We are in Scheme 5 of the Constitutions, and today we'd like to finish that scheme, the rest of which is a very technical kind of thing, and then start on the other half of the Constitutions, which are the more spiritual part. We can use that as a kind of basis for discussing the basic elements of monastic life and also to give a theological basis and a kind of unity to these elements of the monastic life from the point of view of the present Constitution, which is that of the rule of St. Benedict and the Second Vatican Council together with the Canopus Tradition. We got to page 25, I believe, Part 2 of Scheme 5, The Extraordinary Regime. Now, the Ordinary Regime, you remember, is that which is in operation all the time.

[01:05]

The Extraordinary Regime is that which is in operation from time to time, and it consists of the General Chapter and the Consulta. The Consulta you'll find way back on page 31. There are only three chapters in this part. First, the General Chapter, secondly, the Consulta. The General Chapter is very long, and thirdly, the election of officials outside of the General Chapter. That's that extraordinary thing which happens when somebody dies or becomes incapable of continuing in office. Okay, let's go quickly through the organization of the General Chapter, starting on page 25. A. Functions and Members of the Chapter. The General Chapter constitutes the supreme authority and power in the congregation and is its legislative organ. So that's a pretty heavy function, you see, for the Chapter. It's equivalent to an ecumenical council, something like that.

[02:08]

But whereas ecumenical councils are irregular, aren't they? Only, there may not be one more than every hundred years or every two hundred years. The General Chapter is a regular thing, and they varied in frequency from time to time. Some orders have a General Chapter every year, which is equivalent. We have it every six years. In monastic congregations, ordinarily, it's not quite so frequent. I think the Trappists have one every three years. It's a legislative organ, so the laws, the constitutions, actually are made by the General Chapter. So you see how it is the highest authority. On the other hand, because it's only in session very infrequently, it can't do a lot of the ordinary business of the congregation. It can't make things work within the Chapter. The first task, to further the spiritual vitality of the congregation, does this by making laws and directives, and exhortations, and all kinds of things. And then it, as it was in the other renewal, the sound adaptation of the congregation. Every six years, it's up to the Prior General to say where and when.

[03:14]

It's always at Karmāvali. They may have had one at Rome, when they were working on the constitutions, I don't remember. It's either... Now it's at the monastery of Karmāvali. Occasionally, and often at the Presque, but not always, it would have been at the... in the library of the Holy Hermitage. It's nice and cold up here. And then the people that go to the Chapter. The Prior General, the two Assistants, Parker Adjutant, Prior Surya, there's two visitors. You'll see that the composition of the General Chapter is pretty heavily loaded with regard to members of the community of Karmāvali. Also because the Prior General, since he's the superior, ordinarily he's a member of that community. And a number of those other officers, general officials, are likely to come from Karmāvali. Now he doesn't have to come from Karmāvali, but he's the superior of Karmāvali, okay? And it's up to that community to...

[04:17]

Well, it's not up to the community to elect him, it's up to the congregation. Suppose they elected a Prior General, suppose the General Chapter elected a Prior General from Fanta Avalon, or even from New Karmāvali, okay? Well, he would be the superior of Karmāvali. And since it's not the community that elects him, he doesn't have to be a member of that community. Question from the audience Well, the Superior General doesn't have to be from that community, but the Superior General is the superior of that community. You could consider it to be kind of an unjust situation, it could be, except that almost always he is also from that community, okay? Simply by reason of the balance of the people in the congregation, it turns out that way. Within my memory it's never been otherwise. Actually, Father Allapranda was the Prior General for six years, and he was not a professor of Karmāvali, that's true.

