with us. Let me thank you for your hospitality and for the privilege of coming here. I mentioned at the first conference that Mount Savior has always played a large role in my monastic imagination and seeing the church and the crypt and with all its atmosphere and And being with you in your prayer, it's been an encouragement for me, and I thank each of you, and I can assure you of my prayers for your well-being in Christ, and I hope to come back sometime. I'd like to finish up by drawing some loose ends together. I want to go back to something I mentioned about St. Bernard and the four degrees of love. Remember, briefly, we start out by loving ourselves, and that's the way God set it up.

[01:04]

And then we move on, we come into society or into community, and we learn again and again and again that it's more profitable for me if I obey the law of fraternal charity. So we are nice to people, we do the right thing by loving our neighbor because then I don't get hurt. So there's a kind of a selfish, that's a crass word, selfish, but there's some self-interest in our love, we'll put it that way. And then the third degree is when we, after living the life, come to begin to taste God for who God is. And we find God so delightful in himself that we start to love God for his own sake. And we start to love our neighbor because God wants us to. And then finally, after a lot of transformations, we finally come to that place where we begin to love God and our neighbor, not

[02:08]

not for our own sake, but for God's sake. Love God and then loving ourselves and our neighbor, not for any altruistic reason, but because it's what God wants. So, the whole thing gets turned around as we progress. Now, what that presupposes is that we're made for this kind of love. We're made to be completely turned inside out in a complete gift of self. And that may come pretty close to a definition, a working definition of a human person. We long to make a complete self-gift to someone else. So it's love that, you know, the old song goes, makes the world go round, and how true that is, really. There's a new philosophy being concocted. I guess it's pretty much polished off now, as Levinas is an old man.

[03:12]

I don't know how many of you know Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher. But he has taken the rabbinic tradition from the 16th century and made a metaphysic out of it. So there's a whole ethic and metaphysic system that's based on love of the other. in good Abraham Herschel tradition. And it's quite revolutionary for the pundits in intellectual France, because all of a sudden you get the essence of the Judeo-Christian religion put into the form of a philosophy. But there's a lot to it. I had enough of this stuff about, you know, faith versus philosophy and all that. I mean, we need those distinctions. But why not concoct a philosophy? Why not come up with a philosophy based on our experience? And the experience would be for those people that we admire the most, the Baddagh Khamershalds of the world, the Mother Teresas of the world, you know, the people who end up

[04:14]

living a life that's completely selfless, turned inside out, and a complete self-gift to humanity or to their community or to somebody else. This is the stuff of life. We all admire this, we all want it, but we're all afraid of it as well. Okay, so if that's true, then I'm suggesting during the course of these conferences that this desire to be totally self-gift is really what God is all about, isn't it? I mean, that's what our theology says about God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. It's God who went out of himself, so to speak, to come to us first. There wasn't a meeting halfway. We were degraded, and God made the first move and came out to us. And I emphasize that, we're coming out of, because that's the Greek word ecstasis, and that's what I've been trying to say from the beginning. That is, The structure of our humanity, our personhood, is really God's structure.

[05:18]

I mean, we're made in the image and likeness of God, and that's how it works. That God is dynamic, a new definition of God. Yes, God is the unmover and all that, but this has also been in the tradition from the beginning. Arjun always said, the Father is eternally generating the Son in a dynamic movement. So, if that's true, that we somehow, in our very structure of person, in our very structure of our creation, mirror the outgoing of God in love, in the Trinity, and also for our creation and our redemption, that that represents God's going out to meet us, to come and get us, so to speak. Well then, there have to be certain things that follow in our human existence. We start, I won't call it a disadvantage, but we have to start with loving ourselves. It takes a while, just like we're nine months in the womb, so we're nine months, figuratively speaking, in some kind of womb of novitiate, some kind of preparation before we can start to make this complete inside-out self-gift to God in return.

[06:34]

It takes a while, and it doesn't happen overnight. It even took Jesus The Word made flesh a while. He grew in age, wisdom, age, and grace before God and in the society. So it takes time. That's the way God has set it up, and we can't question that. That's a given. All right. Look at yourselves. When I look at myself and I see, am I, and I can ask myself the question, am I on the way to this complete self-gift? no questions asked, no holding back, no holding back a little parcel in case something goes wrong, no little savings account like Anthony of Egypt had, you know. And God said, you know, give everything away, don't keep anything back. Well, that's really a paradigm for monastic life, I think. You come to the monastery, we're invited anyway to leave everything, make a clean slate, and I explain how I think that should be worked in with our baptism.

