As I said this morning, I propose to continue with this fourth degree of humility, giving it a little bit closer reading, especially this one short part, Tacite Conscientia Patientium Pletatur. It seems to me that, for several reasons, this fourth degree is really the most profound degree in the 12-step ladder. And so that's another reason to question whether the ladder is really going from the bottom to the top.

[01:02]

when you reach the apex at degree four, well, you know. And of course, this morning we saw pretty well, I think, that it's a pretty tortured topic, this suffering injustice. And as I said, I'm going to look at the words very closely. Unjust authority... Before I start that, let me just clarify one point that I think that I'm going to have to contradict myself. One of the things I said this morning... don't believe that is that that this is I said that this is a question of object objectively on injustice objective injustice I'd have to turn that around now and say that I'm pretty sure that he is addressing the the monk you know it's from the side of the sufferer and therefore

[02:31]

It is a question of one's perception. You see, it's something like chapter 68. And there are some other places in the rule, too, where it's a question of what you think is happening to you. So, that part, and the word in Ureis, which is sometimes toned down in translations, by the way. But it really means unjust in Latin. However, as I say, I think it's from the standpoint of the person who is suffering. Of course, that's very real. I mean, the suffering is still real. Even a hypochondriac, objectively, there's nothing wrong with them. However, he is subjectively suffering.

[03:35]

Now, we can say that this question of unjust authority is a graver problem for a Cenobite than for an Anchorite because Theoretically, anyway, an anchorite is not bound to authority in that sense. At least, you know, the classic idea of an anchorite is that it is not subject to an abbot, I guess, although in our monasteries you have an anchorite, and some of the Benedictines do also, and they are under the abbot. But like in Cassian's point of view, it's a centibite, who simply has to stay in there because it's part of the bargain. I have to say, too, though, that if you read the Desert Fathers, it appears that some of them anyway, in a few cases, recognized that their Abba was not good and was not holy and not wise, and they chose to stay with him, voluntarily endured this situation.

[04:54]

I found that out from a book, a rather new book by Graham Gould, which is on the communal aspects of desert monasticism, that is in the Apothegmata, the communal dimensions of that. It's one of those thin little books that costs an arm and a leg. These days, you can pay 50 bucks for a book that's 150 pages long. well, very limited audience, of course. Now, I might say, though, that there is a word here that sort of takes the bite out of injuries, injustices, and that is some kind of injustice. That sort of relativizes it. So, Benedict may be be indicating here that frankly, objectively, this may be sort of a trivial problem, but it's driving me crazy.

[06:02]

The monk is really suffering. There's another word here also, there's a couple of words that go along with injustices and one of them is duris, duris rebus. Now, hard things. That word turns up again in chapter 58 and verse 8 on the question of the novice. And you know the novice is supposed to learn the harsh and difficult things that will bring him to God. At least my understanding of that is is not that the novice master or anybody else sets out to provide artificial hardships, but rather that somehow the divitiate does involve an open and frank discussion of what really are the hard things about this life, what it's really going to be like.

[07:20]

And also, when the novice sees and runs into hard things that cannot be eliminated because that's just the nature of the life that will be dealt with honestly. It may be that some of the brothers are hard, hard cases. And Abba sees those things and says, well, what about Father so-and-so? He's a jerk. Yeah, I know. Well, okay. And you don't just say, well, I'll wash your mouth out with soap, kid. Because, I mean, he is a jerk, but he's our jerk. And, you know, okay. Now, the verb, a very key word, of course, amplectare, amplectatur. Amplexus in Latin is an embrace. There's no way around it.

[08:20]

And consequently, we'd have to say that he's asking us, he's telling us that we're not to simply think of ourselves as victims. We're not just somehow weak and unable to cope with this stuff and being run over by a truck. But we are active participants, somehow. in this situation. Certainly embrace a willingness to suffer. I mean, a general willingness. In other words, if you have sort of categorically ruled out suffering from your horizons, then there's a massive problem here. You're not going to be humble, you're not humble, and you're probably not going to work out at all as a monk.

