The poor beforehand will make a formal donation of them to the monastery without keeping back a single thing for himself, well aware that from that day he will not have even his own body at his disposal. The very word celibacy speaks to many people of a minefield that's better ignored altogether. And for some of us who were formed in a certain era of the Catholic Church, celibacy and sexuality were spiritually hazardous topics that were better left with a few cautionary prohibitions and not a great deal of specificity. But at this particular time in our own monastic and church cycle, I think it's very clear with the inundation of sexually explicit language and images throughout the whole of the society around us, the ravages of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in this country and elsewhere, we can state what is, I hope, obvious.

[01:17]

Celibacy may not be understood or accepted by many, but it can no longer be seen as something that's irrelevant. Rather, it demands to be considered in any serious formation of a monk. In one respect, living a celibate life is a form of protest. It's a prophetic stance at the deepest level. It certainly is a protest against all the dehumanizing and gratuitous sexual exploitation that has pervaded so much of our Western culture in recent years. It's a protest against the pornography and intentional denigration of the human body that's fostered by today's social media and entertainment industry. Celibacy is a protest and a symbol of contradiction because All of the above phenomena are telling us that the Christian belief in human sexuality as a gift, ordained for the responsible use of each person according to the call they have received from God, is out of step with the self-indulgent world in which we live.

[02:33]

In this respect, we can only hope to fully understand consecrated celibacy unless our value system is different than the one that panders to contemporary taste. It helps to go back to our monastic tradition and see that celibacy has always been a given. That shouldn't be strange, since both celibates and all those who enter the monastic life have this basic spiritual task of coming to terms with ourselves in solitude as we seek God. Thomas Aquinas once defined celibacy as making a vacancy for God, which is quite different from the alienated loneliness of lust that is always turning upon itself. Celibacy is a choice made then by those who want to be empty for God, free and open in his presence, available for his service.

[03:45]

The embrace of this solitude entails the confrontation of a lot of the self-centered aspects of our shadow side. An American religious sister, Sandra Schneider, I think, captures the radical character and connection of on intimacy and what can help us with our celibacy when she writes, intimacy with God is not one way to live religious life meaningfully, it is the only way. So the aim of dealing with the passions according to monastic tradition is not to eliminate them but to illumine them. Again, we think back to what we said about humility, knowing the truth and recognizing it about ourselves. Certainly, if we cultivate the gift of celibacy, it always has to start with the love for the person of Christ.

[04:48]

And we get that in our tradition. You're reading that Desert Banquet. I don't know if you've come across Amasera yet, but there's a wonderful story of Amasera, and she is attacked by the spirit of fornication. So, as it continues with insistence, she decides that she's going to give herself immediately up to prayer, the fear of God, and she does so out in her balcony, and when she's there, she encounters the spirit of fornication, saying, Sarah, you have overcome me, and then Sarah has this great response, she says, it is not I who have overcome you, but my master, Christ. And that's what it's all about, sexual temptation, of any sort is not overcome by self-mastery but by Jesus' mastery. As John Cashin affirmed the same, if we look at the Institutes, we see him saying, human effort will never be able to win through against sexual sin, for the soul will be attacked by this vice as long as it does not recognize that it is in a war beyond its powers and that it cannot obtain victory by its own effort

[06:04]

unless it is shored up by help and protection of the Lord. If we look to the rule, sparse as it may appear in reference to celibacy, it does incorporate the main lines of our tradition. Benedict makes explicit mention of the virtue of chastity only once. We call in chapter 4 in the Instruments of Good Works, we are to treasure chastity. And in a negative manner, Benedict warns us in the chapter on humility to be on guard against the desires of the body and to pursue not our lust, because death is at the gateway of pleasure. But later in the rule, he goes on to affirm that persons who have renounced everything, in chapter 33, no longer have power over their own body. And that's what we heard, too, in chapter 58, in the profession ceremony. It certainly is a far remove from what we see around us today, absolute personal autonomy enshrined in that infamous feminist adage, our bodies are our own.

[07:18]

It's a mindset that's equally distant from the relentless drive of the present age to use whatever means are available to literally sculpt and re-engineer our body so we can be free of any imperfection. or be sexually appealing. Think of the huge increase in Botox and cosmetic surgery. The collective monastic teaching on celibacy is about a lot more, though, than just rejection of the cult of the body. It really has to begin with an acceptance of our own identity as a sexual person. More precisely, living a compelling witness of celibacy Does that become possible if we are still uncomfortable with our sexual persona or have not accepted fully our own sexuality? In the past, I think a celibate commitment may too often have been mistakenly framed as a choice between celibacy or sexuality.

