Let's carry on with Merton's article, which I was saying to Jack, I said, we're kind of choosing it because there's so much sourness in it, you can be very negative when he wants to. And he's fighting a number of dragons, one big dragon, which isn't so much around, it may be in some enormous monasteries, I guess, some of them, but it's not our biggest dragon right now. The problem of the very heavy institution which pressures you, I don't think that's our chief problem. At one time, it was largely our problem, it was the institutional model of a monastery or the hermitage which tends to be depersonalized, so everywhere that we have a robot, it does not serve anymore. So our area of problems has changed. But at the time that he was writing, we were very much in the same paper as he was, largely. The article was chosen as a presentation of the situation of today, but it really is

[01:06]

the situation of yesterday now, in the 60s. Nevertheless, a lot of the main points, the main goals are still the same. And the way he presents two images of monasticism corresponding to two images of the Church, that's still, in a way, current, even though not precisely, perhaps, in the way that he sets it up. He loves caricature and he loves to exaggerate. The article is really too conflictual, in a way, it's as if people are in some kind of a deep freeze or in some kind of a prison and he's telling them not to be discouraged and that the light will come. He makes it sound pretty grim, and he gets pretty negative about the way that monasticism has been administered, and I think, somehow, I think unfairly so. I think he's a little bit too cynical about the motives of the people who have been running the institutions. That's a product, partly, of his experience in the Trappist monastery at this time, but

[02:09]

a product also of his gift for sarcasm, his kind of raising the sensitivity. It's a general problem in that book, Convocation and the Road of Action. It's funny, because some of his books for the last few years have all been open-ended about the monastic journey, the monastic life in San Francisco, to take it to paradise, and then here it sounds like, how do you take it? Yes. That's critical.

[03:09]

I hadn't seen that in the introduction. What page is that? I guess the pages are different. I'll have to find it, because it sounds like kind of a two-sayer. The spiritual life, and the human self, and the human being, and that you believe in self-help and self-defeat, and you have a mission. You speak of the Trappist experience. That's a very good action page, as well. That's a fun way to... Again, it's a good way to... What's going on before, what's going on after.

[04:14]

What's in place for you? Whatever it is, it doesn't take too much time. And you're working for that now. Still. Still. Stillness. Now, Merton is very much in the process, and he doesn't have the answers. He opens up a lot of questions. They may not always be exactly... They're not the ultimate questions, but they're the first questions that have to be asked. In other words, he sort of asks the opening questions, and then after those doors have been opened, then one can really look for the answers.

[05:16]

What he's really trying to do is crack out of a shell which has formed, a very thick shell, like a macadamia nut, which had formed around the monastic charism. That's why he has to hit it so hard. It's hard to hear from the inside. Which is what he's doing. That's right. When I start responding and doing it myself, I remind myself that what I'm responding to has to help me. I'm very much in need of help. I'm in need of solace. I'm in need of solace. So if I don't help, in some way, there is only going to be a mistake. And I'm not going to be able to help. If that mistake comes back, how many people are going to feel like,

[06:22]

I don't know how to say it, but I'm not going to be able to help at all. A lot of it, see, let me try to rephrase. A lot of that is the struggle between independence and formation, or between accepting, not a mold, let's say, at least a formation, accepting some kind of shape, some kind of imprint, some kind of guidance, and the spontaneity of my own inner inspiration. And that's always going to be with us. So that sort of tension or war between charism and institution, as we see it, charism is not just between what we experience internally, the impulse that we have, and the rule the institution is on, is always going to be there. In Merton's time, and from where he's writing from, there's been a kind of sclerotization, a kind of sclerosis that's happened, so the institution has really taken over. It's really hardened like a closed fist around the charism, around the personal impulse.