[09:24]

And frankly, that's one of the great, I would say, one of the great problems is that we live in a convenience society in which hardship and suffering is abhorred. And that the great... It seems like the great project of many people is to avoid suffering in all its form. And, of course, advertising panders for that constantly, telling you, well, you need this and you need that. And you ought to, you ought to yourself, see? You ought to baby yourself. Now, the translation that we find in RB1980, his heart quietly embraces suffering. has the unfortunate aspect that it doesn't indicate that the word patience is the object.

[10:26]

Patientium. He embraces patience. Now, it's kind of an awkward expression. You don't normally think of embracing patience. But nevertheless, I have to say that this word patience is a real key word in the RB. Michael Casey, the Australian Cistercian writer, has got a very nice article on that. I think it appeared in Chirunga, which I notice you don't get. It's too bad because then you don't get Casey. What do you do? Okay. Remember, we're missing Casey. That's all I can say. We're also missing Cardone. Because I do publish in there because they've got such low standards. Anyway. But it's a beautiful article of Casey's. But I thought a lot about it myself.

[11:29]

You know, it turns up in very key places in the RB. It turns up, for example, right at the end of the prologue. I mean, and that's a very crucial part of the rule. The last five or so verses, and I can just read that and you'll remember it, and I won't go through all of these. But we shall, through patience, share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom. It almost sounds like patience there is the doorway to the kingdom for the monk. And that's a very rhetorical sentence because it's, You've got loose dentures. Stay away from that one. There's about five Ps in there. There's all this alliteration. And what you see then in the Latin is that, well, you don't quite see it, but passionibus, the Passion of Christ,

[12:39]

is a cognate with patience. They both come off the same root, to bear. So, patience has got a pretty poor reputation. In our society, people are patient because they can't do much about things. They sort of put up with things. Because we're very activistic. And patience sounds rather passive. Well, you know, patsy or passive. Whereas, at least in the RB, it turns out, here I started talking about that and I didn't carry through. At the end of the program, here in chapter seven, in the chapter on the novices, 58, He claims that the novitiate is to learn patience.

[13:42]

Well, God knows we learned enough patience in my novitiate, but I don't know if we learned it, but we certainly sort of thought we were putting up with quite a bit. I guess this just pops into my mind. I'm in the sixth grade. We're practicing basketball. The kids are standing in a semicircle. And the coach has got the only ball in the gym, and he's shooting layups. And finally, one of the kids says to the other one, what are we practicing here? And the kid says, patient. That's for my sixth grade in South Minneapolis. Pretty smart kids. Okay, now... You see, the difficulty here is in the translation to get all this stuff in. It's like this. This problem sometimes in translating is you take the watch apart.

[14:46]

You've got the pieces laying out here. You put it back together. The darn thing is running, but you've got some pieces left on the table. And often you've got adverbs and stuff left over. Tachite. Now, literally, silently. tacit, tacitternity, and so forth. Its literary meaning in the Oxford Latin Dictionary is physical silence. You don't cry out. However, it looks as if Benedict has seen fit to include inner silence by including the word conscientia. Conscientia, in the conscience, somehow, in the heart. How do you translate conscientia there? It's a good question. That word conscientia, by the way, this indicates that sometimes we're dealing here with some pretty...

[16:01]

tangled textual history. In Cassian's version of Step 4, he has a completely different word, constancia. Now, you know, constancia is quite close to conscientia, and I don't know what the, even in the critical editions of the rule of whether some scribes maybe had constancia, but... But the point seems to be, and this is interesting, that Cashin uses that word constantia in another place, in Conference 16, to indicate that it's endurance in a hard situation. In Greek you've got hupomone, Persevere to the end, you know, the Latin constancia, to the end. But the interesting thing is that passion in conference 16 is talking about tranquilitas.