[05:20]

But he was pretty much a member of Karmāvali, I think he did do a hell of a thing. I'm not so sure how much he did maybe. But there's an example, because he belongs to Father Allapranda. And then they delegate in letter H. That's something that doesn't go back too far, and the idea is that the general chapter should not just be composed of superiors, but also of representatives sort of from the grassroots. Now, the bigger the house is, the more delegates they send. So Karmāvali sends about four or five, and there's legislation to determine where they come from and how they're elected, and it's quite complicated. I'm not going to talk in detail about the election of the delegates or anything like that, or a lot of other doings in the chapter, because I'm not at that urgent interest. When a chapter comes around, then I'll talk about it. The officers of the chapter on page 27, the order of the deliberations,

[06:25]

all that's technical stuff. The elections. Here's a marvelous piece of Judaic language. The votes are to be free, secret, certain, absolute, and determined. And every one of those words has a meaning. It's marvelous. Every one of them means something. There's a whole lot of reality in those few words. It means that you can't say, you can't say, well, I'd like father so-and-so, unless... In which case, I'd like father so-and-so. Something like this. Yeah, it's making it conditional instead of determined. Certain means you can tell what's there, okay? So if somebody... They used to have marbles. They'd be white ones or black ones. If you got a gray one, that would be insert.

[07:27]

Or if somebody put down a smudge which you couldn't use. Absolute. Let's see what does that mean. I forgot the difference between absolute and determined. That's in the canon of it. It can be looked up in a book. If you're interested in casting a book. Okay, but final means unconditional, too. Free is clear, secret is clear, certain is clear. I have difficulty getting the difference between absolute and determined. It's changing. Yeah. One means that it's not conditional.

[08:31]

It's just plain... That'll come up again. Somebody voted by proxy. They tried to vote a conditional. Somebody sent a conditional. Determined... I'd say that absolute means it's unconditional. Determined means that it refers to a particular person without any possible doubt. You can't say, I vote for a certain monk who has these qualifications. I vote for the oldest monk. Okay, the consulta over on page 31. They elect the general, the prior general, by the way, and the two visitors and the procurator general, and a couple of the lesser officials at the general's office. That takes place at the end. The consulta is a lesser body, a lesser assembly that takes place

[09:34]

in the middle of the time between the two generals' lectures. The third year. The same order of business is in the general chapter. Some things are better. The priors don't have to take a financial balance. And the membership is the same. Okay, chapter 3 covers the case where somebody dies or becomes incapacitated, and they have to elect another replacement for them. The appendix on page 32 gives you the juridical structure of Kamaldolid, which is very special because it's two communities in one, and because the prior general resides there, okay? So it needs a special treatment. Since it's not of general concern, however, not of general application, it was not put in the constitution themselves, but made an appendix to the constitution, because the constitutions are for everybody. And this is particular. Prior general is also prior of the holy hermitage and monastery of Kamaldolid,

[10:40]

which are a similar community, juridical and spiritual. Of course. And then the bond between the monastery and the hermitage, and how you can move, how you choose between one and the other, and how you can move from one to the other. There are two vice-priors. The two vice-priors at present are Franco, up in the hermitage, who used to be a novice minister up there, and Emanuele, whom some of you know, who is the prior of the monastery of Kamaldolid. They're both young. And they're elected by the two communities. See how delicately this is balanced, because the communities have a right to have some say in who runs them, don't they? They can't elect the prior general, but they can elect the two vice-priors. At one time, the vice-priors of the hermitage and monastery were also the visitors. That's not so now. Emanuele is both prior and visitor.

[11:40]

The Franco is not. The other visitor is Bernardino. He also belonged to the family of Kamaldolid. Okay. The task of the two vice-priors. The Holy Hermitage of Kamaldolid, head and mother of the entire congregation, holds first place among all the houses. So there's a precedence even among the houses. In case they were to line up to go somewhere. That's a historical inheritance, that particular passage. Now the decrees. Establishment of a permanent commission of study. Actually, that never got into functioning. It was a noble idea in the glow of the aftermath of Vatican II, which petered out somewhere about May of 1969. It hasn't been heard from since. Those things happen.

[12:44]

Special powers conferred on the general chapter in the third decree. The idea is that with the permission of the Holy See, on the general council, the general council can change things before the next general chapter, since we're in a time of renewal and we have these constitutions, on an experimental basis. Decree number four. Because San Gregorio Alcielio, which is our monastery in Rome, is a house which serves the entire congregation, it's not to be a dependency of Kamaldolid, as it was before. It is to be a dependency of the general council. That's a juridical adjustment. Decree number five is a kind of amnesty for displaced persons. People who had been in another community than their community of profession for a long while, or who wanted to switch for some reason or another, were given this chance, at that time, to switch. Because they were trying to sort of regularize it.