[08:24]

And today, I think it's much more about integrating both of those elements, being a sexual celibate in the service of God's kingdom. I think too many have been deluded into thinking that the theoretical construct of celibacy gives witness to the vow, but that's only half the equation. It's celibate people who are the witnesses, not some abstract concept, in much the same way as married couples, and not the abstract state of Christian marriage, give witness to the sacrament of matrimony. Another aspect of this, of course, is friendship. Now within a monastic community, as within any diverse human community, lasting friendships are the essential recipe for emotional and spiritual health. A serious study of monastic history will underscore how friendship is not a luxury in a community, but a necessity.

[09:28]

But it's not a friendship that is content with simple social companionship or shared interest. It's one that eventually has to respect the solitary character of other people and communities, recognize their right to have and make similar friendships. There's a great line in C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves, friendship has to be about something beyond itself. Because the very condition for having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. For every Christian, a truly graced friendship should always serve as a bridge to know Christ better. I'm sure you're aware of Albert Obradow's great treatise on spiritual friendship. And in there he says that in every friendship you have to have three persons. The lover, the love, and then Christ. who is their link.

[10:31]

For monks of a certain age, we had a warning against fostering particular friendships, and it was an implied admonition about avoiding any hint of homosexual expression. But if avoiding particular friendships is to have any credence today, it must rest in recognizing the dangers inherent in establishing any relationship of emotional dependence on It's not about gay or straight, it's about that dependence and some of the dysfunctionalism that accrues from it. Those who live in monastic communities are no less impervious to the experience of separation and hurt, loneliness, or rejection. But of course, as celibates, we are able to be free. Free to move among a wide variety of people and be loved, not because we're obligated to do so, out of charity, but because we belong in a special way to God, and I'm sure you've been affirmed that way by a lot of people outside the community.

[11:40]

They value our celibacy precisely because of the freedom it leaves us to move in so many circles as a sign of Christ's love. I think some of that gets carried over in the rule when Benedict exhorts the monks in chapter 72 to show their fellow community members the chaste love of the fellowship, caritatem fraternitatis castae. I think Benedict was aware that friendship did not lack genuine affection and attraction. But he also had to know that it was asking too much of fraternal love or friendship to expect them to be rewarding in the same way as human married love. is a great one-liner of a Trappist monk who says that the desert shared with others is still the desert. And as we recognize the truth of that statement, we can also say that some of the most respected examples of celibate life have been known for the friendships they established in and outside monastic community.

[12:48]

The single and married people, those of the same and opposite sex. I know Damasus Winston got a lot of criticism by all the people he would see and know when he was getting started in this country, and, you know, part of it was his personality, but part of it, too, was that tremendous witness we can make in engaging people of all sorts because of our celibate identity. An especially prized fruit of friendship is that of learning, not just how to give, but how to receive love. I think one of the sad mistakes the celibate witnessed in the past was to transmit the impression that celibates were above all human need for affection. A variant of that was to see the celibate as a cut above the ordinary mortal. Celibacy was a call more sublime, difficult, and holier than the commitment of other Christians.

[13:50]

All you have to do is spend time with the young family, with children under the age of 10, to disabuse you of that notion. There's a simple fact that celibates, whether they're ordained or not ordained, whatever the context, have to allow others to minister to them. There's a brother who's a psychologist in the Chicago area who has had a lot of work with people who are celibate, and he called one particular group of celibates, this way of thinking that they were higher, consecrated refrigerators. You know, I think it captures, waggish as that may sound, how deluded we can become if we think we're all that pristine. Of course, we run the risk then of never letting the love of Christ be alive and at work in the witness we give, and that is what we're called to do.

[14:57]

There are a number of dysfunctional qualities that can take place in a celibate if left unchecked by the wisdom of our tradition. One is that of resentment. You know, it's the type of hurt that seems to increase when one looks back over the years, ponders all the might-have-beens. It's really a little more than a very selfish and petty attitude, and it begins to use phrases, if I only knew then, would I know now? And the whininess of phrases like that was particularly evident, I think, in those years of following Vatican Council, too, for people who left. You know, apart from casting an indictment on what was lacking in their formation as celibates, it deflected from any determination to live out a persuasive celibate witness. We see similar forms of what I would call sexual dysfunctionalism in feelings of anger,

[16:05]

Or just low-key hostility, which makes celibates appear not as whole and happy followers of a celibate Christ, but as very grumpy children of an overly demanding God. Those called to celibacy, no less than those called to marriage, come up against a drive to succeed, to please, to impress. And when that doesn't happen, then the finger of blame has to be pointed. And of course, what better scapegoat than celibacy, which has been the whipping boy of so many who have a score to settle with the church. If you listen, we had to, didn't we? During the whole sexual abuse crisis for the popular media, and I'm talking here, you know, New York Times, NPR, Wall Street Journal, it was, you know, celibacy, you know, and it was just displaying this incredible ignorance of what celibacy was all about, but it was, you know, the scapegoat.

