I'm very grateful to all of you and especially to your prior for affording me the opportunity of coming here and preaching this retreat. I always enjoy coming to other communities for retreats because it gives me an opportunity to see the diversity of how the rule is lived out in different contexts, in communities with different histories. But it's a particular joy for me to come here, ever since I was a postulant at my monastery. The O antiphons are memorable also because the second reading at vigils on the appropriate day is from Damasus Winson's Commentaries on the Great Symbols. Actually, we don't have a complete collection, and if he did do all the O antiphons, I'd be grateful for the opportunity of catching up the ones we don't have. That is for us, and always has been for us, a wonderful introduction to the liturgical mystery, to God's presence in the Word, and in monastic life as well. And then later learning of the monastery he founded, and then finally being afforded the opportunity to come here, I'm especially happy and blessed.

[01:07]

And I'm also a librarian at our monastery, so you can imagine that visiting a monastery where you live in a library is something like a dream come true. One of my recurrent dreams, not nightmares, but positive dreams ever since I was made librarian is of breaking through a wall and discovering huge unexplored space for the librarian. To be in a place where that's actually the case is really quite remarkable. So thank you for having me. It's good to be here and I'm delighted to be among you all. I think a retreat is really for, is not necessarily learning new things or being exposed to new material, although that can be a good thing when it happens. I think above all else, since by its structure it means stepping away from your ongoing responsibilities, hopefully, or at least the kinds of things that ordinarily consume the free hours of your monastic day. Since it involves stepping away from those things and hopefully into Sabbath, into spending time resting with the Lord, I think retreat, above all else, should be an opportunity to discover in some very old things

[02:17]

the glory of God, burning brightly right there, as it were, beneath the surface. Hopefully it's an opportunity for all of us to allow the Lord to begin to take some of the crust off aspects of our ordinary life, whether it's our observance, our ceremony, our ritual, our monastic practices, the people we live with, the whole structure of our life. to realize again, and hopefully to experience through doing it, that God really is present in all of those things. And we can allow, as the psalmist says, the Lord to reinvigorate us with the joy of our youth. What I'd like to do from a practical standpoint over the next several days is to use each conference as an opportunity to look at a particular text, which I'll pass out to you, or a series of texts from our tradition. Almost all of them are monastic sources. I'm sure most of you are familiar with almost all, if not all of them, but also a couple of other texts from slightly more contemporary things, and maybe from things slightly more ancient than monasticism, as ways of reminding us, jogging our memories, about some of the fundamental structures of our lives.

[03:35]

Because what we do on retreat, when we allow the Lord to show us how our lives as monks, how the structures of our form of service and our way of living really is, if we have the eyes of contemplation to see it, resplendent with God's glory. When we do that, we are also at the vanguard of people who enable others to do that in the world as well. We live in a world that is absolutely starved for an authentic form of spirituality. I don't have to tell you that. I'm sure you hear it from treatants all the time. I'm sure you encounter it, whatever kind of work you do, or in whatever capacity you serve the monastery. People are absolutely hungry for a rich experience of spirituality. The trouble is, the world in which we live doesn't encourage people to have a diet that goes very deep. People, unfortunately, when they say they want to take their spiritual journey seriously, often mean by that that they want something else to excite them for a while, something to be interesting, some new practice or some new thing to do that will be fun for a bit so that they can move on to something else.

[04:49]

What they actually hunger for, what all of us hunger for, of course, is to be drawn nearer to God, to return to our origin and to our final goal. And retreat should be an opportunity when we ourselves can do that and when we can be reminded of ways in which we can help others to do that as well. We were reminded quite eloquently today at Mass that this retreat is beginning on the edge of, and then in full participation in, the conclusion of the octave of the week for Christian unity, with the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle. And the word unity and union, which it bespeaks, most often reminds us of unity, the uniting of disparate elements, things that have come apart. And of course, we look particularly to the ecumenical movement during these days as a sign of what God wants us to do. But we ought to be aware as well that the word by which we describe ourselves, monks, monadzantes, monakoi, these words have within them that word monos, which we often associate with solitude.

