In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, did you bring your written homework with you? I hope you did. There won't be any exam, and you don't have to show it or share it, unless you'd like to. But it's very important that you write it out so that you have it. that you go through the process of doing it. Are there any questions open about this morning that we should take first before we go on? Okay, then we'll go on, but I will always ask you, so if you have a question you're not sure that you quite understood, you can always bring it along and at the beginning of the next session we will continue, tie it in.

[01:10]

So just to summarize about this morning, I told you that Father Damascus was frequently giving conferences, he called them conferences, to the community in addition to the teaching that he would give to novices, monks in formation, to the whole community. that he put great emphasis on it as sharing the teaching of the abbot. This was very important and central to him. The principle of these lectures or conferences was always, according to the Latin word that he often used, fides querens intellectum, faith searching for a deeper understanding.

[02:19]

rooted in faith, not questioning the faith, but in faith questioning everything, and particularly questioning the use of words, questioning How we use words, what do they really mean? What does it really mean? And how do you know that it means that? Which means you have to connect it then with your experience. And why is it so important to you? These were some key questions. And now we want to, in a way, follow this format during the during this retreat time, and we started with the word God, and right away we spoke about the mystery. When we say God, what we mean is that mystery which St.

[03:29]

Paul says, in that mystery we live and move and have our being And that is the divine mystery, so we are completely in it, like fish in water, or birds in the air, completely in it. It's our element, the divine. Thomas Merton even went so far as to say, God isn't somebody else. That was one of his very famous words. repeating when he spoke to the novices, God isn't somebody else. That's something to chew on. What does that mean, God isn't somebody else? It means we are totally immersed in that mystery of the Trinity and For the Father, the Son isn't somebody else, and the Son is for the Father, not somebody else.

[04:31]

But that's the mystery of the Trinity. There is this relationship, and that relationship we also experience. The medium in which we experience our life in God is following St. Paul, life itself, living, is to be alive and is to be in God. And that holds for every human being, not only for this or that religion, but for all religions. To be alive as a human being is to be in relationship to that mystery, which we call God. God, that word comes from somewhere, who invented that word God for this mystery, and if you follow that back and go to the root of the word God in the English language, as far back as we can go, it means, it's not a name for someone, it's not

[05:58]

A term for a thing like a carpenter or a butcher or a chair, it simply means And that which is called upon, that's what God means. God means the called upon. Whatever is called upon, that's what God means. So it refers to the mystery under a very special aspect, namely of calling, of that relationship. And that is the direction in which we now get into prayer. become aware that as human beings we are immersed in that mystery of life, we live and move and have our being in God, or speaking in Christian terms, we are through Christ immersed in the life of the Blessed Trinity, then out of this flows immediately

[07:15]

the flows prayer, namely the calling upon God and the being called upon God. Because this word God sort of hovers between us calling and us being called. It's just the calling area or something like that. It's pretty open originally. Now we have to be very careful that we don't box it too much in and know exactly what we mean, because that would be, in the terms of Father Damasus, idolatry, that you have it, you have it, you have it, it's fixed. Here comes a mental idol of which he said that was even more dangerous than an idol out there. So under this aspect of calling, we can come back to those three great questions of which we said every human being is sooner or later confronted with those three questions, and these questions lead into that mystery which we call God.

[08:31]

And the first question was, why? You can cut it sometime and just let yourself down into this, why? Why? Why is there anything? Why am I here? Why am I asking why? Why is there anything other than nothing? And you come into mystery in the sense that you cannot grasp it, you cannot get it into the grip of your mind, but you can understand it if it speaks to you, if you relate to it. Brother Bruno mentioned today that he closed his speech for his anniversary by saying, by quoting Fr. Damasus as saying, we did not choose God, God chose us.

[09:33]

And I remember that was a very, very important word for him that he very often repeated. It refers also to that we did not choose God, we are not able to grasp God, but God chooses us, God takes hold of us, God calls us, that's why we call it God. God is the one upon whom we call and the one who calls us first. And this why leads us into the silence, he said, leads us down into the silence. There's this beautiful psalm verse in Psalm 42.7, deep calling unto deep. And Fr. Damascus liked to quote it in Latin, because he said it sounds like the waterfalls, and that, this is the thundering waterfall.

