Well, yesterday I was trying to say, stumbling around, saying something about the Christological dimension of humility in our monastic tradition. And the text about Alice goes on to say that not only is she interested in humility, but she's interested in the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. And we all know, of course, that this fear of the Lord that she's talking about is not any kind of an anxiety or craven sort of fear. You know, the theologians like to resolve the apparent contradiction that perfect love casts out all fear, and yet the fear of the Lord is chaste, enduring forever. And scholastic discussions, can you have this fear of the Lord in heaven that perfect love casts out fear?

[01:02]

But the fear of the Lord is just a kind of a delicacy and an expression of love. and sincerity. I mean, for example, you don't like to say a cuss word in front of your mother. You love your mother. You don't want to upset her. And you just are afraid of doing anything that will hurt someone that you love very much. And sometimes I think that in the monastic life, it's not the bigger gross sins that are the important things, but just the little signs of delicacy in our relationship with God that that mean an awful lot. Now, we have to keep our sense of proportion and know the difference between something that's really serious and something that's not. But just these little gestures of love and reverence for God by reading the right thing or not giving in to a distraction or not, well, just...

[02:03]

doing something that you think is going to be beautiful and pleasing to God. And so all of this can be an expression of this kind of fear of the God that Alice is interested in. But at any rate, I want to talk maybe a little bit about another kind of fear. because there are all kinds of crazy things in all of us. You know, the dark night of the senses, the dark night of the soul on the cross, is all about these things within us, okay, that are opposed to God, that are opposed to the light, and that have to be rooted out, you know, so that the life of Christ can live completely in us. And this means a very, very painful asceticism at times. It's what Dom Vital says, a retired abbot of Achel in Belgium who came because so many years and years and years ago, used to call that formidable enemy, the enemy from within. And this is the enemy that we're always trying to bash down in the Psalms.

[03:08]

And the Psalms, some of them are such a problem for us, especially the so-called cursing Psalms. But in our monastic and Christian tradition, there's never been any great problem about it most of the time, simply because we know that the enemy is the enemy from within. And it's this man who has to die. It's this man, the man of evil, who's opposed to the light, who's opposed to Christ. And so this formidable enemy that just absolutely has to go. And in one of the issues of liturgy magazine years and years and years ago, And there was an account of a survey about these so-called cursing psalms. And that's the funny word, cursing psalm. I used it in the presence of a Jewish friend of mine. We were speaking about the psalms, and I referred to the cursing psalms. And she broke out laughing. She says, you know, you have no idea how funny that sounds in Hebrew.

[04:13]

because the word for thong means praises, the cursing praises. But these terrible thongs, you know, all about dashing the little ones against the stone and bathing your feet in the blood of the enemy and so forth, and you're filled with a kind of violence. Well, at any rate, there was a survey... made in France shortly after Vatican Council, I think, precisely about these cursing songs. And it turned out that most of the religious monks especially wanted to get rid of them or have the offending passages excised because they were going to obviously be offensive for laypeople who came to monasteries or religious houses, whereas all those laypeople are also keeping them. That was the general result. But among the different people who were quoted was one of the great Greek novelists.

[05:21]

You've probably heard of his name. I don't recommend you reading all of his books. Nikos Kazinakis. And he had this great spirit of liberty. He had a funny love for Christ. which he was able to reconcile with a deep love for Buddha and Lenin and Karl Marx. And above all, for Ulysses, the wanderer and the man with complete freedom. So at any rate, in one of his books, a letter to El Greco, he has this account. He's walking with a friend towards midnight on the top of a mountain and there's a a hamlet below. He says, one night I was walking with a friend on a high, snow-capped mountain. Suddenly, coming to a twist in the mountain, I glimpsed far away at the very bottom of the valley some pale lights. It must have been a small hamlet still awake. I halted, clenched my fists, and shaking one of them at the village, I cried out,

[06:30]

I'll slaughter all of you. This was uttered in a harsh voice that wasn't my own. As soon as I heard it, I was seized with terror and trembled from head to foot. My friend, who had become anxious, understand, please. I'll slaughter you all. My friend, who had become anxious, ran up to me and caught me by the arm. What's come over you, he asked. Whom are you going to slaughter? I was weak at the knees and felt overcome by an inexpressible fatigue. The sight of my friend standing there brought me to my senses. That wasn't me, I murmured. Wasn't me. There was someone else. And then he goes on. He says, It was someone else, but who? Never had the depths within me opened up so revealingly. For years I had suspected it. But ever since that night, I am certain of this.