[07:37]

I don't want to get off into a... we turn our backs completely on everything that happened. We have a radical conversion, but it's based on what happened before. All right, there are some pitfalls along the way. And to illustrate those pitfalls, I want to just signal some of the kind of the the detours that we make in life, and these are very general detours, you know, you have to, not everyone fits into one of these categories, but more or less this is what happens to people. You go through life in a religious establishment, in a monastery, in a community, and you come with all the goodwill in the world and a lot of youthful enthusiasm, and, you know, you try your best, and then you start to run up against, after five or six, you know, you start to run up against some brick walls. And the brick walls are usually self-made. And so many people in religion, in priesthood, in the church, in monasteries, get to the point where they go through agonies of desire and effort, and they keep getting tripped up.

[08:51]

And so there comes a time, and it's different for every person, but Frequently enough there comes a time when you just kind of there's something in you that's that snaps And you start to get a little cynical because you just don't believe that all this stuff about absolute love and absolute unconditional Thirst for the absolute you know that that really is And if you're looking for it in marriage, you see here so many people are cynical about marriage. And if you're looking for it in friendship, you see so many people are cynical about friendship. And if you're looking for it with God and religious community, so often people just, they start to make serious accommodations against their ideals. Because they figure, you know, hey, this is maturity. And this is how I'm going to have to do it. So I'm not going to get caught out by all of this enthusiasm and this fanaticism. I'm going to lead a mature, balanced life, and I'm not going to listen to these people who start to talk about unconditional, absolute, and all that kind of thing.

[10:03]

The problem with that is, while you may have opted for a kind of maturity, The problem with that is that underneath there's this kind of hidden desire that if we believe in our creation by God, this divine spark that's in us will not let us rest. We may go many years, but eventually we're going to get tripped up. Out there somewhere in our pool, remember the pool image, is swimming a swan. You know, a beautiful bird that every so often is going to flap its wings and stir up the whole water, because the most cynical person, like a C.S. Lewis, is precisely the kind that falls in love at age 55 or 60. You just can't swamp the human spirit so completely with cynical, a kind of cynical wisdom, and then expect to go through all of life like that.

[11:07]

You know, there are many stories, the bridge over, what is it? No. Madison County. What is it? That story. Right. Very, very illustrative of what I'm trying to say. And they say the novel's better than the movie. I don't know. I haven't seen either. I've read the reviews. One of the ones that I love the most as illustrative of this is Death in Venice, the little novella by Thomas Mann, where this guy had it all together, this writer. He had everything figured out. No one was going to trip him up for being sophisticated, knowing the whole scene. You know, a little bit like John Dominic Croson yesterday in a reading. Had it all, they weren't going to trip him up. He wasn't going to get caught out. All this stuff, and if someone who tells you what the definition of faith is and how far you can take it and all that kind of thing, watch out for that. Because it's that kind of person that's ripe for a great big romance.

[12:07]

Because they'll go after it absolutely and without condition. And that's what happened to the writer in Thomas Mann's book. I mean, it's depressing as hell, but also, I think, very fulfilling, because it means that the man still had life in him. And he went after what we might call absolute beauty in the platonic sense, and he fell head over heels in love with this little Polish kid on the beach. You know, it's kind of unsavory for us now, because everybody's so upset about, you know, pedophilia and all that kind of thing, but it's... Yeah, well, here's part of humanity, too. And there it is. He falls head over heels, and he makes a darn fool out of himself. He goes to the barber, and he gets himself all sweaty, trying to be young again, to fall in love. Now, Brother Sebastian was mentioned about Bernard Ivey at Mepkin. Now Bernard Ivey was the seller at Mefkin and really the savior of that community, of what I call now my community. And he, I think I agree with you brother, he kind of burned out.

[13:14]

He was the savior. He was everything but the abbot. and he should have been the abbot, really. He saved the place financially. He was really the one spiritual director in the place that everybody looked up to. They finally made him the novice master, tried to bring him back into the community, because he was drifting more and more out. He would celebrate mass in the morning with the community, and then he wouldn't show up for any office at all. It was tragic what happened. He finally fell in love with the woman down the road. taking care of her husband who had cancer. And of course, these people were landowners, so he had a lot to do with them. And before you know it, he was gone. I mean, it was such a trauma for that community, because they were so dependent on him. And that was in 1984. When I got to the monastery in 1990, it was still an open wound. And now, six years later, I can tell you, when you talk to the brothers one by one, the thing they'll bring up most frequently is Bernard Ivey.

