for fun. In the five or ten minutes before supper, for example, why not read a page or two of Nehemiah or Micah or 2 Peter? We will undoubtedly stumble on helpful passages if we make this a habit. I suspect that sometimes we excuse ourselves from lectio because we don’t have enough time to get into REM lectio; any reading of Scripture is not wasted.

Lectio Divina, Part 4

I would like to suggest some ways in which we can enliven our lectio. Let me begin by saying that these are tips for a relationship with Christ, and as such cannot be made to work automatically. On the other hand, married people can often improve their relationships by following tried and true advice, and in that spirit, I offer this non-exhaustive list.

1) Begin with a prayer
We should never forget that we come to God when we come to the Bible. We come to God, not only to press Him with our needs, though we might do that regularly. We come to our God in such a manner as to encounter God and not ourselves. We should begin by placing ourselves in a position of openness and trust, trying to free ourselves of any preconceived idea of how lectio ought to go. A spoken prayer can be helpful. I am drawn to the prayer of Charles de Foucault: “Father, I abandon myself into your hands.” The Hail Mary or Come, Holy Spirit are also in line with this. Or we can simply make an act of faith, hope and love. In any case, if we just sit down and rip open the book, we are not likely to depart from the mundane world around us. Just as we line up for statio as a reminder that we are transitioning from the secular world to the sacred, we need to make time for transitioning from the normal awareness we have when at our daily tasks, into a quieter and deeper awareness of God’s voice.

2) Stay with the difficult parts
This is an important priciple for me, and I always recommend it. It is, of course, simply a way of realizing St. Paul’s words to Timothy: All Scripture is inspired by God. There is no part of Scripture that does not speak of Christ in some way. This needn’t be taken to extremes; however, what I am thinking of are the parts of the Bible that scandalize us. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the violence of the book of Joshua, or Paul’s teaching on grace, or the Binding of Isaac, or the Apocalypse. Before we explain away the tough parts by resorting to an allegory that someone else worked out for us, I think that it is important to try and understand these on our own, and at their own level. We shouldn’t jump too quickly to defend Catholic ideas on freewill against Lutheran ideas of grace when we read Galatians or Romans. We should simply try to Paul at face value. The Word is alive and pierces: it should make us uncomfortable and separate the dead parts of us from the dying in order to give us real life. Or again, as I mentioned last week: we can read ‘turn the other cheek’ as a stark principle in general ethics, given with 'Semitic concreteness'. It is much different to imagine getting smacked by someone whom I don’t like and actually turning the other cheek.

Lectio Divina, Part 3

Finally, we are always tempted to read Scripture on someone else’s behalf. Michael Casey refers to this in Sacred Reading as what happens when we are not possessed of good self-knowledge. We read the Sermon on the Mount and we note all the way our brothers don’t carry out Jesus’ commands, at least as we interpret the commands and as we interpret their actions. This is a bad position to be in, but I must say that it is one familiar to me. We might put a more positive spin on it: “Yes! This is what I need to tell so-and-so. Maybe he’ll change if he sees that he is sinning.” Frankly, I doubt that this will ever work except with an extremely humble brother, and if that’s the case, why in the world are we trying to help him and not ourselves who are not humble? But how easy it is to find all kinds of accusations against our enemies in the Scriptures and miss God’s word to us!

The cure for this is self-knowledge, and this comes again from really taking the Word of God to be God’s Word for me today. It comes from a deep desire to listen to what God has to say and to put aside our own thoughts, plans, ideas, preferences and so forth. God’s Word saves! It is Jesus Christ come to unite us to Himself in His death and Resurrection: Scripture, like the liturgy, is the presence of Jesus’ saving power in our midst. But we must take it to be so, and we must take it seriously and to heart. We must constantly ponder all of God’s Word in our hearts, following Mary’s example, and to do so with trust in God, no matter what he says.

Let us simply resolve as monks to make more time for lectio, to allow God’s Word to reveal us to ourselves in our weakness and in God’s loving mercy; allow God’s Word to speak directly to us, not wiggle around it, but accept it and its demands in love for God and gratitude for our salvation in Christ.