[13:51]

There were a lot of people that belonged to community A and had been living in community B for a long while, over and over, for all kinds of reasons. So that's a one-time thing? It's a one-time thing, yes. Would this be reviewed by the whole general council? No, not the individual request. See, the prior general would have the power to say yes or no. So that's all over. Now, two examples were Father Robert, who transferred to Kamaldolid at that time. As I remember, it was that time. And then Thomas did also. I think the two of them were the same time. And they still belong to Kamaldolid. Does that have an effect on the transfer? Well, that can be changed. It can be changed back. For instance, if either one of them were here at New Kamaldolid for five or ten years, quite likely it would be that those two would be transferred. Okay, the next is a special decree for New Kamaldolid.

[14:56]

Now, this actually is made possible later on in Scheme 10, but Scheme 10 had not gone through in this chapter. You see, these are the clean-up items for the first session of this general chapter in 1968. And they hadn't made this adjustment of the novitiate and so on. And we needed it. We said we didn't need it. So they rushed it through for us. And then the same thing came up pretty much later on, except for one item in Scheme 10. The idea was to lengthen the period of formation here at New Kamaldolid since we're dealing with barbarians, not people with centuries of civilization. So we were permitted to have a two-year novitiate. Americans are barbarians, in case you didn't know. A two-year novitiate, and to prolong the period of simple progression up to nine years. Now, that was already in the power of the prior general, but it's put in the power of the prior,

[15:58]

in other words, the local superior, because the prior general doesn't know the people, so it's very hard for him. As a matter of fact, the prior was simply asking if he would give us a letter by a magazine because he doesn't know the person. So that permits a long time before a solemn provision. That's right. So the same thing is in the Constitution, now for everybody, okay? This was a special provision for us. Yeah. Well... Now, the prior has the faculty to use this procedure, okay? Notice. So he doesn't have to do it, okay? If he wants, he has... And remember that in the declarations for that time, the postponement was six months. So this is doubling it.

[16:59]

He has the power to double it, but he doesn't have to for a given candidate, okay? And then a year later, Scheme 10 comes along and makes it a minimum of a year for each one, a maximum of two years for each one, which is actually more than a scheme, but it's fluid. You don't have to do any of these things, and certainly you don't have to prolong the period of simple professionalization entirely. A person can make this on professional for three years if everything is positive. So that affects everybody except confederated benedictines. There was a little concern with, like, a priest who would come in, okay, and sort of zip through the formation period, be in the community, be in the chapel, have a vote and all that, and really not going to invite this, really. I mean, that's just horrible. Or another religious, somebody coming from another religion. Actually, you'd be amazed how much different it makes the kind of formation you have. You just have a whole different mentality. It can wreak havoc in the community.

[18:00]

Okay, any questions about that before we turn to Scheme 6? Now, Scheme 6 is a different kind of material, you'll notice immediately. And 6, 7, 8 and 9 are a different kind of material. Then 10 returns to the more, what would you call it, technical, theoretical material that I'm talking about for a minute, but not entirely. 10 is kind of a mixture. But we have prayer, we have asceticism, we have the monastic apostolate, we have poverty and work in these intervening schemes. A lot of the main... And these contain the main elements of the monastic life, even though they're not all in the titles. For instance, under asceticism, we probably have silence, solitude and things like that, which we might not immediately think of in that connection. Everything is lumped together into these chapters. Now, what I'd like to do... You've heard about all of these items already. It's pointless just to repeat them. What can we look for as we go through these schemes?

[19:05]

I think one thing that's very important is the general theological viewpoint on which things are being looked at, and the way that they're tied together, the meaning that they're given, the meaning and the purpose that they're given, okay? Because there's an attempt to interpret all of these traditional practices in the light of the Gospel and in the light of Vatican II, the Second Vatican Council, and in the light of the Church, the ecclesiology. You can say that the Second Vatican Council is the Council of the Church, the Council of Ecclesiology. When you begin to think of Christianity or Catholicism in terms of the Church with the consciousness that we didn't have in some way before. If you compare with the earlier Constitutions, the Church is thought of in a different way. It's thought of as, what, as a kind of optimism institution, rarely as the local church in the early liberation of the Constitutions. And here it's thought of in kind of a theological way. And then the attempt