[07:34]

There are dark depths within us, many levels, harsh cries, ravenous hairy beasts. Then he asks, can nothing ever die then? Can nothing in this world die? As long as we live all the nights and moons before man's coming together with their hunger, thirst, and pain, will live on and continue to suffer with us. Fear sweeps over me when I hear the bellowing of the terrible burden I bear within my inmost being. Will I never be saved? Will the depths of my being never be purified? Well, that's not going to be our experience because we're Christians. Okay, we've been plunged to the death of Christ and we're risen with Christ and we live by this new life. But as long as we live until we experience the final consummation of the Paschal Mystery,

[08:37]

There's always going to be something of this darkness within each of us. And we have to be sensitive about others. And you see this coming out in all the horrible things that we're praying for. We can't understand about genocide and Bosnia and all the nasty things that are going there where these hairy beasts are taking over and these awful, awful things that are within so many of us are coming forth and manifesting themselves. Well, something of that touches us all deeply and personally. And all of that has to go in our monasteries and in our monastic life so that our communities can be as much as possible, you know, this kingdom of God that's already being anticipated, that kingdom of God that's still to come but is already present because Jesus Christ is present and acting in our communities and in our lives. So, at any rate, I think that the fear of the Lord, now that Alice is more concerned about, as I said, is the more distaste fear that means a real delicacy in our relationship with God.

[09:50]

So, I'm going to skip most of that section and move on to an experience of hers that are very common and I think essential. to our monastic experience. She says, oh, how often, or the author does, and now the translation is, she voiced to her bridegroom in the cry of Rachel. The Latin text says, how often she shouted out, she used to shout out, Alice is no tame spirit. She addresses the Lord as a kind of a holy freedom, sometimes an unholy freedom. She's constantly bellowing out, shouting out to him. She's a demanding woman. So anyway, now, she's shouting out to the Lord, to her bridegroom, her bridegroom, With Rachel, now you remember in the Pentateuch, Jacob's wives.

[10:58]

Rachel, who's the find of the contemplative life, who's absolutely stunningly beautiful, and for whom Jacob worked for so many years before he got to marry her. And then Leah, who symbolized for our fathers the act of life, who bore children right and left, but wasn't all that much to look at. She was blear-eyed, but she was fruitful. Rachel, who is sterile and is contemplative, she wants to bear children. There's a question of our contemplation passing into action. She just shouts out to Jacob, give me children. Give me sonnet. And this is exactly what Alice is saying. She shouts out to her bridegroom, Jesus, along with Rachel.

[12:00]

Give me, she says, children, or else I'm going to die. And this, I found in my monastery, is very, very frequent... I just heard one of the brethren quoting one of the Desert Fathers just a day or two ago about the brain or the intellect descending into the heart. There's so much maybe that we know at a purely conceptual level. And we know that it hasn't reached our whole being, that it really hasn't transformed our whole life. And we're aware of the fact that it's true and we know it's true. But it just hasn't worked its way into our full being so that it passes into our deepest being and all of our actions and all of our thoughts. But at least it's made some kind of a beginning. But now this is tremendously painful sort of experience. Well, so it's probably something that we've all had and you can't have it unless you have a foretaste of the real thing.

[13:10]

It's a great deal to do with what I think Gregory talks about desire, the desire that increases our desire. You have a taste of God, you have a taste of truth, and that gives you a bigger capacity to know and love. But the reality is already present, and yet there's a distance. And so you can rejoice, and this is, we're talking, hearing about compunction, okay? You can rejoice at the final reality that's already present in some incoherent way, but you weep because it's not fully present and because there's still a distance, you know, between experience and full realization. And we, in a monastic context, I think, are very sensitive about this because everything cries out, you know, goes deeper and deeper and deeper into God. And anything that holds us back, we're more aware of it. We're more sensitive about it. And so it becomes more painful. So at any rate, poor Alice now is just in this terrible situation in which she feels that her contemplative life just hasn't transformed her whole being.