[17:12]

Now, the discussion there has to do with friendship. And he's talking about, well, what happens when friends start squabbling? The big thing for passion is don't lose your tranquilitas. Now, it seems to me that, and there's similar vocabularies, see, in these two places, in Cassian's Step 4 and Conference 16.26, it appears that there's a kind of stoic background, see, and that's the part that I think we have to be careful about. I don't think that Christianity, although Cassian is certainly a Christian, but those stoic issues are not exactly Christian issues. Keeping your tranquilitas is not the big thing for a Christian, as far as I can see. Keeping your cool.

[18:16]

We recognize now, psychologically, that there are people who are very good at keeping their cool. But who are not, maybe very unhappy or are not loving, love is more primary than tranquilitas. To simply create a lifestyle, for example, that enables you to maintain your tranquilitas is not necessarily all that admirable for a Christian. I'm sure the abbot wishes he could maintain a lifestyle that would enable him to have his tranquility task. But he's got some bozo coming in yelling at him about some tractor. And he says, that's the end of that. I'll have no more of this kind of stuff. I'm going to be tranquil. Well, okay, but you're not abbot. I think the book has also bought into this to a certain extent. He's got a little book on fasting. Nice book. But he says in there, And he's following the RB, literally, on eating.

[19:22]

He only eats one meal in the afternoon. But he said, it would be quite impossible if I had to deal with my confers. If I had to engage in encounters with people, you couldn't maintain your fasting. And I think he means his tranquilita. As a great scholar, His confreres revere him and they protect him and they wouldn't think of disturbing his tranquillitas. But is that really the point for a Christian? Is that why we created this lifestyle? I mean, we can just be selfish old bachelors and have a lot of tranquillitas. Okay. I suggested this morning, and I still worry about that, that a quiet heart may be misinterpreted as a suggestion that we can actually come to believe that injustice is justice.

[20:26]

And I'm sure that I've seen that in some books back in The Novitiator, whenever, some of these books about monastic humility that you would even somehow interiorize so that you would no longer see the injustice. Unfortunately, people then become blind to evil. And then that progresses until there's no more conscience. We see that with Nazi Germany. Apparently, all sorts of high-minded, wonderful people had internalized Nazi... propaganda just in order to avoid trouble and finally wound up being quite enthusiastic butchers. Self-censorship results in moral nullity. That's a hell of a sentence.

[21:27]

I wrote that. I was inspired that day. Nonviolent resistance is quite different. Okay. Getting back to Conscientia, Boyas, a French scholar, good RB scholar, thinks that Benedict has replaced Constantiam with Conscientia because he wants to avoid martyr language. Here again, he's eliminated the word martyr later on in this fourth step. Here he's changed Constantia to Conscientia. we rather easily imagine ourselves to be victims and martyrs.

[22:30]

Vauglay, in his commentary, says that he thinks that step four of Benedict implies and of course, he's going back to Cassian's language in step four, that it implies Institute 4, 8 to 9, because of the resonances of the vocabulary. There's common vocabulary, which encourages an Abba to test a disciple deliberately. And he says that since the Master had used the same scripture, proofs, namely Luke 10.16 and John 6.38. I come not to do the will of my own will, but the one of him who sent me, and so on. He says, to use the same scripture testimonia, verbally thinks that the Master shares the same philosophy of formation.

[23:37]

And, well, I have to admit that there is a place in the RM Namely, at Tema Patris 40, the theme of the Our Father. If you know something about the RM, it's got a huge preface, a huge prologue. Part of it is a commentary on the Our Father. And in there, he says that our will must be thwarted. it appears that the master believes that the only possible salvation for a Cenobite is that his will be systematically crushed. Your hair's standing up in the back of your neck. I do remember some aspects of that in my formation.

[24:43]

It seemed like They were sort of waiting to notice your enthusiasms and then say no. Now, of course, some of my enthusiasms were nutty, and they should have said no. And we don't just let people follow their inclinations. But somehow those inclinations are also grace. and are the working of the Holy Spirit. And in seminaries, they're indispensable. And if they're crushed, I mean, if somebody thinks that's their project to snuff out the goodwill of people, then there's something very dangerous going on here. Now, I shouldn't criticize Vogue without him being here to smack me, because he's more than capable of defending himself and is a great master.