[20:14]

to put everything into a theological context. We get tired of the word theological. What I mean is, everything in terms of ultimate meaning. Not just to make a preset, a law, okay, without locating it in a framework of meaning. Actually, it's very important for us now, in this time of transition, this time of transition, to locate something. I said, to locate something theologically is to locate it in terms of its ultimate meaning. To locate it in terms of, if you tell somebody to do something, let's say you tell them you're going to fast every Friday, you've got to locate that in terms of the meaning of what he's doing, the ultimate meaning of what he's doing, which for a philosopher would be one thing, but for a Christian monk it's in terms of the Bible, it's in terms of Scripture and the Church, sort of the plan of law. So this is where the greatest difference appears between

[21:15]

the older Constitutions and the present Constitutions. You'll notice that the older Constitutions tend to look at the Church more institutionally and they tend to look at law as law. In other words, you do it because you've got to do it. And here's the sanction for it if you don't do it. The new ones are very mild about prescribing things. And when they do, they always put it in the context of meaning, they very carefully justify it as it were. Sometimes almost apologetically about something. That's the mood of the time. And so it is with prayer then. You'll find that there's a lot of structure in this scheme on prayer. It's been very carefully put together with the theological elements, the basic ones at the bottom, and then sort of building up so it's a kind of pyramid structure. And at the bottom of the pyramid is the doctrine of the Trinity, is the basic Christian reality, the plan of God and our inclusion in the Father,

[22:16]

the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's in number one, before it even starts talking about prayer in this way. Then the second part of number one, the sacramental connection, the Eucharist, the third part of number one, see, this is before we talk about monks at all. This is a general theological basis, which is straight Vatican II. Actually, the first one is from Ephesians 2. It's built on the analogy of the Council of Christians. Now, what's the importance of this third paragraph? The entire life of Christians consecrated by the Holy Spirit to form a spiritual temple and a holy priesthood. Building the monastic life on the basis of the so-called universal priesthood, which had been pretty much in the shadow since the Protestant Reformation. Do you remember

[23:17]

what came up at that time? Protestants said, well, there ain't no institutional priesthood. Everybody's a priest. And so the priest says, yes, there is. The church says, yes, there is. And that's where the battle was. In fact, it was so bitter that the doctrine of the universal priesthood, which is in, for instance, St. Peter's Letter, and it's in other places, got practically pushed out of sight in the Catholic Church. It was considered kind of sinister and a threat because Luther had used it as a weapon. So it's brought back in in Vatican II because it's extremely important, okay? For instance, the monastic life gets a lot of its meaning from the fact that what you are doing in the liturgy and in your prayer is a participation in the sacrifice and in the prayer of Jesus Christ, the one priest. Now, it's a priestly act. If you want to find the theological core, the theological backbone

[24:18]

of your prayer and even your life, you have to come back to this notion of the priesthood of Jesus and the fact that we all participate in it, not just the ministerial priests, not just the ordained priests who have a special role, but in some way, on a certain level, the universal priesthood is more important than the ministerial priesthood, okay? On a certain level. On another level, of course, the sacrifice, the service of the Eucharist is indispensable and therefore the ministerial priesthood is necessary for the existence of the Church. Or nearly necessary, in this scheme of things. So that's why that's put so strongly there. Now, the universal priesthood of the faithful is reasserted in Vatican II. Those beautiful phrases of Saint Peter. A spiritual temple and a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices to God, to Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ. They exercise fully

[25:20]

their holy and sacerdotal character. Sacerdotal means priesthood. So that theology of the universal priesthood, which is rooted in the priesthood of Jesus, which you also find in the letter of the Hebrews most strongly, is used as the theological basis here for monastic prayer. Now, in the scheme on prayer, it's not only what we call prayer, but also the liturgy, okay? Including the Eucharist. You can think of that as sacrament or whatever. It covers that. Now it descends to the monks. It continually narrows down starting from the broadest place, the pyramid. Have a special attention for prayer. Especially those in the hermitage where the focus on prayer is even stronger. In other words, leaping through this when I come in every morning. Now the Benedictine framework is smaller still, narrowing down still. Nothing be preferred to the Opus Dei. The Opus Dei for Saint Benedict, as was brought up by Thomas the other day, is the divine office. So the Benedictine communities