[14:16]

He lives right down the road. So I say, well, you know, Bernard was one of these people that had everything figured out. He really did. You know, people would go to him with their problems. And I said, well, no, you know, it's this. And he gave a lot of good advice, great advice, except to himself. And he forgot about the absolute love of God. He really did. He just let it go somehow in the effort by being Everything to everyone in the monastic community forgot about God. Now that story can be repeated time and time and time again in the monastic community. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to say that people don't evolve out of the monastic community, because they do. I'm not going to be foolish enough to say that everyone in the community shouldn't have left. But when you see this man, who was really a pillar of that community, really understood a lot about the spiritual lives. Now, doting over flowers and grain futures, he's a millionaire.

[15:24]

I mean, he's done very well. But, you know, you go over there and his life is so pathetic. And the brothers say, how? How can he? How can he do it? How can he pretend to be happy? With this woman who's got the loudest mouth in the world, the most disrespectful kind. I mean, she's a nice lady and all that, but... You know, and you say, I don't care what. I mean, they're both old now. Sex can't be that. I don't know, he's got a lot of money, sure, but is he... we just... we just... anyone who comes in contact with him in the community, he's a nice guy, he's very helpful to the monastery, you know, and a nice neighbor, and so we have a lot of contact with him. You just wonder what is going on in his heart. So, he went after... he went after love, he went after it, and you really can't blame him for that, because he had lost it in the monastery. So I say, for those who think they've got it figured out, you know, and I include myself here every so often, when I start to forget about the absolute fire that is God, and I think I'm going to contain it, you know, you know, I'm going to push myself to it.

[16:40]

Watch out, because your pool might be clean and smooth, but there's a bird on there somewhere that, given the right circumstances, will start flapping around, and that water's going to get real churned up. And then you get the other type of person who really never really comes to grips with the fantastic request and demand that God makes for this absolute surrender in order to be absolute self-gift, which is what we're called to. That's how God set us up. That's how he made us. And so you get people who are They really let their emotions get away from them because it's just too hard to control. So you get the people who go from one crush or one infatuation to another. They know that life is full of these hidden invitations. And they're full of feelings and they're full of love and so they're just going to make an accommodation with that.

[17:47]

These people are legion too in the church. And, you know, well, we all need a little of this, and so to fall in love is fine, and it is, I suppose. But that kind of person, in an effort to get a hold of some kind of addictive strain in their personality, we start to make accommodation there, too. So then you watch, you go from one friendship to another or from one hobby to another or one infatuation or anything to fill the void, to try to settle the pool. Because my experience from that kind of prison is the pool was always churned out. And the emptiness and the solitude, I just can't take. And I don't believe that God is calling me through that, because after all, I'm not like that. So therefore, there can't be anything true in that for me. And that kind of person will go years with this kind of flip-flopping around until

[18:51]

until they go over the brink. And this happened, we've got a case right now of this in one of our communities, where the superior, she has just lost it completely. And she just fell in love with somebody and now she's gone. And she just, it's just amazing, this woman's 70 years old. But it happens, it happens. Because something was not taken care of long, long ago. And you can see that those of us who have known her for some years, we couldn't have predicted what has happened now, but we were uncomfortable with some of her accommodations, what she would talk about. And this accommodation with, I'll call it psychology and depth psychology, which she was very good at and had several degrees and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so I see that as tragic not because people are wicked or anything, but because the risk was too great and you either go this way with cynicism or you go that way on the other direction.

[19:56]

And the red hot truth is that we're called somewhere beyond both of those answers. So the real hard thing is to use human life, not to be cynical, like the man in Thomas Mann's novella, not to go overboard the other way, but to use, not deny our emotions and our humanity and our sexuality and all that, not deny our thirst for love and our demand, because that's the way we're made, for absolute love. Not only that I love absolutely, but that people love me absolutely. as we had it when we were in the womb, and we were totally dependent on our mother. See, this structure is part of who we are as human beings. We went through this trauma of separation. You listen to people like Robert Coles and others who talk about depth psychology. When I'm talking about depth psychology, I mean that psychological matrix that we are that was formed before you're two years old.