[25:51]

But it's wrong about this, that he buys into this. He somehow thinks that, he thinks at least that Benedict shares that view, that somehow the will has got to be, I don't know if he'd say crushed, That's pretty drastic, but that the will really has to be shackled. Now, I can just tell you about a little interview I had with him when I was a student in Rome. I went to him one day, and I said, what should I write about? Sort of meaning, look, I'm going to go home, and I, you know, what should I do? I mean, how do you work? And he said, what are your interests? follow your interests, because there's where the dynamism is, and that's where the head of steam is. And I must say that as an editor of a prestigious periodical, one of the basic lessons that I've learned is that the primary energy in the Horne publication process is...

[27:09]

has to come from the writer. And if the writer hasn't got it, nothing so much is going to happen. And when they get cold feet and then start saying things like, oh, well, I don't know if I should publish this and so on, and then I say, okay, fine, it's your decision. Because if you don't want to do it, we won't do it. And I think that even more crucially, to be an independent writer and not to have to publish. See, I don't have to publish. I don't have a university job, so it's got to come out of my guts. Well, there's got to be ideas flowing and interest, interest. And where that comes from, I don't know. But I do know that where people don't have it, nothing's going to get done. And unfortunately, that's what happens too often.

[28:10]

People come home from graduate school. They're superbly trained. And you see, in grad school, they just set you these projects. You've got a thesis and all this stuff, and you've got to get it done. You're up against the wall. But when you come home, nobody's going to tell you you've got to write. So you don't write. And I've had a couple of confers that I tried to personally nurse through, you know, sort of present them with ideas and stuff. They say, oh yeah, that's great. They take it and they do something. I thought finally, hey, wait a minute. These are my ideas. So all I'm saying is this whole question about initiative is very delicate. In my community, we have learned a very hard lesson. We had to close a school, intruded a vacuum, and really Now, the most precious, valuable thing that we need is initiative and ideas by the monks as to, you know, work that will be, you know, fruitful work and all this stuff.

[29:24]

And where you've got a bunch of people saying, give me a job or, you know, tell me what to do. It's hard. You haven't supposed to have all the imagination and ideas and stuff? Can't. So, I guess that's enough of this. We've got 15 minutes. If anybody would like to talk about this, back there. We had it at the council. It started off with the major. They were at the end. [...]

[30:26]

They were at the end. [...] Sure, sure. The only thing is that I noticed that sometimes you get into a three-cornered game with the monk, the council, and the abbot, but nevertheless, Benedict says do everything with council and you won't be sorry, and that applies to the abbot and to the monk. A number of other people told me the same thing.

[31:39]

and they must keep on secure. So I think that it's clear. And it can happen if you have to do it. And some of them may see it quite differently than you think of. One thing I thought about that is I think, on death in a way, it's really impossible. A parent gets a job, for example. I don't need to see that you're 40 years old and think that you're probably in my own name. When you're 80, you see it may be the same mistakes in your 40s.

[32:56]

But it's very hard to realize . You always, but doing what the So the superior cells, even when you look at it, you couldn't see it as wrong. The only exception we make is that superior cells being something that's probably pretty simple. Then we are about . When you follow what the superior cells, you can see it. That is wrong, all of it. It makes you stand it down. You get all the merit from that. Yeah, I mean, and I certainly think the distinction between what is evil and what is simply in congruent or what I don't like or what I find very difficult, and that's important to keep that distinction. But it still begs a huge question about, you know, sinful.