[06:06]

Quite rightly, the word has often been used of those who go apart from the large grouping in order to experience God in more quiet and in more solitude. But Father Adalbert de Vauguey has recently reminded us, in a number of places, and Gabriel Bungi, a commentator on Evagrius and many other of the early monastic sources, has also emphasized that this word monos, or monados, is not just a word about solitude. What we are as monks is men who are about union. The word monos or monodos in that context means not only the one who is focused on being alone with God, but the one who desires and yearns for union with God. To be a monk is to be a man of union, to be someone who strives for and has at the center of his heart this longing for union with God.

[07:07]

But there's a deeper richness to that word, even than just that. Beautiful though it is, it conjures up those wonderful patristic images of hannosis, the uniting with God, which is also a participation in divinity, a divinizing like unto what happens in the Eucharist. God takes ordinary things and fills them with a glory which is the glory of himself, and draws them to himself. There is that wonderful sense of uniting with God, but this term is also used in a particular way, of God's uniting of himself with that which has fallen away, that which has become fragmented. One of the Desert Fathers, Evagrius Ponticus, particularly uses a form of this word, the word by which we identify ourselves, by which he identified himself, to describe that energy or movement within God himself that draws the fragmented, broken, disunited creation back into union with himself.

[08:15]

God as the One, God as monos, is not solitude, sovereign, separate. It is God drawing back into oneness all that he has made. And that's the word we use to describe ourselves. That's the word, the reality that lies behind what we are. People who prize solitude but recognize that it has within it a movement, a dynamic drawing back into union of all that God has made. And that happens at a variety of levels. In our tradition, and I hope that the next few days can be a reawakening of, a rediscovering of some of the major currents of our tradition, which I think our age is always in danger of losing, that reuniting, that energy of union is experienced in a very concrete way on three principal levels. for us as monks, at the level of our inner selves, the place of repentance, the place of metanoia, where compunction and change and sorrow for sin and a desire to become different, better people is the operant movement.

[09:29]

That very powerful impulse of desire to become new, which of course is an action that only God can accomplish within us. That whole area of our lives that's lived out, in a formal way, in asceticism. In all the practices, all the activities that enable us to take seriously God's call to change, to be transformed. In other words, to be reunited, to become again at one with God in our hearts, a union with our divided, fragmented, fractured selves. And the traditional language that's used to describe this in the Rule of Saint Benedict, in the older monastic sources, And right down to the present is, of course, the language of virtues and vices or instruments of good work, tools by which we labor, which is another way of saying tools which God gives us so that we can participate in the labor which God has already begun that results in the transforming of our hearts, a reuniting of our divided and broken selves, but also

[10:42]

a union, a being drawn into greater unity with one another. We are Cenobites. We are people who live in community. And although perhaps the world misunderstands it, because I think community is one of the most grossly misunderstood realities in our modern age, there are, I need not tell you, aspects of our life together that provide ample asceticism. choosing to live, being invited and being granted in virtue of vow the right to live for life in a particular community, with a particular group of people, which is the unique charism of those who follow the way of Saint Benedict, carries with it an opportunity and an obligation to be changed, to be transformed, not just with our broken, divided selves inside, but in light of our relationships with one another, the fragmented self and the experience of the fragmented other we find in our life together.

[11:44]

This reuniting, this reunion, which the word monk contains within it, is also a being united with each other. Now, if the reunion with our inner selves is the whole area of asceticism and monastic practice, this awareness of relationship with each other, which I think we would today be tempted primarily to view in psychological terms, to use psychological language for it, or perhaps sociological language to describe the culture we come from, or the kind of expectations of the world in which we live, and how that makes easy or difficult our task of living together. We need to bear in mind that the tradition we come from looks at that dynamic, the reuniting of our broken, fractured relationships with one another, as a form of contemplative experience. The beginnings of contemplation is what in the Greek monastic tradition was called theoria physicae.