[21:00]

Everybody has to go through that trauma of separation from the mother. And how you do that, and how you're helped to make sense of that, everything depends, later on, on how that transition is made. So, I'm basing myself on that reality. We've got to deal with it. We are used to being loved absolutely unconditionally. Therefore, when we grow up, that's what we want to do, but we also want to receive that, and we'll search and search and search and search until we find it. we may fool ourselves into thinking that we can go years and you know I'm beyond that now and I don't have to really watch out because you may get bitten at some point you know and that would be very good but then how to deal with it so I want to illustrate further what I'm saying with by an example a story which is true and has just ended so to speak or one leg of it has ended and that's two women

[22:04]

Marty and Betty. Now, Sister Betty, these are true names, you would know these people, so I can use their names. Sister Betty Condon is an Adrian Dominican, but she's from Charleston. The Adrian Dominicans are big in the South, in Florida and in South Carolina, because Archbishop Barry of Miami, years ago, had a sister who was an Adrian Dominican. And he started, he brought, because they were brother and sister, he got her to send a lot of her women down to the Florida area and they started Barry University or Barry College, which is still going. Big, big place in Miami. And so there are a lot of Adrian Dominicans in there, and they are a very strong, cohesive group. Our image of a lot of women's congregations today is that they're kind of fading away and all that. Well, not the Adrian Dominicans. They may be getting older, but they're getting stronger. They are a very cohesive group, and they have a very, very strong structure. And so they even have a little province in the south, which is made up of South Carolina and Florida.

[23:07]

So Betty was a Charlestonian, we call them, one of the bluebloods from, you know, centuries back, her family. She entered the community years ago. She's in her late 60s now. And the family consisted of three girls and one boy. So Betty was the oldest. And Marty, the second daughter, was right under Betty. And then there was the boy. And then there was a much younger sister. And I forget her name. To make a long story short, about five years ago, Betty, having done all kinds of pastoral work all over the world, in Africa with the Dominican men, and in Kenya. And then she started the King's Tree Retreat House, which Madaliva knows, because she was in South Carolina for a while. And Springbank, we call it. The Dominican men had it, now the Dominican women have it, et cetera, et cetera. So about five years ago, Marty, the second sister, took very ill.

[24:08]

Now she had tuberculosis as a child, so she lived most of her adult life with only one lung. And finally that lung gave out. So she had emphysema, and she had this, and she had that. And she spent, this is Marty now, she spent a lot of time in the hospital. And finally, I don't know all the medical ins and outs, but finally it meant that she had to have 24-hour care, either in the hospital or at home, with the machine hooked up to an oxygen machine, and monitored very carefully, because if she should ever start to cough or get out of breath, the machine had to be hooked up immediately, or she would die. So it was a real extreme situation. And the younger sister, the youngest, turned out to be one of these mothers that had eight children and was just so totally absorbed with her grandchildren and all that that there was just no way. And she, that younger sister, was taking care of her husband's 90-year-old mother, so there was no way that she could help take care of Marty. The brother was an invalid from the Korean War, was kind of out of it.

[25:13]

But that left Betty, the Adrian Dominican. There was really nobody else to take care of Marty. She lived alone in a little house in the middle, in the peninsula in Charleston City. So Betty got permission from her community to live with Marty and take care of her. And this is where the story starts. Betty used to come out and tell me, because we were good friends, and she used to come out and talk to me about her problem. She said, first of all, you know, I've had to leave my ministry. We were just about ready to start up a house of prayer on the beach. And then this happens. And now I find myself incredibly, you know, I can't even hire someone to take care of Marty because she's so hooked on me. She's afraid of these nurses, that they won't hook up the machine in time. She's afraid of the volunteer groups, that they won't be there when she starts to cough and needs the machine. She's got to have it right now. Then she's afraid in the night. She's afraid that she'll wake up, and there won't be anybody there, and what will she do?

[26:15]

And she was getting weaker and weaker and weaker. By this time, she weighed about 90 pounds. And no idea from the doctors how long this might go on. So Betty said, you know, I'm stuck. And I now find myself not only the principal caregiver, but a lot of other things for my sister. Now, I love my sister, but, you know, this is real game. So, that's where the drama starts. Now, from Marty's point of view, Marty is upset that she is now totally dependent on someone else. If she's going to be totally dependent on someone else, by God, she's going to have someone that she can trust. So she sets it up, you know, asks Betty to leave her community temporarily and come and take care of her and live with her. So that's what Marty does. Then Marty starts this game whereby she is so dependent that she kind of clings to Betty, clings in the sense that, what are you doing?