[14:24]

She's not bearing fruit. She's not becoming, you might say, a spiritual mother. I'm just thinking of a few instances from my own monastery. Our brother Anthony, I was... Alas, for the monastery, Father Master, the juniors, first verse and eighth of time, disastrous period of time for the life of the community. But we had about eight wonderful fellows. No, that's not quite true. They're very screwed up fellows. Even more than their father master was. But they're basically really quite wonderful fellows. And so I was just beginning as master of the juniors, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them. And my plan was to build on what they had learned in the division and have what we called in those days ongoing formation. That was going to be my motto, ongoing formation.

[15:26]

So I had the hypocrisy to speak with each of the seven or eight members of the junior eight individually to get their ideas about what they thought the monasticate should be about. And so I phrased my questions in such a way that inevitably I was going to get back the answer ongoing for me. And it worked with everyone until I got to Anthony's. And Anthony, this little shrimp of a fellow, and he wears a beard, and he comes from a very handsome family. But I think when he was born, something went wrong. Part of his face is caved in, and just physically, just a mess. And the most beautiful person in the world. And slow speaking, and slow thinking, but really deep. And so at any rate, Anthony and I were there having a colloquy.

[16:29]

So I asked Anthony about this, and I thought, what do you think the nature of the monasticate should be? And Brother Anthony just sits there for about three minutes, and I know better than to jump in like I could with the others. Finally, he said, well, Father, he says, I really don't know. But one thing I do know is It shouldn't have anything to do with ongoing formation. And so then I was silent for about three minutes. I said, well, Anthony, could you explain what you mean by that? And then he thought a minute, and he said, you know, Father, in the Nevisia, I learned so many things. Maybe I learned... too many things. And for now, I just want to spend the rest of my monastic life understanding and experiencing more of what I already know.

[17:36]

I mean, he's a real man of prayer. That's real, real wisdom. And, you know, sometimes... we feel a little bit hypocritical, at least I do, when you're saying things that you really believe, but you also realize that you have it interiorized in the way that we should. I mean, it's like the liturgy. The liturgy puts on our lips all of these transforming words that are so much bigger than ourselves, but we haven't made them our own really at the deepest possible level. But the process has begun. And we have to believe so much in the mercy of God and the priority of God's love that we just have to rejoice that we're on the way. I really had a wonderful lesson taught me by Father Flavian years ago. Do you know Father Flavian? He's a wonderful man, a real hermit. Not the least bit sense of humor.

[18:41]

Extremely serious. Just a model of monasticism. They call it gravitas, gravity. But a real man of prayer. And everyone recognizes in him a kind of a moral authority that just floats forth from what he is and what he represents. So at any rate, it's not a kind of a carefree type of monasticism that he stands for, but something very deep and something very serious. Well, in the Juniorate, I had a fellow who was sort of a playboy type, and really not terribly serious. And Father Flavian had just been elected abbot, and he had come to us from his hermitage. And our former abbot, Don James, had in his turn gone to a hermitage after being abbot for a number of years. And so it was really interesting, the sociological phenomenon that was taking place in the community when Father Flavin became abbot.

[19:47]

because everyone started picking up his line about the heramedical dimension of the monastic life. And the books read in the refectory were all by authors whom we know that Father Flavian admired and loved. We heard the venerable Lieberman's letters and so forth. It was a little bit artificial. But at any rate, this playboy type would go to Father Flavian for spiritual direction, and he'd go through the song and dance, about looking forward to this austere, hermitical type of monastic experience, and just saying exactly the right thing that he knew Father Flavin wanted to hear. I was getting madder and madder about this, because I couldn't understand how Father Flavin would have jumped in and put the fellow straight. For me, this was a real serious problem. And so one day I just went to Father Flavian, and I was tremendously upset.