[10:46]

He liked the sound of it. deep calling unto deep, the deep of God calling to the deepest in us, and the deepest in us calling to that depth of God, which, as I said this morning, C.S. Lewis says, you can throw down your thoughts forever and ever never will an echo come back, it's just this abyss of silence, and he speaks explicitly of the Father when he says that, because out of this abyss of silence, out of the silence comes the word, and there's this beautiful Christmas antiphon when The night in its swift course has reached its midpoint, and all was in perfect silence.

[11:52]

Then your eternal world leaped down from its heavenly throne. So the world comes out of it, and everything is silence. Out of that silent night, on this Christmas night, comes the world. Out of the silence comes the world. And the answer to what, for everyone that you can ask, what is this, what is this, what is this, it is a mystery to me. We hit mystery when we ask what, because in last analysis, we cannot fathom what anything is. What? We can understand it because it speaks to us. Everything that is speaks to you. And we can practice this.

[12:53]

We can start with things that are easy, like sit and look at a tree. A tree is a word. God speaks to you through a tree very eloquently. You don't have to translate it into words. Just look at the tree and it does something to you, or you listen to it. It rustles, or you listen to the rain. A rain is a word that speaks to us, not the kind of word that you can look up in a dictionary, but a word in the sense that it tells you something, it wants to reach you, it calls upon you as you call upon God, it touches you, and that was also very important to Fr. interact with this mystery of God through all our senses. That spirituality, as I said this morning, is aliveness on all levels and also aliveness of all your senses.

[14:02]

So whatever you can do to look so deeply that you see that mystery, or listen so deeply that you hear the silence, or taste, you know? These senses are great gifts that are given to us, and they want to be cultivated, and spirituality does not begin with spiritual thoughts and reading spiritual books of this. It begins with listening deeply, and even listening when there is nothing to be heard, listening to the silence, and tasting it. And Fr. Damsus was speaking about the spiritual senses. Nowadays, there is not much talk about the spiritual senses.

[15:03]

But in the Middle Ages, there was a lot of talk about the spiritual senses, and the spiritual senses are not another set of five senses, but they are our five senses, our God-given five senses, fully alive, fully alive, so alive that you Taste and see that I am God, as it says in the Bible. Taste and see that I am God. You taste your beer, your dessert, your apple, whatever you're tasting, and you taste it so deeply that God's love speaks to you. In last analysis, all these different words are the one word, the one logos that comes out of the silence of the Father, and all of them say, lastly, only one thing to us, and that is, I love you.

[16:06]

That's the basic message. You listen so deeply, you hear, God loves me, and God loved me first. That was also something that was very important to Father Demmes, that it's a quotation from One of the letters of St. John, I think the first one, God loved us first. You don't have to whip up some love for God. You just sit and realize, taste deeply that God loves you. Smell the rain, how wonderful this grass smells after the rain this afternoon. That's God saying, I love you. And the spiritual quest consists in learning all the different languages in which God says, I love you. And through the rain, God says, I love you in a language that you can only understand if you learn rain language.

[17:12]

Through cherries, you have to learn cherry language. That way of saying I love you is not said in any other language. God says it in cherry. Otherwise, what would cherries be about? We are an expression of the eternal world that wants to tell us that God loves us, and so training our senses to become spiritual senses, that means highly alive and alert senses, means listening and tasting and smelling and touching and hearing so deeply that we hear God saying in that unique language of whatever we hear, I love you. And that is, of course, also true of human beings. Every human being is totally unique. And it's a unique way in which God says to us, I love you, anyone whom we meet.

[18:15]

And that is why the early Christians said, have you seen your brother? Have you seen your sister? You've seen your God. We need to, and therefore also our great responsibility, to go through life and radiate God's love. That's the only task. Show God's love through anything we do, through everything we suffer, but above all through the way in which we relate to others. In that way, everything becomes And today we had in the reading at dinner, today or maybe it was yesterday, where Rabbi Sachs, is it? Is that the name? Whatever the author, was referring to the passage where Moses comes to the burning bush and he said,

[19:25]

And very frequently what God says there is translated as, I am the I am. And that is not a correct translation. It's really a mistranslation. For the Damasus was using Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. very, very frequently, and so often, they are all in German, I think, there is no English, right? We have all these volumes of Rabbi Hirsch, a 19th century German rabbi, but he was quoting him so often, always saying, and Rabbi Hirsch says this, and Rabbi Samson Raphael says this, and sometimes he made a mistake and said, and St. Samuel Raphael. He was calling him like a church father, you know. And these Jewish rabbis, and particularly also Martin Buber,

[20:33]

See, the real right translation of this passage is, I will be present as the one as whom I will choose to be present. And that means in everything we encounter through the Logos, God is present in everything that God chooses to be present, in a rock, in fire, in water, in the oil of the sacraments, in bread, in wine. And if we grow in our understanding and if our spiritual senses grow, then we will find God in everything there is. And there is a saying of Jesus that is not in the New Testament, what has often been quoted as possibly a saying of Jesus, split the wood and I'll be there.