[12:47]

We might call it physics. God in physical things. The beholding of God, and not just in nature, not just in pretty things, birds and flowers and trees and snow and mountains, but in the more difficult and God-filled reality of other people. The contemplation, the beholding of God in creation begins and has its highest expression not as our world sometimes thinks in the national forests somewhere but in precisely that difficult place of our interaction with one another. The beholding of God in creation is a call to allow God to open within us our capacity to behold him in his image. which is the brother, the sister, the person, very often the person I'm having most difficulty with. Our being reunited is also a being united with one another, which has its ascetical and its difficult and its active cooperating with God component, but is above all else a task of contemplation.

[13:57]

Beholding God in the created order begins for us as monks and finds its highest flowering in the ability to perceive God in one another. And chapter 72 of the Rule is a kind of wonderful meditation on all the words that Benedict can find for the love that is created, or that has to be created, in the heart for that to be true. When we can perceive God in the other, when we can, as he says, honore se in vicem brevenient. Not so much compete with one another, but prevail, seek to grow in your capacity to show, to behold, and even to proclaim the honor, the glory that is in the other. We are to be reunited with one another, a task which is a task of beholding, of contemplation. And, of course, we are to be reunited with God. To experience the truth that all of the images and words, all the language and concepts, all the beautiful things that God gives us so that we can perceive the presence of the Lord in created things, and especially in one another, also have to give way.

[15:14]

to the certainty that God is, in fact, also beyond all of that. That to be with God is a laying aside of images, a letting go of the things that are comfortable for us, a willingness to enter in to the depths not only of silence, but of the limitation even of speech and of human concepts. These three great areas of our being united ultimately with God in our broken self, in our fragmented relationships, and in our clinging to the things that keep us from moving towards God, beyond our own little limitations, are the three great movements of the spiritual life, all of which have traditional names, which we'll look at over the coming days, but which I think are actually fairly meaningless, unless they are concretely real for each one of us in our lives as monks. I think it's important to review how our tradition has looked at each of these different kinds of reuniting because there is always a danger of misunderstanding these spiritual projects, of turning them into a kind of technique, something that one does and achieves and then goes out about one's business, continues doing whatever one wants to do.

[16:39]

We are always deepening in a movement towards God that requires humility, that requires an awareness of the fact that the categories and the techniques and the approach we have to our life always has to be born anew, born fresh each day. One of the paragons, at least I sort of regard him as that of our community, Father Eleutherius Wenantz, just celebrated his 70th anniversary of profession, and occasionally, almost in frustration, he drops these little apothecmeta, which are useful to ponder on occasion. He said, I tell you frankly, he is a Belgian, and so he continues to retain his accent, I tell you frankly, I have been a monk for, I guess now it's 70x years. I ask myself every day, why am I a monk? If I cannot answer, I must leave. Now, he won't leave, I'm sure, and he hasn't left, but what he means by that is not just, is I cannot simply stand in virtue of my profession and admit that I made a choice back then which binds me now.

[17:55]

I have to today be about the project of giving myself to God. of allowing my fractured and broken inner self, my breaking and maybe even widening chasm of relationships with others to be healed, and I have to be willing to take a step even into the uncertainty of who God is this very day. Techniques and categories are valuable and helpful, and we need to know how to talk to the world about them, but the principal task is one of beginning again each day. And I think a good place to begin, or a good set of little texts to glance at, and as you're passing these around, I'll assure you that my intention in these conferences is that they not be overly long. My approach to both homilies and retreat conferences is that the people of God will forgive you much if you do it briskly. I think that's true in many areas of life. I intend to highlight a few points.

