Obedience is, of course, our deep listening to the word. Audere means to hear, and obaudere means thoroughly to listen. It's the intensive of the word listen. And auskulte, the very first word of our holy rule, is listen, listen thoroughly. But the Dhammas always emphasize that aspect. The whole of monastic life is this loving listening, and listening to Word of the abbot, to the doctrina abbatis, this obedience ties you to the abbot.

[01:03]

The stability, he kept saying, ties you to the community, stability in the community. The obedience ties you to the abbot, And conversatio morum ties you to the rule, because it's monastic life according to the rule. Those three, the community, the abbot, and the rule, go with stability, obedience, and conversatio morum. But the obedience is a personal obedience And therefore, it leads to discipline, and further, Damasus always emphasized the great difference between discipline and regimentation. Discipline is the attitude of the disciples, of the disciple, and

[02:12]

The pupil, I remember him saying, the pupil is called pupil because he looks so deeply in the eyes of the teacher, of the spiritual father, that he looks into the pupil of the eye and sees his own little image in the eyes of the Father. He has the courage to open himself, you know, the monk has the courage to open himself to look and be looked at. And in this looking and being looked at, he sees his own that means a little doll, a little image of himself, in the pupil of the teacher's eyes. And he said, that's something completely different from regimentation, which is a word that comes from the regiment, it comes from military discipline.

[03:22]

It's not, it even deserves the name discipline, military conformity rather than discipline. A drill sergeant is not interested in looking into your eyes or having you look into his eyes. He's just interested that you conform to everybody else and to the commands, to this obedience is that, give me a heart of a disciple. And you see how intimately that is connected with the Trinitarian vision, with the Word, with the Son who stands before the Father and has nothing that he hasn't received from the Father, is constantly looking at the Father, is constantly even with Jesus Christ in the In the Gospels, especially according to John, it's always asking, has my time come?

[04:25]

Is this now the right moment or is it not? He keeps his eyes on the Father. And our obedience is, in last analysis, an attempt to become conformed to the Son who stands before the Father, in the Holy Spirit. And there we come to the conversatio morum, And Fr. Dermus always stressed it was conversatio. At that time there was this discussion, is it conversio or conversatio that I referred to last night. And Fr. Dermus was emphasizing it's conversatio. It's a again and again conversion. Every moment, so to say, you have to be turned again towards what is now the will of the Father, and do it, and so understand from within what is the will of God, moment by moment.

[05:26]

And of course, the way in which he taught this was through the school of the heart. There was another question, how was the formation of Father Damascus, what was special about the kind of formation at Mount Saviour in the early days, and it was the emphasis on the silence, as I spoke already about it. And silence, in the way in which I have so far spoken about it, is of course a great good, and it's a great virtue, and it's a great good. But silence, as everything in human life, can also go wrong. And when silence goes wrong, it becomes a dead silence.

[06:32]

We speak of dead silence. But the silence of stability or the silence, monastic silence, is a live silence. It's not at all dead. Therefore, it's always open to the other. It's the silence that's necessary to listen to the other, and not a silence that doesn't want to have anything to do with the other. And if you have that silence, then you get a wonderful interweaving in the community where everybody is so silent that everybody else can come to words and doesn't even have to say anything, but you hear it without being said. Well, if the silence goes wrong, you have a community image which is like a tray of ice cubes, and they all sit next to one another, and nobody says anything to anybody else. They are frozen in their silence. So this is a danger. And one has to be aware of that.

[07:36]

And the formation aimed at that kind of silence that was an interactive silence. Discipline, I have already said, that was formation, a personal formation, not a being cut. I think one of the images that Father Damascus used to show the wrong kind of formation was cookie cutter, where you roll out the dough and then you have a cookie cutter and then you cut out the monks. The cutter is the form of the monk and then you cut out little monks out of the same dough. That's not it. Formation doesn't mean to press you into a form. Formation means to bring out in obedience in this

[08:40]

listening, what are my talents, what are my particular gifts, and what are my particular shortcomings, bring you into a loving listening and then into a loving doing. And so the conversatio morum, on the basis of the Gospel and the Holy Ghoul was the school of the heart. And if you read through the points of this school of the heart, And I must say I'm particularly grateful to you, Brother Gabriel, for having preserved this, you know, and this could have easily gotten lost or vaguely remembered. Yes, Fr. Demers has always emphasized the school of the Lord's service, but over the years, Brother Gabriel has

[09:41]

printed it out and shared it with others and shared it with the community. So that's one of the great gifts that we have received. And I'm really personally also very grateful for that. And the summary of the 10 steps that is worth going through is first stopping. First stopping, the first two points are stopping. I am sheltered and I rest in the right shelter. This rest, this rest in the Father, this coming to rest, this stillness, is in the first two steps. I am sheltered in the love and fatherhood of God. through Christ, who is my peace, sheltered in peace. Peace goes with that silence and with that stillness. I'm sheltered. Then, with a comprehensive act of humility, I leave the fortress, which is the false shelter of my own pride.