[21:42]

Break the stone and I'll be there. Everything, wherever you go, you find, if it isn't an actual word of Jesus, but it's the message, it's the message of the whole Bible. We can find God in everything. And that would be then a calling upon God and God calling upon us that relationship, that discourse with God under what? Whatever can be God, I will be present in whatever form I will choose to be present, says God. And so why was the word by which we communicate silence with silence? Silence speaks to silence. Word, what was the question that leads us to whatever it is speaks to us, to the word, not to the silence. And the how leads us into the understanding, the prayer of understanding.

[22:48]

And understanding means listening so deeply that the word sends you to do something. Before it sends you, you haven't really understood, you've just heard the word. But when you know what it wants from you, and that is not, we must not limit that to saying, I think you should take this or that vocation, or you should do this or that today. It's not to be limited. If you listen to a flower, you look at these beautiful plants that are around here. They are not going to tell you something that you can put into a command of words, but they will tell you, you can enjoy this, live, enjoy, breathe, be like a plant, just be there, that sort of thing, but they will tell you something.

[23:53]

And when you hear that and do it, then you have really understood. only in the doing do you understand, but what we always want is to overstand. The difference between grasping and understanding is that the grasping wants to stand over and get control of these things. And one of my Zen teachers used to say, oh, you in the West, you say you want to understand, but what you really want is to overstand. He said, you are like people that go into the shower and put an umbrella up. To understand water, you have to let it rain on you. And to understand swimming, it isn't enough to read books about swimming. You have to get in the water and swim. So you understand by doing, only by doing do you really fully understand.

[25:00]

And that is also a kind of silent calling. Through the doing in silence, you follow the call, you follow the call of the Word. And that shows again this beautiful round dance of the Trinity that we refer to, that the Kappadoshian Fathers were so fond of. Out of the silence comes the Word, We can communicate with the silence, by silence. Out of it comes the word, we can listen to the word and respond to the word, and in the responding you understand, and the understanding is a silent way of returning into that silence. So it's the Logos coming forth from the silence of the Father and in the Holy Spirit leading us back to the Father. And therefore we have now three worlds of prayer in the Catholic tradition, three clear-cut traditions of prayer, and the first one is called prayer of silence, prayer of silence.

[26:25]

Be still and know that I am God," says the psalm. Be still and know. There's nothing else to do. Just be still, but really, really still, and you go into that stillness of God. St. Bernard has a beautiful passage in one of his comments on the Song of Songs and he says something like, ìThe quiet God quiets everything.î And when we look into God's quietness, we ourselves become quiet. Or when we let ourselves down into God's quietness, we ourselves become quiet. It's this prayer of quietness, prayer of silence. Fr. Gregory, in the early days, once had a radio interview, I think, in Elmira, and we were asking him, how long was it?

[27:31]

What we were talking about for a whole hour, he said, silence. An interview about silence. Yeah, you can talk forever about silence, but to really understand it, you have to be silent. And that is a real form of prayer. It's an absolutely valid form of prayer in the Catholic tradition, just to be silent. there's nothing more to be said, to let yourself down into the silence. And there is even one psalm, I forgot to look it up, I can tell you tomorrow, it's one of the psalms that is now differently translated, but I think the original, correct translation is, to you silence is praise. To you, O God, silence is praise. So silence is its own form of praise.