[18:57]

to use these texts as a way of opening up aspects of our spiritual life, but primarily their use for you ought to be to spark a looking around at what you already have, what already surrounds your life, and a reflecting on the presence of God in those things. This is not intended to be a monastic texts seminar. but simply a kind of a little flint-struck spark that will hopefully have other effects in your own lives. I've chosen two texts that I think highlight something of the rhythm and the movement of monastic life, which should be for us a reminder of the fact that what we do as monks is fundamentally what we do as Christians. fundamental sacrament of monasticism is our baptism. We are living out thoroughly and vigorously that into which most of us were initiated before we could even speak, an event which we actually can't physically remember.

[20:00]

We live out our being committed to God. That's the basis of our lives, and for that reason I think when people ask us about the unique aspects of Benedictine spirituality or monastic spirituality, we need to have the humility to tell them that it's really generic Christian spirituality, that the monks and nuns in the fourth century were simply keeping alive the prayer practices and the understanding of growth towards God, which was their heritage from the age of the martyrs. that was the self-understanding of the early monks. They were continuing something which had already begun in previous generations. So the texts I've chosen both predate and, in a certain sense, reach beyond the monastic context. On the one hand, a letter by St. Cyprian of Carthage from the middle of the third century, and on the other, an often neglected part of the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation. I'm Dave Erbom from the Second Vatican Council. And I think within these, both of these texts, is a wonderful articulation of the underlying rhythm, as it were the kind of DNA code, or if you want to put it in musical terms, the underlying beat, or perhaps the leitmotif of our lives as monks.

[21:17]

A kind of spiritual rhythm that I think opens up and gives meaning to what we do together at the Divine Office. what we do privately when we are praying, especially what we do when we are praying in the spirit of Lectio Divina, experiencing God in a written text, and what we do really in our relationships with each other. I think these two texts can be reminders of an underlying rhythm which we use a technical vocabulary to describe. but which really is the, as it were, beating of the spiritual heart, the movement back and forth of what ultimately turns out to be our progression towards God. The letter from Cyprian is a wonderful description of beholding the glory of God. It's a beautiful early contemplative text, and it has echoes within it that find their way into the Veni Sancti Spiritus, and to a certain extent also the Veni Creator Spiritus, the great hymn and sequence

[22:23]

of the Holy Spirit that invites us to experience the Spirit of God, not just as a static image, but using all the dynamic language of human need and longing, and even pain and sorrow, which can be touched and healed, which can be moistened if it's dry, which can be warmed if it can be cold, which can be made whole by the Spirit of God. A beautiful image of the beholding of God and of the transformation of the human heart that the vision of God creates. And it begins in an almost poetic sort of way. As the sun shines spontaneously as the day gives light, as the fountain flows as the shower yields moisture, so does the heavenly spirit infuse itself into us. Again, beautiful image of the Holy Spirit as these healing touches this fountain, the shower, the sun shining, the day giving light.

[23:25]

And then, of course, he goes on, Cyprian goes on to use the great image or metaphor of beholding God, of contemplative experience, which is the image or metaphor of vision. When the soul in its gaze into heaven has recognized its author, it rises higher than the sun. far transcends all this earthly power and begins to be that which it believes itself to be. This martyr of the early church, this bishop who predates the tradition of monastic spirituality, describes a beholding of God that changes the one who sees. We look up to heaven and we're remade. We rise, in a sense. We become that which we had previously only been able to express in words of faith, in the creed. We are children of God. We are sons of the Heavenly Father. And now Cyprian gets very practical.

[24:26]

Isn't this lovely, beautiful image? How does it happen? What is the Christian act, what is the spiritual practice or discipline that enables us to experience this and participate in this movement of beholding, being changed, and rising into the presence of God? Surprisingly simple. Do you, whom the celestial warfare has enlisted in the spiritual camp, observe a discipline, uncorrupted and chastened in the virtues of religion?" Again, to act in a way in accordance with the will, the law, the gospel of Christ, to practice, as we might say, the instruments of good works, but then a very specific practice. Be constant as well in prayer as in reading. Now speak with God. Now let God speak with you. The movement back and forth, the syllables themselves invite a sense of rhythm.