[27:18]

You know, one will be in one room and the other will be in the other room, almost to the point where they could not be separated. because the sick one was so frightened. But then she started to become emotionally codependent. And so they ended up that she wanted her sister Betty around all the time. Not only that, when Betty would start to resist, Marty would start these little manipulations. She would grow silent, you know, the passive-aggressive thing, or she would do this, or she... all sorts of little signals that they developed over the course of several years so that one could pull the cord on the other. And that's how Marty did it. She was totally dependent, then she played this game of emotional codependency and passive-aggressive behavior to get what she wanted. Finally, it was suggested to her, in a kind of an intervention by the family, the other members of the family, that she accept to have other nurses and other kind of caregivers so Betty could get some fresh air and leave for a day or two.

[28:25]

The most Betty could ever accomplish was an afternoon at Mefkin. That's about the extent of it. And she said, well, I have to get back. And I said, well, The nurse will stay, and, well, no, with their medication, and I've got to give them, and off she would go. So Marty had the thing pretty well under control. And the family tried to break in there and say, you know, you need a wider circle of people. You need to start to see that life is not on Betty alone. Well, finally, when it got so bad that Betty thought she was going to have a breakdown, They had this big intervention, and what happened was that Betty said, I'm just leaving. And Marty was scared out of her wits. For about two weeks, they had to sedate her, they had to put her in the hospital, they had to do this. Now, Betty did not abandon her, but they were just trying to break her of this codependency. And you may say, well, isn't that sad that they let it get to that point? Well, there were issues. You see, Betty was trying to play the religious during all this.

[29:29]

She's trying to play the perfect sister. Having tried to play the perfect nun all her life, now she's trying to play the perfect... So she let herself get co-opted into this thing. And she admitted, you know, I walked with her through this, and she said, you know, I'm really caught, but I don't want to let her down. You see the game that's going on? Betty, as a religious person, knows that what her journey has been is the search for absolute, unconditional love. And she's had great friends, both men and women, who have shown her that and helped her. She's a very mature person. So she's going to be this perfect friend for her sister. not realizing that a lot of the time you just can't be that. You've got to appear a failure sometimes for other people in order to do the right thing. Marty eventually righted. She eventually, after she got over her trauma of being in the hospital, she came home and then she started to see that she could not cling to Betty as she had clung before.

[30:37]

So there was a happy ending in the sense that she died, but she died with a little more self-knowledge and equilibrium, emotional equilibrium in her life. Betty is now freed of this terrible, terrible situation, and she has You've got to appear a failure sometimes for other people in order to do the right thing. Marty eventually righted. She eventually, after she got over her trauma of being in the hospital, she came home and then she started to see that she could not cling to Betty as she had clung before. So there was a happy ending in the sense that she died, but she died with a little more self-knowledge and equilibrium, emotional equilibrium in her life. Betty is now freed of this terrible, terrible situation, and she has started her house of prayer on the beach. And so, you know, she's a lot happier. But what she and I have worked out together is a kind of self-study that we've found very useful.

[31:48]

And that is, look at these four steps that Betty and Marty went through and try it out with my own relationship with God. When I get so far onto the spiritual life that I get to the point where I know that I'm totally dependent on God, I know that what I want from God is to live for God totally in continual prayer. I want to be spiritually transformed. I want to do all the right things, because I've learned that God is good. To taste and see that the Lord is delightful, and that's what I want. And when I go after that, you know, the Desert Fathers say all a person has to do is decide that they're going to live for All of a sudden, just try to put on a good resolution and watch what happens, like a Newell's resolution. Just make it explicit and focused that I'm going to do this for God, and watch you get, boom, knocked right over. I mean, that's just the way it is, because the powers of the air are out there.

[32:52]

They're not going to let anyone do good, because I decide I'm going to do good. So I admit I'm broken. I need God. I'm totally dependent on God. My appetites would swallow me up. Either I would become cynical or I'd become caught up in a series of loves that I can't control. We're all stuck in that to a certain extent, anybody who really wants to admit it. So what do I do? Well, if you're not careful, you start to manipulate God. Okay, if I'm totally dependent, then I'm going to refer everything to God and I'm going to get pious. And then, I like that, it seems to work. You do everything you're supposed to do, your life straightens out, you become ordered, people like you, you like people, and you try that in the community where you're going to be Mr. Goody and do everything for everybody and be nice and love everybody and all that. What happens? Before you know it, everyone starts expecting you to be like that all the time.