[28:36]

It's the way in which we, so to say, call silently to the Father. At the Karmaldolese monks in Big Sur, we had, I spent a long time there, and we had a a cat, a kind of cat that is called, it's a gray cat, I think it's called Katsushin, I think it's called a Carthusian cat, and it's gray and has tangerine eyes and it has a silent meow. The Crusaders brought this kind of cat back from Egypt, I suppose, and then in France, in the monasteries, they bred this kind of cat, and they bred it

[29:48]

so that it wouldn't make any noise. And when it wants to meow, it looks up at you and it goes, moves the mouth, and it's pitiful. It goes much more to your heart than if it was actually saying meow. It looks up and says meow without any sound. In this way, we can also communicate with God. This is a kind of prayer of silence. We say nothing, but God hears the silence in our heart. And the second world of prayer is called living by the word. The emphasis is now not on the silence of the Father, word and the logos and living by the word. means living by every word, and this is beautifully brought out in the story of the temptation of Christ, do you remember?

[31:03]

It's both Matthew 4, 4 and Luke 4, 4. I noticed that for the first time today, it's a very strange fact that This particular verse, man lives not by bread alone, is both in Matthew and in Luke 4.4, easy to remember. And so you remember the story, Jesus is in the desert, and has fasted for 40 days and he's hungry, and now these stones that lie around there look like loaves of bread. He's probably even a little delirious and sees these stones as being bread. And now the tempter, this is an allegorical way of speaking about it, the tempter says to him, if you're truly the son of God, say to these stones that they should be bread, turn these stones into bread.

[32:06]

And Jesus says, man lives not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Not by bread alone, but by every word. So that obviously says bread is a word. Human beings live not by bread alone, but by every word, by every other word. So, first of all, he establishes that he looks at bread as a word, that God speaks to him when he eats it, when he breaks it. It becomes a word, he lives by it. And then he says, Implicitly, who am I if I am truly the Son of God, the obedient Son of God, that I say to the Father, you better say something else? This is the moment when the Father says to me, stones, and I as the obedient Son will take this word and will not change God's word, and the mouth will say, you better say something else.

[33:13]

That is implied here. And then Luke, in the account of Luke, it says that at the end of the Temptations, and the tempter left him for a while. So if you read this attentively, you wonder, where is he coming back? And he comes back in the Garden of Gethsemane. Because Luke says then, this is the hour of darkness, so he alerts you to it. And it's beautiful, in the desert, the desert and the garden, they are very often two poles of one another. That was also one of the favorite themes of Father Dan, is this desert and garden. I will lead you to the desert, I've already mentioned it, and the garden of paradise and the garden of of the resurrection, grave and resurrection. I think that's even in the pathways in Holy Scripture, he refers to that.

[34:17]

But in the desert, the son is hungry and wants bread, and the father gives him a stone. And the stone means death. There's another passage, not far from that one, in the same gospel in which Jesus says, if your children ask you for bread, will you give them a stone? And then if your children ask you for an egg, life-giving, will you give them a scorpion? Looks a little bit like an egg. Deadly animal. When they ask you for, what is it? There's something said that if they ask you for that, you give them a snake. So again, in the desert, the father gives the stone, the symbol of death, to his son. And in the garden,

[35:18]

In the desert, the son wants the bread and doesn't get it. In the garden, the father gives him the chalice, the bread and the chalice, the chalice, and the son doesn't want to drink it because that chalice also means death. There's this psalm verse in which the enemies of God have to drink the chalice to the drakes and that means death and they die. So it's an image for death. And Jesus in the desert says, I am the Son of God and I accept what the Father gives me, and in the Garden of Gethsemane also says, prays just as he had prayed for food, he was hungry, so he prays now the other way. If it is possible, let this chalice pass me by, but if you—no will be done."

[36:40]

And then he drinks it. So in both cases, he accepts death. trusts that he can live by it, because he says man lives by every word of God, even by the word that spells death. So this is very important for us because God gives us all these different words in the course of our life, but the last word would be death. Now it's time to die. And if we have learned to live by every other word, when God says death, we will trust, we have always trusted, we have always been living by whatever God gave us. When the last word comes and says death, and we know that's what it's gonna say in this life, We will also say, I can, I trust that I can live by every word of God, even by that word that spells death.

[37:41]

And that is the great, that's sort of the deepest meaning of this prayer of learning to live by every word of God. Living, being nourished, living by God's word, being nourished, step by step nourished by God's gift. And then, so we had the prayer of silence, we had the prayer of living by the word, and now comes the prayer of understanding. And that is again another whole world of prayer, and that is called contemplation in action. Contemplation in action. Father Damascus had a very clear understanding of contemplation. It was based on the word contemplatio in Latin, and that is made up of first the syllable con, and that means to

[38:44]

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