[10:52]

I leave that, and I make sure that I'm at rest in the right shelter, God's love for me. And humility wasn't a humiliation, you know. It was a down-to-earthness. We come to talk about that in another context, but humility comes from humus, from earth. It's a down-to-earthness. Father Thomas expressed that. So the first is this shelteredness and this rest. Then comes the looking. There are several points on that. From that place of peace, now I I extend an open welcome, I open myself, open welcome, but first I have to get at peace. Then, from this place of peace, I extend an open welcome to whomever or whatever comes my way, instead of acting like a porcupine at the approach of an enemy.

[12:00]

But I open myself. I withdraw to take counsel. Taking counsel means also looking and listening, listening within my heart to discern the will of God, obedience, ready to die and rise according to God's design. I take note, I take counsel, I take note. I take note of my natural instinctive reactions that would prevent me from responding. I take note of my habitual characteristics, my lovable force, you see. I weigh the case in the presence of the right teacher. I look at the teacher in discipline. I look eye to eye to the teacher. the inner and outer teacher. So there's all this looking, this looking and listening and that openness.

[13:04]

And out of that comes then the third step, and that is the doing that leads to understanding. Now I use. First I stopped, then I looked and listened, and now I do. I use my talents and faculties rightly. where each is applied carefully, presenting all the material, all that I have, then I make my decision. with trusting God, and then I return to the other and present my decision in all charity, believing that God's love will bring it to glorious conclusion for all concerned. And glory was one of those key words for Fr. Damascus, the Commode in He was a doxa, I would say, in Greek. The shining forth, you see.

[14:06]

In monastic life, the Trinitarian mystery shines forth. or like Saint Irenaeus says in this famous word, the glory of God is the human being fully alive. So the monk tries to glorify God by coming fully alive on all levels. And usually people, when they quote Saint Irenaeus, stop there. But there's a second half to that word. Not only the glory of God, shines forth, that shining forth is the human being fully alive, but the life of the human is the vision of God. That's the other half. For the human to be alive means to look at God, and that vision of God means that Trinitarian vision of which we just now spoke over and over again. That's why it is so important. And so we can conclude this and sum this up by answering another question that I received, and that was, what was Father Damascus's distinctive vision for Mount Saviour?

[15:22]

What was his special vision for Mount Saviour? And I would be very grateful to the older monks if you fill this up and complete that, because my memory is also not complete and I may have forgotten some of the things, but these are the things that I remember, and that seemed particularly important to me, of that vision for Montsevier. The first one, it is a contemplative monastery. Montsevier was founded as a contemplative foundation, and that was contained a great deal more, the notion of contemplation, as I said yesterday, contained action. It was not just withdrawal. It was withdrawal to see and hear, and out of this seeing and hearing then act.

[16:27]

But it also meant, in the context, that it was not a monastery that was founded for school, to have a school where students would come or parishes. What Father Nemesis always emphasized was, we are not for the ordinary ministry in the church, but for keep ourselves open for extraordinary ministry. Out of this contemplative attitude came for Father Damascus a great deal of activity. He was very, very active. That's, in the last analysis, why I was sent on. He sent some of us out to give talks because he had so many invitations for talks that he couldn't I take them all." So he started once in a while to send one of the older monks out to give talks.

[17:31]

That's how he got on that particular road in monastic life. But he was deeply engaged in the Catholic Order Association. deeply engaged in the liturgical movement. Not just engaged, he was one of the prime movers of the liturgical renewal in the Catholic Church in the United States. So contemplative meant for him both vision and action, and putting the two together, an action that comes from the vision or action that comes out of the silence, a word that comes out of the silence. So contemplative was the first important aspect, I would say. According to the rule of Saint Benedict, directly, the rule of Saint Benedict, there is a word

[18:33]

recorded of St. Francis, who wrote a little rule for the Franciscans, and then at the end of his life, the Franciscans had altered that rule already in their life, and he was very sad about it. And the word was, sine glossa, sine glossa, he would always say. No interpretation, that's the rule, no interpretation, just follow the rule. And somewhat in that same way, Monsevier was very pioneering in being a monastery that really followed the rule and not constitutions. In Guinea we had no constitutions, we had the rule. And there was a special effort made to follow the rule in all things except when there was a very serious reason not to follow it.