[33:55]

You're the caregiver. You're the one everyone can depend on. And there's something inside the gut that starts to resist. You can try that for a couple years. And then I know I did that as Abbott. I thought, you know, it's easy for me to give. I've got a lot to give, so I'll give it. After about four years of that, I started to weigh it down and say, hey, wait a minute. Is this what I really want to do with my life? I mean, it was fine. I was on a high ego trip. It was great for a couple years. What, 12 years? 18 years? I mean, these guys aren't changing. They're not learning anything. I'm breaking my back and the same old crap's going on. They're not changing at all. And here I'm breaking my, you know, nobody's, nothing's happening. Do you see the trap? That's what I'm talking about. The long haul. So then I start to, I'm going to start to manipulate God a little bit. I'm going to start to say, you know, if you want me to be good and serve these people, then I need a break. And I want this, and I need that. I start bargaining with God. I catch myself doing this. Just like Betty did.

[34:57]

She started manipulating. And then, you know, she watched Marty do this to her. You start, well, you know, if you really want me to do this, I'll wait for this sign, or this is going to have to happen before I'm really going to do this for Brother and so-and-so. Or if I have to raise money for this building, you better give me some, you better help me out, because if it fails, what am I going to do if I'm a failure? Well, maybe that's part of the thing. I've got that coming up right now. We're ready to go into this big building project. I'm saying, well, suppose it falls flat on its face. I've got a good record going now. Well, I'm now thinking that's maybe precisely what God has in store for me. Just a great big blob. And I don't know if I have enough faith to face that. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about. I mean, okay God, you've helped me so far. Now, maybe I'll walk right into the trap. Whatever I'm going to do is going to work, right? No. And I'm going to have to live with that. So make sure, I need to make sure that my intention is pure before God.

[36:01]

Because I can start to manipulate God. And then get passive-aggressive with him. Things don't work out, and I start to make accommodations and all that. Either way. And then I get to the point where I have just, you know, an almost total, something happens that just knocks me off my seat. And I suddenly realize that I haven't been living uprightly with God. Oh, I thought I was. Then it's at that point that the church or my community or my friends can come to the rescue. This is what happened between Betty and Marty. And this is where I feel the function of friendship is really important because somehow, sometime, somebody with whom I'm going to be mature enough to self-disclose is going to sit me down and say, This, this, you're like, this happened, this has happened, that's happened, and that's happened. Now that happened to me when we had this abatial discernment.

[37:02]

As I said, it went on for six months, and at one point we had two facilitators come in, and they had several meetings, five or six meetings with the community without me, so I lost control. I felt I lost control of the group. Then they lined the whole community up as you are, right here, and each brother told out loud, in front of me, sitting there, what they thought was wrong with me. I mean, I can tell you, I, inside, I just, well, the two jerks that were facilitators kind of propped me up and said, well, no, no, no, you know, you'll keep it. And I, you know what I said to both of them? I said, neither one of you have gone through this in your community. They both have it. I said, neither one of you have guts to do this. And I was really mad. We had a real confrontation. I let it all out. I heard later that one of the adults called up another and said, yeah, well, he's kind of upset. But they were my friends through thick and thin, and they helped me through this. It was a graced moment because we got out in the open.

[38:06]

Everything that I thought I was doing that I wasn't doing, all the resentments that were going on and all this kind of thing. It's very, very helpful. I don't recommend it. I don't because it can be very painful. But I realized what the value of friendship can be. And then they asked a very poignant question. They said, you know, you're really an outsider here. You've come from another community. Do you really want to stay with us? Do you really want to be a member of this community, as the abbot, or anything else. And I really had to say, I hated to say it, emotionally, because my heart is still at Gethsemane, but I had to say that I have started to love some of these people, really love them. And not just love them as with the coup of the pastoralists, but really love them as brothers. And I had to say that, and once I said that, and once I got it out, then all the tension just... Because what they were doing as a group, they were feeling afraid that I was going to get up and leave.

[39:13]

That was one of the feelings. And that's where some of the resistance was coming. Do you like it here or not? That's kind of what they said. Do you want to stay with us or not? And they were very transparent about it. They would have let me down. So that's why we had to do that. See, I'm not recommending that to everybody. But in our case, we had to go through something like that because I'm an outsider there. I was brought in like deus ex machina, and they didn't even know me, and I was elected the abbot. So we had to go through a process like that. Is this home for you? So that's why I'm saying, and I learned that it's through friendship. And I had people that I talked to outside the community to help me. Here's my story. Here's what I'm made of. Now, what am I supposed to do with this? Because emotionally, I was caught between a drama going on at Gethsemane now and my own community now. I didn't know what to do. I really didn't know what to do. I felt caught. I really felt caught. And I realized, as I've never realized it before, that friends are not a luxury.