[20:48]

I said, Father, how can you be so stupid? I mean, can't you see what the guy is doing? He's just going through the song and dance to try to impress you. And Father Flavian just sat back and roared with laughter at me. I mean, the first time I ever really saw him laugh, and I wasn't the least bit comfortable, because I was dead the least serious. And he said, of course I know what he's doing. And he says, but you have to realize that he is trying to show me an image of something that he really wants to be and that he certainly wasn't. But he was going through a let's pretend period that really corresponded to maybe some deeper aspiration of his. So I've always remembered that when I see an indication of a certain amount of phoniness, someone saying something a bit artificial, that it can still correspond to a deep aspiration that this person is really yearning to be like what he's pretending to be, but really, really isn't.

[21:59]

We have to be so careful, because we just have to be the people that God has made us to be. And he takes us as we are, but then again, he doesn't take us as we are. He takes us as we are always to transform us more and more in Christ, and to bring us closer to him, and make us, you know, more and more fulfill our true vocation. So as I said before, the monastic life isn't the least bit static. And so like Alice, you know, we have to grow, and we have our dark nights, and we have this experience of being sterile, and no carryover. in our actual monastic experience of the things that we have already tasted in an incoetive way, but an imperfect way. And so this is part of the pain, the real pain, of being a real monk when we're aware of what we are called to be and yet aware that we haven't been yet perfectly transformed in Christ.

[23:01]

Well, this is so wonderful in our monastic tradition. See, uh... I'm thinking about Father St. Bernard. Now, I don't recommend this as a practice when it comes to receiving postulants and screening prospective applicants for contemporary monastic life. But for someone like St. Bernard in the early Fistercians, the question when he came to the monastery is not so much what state you're in when you come to as where you're going. And the important thing is that you have made a first step, a first experience, at least, of this love of God that always comes first. You know, all of our monastic experience is just simply a response to God's initial love. God always is taking the initiative. And if you have a desire, and you really have a desire to

[24:06]

then this should give you so much confidence because you couldn't possibly have that desire unless God had put it in your heart. And so the fact that you desire something that you're not or that you don't have is a sign that God has already been working. And that if God has been working, then he gives you the grace to respond. And he loves, and that's why we can love in return, even in our poor, feeble manner. And so I'm just thinking of this wonderful story that I love so much about a rather unlikely vocation, Eclairvaux, a guy whose name was Constantius. I think it's a fictitious name. I mean, someone who's constant and persevering. But anyway, he began his spiritual odyssey in rather strange circumstances. He was a thief. and a brigand, and a murderer, and a rapist, and you just name it.

[25:09]

And, I mean, he was just an outcast of society. And so everyone was out to get him. And finally, justice did catch up with him. And St. Bernard and a group of monks were on their way to have a party with the Count of Champagne, Count Thiebaud. And as they approached the town where the Count was staying, they saw this posse dragging this awful guy out to the gallows to swing him up, which was perfectly justified in the circumstances. And so Bernard, the Countess there, and Bernard inquires what's happening. And he pleads for the life of this hopeless man. And Count Tebow says, He's never done a decent thing in his whole life, and the only good thing he can do is to die. And so then Bernard says, you know, the neck of the noose is already around the guy's neck.

[26:13]

And St. Bernard says, here, give him to me, and I'll take him back to Clairvaux, and I promise you he will die a long, lingering death. Clairvaux. And so that's what happens. They put the rope in Bernard's hand. And then it's the most beautiful scene. You read these little stories and the little details that we just might tend to cross over without taking into account. But the account says that Bernard took off his monastic robe and put it on this thief who's probably stripped to be hanged. But, you know, the Cistercians, the monks in those days, they always wore their cowl when they weren't working. And so, obviously, Bernard, in traveling, had his monastic cowl on, and his robe was under the cowl. Now, you can just imagine the physical proportions of taking off your house robe under your cowl.

[27:18]

I think even someone like St. Bernard was a little bit undignified to see him doing that. But he takes the most intimate part of his clothing, and puts it on this awful thief. That's such a tender, beautiful gesture. And putting on Christ, as Christ is this garment that covers us all, it's just an absolutely wonderful sign of love and compassion. Bernard had a great crony friend, the Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland. who introduced the monastic life of the Cistercian kind, Benedictine kind into Ireland. And Malachi died at Clairvaux on one of his journeys to or from Rome. And so Bernard took Malachi's robe, and he used to wear it on the anniversary of Malachi's death, and he had Malachi buried in his own robe.