[07:25]

And so a lot of his fighting here is to loosen up that grip so that it will be able to pulsate, so that there can be a real living interaction between the two. Even like a heart has a contraction and an expansion, it's like those two movements. But the thing was so tight, and so there was this sclerosis that hardened so much that the heart couldn't pulsate larger than the monastery's. It was all contraction, no expansion. So that's part of it. You know, there's something about Pilate himself. One of the reasons a lot of people didn't come to Pilate, was because he didn't have a vision of what he was going to do there. He didn't have a lack of a point of perspective. The goal of Pilate was to stay there, but he also had a goal of informing the people of the city that he was going to build a monastery, so that everything would be out of the way,

[08:27]

and everyone would be able to come to Pilate. That's just not what it claims to be. If it doesn't produce love, then what good is it? Some people never wake up to that, I think. Because some people, what they're looking for really, because they're rigid, they're looking for rigidity. You take the hard person who's working on willpower and on compulsiveness, what he's looking for is something just as hard and compulsive as you. So he's not really looking for love. And if he sees it, he won't accept it. And there are a lot of people like that who come into monasteries and stay there, because that's what they want. They don't want to wake up to love. They don't want to be vulnerable. They want to do it with their muscle. And the Trappist organization was a lot like that. It was hard, I think, to love on that set-up, because it was so energetic moving forward on those tracks, as well as for other reasons.

[09:28]

Well, it goes on and on. God sort of nurtures the spark, even when the shell gets that thick, even when it seems almost dead. But somehow he seems to keep things alive so that life can generate from them afterwards, even when the tubers get very thick, when the veins get hardened and so on. It's strange. If the Father answered it, that's the way it works. I mean, something else can spark from the other ones. It's happened numerous times. You can say the same thing about the whole monastic tradition, which sometimes is like a set of hardened arteries, and then new life can spring from it. It's done many times. Okay. We'll be moving around this area as we continue here. So we got as far as page 7. I've got page 17 here. I don't know what your page number is. Okay. Because, see, the page numbers are different in the paperback edition and in the cork foundation. The copies that you have are from the cork foundation. That's why I couldn't connect to the introduction. Is that correct? Okay. Now, the basic question here is

[10:35]

between two models of monasticism, between an institutional model of monasticism and let's call the other one a personal model of monasticism. When we talk about contraction, when we talk about rigidity, when we talk about rules and observance, when we talk about authority, when we talk about the institutional model, when we talk about personal growth, when we talk about freedom, when we talk about creativity, we talk about the realization of the inner self, the individual response to the Holy Spirit. We talk about mysticism. Then, usually, we're talking about the second model, which I'll call the personal model. We could call it a hundred things. Now, I was looking for a good example of the institutional model as a counter-piece to Merton's presentation of the personal model, which is what he's continually doing, except that, like in the Seven-Story Mountain, he completely swallowed the institutional model. He swallowed it whole, he doesn't let it go no more. In his early books, he doesn't tend to be critical.

[11:35]

In that case, he does. Now, a good example of the institutional model is Abbott Marming, who was writing in the century. He was an Irishman who entered a Belgian monastery. A Belgian monastery, you can imagine. It was also an Irish practice monastery. He's not a Trappist. He treats out, he sets out, in Christ the Ideal of the Monk, which is his major book on the monastic life, and it's a beautiful book. I was nourished on this book when I read it. This was the standard doctrine of the Quorum of Brothers, and it's marvellous. It's a synthesis of Louis Saint Benedict and Saint Paul and some of Saint Thomas Aquinas. And it represents a certain stage of Catholicism, which is pre-Vatican II. Vatican II opens up to the possibility of this other model of monasticism that Merton was talking about. Now, the first part of this book of Marming is entitled A General View of the Monastic Institution. Now, if you put that on the title page

[12:38]

of a book nowadays, you could use it for, I don't know, an obelisk, or you could sit on it, but you'd never persuade anybody to read it. But this is, he wrote it in about 1920, in the twenties. Chapter four is entitled The Centervitical Society. Let me read a little bit as an example. The foundation stone of the centervitical society having been laid in the person of the abbot who remains for us in order to complete our broad outline of the Benedictine idea to examine more closely the diverse elements. See, it's a static image. It's like the image of a building or a temple. Part one. We've already remarked that there's a striking analogy between the government instituted by Saint Benedict and that of the Church. And this should in no wise astonish us in a rule coming from one in whom the Christian sense is so closely allied to the Roman genius. Now the Roman genius is talking about permitting laws and permitting government. It's an organizing genius. You know that the constitution