[26:21]

give this primacy to the various forms of celebration of the mystery of Christ in the sacred liturgy. Notice the care in saying that the liturgy is a celebration of the mystery of Christ. Meaning, meaning, meaning. All the time it's trying to get it into a framework of meaning to tell you what it's about, not just that you do it. For instance, if you look at the other constitutions, the other ones, they would say, well, Mass will be celebrated. Conventional Mass will be celebrated every day at a certain time. Everybody should be present. But that's it. This is a different one. In the liturgy, indeed, Christ daily exercises his priesthood. See that continually. Associates with himself the Church's pride. Now there's this very powerful phrase. SC, remember, is the document on the liturgy, Vatican II on the liturgy. Sacrum Concilium. The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed, and at the same time it is the fountain from which all her power flows. At which point the Carmelites begin to shrivel up

[27:22]

in the corner and say, what? There's nothing left. It's a very strong statement. The liturgy is the source and also the consummation. It's the ground and it's also the apex, the base and the peak. So Vatican II itself has to point out them carefully because it's not working. Because it can be a kind of pan-liturgism, especially in Benedictine monasteries, whereby the liturgy is everything. So you do the liturgy and then the rest of the time you say, do what you can. The Vatican II, I think, isn't it specifically referred to in your words that the liturgy is the spirit of authority? I think it's the liturgy. Let me see. I brought it with me. I think it's the liturgy. That's number 10. Now it's the liturgy.

[28:40]

Nevertheless, the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed. It is also the fount from which all the power flows. I was joking. See, at one time there was this big battle between the proponents of the liturgy over here, the liturgical prayer over here with a bag of genie bearing the flag, and contemplative prayer over here with Maritime bearing the standard of their respective white horses. And when you seem to give everything to the liturgy, the people whose whole focus is on interior prayer, personal prayer, private prayer, contemplative prayer begin to be very fearful. And sometimes rightly so. It's a crazy polemic that that's what happens. And they're all saying that the liturgy is the service of the summit is to make peace and love. But does people know how to do it? Oh, sure. You've got to bring it out, though. Otherwise,

[29:41]

they feel that they've completely conquered the field in all these books. I think when you read A, that might answer that. The Eucharist is so important. Yeah. Yeah, the problem of whether it's the liturgy or the Eucharist is being talked about. Now, as far as the liturgy is concerned, it's the Eucharist that is the most, the central part. The Eucharist is certainly the apex. And it's... I guess you'd say it's the foundation, too, because by it we are incorporated into the body of Christ. Therefore, it's by it that we participate in the priesthood of Christ, right, which is the axis of this. So it's foundational. They're like concentric circles, you know. You can consider the Eucharist to be the core and then the Divine Office to be sort of around it. You know, just as the Paschal Mystery of Jesus, right, is the core of his life,

[30:42]

and then his other acts, also his acts of worship, are another wider circle around that. Okay? Okay, now we get to the Eucharistic celebration. This is the center of the life of the community because from it the Church is born. Of it, continue through it, go through it. So that means it's the source. The communion and Divine Life and the unity of the people of God, these are the basic dimensions. The vertical and the horizontal, which we found earlier on, remember, talking about Church as sacrament and the monastic community, that was in Scheme 4. Now here you find it reproduced once again in the celebration of the Eucharist. Now, this theology of the Eucharist was not in the earlier Constitution, you see, so it's a great enrichment. It means that you can use the Constitutions in a different way now than you did before. See, now, in a certain way

[31:42]

you can use them in spiritual reading or to find your bearings, theologically speaking, within the Christian history. That wasn't possible before. Expressed and realized. Every word is loaded there. So, we won't comment on that. Fortes to the future perfect communion with the Blessed Trinity. If you read the big text for this area, it's Father Vagagini's book, The Theological Sense of the Religion. And Vagagini was very close to the Second Vatican Council on the religion. He was on the commission and often had a determinant influence, I think, also on the document. And he may have advised also on the Constitution in this book. Number five. Therefore, since that's the center,

[32:44]

everybody has to be careful, individual and community, that the orientation of their life is in accord with it. And for preparation and development we need this direction. Then, on the celebration itself, there were a lot of things to be changed, you see, in the celebration of the Eucharist at that time. One principal thing was that you had the priests all saying so-called private masses and then you had one conventional, conventional, conventional mass which was celebrated by a single priest. The whole community would be present and not con-celebrated. And that was changed. You see a strong push in that direction. According to the nature of the praying community and the intrinsic exigencies of the celebration. Now those are subtle, mild pushes towards changes in the liturgy, on a concrete level. Then the resulting contemplation.