[25:31]

Now speak with God. Now let God speak with you. Cyprian is recommending what we would call Lectio Divina, or listening to the text proclaimed followed by silence, or singing a psalm followed by a silent interval for self-offering. He's describing what we might call the most primordial or basic movement of the heart in its relationship to the God who gives us Word, first the Law, and then the Gospel. to listen to God and to speak to God, to use words and then to let words go, to allow our experience of God to be an alternating rhythm of images and words and speech and quiet receptivity. Cyprian is giving to the whole church, not just monastics. There are nuns, strictly speaking, although there may well have been women living in consecrated communities at this time, but since men wrote the later histories, we don't know much about them.

[26:38]

Nevertheless, he's writing this for the whole of the Christian community. This is a basic Christian way of praying, which we recognize because it's the fundament of our lives as monks. And then Cyprian describes the effect. whom he's made rich, no one can make poor. There's no poverty to one whose breast has been supplied with heavenly food. And he uses all the images of a gloriously outfitted basilica in the ancient world. Ceilings with gold, houses with mosaics of marble. All of this will seem cheap when you know that it is you yourself who are perfected. You are adorned. And that temple in which God's dwelt as a temple in which the Holy Spirit has begun to make his abode is of more importance than all others. Cyprian is describing the transformation of the human heart, the change that takes place within us when we dare to allow our eyes to be open to the presence of God, when we allow our experience of the sacred text, whether

[27:43]

privately read in Lectio, whether publicly heard at the liturgy, whether chanted together in the form of psalmody, to be a means by which our eyes are lifted from earth to heaven. And he's describing it to the whole of the people of God. In our own day, the Church has re-emphasized precisely this rhythm, but in an even more vigorous, and I would say almost revolutionary kind of way. Cyprian describes the effect on the human heart of listening to the Word of God, experiencing the sacred text in this way. The Second Vatican Council describes the effect on the whole of the people of God and the extent to which participating in this rhythm is the means by which the Holy Spirit causes the tradition to grow within the church. The tradition that comes from the apostles makes progress, crescet, in the church with the help of the Holy Spirit.

[28:48]

That's true, and especially Cardinal Newman and now lots of folks are emphasizing the significance of the development of tradition, not change, not contradiction, but that growth into a fullness of expression that is a continuous deepening of the incarnation in each new generation. There's a growth in insight into the realities and words being passed on, and this comes about in a variety of ways. Here the Council is articulating how doctrine, how tradition develops, how it grows. It comes through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts. All the people of God who engage in this practice of listening to the Word, allowing the Word to change them, are engaging in something that not only has an effect on them personally, but which the Holy Spirit uses as a way of allowing the truths of the faith to become re-articulated ever more clearly.

[29:53]

It comes from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience, and it comes from the preaching of those who have received, along with the rite of succession and episcopate, the sure charism of truth, through the magisterium, through the received tradition, and through the ongoing pondering in the hearts of believers of what we have received. What we would describe as the rhythm of Lectio Divina, the rhythm of the liturgy, is in fact the basic primary rhythm, the movement within the heart by which the Lord speaks to us, by which we respond, and which Christ and the Holy Spirit use as a means to enable that which we have received to be passed on and to grow as it's passed on. The Council gets very practical. All clerics should immerse themselves in the scriptures through constant sacred reading and diligent study. All the Christian faithful, especially those who live the religious life, should engage in frequent reading of the divine scriptures.