[19:45]

But if the rule said something, do it, unless there is this very special reason not to do it. And there were some things that we tried and didn't work out. For instance, in the beginning we followed the rule in saying that the younger one should call the older one's father and the older one should call the younger one's brother. Well, people would come to Father Luke, or we would call him Father Luke because he was the older one, and then people would come to him and say, Father Luke, would you please hear my confession? So, whoops, that wouldn't work. simply to conform, we found that wasn't so important that you call the older father as long as you honor the older monks and the older ones love the younger ones.

[20:52]

The attitude was more important than the name that we gave to it. And another one was, for instance, that we had dormitories for everybody. Everybody should sleep in the same place. In the beginning, that was easy because we had no space. We all slept in the barn, in St. Peter's barn. And we had a big thop over us so that the pigeons wouldn't drop on us. So that was easy. And then when it got very cold, we all went into St. Peter's and tripled and quadrupled up in the little rooms that we had there. But the dormitory was also something that, according to contemporary needs, didn't work out. And then another one was the horarium.

[21:55]

For a long time we were working. The monastery has a different horarium. It goes by the sun, you know. It doesn't go by the hours. It goes by the sun. Sunrise and sunset, and that changes every day in the year. So we were trying to adjust to that. But that was another thing that didn't work out because people came from the outside. They wanted to know what time was Vespers. We couldn't say approximately. But at that time, there was one community in the country that did follow the Horarium of St. Benedict, and they had nothing to do with the Benedictines. There was a commune somewhere that had discovered this rule of St. Benedict. They were so enthusiastic about the idea that you were really in harmony with the rhythm of the cosmos that they practiced that. doesn't exist anymore, simply hippies that got together and discovered this.

[22:59]

So we tried it, but again, it was something that didn't work. But the principle remained, when the holy rule says something, try to do it, and only if it doesn't work, then do something else. So that following of the Holy Rule, that was really very important. And then, not clerical. That was a great distinction between clerical monasticism and our monasticism. Our monasticism, Mount Sevier was for people who had a monastic vocation. It had nothing to do with a priestly vocation. And for them, this emphasis, the monastic vocation is something that comes from within. A human being can have a monastic vocation and never find a monastery and still remain having this monastic vocation and live by it and be a monk.

[24:07]

You don't even have to be in a monastery. You have a monastic vocation in your heart and then if you're lucky you find the right monastery. But a priestly vocation is not something that you have in your heart It's a vocation, it's a calling from the bishop. But Thomas was always emphasizing that the priestly vocation comes from the bishop, not from your inner heart. If you are not disposed to it, you may refuse, or you may be very disposed and hope that you will become a priest. But you can't become a priest on your own unless the bishop calls you. It's a call by the bishop. It's a completely different thing. It's a completely different kind of calling. And so, Fr. Adamus also had bad experience with that because, first of all, in Europe there are many monasteries.

[25:13]

I can't remember right now whether Maria Lach was one of them, but probably was, because the very early monasteries in Europe, a thousand years old, they were in the wilderness, and around it were these little settlements of heathens. And so the monks had to go out and be pastors to these villages. And so many monasteries at that time, in our time still had 30 and 40 parishes. So maybe half of the monks or more than half of the monks were out in the parishes. What should they do at Easter? How should they celebrate Easter if the monks were pastors and had to celebrate Easter in their parishes? So it created great difficulties. In Keyport, which was the monastery in New Jersey that Father Damascus first founded together with Abbot Leo, they also had difficulty because the bishops always wanted them to go out into the parishes.

[26:22]

They were priests, they were needed in the parishes. So Father Damascus said, exactly like it says in the rule, we will have in the monastery as many priests as we need and no more. And, of course, that the abbot has to be a priest, this is a very recent invention of the Church, and I'm extremely happy that we, at this present moment, were able to overcome that, because it's really in the vision of Fr. Damascene, the original vision of Mount Saviour, that Not that the abbot has to be, cannot be a priest, but doesn't have to be a priest. That seems essential. It really seems to be part of the vision of the Tathagatama.

[27:23]

And he also, this belongs into this context of lay monasticism, he emphasized over and over again, you are not monks because you are better than these lay people. He said you are monks because you are weaker than these lay people. The lay people can do all these things and don't need all the support that you get in the monastery. And take for an example someone among our hombres who does all the things that we do in our life, and maybe better than we, without that support and without distraction. gift of the monastery, as he saw it, was that it is a monastery, monos, one, where everything is geared to this one goal and to support this one goal of truly seeking God.

[28:28]

Nothing else, but one goal. And that leads to another aspect of Father Damos' vision, The monastery was liturgy centered. It was centered on the liturgy, that we have a central church and that the altar is in the middle. There is no architectural invention that is an expression of the spirituality of the monastery. The altar is in the center and the community stands around the altar and that is the main activity and to praise God, praise God together. And now and then we have to go into other things, but basically that's where we are. We stand around the altar. And therefore, the frame of the day is not the work.