[33:59]

I mean, I brought up that case this morning. about putting somebody, I think, radically unfit in charge of a large institution. Is that a sin? You know, I mean, bad word of business is pretty slippery. It isn't one of the ordinarily labeled sins, obviously, but it could be gross negligence or, you know, real mismanagement or something very wrong because lots of people are going to suffer. Lots of people are going to stop it. I might say, by the way, I said this morning, well, in fact, the whole thing worked out just fine. Yeah, on one end, one guy who sent us out to America is still in charge of the school after 35 years and doing a superb job. But on our end, the guy he named for our place was incredibly incompetent and, unfortunately,

[35:01]

The school was in such turmoil for two years that when the monks came to decide whether to keep the thing going, they had such a bad taste in their mouth, many of them, and so we closed. We closed our high school, and I still think it was quite a mistake. But anyway, so things have consequences. Yeah. I agree. Blessedly, it's rare. You're a total sign?

[36:02]

Well, you know, I pointed out to somebody this morning a possible kind of a case that it seems to me, and I've actually said this in print someplace, Let's say you're the administrator of a big hospital. A sister, basically. These orders have huge hospitals. And let's say that the order is insisting that they're trying to organize this hospital into a union shop. And... You're told you break that union. You take steps to break that union. We don't want that union in here, all right? This is a very controverted kind of question, and you, Mary, as an individual, believe that that's really wrong to be busting unions or engaging in that kind of activity.

[37:15]

Well, maybe the opposite. Maybe you're told to bring the union in, and you think it's wrong, evil, the way that union operates. Those are top questions. And you're now dealing with huge institutions, millions of dollars, employees, and all this stuff. You can't just say, well, I did what I was told, and that's all that counts. I mean, if you're in that position, that you are capable of managing an institution of that size, you better know a few things. And one of them, you ought to have some ideas about labor management practices and all this stuff. You can't just be a simpleton. I mean, we will not simply be able to go before the throne of God and say, I did what I was told. I'm sorry. The abbot will not be holding your hand. And it's going to be a little lonely up there. So...

[38:22]

I know, but you know, I have to say this. I mean, a lot of that kind of wisdom I can certainly understand, but it sounds quite a bit like the rule of the master. And I have to say that... that the unfortunate effect can be sometimes of religious who don't know what they want or what they think or what they feel or anything. They're sort of, I don't know what you'd call that. I mean, it's important to understand your own heart and to not have somehow anesthetized it or whatever it is. And sir, to systematically set out to seek hardships and all that kind of stuff, it's got its problems.

[39:29]

Perhaps masochism? I don't know, but I can point to one situation. When I first came to the monastery, certain monks were, it seemed to me, systematically neglecting their health. And it seemed that they thought they were doing something virtuous. And I guess it was this offer it up business, offer it up. Somehow that pendulum has now swung to such an extent that they can think of little but their health. Same guys, 40 years later. You know, now we do have in our society, in this country, we've moved a long ways toward taking care of yourself. You know, eat right, exercise, and all this stuff, and you get a tremendous amount of concern for the self. I understand it's a problem, and surely for a monk, but the other end, the other extreme of not paying attention to your heart is... For example, somebody told me...

[40:50]

He came to the novice master, and he said, I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to stay or to leave. And the novice master said, well, what do you want to do? It's shocking not to never. What do I want to do? I mean, it's that simple? Well, for heaven's sake, your heart must be, you know, it must have some validity. I mean... Why are you here if you don't want to be here? And if you want to leave... So, I don't know if I'm being very coherent here, but I think it's possible to be sort of all the time neglecting your heart. Frankly, if you take that maxim, surely, for example, people... are going to be like doing better work when it's something that they like doing, that it's there.

[41:56]

And we can't all be doing work that we like to do and we can't all be doing work we love to do, but it's sure you're better off when you've got people who have got that kind of fire because I worry sometimes. Once in a while I run into a confrer who seems to be perfectly responsible and doing a good job, and he frankly admits, I can't stand this job. You've been doing it for 20 years. I know, but I really don't like it at all. It's very heroic, but I just wonder about it, whether he should be... Hey, look, I'm digging a hole deeper and deeper. Let's go to cop.

[42:37]

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