[28:19]

I don't understand exactly the psychology of it. But I find it just something very beautiful. I'm just thinking of a novel. It just came to my mind. What was it? A nice and quiet place. It's a quotation from a line by Moravelle or someone about a cemetery. And this novel, it all takes place in a cemetery. And this kind of marginal person on society just hangs out around these vaults and so forth. And he lives in this tomb there. And so there's various people who come to visit their loved ones in the cemetery and what happened to their spiritual evolution and so forth. There's this wonderful scene where it's toward the dawn, and this young man and this girl have been walking around all night. They're just hopelessly in love with each other, and it's been raining. And so they just went through. And they climb up on the cemetery wall. And this takes place, you know, outside the big cemetery near New York. And they're sitting on the wall.

[29:21]

And they're watching the sun rise up behind the New York skyline. And, of course, they just trench through. But the young boy, you know, he loved the girl so much. He takes off his heavy woolen fog. He's probably dripping wet. and puts them on the younger girl. And somehow, you know, this is such a sign of such a tender love and concern, you know, probably thinks that his socks are drier than hers or something. But this, well, you find this tenderness and this delicacy. I'm speaking about, you know, the delicacy of our relationship with God. We do crazy things like this. That is signs of tenderness. Well, this is a distraction because what I wanted to say about This guy who's brought back at the end of a noose, literally, to Clairroix, he lasts there 30 years. And his last years are filled with a great deal of painful suffering. But he's become a great lay brother, and he dies a really holy death.

[30:23]

Now, he didn't begin with too many bright prospects. He's not the ideal candidate for monastic life. He would never pass a screening test nowadays. Under no conditions. But for our monastic tradition, God's mercy had intervened at this dramatic point where this poor man who had been completely turned from God and turned from society and probably all mixed up with it himself, had for the first time some experience of God's mercy, which is enough to begin the possibility of his responding to it. Bernard was a realist. He never, I think, thought that in the concrete he would find a monk at Clairvaux who loved himself, which is the highest form of love, because God loves him. We can love God because God is God, but there are not many of us who can go so far as to love even ourselves, chiefly, because God loves us.

[31:26]

And so he just took it for granted that our love of God was going to be ambiguous at times and mixed up with lesser motives. You know, a mercenary attitude would beat her. But for him, we were on the way. Do you have a vow of condensation of manners here, or is it conversion of manners for the margin? What do you call it now? Fidelity to the monastic way of life? No, we go back to the... Well, yeah, most everybody says it, and I'm kind of at the moment, is conversion of the monastic way of life. But for me, Christopher Stendhal was here once, and of course this word conversatio in Latin is in Philippia. Sure, sure. Conversation is in heaven. Right. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, I think that the young people today would say identity.

[32:27]

My identity is in heaven. Okay, all right. I think conversatio, in other words, our identity is with the risen Christ. Uh-huh, that's all right. That's our conversatio. Well, we're finding out so many wonderful things about the traditional monastic terminology. But in the 12th century, practically every place, the term wasn't conversatio. It was conversio, which was a semantic mistake. But for me, kind of a happy one. Because our monastic life is all the time this ongoing conversion. and going deeper and deeper and beyond. I remember Father Lewis saying it's almost the equivalent of doing the most perfect thing. Please be careful because that could make you very scrupulous. Is it more perfect to read the Narnia Chronicles of C.S. Lewis or Rodriguez's three volumes on the virtues? And so, well, you can get into a terrible bind that way.

[33:29]

But still, the general thing, the main thrust of our life has to be this ongoing conversion. Do all of you remember how Donald Damascus used to speak about Mary Magdalene as the sign of conversion, and do you remember Father Martin, or did he with you? In this moment, I can't do it. Oh, it was just absolutely wonderful. I had a plan to talk about this, but I will then. He spoke about two different kinds of conversion, and there's St. Peter. who's a tad bombastic, and he has this image of the Messiah, the triumphant one. And he has to be converted to Jesus as the suffering servant. When Jesus has to face his best, oh Lord, far be it from you to go and meet your death. And if everyone else betrays you, I'm not going to betray you. And all of this confidence, and he just simply cannot accept the fact of the suffering, humiliated Messiah.