[40:17]

Friends where, as Aylward says, you don't pick your friend, God chooses to give you someone in your life that can mirror you, and then you try that person out, as Aylward says in his treatise on friendship, you try that person out, and if after trial and error over a long period of time you're ready to commit to that person, Not that they're going to do for you, but that you're going to commit to them, that no matter what they do, no matter how disloyal they become, you're going to be constantly, unconditionally, and absolutely devoted to them. See, we're talking about a friendship, a kind of friendship, that's far beyond emotional codependency, far beyond infatuation, far beyond anything that's kind of out of character with religious life, but we are talking about a deep, deep personal commitment and love between two people, either in a community or whatever. It's there, and it's not just a luxury.

[41:21]

I thought it was just kind of a nice thing and a mirror of what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to love God. Now I know that unless I have friends on whom I can depend, I'm not even going to get to God. I can't even begin to love God. So I'm talking about some kind of... I'm suggesting, and I know this is a bold statement to make, that on the way to a complete self-gift of myself to God, along the way I'm going to have to go the route of deep spiritual friendship. That's one of the steps along the way. Or I don't know who God is, and I can't self-gift completely to God either. It works. There's just no shortcut to being a complete human being. Those people who think, well, they're going to kind of jackrabbit over to the Almighty and to a completely spiritual experience, that's wrong. Because we're human and we need to go to God.

[42:23]

Yes, we are called to a complete self-gift, but on the shoulders on the aid of people who love us, brothers and sisters. There's just no other way. But we have to accommodate that reality, if that's true, with enclosure, with monastic community, with brotherhood. You know, this is part of discernment, that you work out with the superior, whether, you know, your friends are, I don't know, in this deep, deep term of spiritual friendship, whether one or two in the community, you don't have that many, or they might be outside the community, I hope I'm not, you know, trespassing in propriety. I just feel that it's part of the way of emotional maturity before the self-gift is complete. And once the self-gift starts to happen, you get on what the spiritual writers have always called the high road.

[43:23]

You can start to trust your humanity. You can start to trust other people. You can start to love and be attracted. you know, to others around you, in your circle of acquaintances. It's like learning about the manifold wisdom of Christ that Evagrius talks about. The first thing that happens on the way to Teoria, after you've lived all the virtues and your pool is smooth, what happens then? Then you come to love. 1 Corinthians 13. And then you get to apatheia, where I can take in more and more and more life. But Evagrius is very clear that you live a completely human life first, the second natural contemplation. Here's the second natural contemplation. Then the first natural contemplation. See, when he says second, he means down from the top. And when you're coming up from the bottom and going up to the top, you come to that point first, that second. And that is a complete at-homeness.

[44:25]

a complete integration of material world and its pulls and attractions and its loves. I'm at home. I can do what I'm supposed to do simply, do my job, be a complete human being. Once I've reached that level, then God acts in a more direct way and pulls me further up out of myself. into what the spiritual writers have always called contemplation, but you don't get there by going around your humanity or by going around the demands of love. As I said, love is basically this structure of outgoing, we're called to that, we're called to that complete self-gift, but in order to get there, You have to go this route of complete, responsible, emotional, psychological maturity, which is not going to happen. Now, God can take us, can leapfrog us over some of these difficulties, and he's going to have to. Because a real friendship, a real emotionally mature friendship, is part of ecstasy.

[45:35]

It doesn't happen just on my own efforts, my own rational efforts. It's a grace. And part of the structure of grace is this outgoingness, where I forget about myself for an instant and go out to my friend. So that one day I can forget about myself completely and be a complete revelation for the love of God. So, that's not all I have to say on the topic of eternal charity. As you see, it's a lot more than just being nice to people in their effect. Yeah, it is being nice to people in their effect, but from my heart, from my deepest being, that I do the right thing for the right reason, and avoid that temptation, as T.S. Eliot put it, of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. And so, it's an adventure that takes a lifetime of effort. It's also an adventure that is so exciting in itself that if we don't achieve it completely, that's okay.

[46:43]

I'd rather go to God saying, I died trying. than to say, well now, this is all I'm going to do, and I've wrapped up my talents in this nice little package because I knew that that's all I could do, so here you are. Remember what God said about that kind of an attitude in the parable about the talents. I'd rather risk all on this absolute, unconditional love that God puts in my heart. And I'm more willing to trust that now that I know that I get there with a little help from my friends. That I don't just so spiritualize the thing that, you know, I fast till I'm skin and bones and I don't talk to anybody and all that kind of mystical contemplation. Forget it. That's not what we're called to. We're called to emotional responsibility. So I'd ask for your prayers. Thanks for listening and being so receptive.