[17:10]

And blaming celibacy for the woes of everything that's happening really skews the whole understanding of what a celibate witness is all about. I think in the past, much of what passed as formation in celibate living concentrated on abstinence and renunciation. Well, given the impression you bit your teeth, you took cold showers, and that would take care of it. And I mean, I don't want to, there is definitely an essential place for asceticism with respect to celibacy. But I think we neglected the more positive and challenging lesson of integration. The mature religious celibate learns not so much to reject Eros as to transform it, or have it be transformed in conformity to the call Christ has given us. Pope Benedict XVI had that wonderful section in Deus Caritas of how Eros is in cooperation with God's grace.

[18:15]

We don't ignore it. We see it as a valued part of our witness. It's interesting, you know, to read the John Jay report that was the report that was submitted to the American Catholic Bishops after the Dallas meeting in 2002, and it said there was arrested sexual development and a dearth of seminary programs of sexual formation for several generations that were influential factors in creating a climate for some of the perpetrators of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. They were right. And that naivete of sexual formation in seminary programs, I'm afraid, had its counterpart in religious and monastic communities. The Christian virtue of chastity and the monastic call to be celibate don't happen automatically. They demand a combination of discipline and common sense that are lifelong.

[19:18]

The ascetical practices of the renowned figures of our monastic history who underwent all these exacting bodily mortifications, maintained strict fast, are not things we need to emulate. But the sacrifice of celibate life should not be posed as a matter of choosing one sacrifice out of many. If, for example, one looks at a celibate who abstains from genital expression but who never abstains from anything else, that individual is not going to be a very effective witness of celibacy or asceticism. And we've seen that in the priesthood, too. Father gets to enjoy other things if he gives up his married life. Certainly, moderate use of food and drink are part of this, as are the clothes we wear, the elements we choose to immerse ourselves in from the surrounding culture. And if we reject prudishness, we shouldn't neglect prudence. There's certainly a great deal in the world around us, and we can look at cinema, art, we can go to literature, and we can see that there's much to benefit, but it has to be done with a prudent and discerning conscience.

[20:35]

There's also a way in which sensibly structured manual labor, physical exercise, and leisure can provide healthy physical outlets that allow us to relax and recreate. And then there's that recurring connection of celibacy and solitude. I used to tell novices when I was in formation that if they can be alone, silent, and at peace with themselves, then they can begin to establish the necessary independence from the perceptions and expectations of others in the community. And we know how that happens, there's always expectations we put on the new people. You have to have, not just an interior life, but a space where you are in solitude and in communication, communion with God, to be able to stand up to those expectations. Again, I'll quote Sandra Schneider, she says that the core of religious life is a radical and irreducible solitude.

[21:42]

Hemming now encaptured this too when he said, in solitude, a free response to our sexual identity becomes possible. Solitude prevents us from relating to our sexuality as a way to prove that we've been loved, and thus allows us to experience our sexual feelings as a manifestation of God's unconditional love. The challenge of a celibate life, which is equal to that of a single life of other people living in our society, is not to permit the factor of loneliness to lead to self-pitying behaviors or alienation, which is what we see so often, sad to say, with the diocesan priesthood. I do spiritual direction with a number of diocesan priests and it's a constant battle, that loneliness. Another popular contemporary celibate writer on spirituality, Father Ronald Roheiser, says Those committed to consecrated celibacy have to make peace with the fact that they sleep alone and will die as celibates denied the full symphony of life.

[22:51]

In recent years, at least, celibates have been more willing to admit this loneliness and at the same time realize that even the best communities cannot wholly compensate for such a state. And we should not overlook the fact that There are married people sleeping together who experience that loneliness. But then, too, in this life, whoever you are, there is no finished symphony. And that's where the charism of celibacy announces to others that there's something beyond this life, and there's the eschatological character of its witness. You know, we throw that off so lightly, but if We're going to get people to look beyond the horizon of this world and do it in a convincing way. Celibate witness has to be a part of that. And if celibacy does not receive a favorable response from the general public, it may be there are not enough committed and satisfied celibates willing to talk about their experience.

[23:57]

I remember being very touched and renewed in my celibate commitment when I read a reflection of an English Benedictine monk, David Moreland, in a book that came out a few years ago on people reflecting on their celibacy. I'd like to quote from that. He was a monk of my generation, so it has particular poignancy. David Moreland said, the single most difficult thing for me in being a monk has been celibacy. Yet I am quite sure that God wants me to be celibate for His own mysterious purposes and that the path to genuine happiness lies there. Certainly there have been enough bits of evidence in my life, both positive and negative, to convince me of this. Fidelity to being celibate has brought greater peace of mind, deeper prayer, and warmer friendships, especially with women, while attempts to evade it have usually been disastrous both emotionally and spiritually.