[34:33]

So then he has to be converted to this aspect of Jesus' ministry and his destiny. And it's beautiful and it's painful to see this conversion. Now, then the other great conversion is Mary Magdalene. And she's all heart. And she's all love. And she is the one who has to be converted to this experience of the risen, glorified Lord, quite the opposite of St. Peter. And so when you see this spelled out so wonderfully in St. John's Gospel, she's always running. She runs to the tomb. You know, at the break of day, there's a kind of act of thing there. So she dashes to the tomb. And she stoops in, and she can't see anything yet, but she's turned to the tomb. And here this woman, all she wants to do is spend the rest of her life around the empty tomb. She doesn't know it's empty yet, but around the tomb of her loved one, anointing his body, just filled with love, just pure heart.

[35:42]

And so she has to be converted away from this too earthly and too... and quotation marks human, effective understanding of her relationship with Jesus, the risen Jesus. And so then, there's the first conversion. She hears the voice, and she turns around, and she doesn't recognize Jesus for who he is yet. She thinks he's the gardener, and there's all kinds of wonderful symbolism about this being the return to the garden of paradise, and Jesus really is the gardener. there but all of these double play on words that St. John loves so much and she says they've taken away my Lord and Jesus has been taken away I don't know where they've laid him And Jesus is sometimes taken away from us because we have such an imperfect experience and understanding of him. But this is only a type of experience when we think our Jesus has been taken away and we don't know where they've laid him.

[36:48]

That will lead us on to a closer identification and understanding of who Jesus really is. And remember, she calls him a rabbi. She has these terms that apply to him perfectly, but yet are not the full, perfect revelation of who Jesus is. And then St. John says, she turns again. And if she turns again, she's looking back into the tomb. And I remember Bolton's commentary on St. John. These great scholars, but they sometimes don't know what they're reading. He points out this difficulty of the topography, that if she turns around again... in this conversion, she's looking back in the tomb, and this doesn't make sense, so there's some redactional problem, and there must have been two texts that got conflated, I think, with his conclusion. But obviously, it's another turning towards the Lord, until he speaks her name, and when he identifies her, Mary, then she recognizes that she just really is.

[37:49]

And then she just clings on to him for dear life, and I think the rule of the master There's a wonderful phrase about when the monk is praying, it should be as if he's hanging on for dear life to the knees of Jesus. That's a perfect symbol of the monk at prayer. But at your age, then Jesus says, don't touch me because I've not yet ascended to my father and your father and go tell my brethren and so forth that I'm ascending to their father and my father. And so then she comes to this revelation of the risen Lord, the ascended Jesus, the Lord of glory. And so this is a further conversion. And then she becomes the apostle to the apostles. That's one of her names in the literature. Apostola, apostolorum. Not only is she an apostle, but she's the one who carries the message of the risen Christ.

[38:53]

to the very apostles themselves. So she undergoes this conversion. And so all of us, like Alice, you know, are in this process of ongoing conversion, turning more and more to the Lord, and understanding more and more about him. So... wonderful in St. John's Gospel, to trace through all the different titles that are given to Jesus, beginning with his first week of ministry. And you have about eight or nine titles, you know, Messiah, Son of David, Rabbi, Master, and so forth. And then the final thing when St. Thomas recognizes him, and he says, my Lord and my God, and then the final consummation of everything. So anyway, we think we know Jesus now, and we do. There's absolutely no doubt about it, and he knows us. But it's a question of knowing more and more and going on in her monastic life. So Alice is making a splendid beginning, but she's feeling the pain of it too. Okay, so that's this evening.

[39:55]

We'll say a few more things about that. I think I've taken about all the time. We should have this one. Father, I'll try to leave a few minutes maybe for objections. discussions just this evening. So until then, I help them in the name of the Lord. I have to stand up before you stand up.

[40:33]

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