[47:46]

I think Brother Sebastian has a question. Oh, absolutely. Here's somebody else that's going to get up and leave. Oh, absolutely. When you start to describe a group or a community and their psychological state, that community's biggest problem is abandonment, the problem of abandonment. And they're young, you know, like you are. They're not 50 years old yet. It takes a while before monastic communities really get through, you know, the basic challenges of commitment and all that, so that a tradition is laid in a group that's passed on to generation after generation. And monastic communities under 50 or 75 years old still have a lot of experiences to have.

[48:50]

And so Mepkins is always going to be, as long as I'm alive, I'm sure, my lifetime, it's going to be the issue of abandonment. Don't leave us. And they're a basically simple community. So a talented guy comes in and fixes up everything and does everything for them and then leaves. And that scares them. I mean, they really get buggy about that. What do you mean, canceling? Well, I mentioned the example of the character in Thomas Mann's book, Death in Venice, where this guy thought he had it all together, uh... but was not uh... he was able to produce one bestseller after another he was a novelist in the movie i think he's a conductor a musician i never saw the film but uh... in [...] the in the in the novela whatever you call it uh... he had it all together but he had long since given up the idea of falling absolutely completely in love he'd just given up on it because it's just not for him

[50:10]

And so he made it, what I'm trying to say is he made an accommodation with the muse, so to speak. Now that has spirituality, it has nothing to do with it, this is just human life. But he forgot about the absolute, even in art. He was comfortable and relied on his ability to produce one good book after another, but what he missed was the fact that in order to go for the absolute, he might have had to endure a failure or two in order to get to the really great work. Now, that happens a lot in life with professional people. They don't want to take the risk of a failure. But in not wanting to do that risk, they'd rather have the reliable second best all the time, because at least that's secure, either for income or for reputation or whatever. Merton was like that. I mean, he could have gone on producing one pious book after another, but he kept turning his back on everything he did for the sake of the adventure.

[51:13]

Now, I'm no Merton fan. I haven't even read all of it, but there's something mesmerizing about his life and about his being burnt up. You know, in that accident, there's something really archetypal about that. He went after his star, and finally he got it. More than you bargained for. And, you know, in monastic circles, in Europe especially, he's degraded and put down, or these people like Alice von Hildebrand and all that, who really go after him for his move to the East. That he gave up, he gave up the Spirit, but that wasn't true at all. If you really want to know about Merton, that was his despair over a spiritual bankruptcy in the Western Church. And what I mean by spiritual bankruptcy would be Vatican II. He was scandalized by it on the Second Vatican Council. I mean, there were lots that he agreed with, and he was pushing for all those changes and all that kind of thing. But do you know that to the day he died, he despised the English liturgy?

[52:17]

He wouldn't even go to it. He kept telling people that, you know, we've thrown out our culture, our heritage. I mean, this is Merton. But no one will talk about that because that's not politically correct with the Merton groupies. But that's true. If he had lived longer, he'd probably be, I mean, this is an exaggeration, he might be one of those people that's going after the Tridentine Mass. Thank God God took him. So, he's one of these people that took the risk and lost, or not lost, I don't think he lost. To me, he's a great success, spiritually, but I still don't relate to him real easily, but does that help to see? I hate to give an example of people that I know and my own acquaintance, because that's to make a judgment, and I'm not out to make a judgment. That's why literature is always safer to use as an example. And I question myself a lot. You know, I'm getting up there in years and I think, well, you know, there are a lot of ways, Francis, in which you've chosen the more comfortable route.

[53:24]

You know, maybe if I had been more prophetic in my life and really put my money where my mouth is, I'd never ended up at Mefkin. I'd still be a dissenter. Because that's what I'm always longing for. You can tell that. I mean, I like what I'm doing, I love the place where I'm at, but I keep second-guessing, you know, what if, what if, what if. And, well, yeah, I think a lot of us, myself included, sometimes opt for a kind of cynicism. I'm not going to run too far with life, because you might get burned. Yeah, sure. Well, it holds me back, I know that. Not until I'm real sure that I have to do this, come what may, and that doesn't happen too often, unfortunately. Thank you so much.

[54:26]

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