[25:03]

As I have become more aware of my own weakness and inability to carry this particular cross on my own, so gradually has it become easier to entrust my own affections, emotions, bodilyness, and sexuality to God, and find there a gentleness and acceptance which is an assurance that I am indeed loved, body and soul, and full of the encompassing love and mercy of God. Out of that growing awareness comes the freedom and the ability to love and be loved by others. There is an eloquent testimony to both the struggle and the affirmation that comes from living as a witness. You know, talking about it, we have to admit, again, some of our deficiencies. I remember when I was still in formation, I went to a place in Chicago in the year 2000, was a summer program for formators who were trying to establish programs in formation that would incorporate sound teachings and sexuality.

[26:13]

And there was a group of us, we're all over the world, Africa, Latin America, Europe, we were 50 something at the time, and we began talking about our experience of formation. And each and every one, the men and the women, and these were active religious, every type of religious the formation programs we had were absolutely bereft of anything that was suitable in terms of teaching about celibacy. And I think that says a lot about where the church was at the time and where we need to be today. I think experiences like that would seem to support in part the criticism that the Catholic Church has been better at silence and secrecy than at openness and honesty. It's my conviction that celibacy should make us less secretive and self-conscious and more open and trusted. Just as honesty speaks what we really think, so our celibate chastity should show what we really feel.

[27:21]

And if we cannot be honest among those with whom we live, the stakes are raised that we will be more vulnerable to the exclusive sharing with a significant other. I've been struck by a number of clinical psychologists who've affirmed the monastic wisdom of what we were talking about earlier today, sharing completely the whole of one's story with another person, a person who not only understands our spiritual yearnings, but also understands our celibate commitment. And let's face it, men in particular have been particularly adept at just denying any need for self-disclosure. we just go on, and you know, we're just creating a minefield for ourselves. There has to be some way in which we acquire that skill to talk about ourselves, not in some elaborate therapeutic session, but simply to exchange in an honest way what our celibate life is all about.

[28:30]

You know, I was struck again how you see this coming out in odd ways. Some of you might remember about 10 years ago there was the book Father Joe, The Man Who Saved My Life. It was written by this crazy guy, Tony Hendra, who recounts how this solemn monk on the Isle of Wight, gave him the compassion, the understanding, and the good, solid sense about his own sexual problems and just his spiritual life, was just his anchor for him, because he would go back to him because he trusted him, and this was a person who loved in the right way, as he says in the book. And for all the craziness of Henry's life, You know, it was just marvelous to see him keep on going back and finding the truth to this person who was faithful to a celibate commitment throughout his whole life and was able to deliver to others the wisdom of that.

[29:38]

My own perception of the people who serve as such models is that they are as comfortable with prayer as they are with their sexuality. Which leads to, I think, an irrefutable fact that if we do not pray, our celibate commitment is going to stray. Some of you may know the name Richard Seif. Richard Seif was a monk of St. John's for some time, later left the community, became a clinical psychologist, and probably has been one of the major commentators on Catholic Church and we've been dealing with the sexual abuse crisis but I remember Richard Sykes saying once so emphatically to the St. John's community, I can tell you if you give up your common prayer and your private prayer everything else is going to go south very soon and it's you know not some earth-shaking new theory but it's proven.

[30:43]

I mean I look in my life at people who've had major problems on the issue of celibacy and you can trace that their prayer life has been losing its wheels and instead it's happened. Again, the celibate has to return regularly to that solitary meeting with God, someone who fills up the space created in the acceptance of our call. We have to stand vulnerable and powerless before the Lord each day, asking to fill us with the power and peace of his presence. Because in the final accounting, religious celibacy can never be justified merely for its functional qualities. We hear that so often, you know, the celibate's more accessible in helping others. Yes, but if it's just that, it does not really deliver the goods on celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of God. It's really about how celibates relate in an intimate way to the person of Christ.

[31:45]

or the model of Jesus allows any celibate to fill up the emptiness that is at the heart of who they are as a sexual person. And in our monastic tradition, much of the affective character of the celibate is also directed to the person of Mary, whose own virginity was the source of vitality and spiritual fecundity that continue to be our model of God. We all are, I think, very much appreciative of the channel of monastic tradition that came, especially through the Cistercians. You certainly have your salve around the Marian statue down in your crypt and the Memorare in the morning. I've been struck, I mean, even the most stolid monks who just are, you know, the consecrated refrigerators, give them a rosary and, you know, something happens.

[32:50]

They mellow a little bit. And I think that's good. It gets to their feminine side. And finally, celibacy is about the kingdom of God more than it is about the daily crawl of life in this world. And that's where the celibate can witness to a God who, in calling any individual to celibacy, lets that person of Christ take hold of them. allowing Christ to turn their commitment into something of more far-reaching value because it's going to lead them through Christ's love and the love of many others to his heavenly kingdom where the love lasts forever.

[33:31]

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