[33:47]

So, warmly recommended that the celebration of the Eucharist be one and the same for all the members of the community. Now, this refers to the question of private masses or the one con-celebrated conventional mass. It's a strong push to drop the duplication of mass by having the priests having their real Eucharist and celebrating themselves and then attending the conventional mass or the spectators or the court participants. That was the real battle that was getting a lot of attention. A lot of people here were afraid of keeping the private masses. You see, the more solitary life you have the more you're wanting to want to keep the Eucharist too as a solitary practice according to the Vatican. And it has a long history in my work because I think at the time of St. Norman you'd find a lot of priests celebrating private masses.

[34:53]

And some of those monasteries, in fact, like in the Trappist monasteries of our time 30 years ago you'd have about 20 altars where the priests would celebrate each one as one private mass side-by-side like in the crypt of the church. And then you'd have one big conventional mass where everybody was present but only one priest and maybe the abbot would celebrate. And you get very attached to those things. In spite of if you think about them think about them clearly but at a certain detachment you realize that they don't conform relatively naturally to the Eucharist which really is communion which is this sharing of life. On the other hand if somebody is really a recluse well then it's quite natural for him to celebrate by himself. So anyway we went back to Portland and there was a lot of Archimandrite there. And before we finally arrived in Archimandrite we were all present so not compromises or quarrels

[35:54]

on the side of the unified celebration but there's the open possibility of the open. St. Peter Damien has this little treatise Dominus for Viscum in which he talks about the mass the priest celebrating the mass privately and so you know and that's one of the strongest statements that is made for that kind of private and solitary worship. Okay on the solemnity of the priorship causality because that expresses the unity of the community. The last paragraph in that part since all the faithful now not just the monks but all the faithful exercise their priesthood in liturgical assembly when they are present their active and conscious participation in divine mysteries is to be part of this is another gentle push which has very concrete repercussions which would have been evident here at the time when they had the electric screen here in between

[36:54]

the two points of the church which buzzed open the idea is that where the faithful have been kept sort of held off at arm's length from the celebration they should be in some way allowed to come closer and further forth. Now that as you can imagine is a very tense subject to monasteries and you see a great difference in various monasteries even if you look at various Catholic monasteries if you go to Gethsemane you find the people up on the balcony which is about 300 meters from Mars it's about a thousand feet away and the priests almost have to take a bus to get there to give them communion. The whole service waits for the priests to come back and then finally they can go to the choir and rest. Whereas in other ones we're pretty close to the people here. It depends a lot on where you are at geographically but if you're near a city it could be just impossible

[37:55]

to be able to come as close as we could be drawn to. But that's always been a very sensitive thing. And even then it's still a debatable thing. Like should you have somebody from among the retreatants read the second reading on Sunday or something it's still on the same line as it was before. You become very tired of that kind of thing and that kind of discussion. The Divine Office. So the Divine Office is very important for monks. Now monks had a lot of a place in the actual evolution of the Divine Office if you read the history of it. The canons in the city churches and a lot of it came from the monks. Especially the way that the office was formulated by St. Benedict and his rule had a lot of influence on the subsequent even in the Roman offices. Celebration

[38:56]

of the Divine Praise is a fundamental effort of their life. There was probably a dispute as to whether to put the fundamental or the fundamental one. Number eight. The sacrifice of the Divine Praise. These are classic biblical praises. Once again here as in the Eucharist Christ exercises his priestly action. Sooner or later it's important for you to read something on that theology of the liturgy if we don't have a class on it. Because otherwise we don't know how to relate what we're doing to the know how to pull it together in our minds. The mystery of salvation finds its plenitude in the Church. In quote Cachin conference