[30:58]

They go gladly to the sacred text, whether in the liturgy or in devout reading. or in whatever exercises or other helps with the approval and guidance of pastors are happily spreading everywhere. But let them remember, the Council says, that prayer should accompany the reading of sacred scripture so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For we speak to him when we pray, we listen to him when we read the divine oracles. Centuries later, the same truth that Cyprian articulated is re-expressed by the council as an invitation to the whole of the people of God against the biblical text in prayer. This is the heart of our lives. This is the basis on which our monastic practice arises. For us to deepen in it is for us to be changed, for us to allow God to transform and to heal the divisions we experience within our own hearts, within our relationships with one another, in our movement towards God, a threefold healing and reuniting, but it is also

[32:13]

something which enables us to become of inestimable value to the people of God. We become means by which the basic rhythm of the spiritual life can be talked about, can be shared, can be practiced by the whole of the people of God. by becoming ever more truly men of union with God, we also become the means by which God reunites the whole of his world and especially the world of men and women with himself. I hope that our time together over the next several days can be a rediscovery of some of the riches of our tradition, things which can touch and transfigure a bit our own lives, but which can also be of value to us in whatever kind of interaction we have with, particularly with laypeople. We'll look at a couple of rather straightforward, if you will, exercises that can be ways of reminding ourselves of this basic rhythm of listening to God and speaking to God, and which can be very practical ways of expressing to people

[33:22]

what it is we do and what we can suggest that they do when they ask us for a word or for a practice. And we will also, as we gather together, hopefully ask the question, what is it for each one of us that God is inviting me to bring forward to allow to be healed, to allow to be brought back into union with himself? Tomorrow we'll glance at what I think is one of the best of our traditions, glimpses of what it means to be in the dynamic struggle of relationship with God, which surprises us and offers us opportunities for change, which St. Gregory the Great gives us in the dialogues in his depiction of St. Benedict. We'll look particularly at Benedict's interaction with his sister, Scholastica, and at Benedict's experience in the tower, when he beheld the whole of creation in a single ray of light. These as symbols, as external expressions of what it is God intends to do, and is in fact doing, within our own hearts, and which he invites us to cooperate with, with a goodwill.

[34:34]

Thank you. Does anybody have any questions or observations? I must tell you, I'm thrilled at both the size and the possibility of that. If you do ask questions, and I strongly encourage you to do so, this will in fact be the first men's community in which such a thing has ever been possible. In communities of Benedictine women this often happens, but I don't have to tell you that our gender tends to be a bit more reserved about these things. Don't feel the least bit shy. I'd love to be able to say that there actually was a monastery where people did interact during retreat. But it doesn't have to happen tonight, so don't feel on the spot. I would say the thing of Lectio just occurred to me. I don't know how often I had really done Lectio, because you're so We knew we were trying to go after the text. You just don't have to text go after us at all. You just realize it happens, but almost against one's intention, not against one's will.

[35:44]

But the receptive part, allowing the text to question us, is so different from our education, race, world. True, absolutely. So, I just realized it's more difficult than I thought. I appreciate that, because I hope to look specifically at the practice of Lectio Divina, not just from the standpoint of technique, because I think, there again, when one talks about technique, one's really trying to find almost poetic or metaphorical language to describe something which is as intimate as any loving relationship, because when one's talking about Lectio Divina, one's talking about how the Beloved touches our hearts by means of the text. And it's obviously going to be very individual and very personal. But nonetheless, I think you're absolutely right. I think there are ways in which we can highlight sometimes the impediments we put up in that process, or even the kind of training we've had that sometimes makes it hard to allow that to happen.

[36:46]

Thanks. So we all want to do that very well. Not quite. The O antiphons, which came out of the O antiphons? Oh, Demesis has a set of commentaries on the symbols that are described in the O antiphons. Rudolf Jesse, I think Immanuel as well, and just a number of them, but it's not complete. It was put together in a little book, and it was intended as a book of symbols. But you know, there's so many... He had a stable of the homilies, which is in one of the father's hands. All the O-adiphobes? All the O-adiphobes. Yes, well you see. I've seen it in the brother's hand. You'd have to know my brother's hand. I believe what we have is actually a transcription of those statements from that book on symbols, but again, it lacks, I think, only two or three to be a complete set on the antiphons, so we've always presumed there must have been an original

[37:51]

set of homilies on the antiphons that those were incorporated into, but who knows? But if you have them lying around somewhere, I'd love to take them home, copies of them. There we are. Thank you.

[38:18]

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