Lectio Divina, Part 2

Scripture, in some ways, is a reflection after the event of the saving acts of God. God spoke the Ten Commandments before they were preserved in writing. They were in effect from the moment God spoke, they didn’t need to be written to be promulgated. In the same way, Jesus’ resurrection is an unrepeatable event. It didn’t happen because we read about it. We should read and let the reality of what we read go right to our hearts. Sometimes, I believe we are too fancy and intellectual with Scripture. While I don’t advocate naïve fundamentalism, don’t we often try to avoid the conversion that Christ is trying to work in us by working too hard to find hidden meanings in the text? I recommend reading the Sermon on the Mount regularly and just trying to carry out what the Lord teaches there.

When we try to allow the Word of God to hit us directly, where it matters, we will probably have a few responses. Perhaps by a movement of grace, we will be inspired and really desire to change. Perhaps we will be struck with compunction: to look at a woman with lust is just as bad as adultery? Oh dear! On the other hand, it is possible to get used to our failings and simply say, “well, I can’t do that” and give ourselves a pass on forgiving, on loving our enemies, on fasting and praying. If we aren’t willing to see ourselves as so weak, it is also possible to seek in allegorical readings a merely intellectual application: adultery is idolatry, and I have idols, yes! But I am aware of them and am working to eradicate, to be sure! All the while, we miss the plain sense that says we must learn to regard persons chastely, not possessively. We might completely miss the fact that we are unchaste in all kinds of ways because we don’t take the first step down that road.

Lectio Divina, Part 1

During the week of our community retreat, I will be sharing with excerpts from a recent chapter conference that I gave on lectio divina. Next to the liturgy , "lectio" is the prime component of monastic spirituality. It is a meeting of the monk with Christ in the Divine Word. While this was a natural dynamic for early monks, for many reasons, this spirituality needs formation and regular theological reflection today, for reasons that I hope will be clearer through these posts.

Please keep us in your prayers this week! I promise to prayer for all my readers each day.

Part 1.

During the meeting of American superiors of the Province here at the monastery last year, Abbot Anselm [Atkinson, of Petersham, Mass.] asked a question that seems to be on many superiors’ minds: “Do monks actually do their lectio?” Apparently there is reasonable concern that they do not. There are good reasons for this concern, and it does not stemprimarily from bad will on monks' parts. In some cases, older monks were formed before the Council and were not trained for lectio. In other cases, there simply is not enough leisure in the life to allow the time for a deep exposure to Scripture to take place effectively. As superiors of contemplative houses, we discussed the fact that we all have sufficient time set aside for lectio, and it was here that Abbot Anselm asked the more probing question. “Let’s assume that monks are doing their lectio. Do they seek answers for their lives in lectio, or do they run to the abbot as soon as there is a problem?” In other words, is this time spent with lectio real prayer, the Word of God addressed to me today? If not, and I believe that this is a problem for most monks today, how can we recover this personal approach to the Scriptures?
Let me begin tonight with a brief theological reflection on Scripture and then move to some practical tips for lectio that I have discovered in ten years of regular prayer in this fashion.
“We proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” Scripture is not primarily information. It contains information, yes, but we profess that the Holy Spirit, speaking through the human authors has given us access to the Christ-event through the mediation of Divine Revelation as a whole. One of the very clear teachings of Vatican II is that there is only one revelation, and it is Jesus Christ. There had been some questions coming from Vatican I and from Trent as to whether there were two parallel streams of revelation, the Scriptures and the secret teachings of Jesus handed down through the Apostles.
In affirming one revelation, the Church affirms that first and foremost there is simply Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came into the world, took human flesh, died and rose for us and ascending into heaven gave the Holy Spirit that we might share life with Him. There is a fine article in this month's Rite magazine written by Deacon Charles Bobertz, who taught me New Testament at St. John’s. He points out that before there was the New Testament, there was the liturgy of the Church as the means by which Christ’s presence was realized and shared, and that it was out of reflection on the liturgical life of the Church that the Scriptures were produced. So we have twin supports in our own life with Christ in the monastery, the liturgy and the Scriptures. They should interpret one another and lead to one another. We should always situate our reading the Bible in the Church and her life as it is best realized in the liturgy.