[39:57]

ten chapter eleven which I think is the end of that conference where Cachin quotes St. Gregory homilies on Ezekiel book ten. Unfortunately we don't have those in English. There are some big quotations about this western mysticism. Since the divine, number nine, divine office is intended to sanctify the course of the day. This is the reason why the divine office is broken up into different hours. It should be celebrated as close to the proper time as you can, taking into consideration the changed conditions of life, which means that it makes a lot of difference what kind of work you're doing and so on, how you schedule the divine office. The divine office is going to be scheduled. The hours will be scheduled differently in the 6th or 7th century than they are in the 20th century. And so for instance, a community may not want to go to church eight times a day to pray

[40:58]

the divine office, so they may condense a couple of hours, but they may readjust the hours because of the demands of their work. Otherwise their work is too broken up. Lords and Vespers, that's morning prayer and evening prayer, which are the two hinges of the divine office. Those are the two most important hours, even though not necessarily the longest hours. Vigils, which are the longest hours in all this. Schedules. Participation of all the members of the community. In other words, don't have main hours of the divine office at a time when some people will be working and not able to attend. The form of the celebration. Well, to each element, reading, psalmody, singing, silent pauses. For an hour of the divine office, according to the directives, you have to have four things. Psalm or psalms, scriptural reading, prayer, hymn or song. Silence is not

[41:58]

one of the absolute requirements, but it's obviously it should be there. But you know, up to, before the renewal, there wasn't much silence in the divine And it was very difficult, of course, to find the right rhythm for it. Maybe too long, maybe too short, maybe too many of them. Guests and the faithful. So the same thing holds for them. They should be able to participate actively. Lectio Divina. Notice the sequence. First the Eucharist, then the divine office, Lectio Divina, and finally prayer. Preparation and expansion in a coherent commitment of life and in that this prose is up to slow you to sleep. In Lectio. Contact with

[42:58]

the word, food of the soul, pure and perennial source of the spiritual life. I think that's quoted twice. The earlier time was in Scheme 2. A beautiful phrase from Dei Verba, which is the Vatican 2 Constitution of Preparation in the Bible. It introduces the monk into the mystery of salvation. So it's an initiation. An attitude of conversion is needed. And then specifically on what you read. And this owes something to the last chapter of the Holy Rule, chapter 73, in which Saint Benedict said, remember, read what page of Scripture you and you'll see. The Scripture, first of all, the Word of God, then, the Fathers, Tradition, and the Ever-Living Reflection of the Church. We

[43:59]

may have quite a struggle with ourselves to come to a good view of what our reading, our spiritual reading, is to include. Spiritual reading properly. Is it just Scripture? Some people might say so. The Fathers, they say, are merely sort of digesting the Scripture or integrating the Scripture, or unifying the Scripture and processing it and giving it back to the Combined Body, transmitting it to. Tradition, not only the Fathers, but also perhaps later writers, or writings which somehow fall outside the circle of the Fathers. There is a line. I think they get to it a little later. I think it comes up a little later. They're not able to define it with complete sharpness here. And actually, it's not

[44:59]

that sharp a line, because if study is prohibited from having any of the quality of Lectio, then it tends to go dead. On the other hand, Lectio is not completely without kind of reflections. The study is seen as a preparation. They don't distinguish qualitatively. They don't say that if you read this, it's Lectio, and if you read that, it's study. Because you can study anything, including the Bible, including the things that you do with Lectio all the time. And your Lectio range extends also beyond the narrow limits that I mentioned before. It's harder to read the Code of Canon Law for Lectio than you do. You can do it sometimes. If you look at it read it in a certain way, there's some passages that explain it. And it's so different for different

[45:59]

people as well. Now, the ever- living reflection of the Church, this is important. Even a contemporary reflection of the Church, which means reflection of theologians, spiritual scholars, on. It can be a mistake for us to confine our reading only to draw a line around it in terms of time, and say there's nothing after the 6th century, after the time of the Fathers, or nothing after the monastic centuries, nothing after the early days. There's a time for focusing our reading on times. There's another time we have to learn to be quite open and to listen to the truth of the Word and whatever that word tends to is. Nowadays we do that. It's a

[47:01]

way of reading. It's a way of reading which leads to prayer. Whereas study doesn't lead to prayer as it does. Study, you're trying to understand something, then you're going to go on for years and years

[47:12]

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