[29:38]

But the hours of the day, the hours of prayer, form the frame for the day. And that is very different from all other monasteries that existed at the time, where it was the school and the school plan that decided when you went to prayer. And sometimes you said to your sextant none all at once, That was completely different here. The frame of the day was ours. And, of course, also liturgically, reforms in the church. When Montseville was founded, We can hardly imagine that anymore today, but in all the parishes, the resurrection at Easter was celebrated on Holy Saturday morning. And then one didn't quite know what happened then.

[30:43]

That's why Father Damascus put so much emphasis on the Holy Saturday as the day of silence, of no liturgy, and so forth. Again and again he spoke about it, and we had the liturgy at the Easter night, but that was revolutionary. It was almost seen as a grave sin by some people, although causally, remember he was Confrere of Fr. Damascus in Maria Lach, and also a great liturgist, and he celebrated the Easter night, which was not really allowed, during the night in the convent of Sisters, not in Maria Lach. at the exulted, he dropped dead. And so, everybody said, the devil killed him because he was sinning by doing this. It's very difficult for us to imagine that, but Monsignor was

[31:50]

way out there in liturgical reform just by doing things like that. And of course, by having the altar turned to the people and all these things. So, that is, I mention that partly because it's of interest, what was the vision of Fr. Demmes, but not because of antiquity. This is our vision also for the future, you know, to stay alive on the earth. The liturgy isn't something that's frozen. That was the problem then. Now it's thought, and now we can work with it, and go forward with it, do something with it. Then another aspect of the vision for Montserrat was that it is autonomous. It was under the abbot Primate, But even if that is no longer possible, the more it is a small community, autonomous means giving its law to itself, not following somebody else's law.

[33:03]

the law in the sense of how the community acts must come out of this community, not imposed by a congregation or by anybody else. And if the congregation is good, it will allow that because it is a community of lively communities, a community of communities. And Father Terence saw this as extremely important because, as he put it, the monastery is to the church what the church is to the world. The monastery is to the church, the Catholic is to the world. In other words, a model of what the church should be, not a power pyramid, but a network of networks. We'll come back to that. And jokingly, he was referring to the monks in the church as the pikes in a corpse pond.

[34:14]

When you raise corpse and you have them in a pond, the corpse are very slow fish. Slow is the nice word and lazy is the not so nice word. They are sort of lazy around there. If you don't watch it, even moss can grow on the scales. And so when you raise carp, you put a little pike in there and that zooms around and he bites this cup, he bites this cup a little, and then they have to escape and they swim and he keeps them alive. And so he said that's the vocation of the monks in the church, to bite them a little and chase them around. And he also always emphasized that the institutional the priesthood, the institutional church, is the successors of the priesthood in the Old Testament.

[35:18]

The monks are the successors of the prophets. We have a prophetic vocation, and that means keeping the word of God alive in the church. Not against the institution, of course, not against the institution, but it's our service to the institution. Sometimes he called it loyal opposition. Loyal opposition like in a parliament. Loyal opposition in the church, but of its own spirit. And that answers, of course, the question what was so unique in this vision. Everybody was unique. Contemplative monasteries, they were all schools following the rule without Without interpretations, without constitutions, no, everybody had their constitutions.

[36:26]

Not clerical, no, but there was a very strong emphasis on making every monk that could possibly be studied for the priesthood, make every monk a priest. The liturgy was always important in all the Benedictine monasteries, but to make it that strong an emphasis in the center, that was also unique when Mount Sabaeus was founded. The autonomous position, obviously, was unique, except for Western priory, And the whole understanding of the monastic life within the church as loyal opposition or as successors of the prophets, that was also unique. I would like to ask you for a homework again to complete the sentence, my greatest hope for our community is, because now we have looked back and we have seen what was Father Damas's vision, but that could be very dangerous.

[37:48]

You get stuck in the past, you know, monks get stuck in the past. The past is to inspire us. But more important is to go forward and to have a vision for the future. So my greatest hope, my vision for our community is, and then write that out so that you have it. Again, you won't have to share it with me or with others, but you can. And it's important for you to have really said it and to have become clear about it. And then, I would also like to ask you to pray for Joseph, a friend of mine in South Africa, who has been refainted and was brought to the hospital, and now he's thinking something's wrong with his heart, but they don't know yet, so they are trying to find out, and he asked to pray for him at this time.

[38:50]

So let's again say that doxology, because as we see, is so central to the vision also of Benedictine monasticism, as Father Damascus had it, this Trinitarian monastic life. So let's again say together, to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Glory be to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

[39:32]

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