[13:40]

given by eternal wisdom to his Church establishes a monarchical and hierarchical form of government reflecting upon earth God's supreme monarchy in heaven and the hierarchy that remains of it. Wow. I could almost have sung that, you know, about twenty years ago. That was beautiful. But if I look at it now, I'm not quite as lyrical about it. Because the danger of that is, of course, that you divinize the institution. You see, you take a given structure. He's saying this about the Church. But say you take the monastery and you say this structure of authority and the whole thing in the monastery is a direct expression of God's will, a direct and complete expression of God's will. That's the danger, because it can be an expression of God's will. I believe it can inspire some men to write his book. I believe that the Benedictine monastery with its structure is an expression of God's will. But if you make that the totality of God's will, if you say it's the perfect expression of God's will, and especially in a concrete case, then you're in trouble. Now, here we get the difference between the Catholic idea and the Protestant idea.

[14:42]

The Catholic idea is that the Church mediates salvation to you. But there's also the direct mediation of the Holy Spirit. Now, when the direct mediation, not mediation, but direct communication of God to you by the Holy Spirit in your own heart. Now, when that's forgotten, the Catholic trap is that the institution which mediates becomes absolute Christ. So the Church is God. The Protestant principle is that there's no mediation, that nothing between you and God can communicate God to you, but only God directly through faith in the Holy Spirit, faith in grace. Now, the trap there is obvious, too. That is, if you rule out the mediation, you rule out all the things that God gives you to help you to live with him and to live with other people. Practically speaking, you rule out the Church as a substantial entity. You rule out not only authority, but also the sacraments. If you take the principle, absolutely. Now, Abbot Armin is writing from the position of a Tridentine Catholicism,

[15:45]

or the Catholicism of Vatican I, which was a militant Catholicism which identified itself in its contrast to Protestantism, okay? So, you'll find this kind of fortress idea in Armin. And he'll sometimes distinguish the Catholic idea from the Protestant idea. Of course, disfavorably for the Protestant idea. But he doesn't see the shadow in this particular image of Catholicism which is seen clearly in the right of Vatican II. At the basis of the visible body, which is his Church, Christ Jesus has placed a visible foundation, Peter and his successors. From them, all power and jurisdiction is derived. In the same way, our Blessed Father makes the entire organization of the monastery dependent on the Abbot. When the supreme evasional authority flows all the activity of the monastery into all delegation, the principal officials in the monastery, the priors, settlers, and deans are instituted by the Abbot. Not only does the first investiture of these officials depend upon the power of the Abbot,

[16:47]

but then the exorcism, and so on. The centralization of power within the hands of the Abbot is one of the most distinct ideas in the monastic Church. And then he goes on and modifies it somewhat. But you get the idea, you see. If you're not careful, you get the idea that all grace flows through the Abbot. And this is, once again, a Catholic trap. That God only comes to you through authority. That God only comes, in essence, He doesn't come out of the ground. But the Holy Spirit comes up from the ground of your heart. The Holy Spirit is indwelling in your own center. And He comes to you in all directions in everything that happens in your life. Now, Marmion knows that, of course. Knows it better than I do. And he frequently says it. But nevertheless, this image tends to become the absolutizing of the mediation of the institution, and particularly of authority within the institution, which is the Abbot. Now, Martin is writing out from under that. You see, he's writing out from under the shadow of that structure, and of that ideology. And that's why he's so good.

[17:48]

Because he's seen how far it can be carried when you really have, in addition to that Benedictine kind of absolutizing, which can be very benevolent in some Benedictine monasteries. Because the Benedictine thing also is breadth and moderation. But you take the Trappist reform and put it on top of that, and you've really got something. The Trappist reform, which centers on penitence and on work, and then put on top of that the energetic American personality and little Irish chancellors, and you've got a pretty good mixture. You can drive yourself up in the car. That's what was happening. So you've got the institutional model, and you've got the personal model. Now, we could talk about some other models, too. Where Martin, where was it? On page 16, where he talks about being able to adjust the institution in order to emphasize on one aspect. You can dream up about four other models depending on which of those drivers you select, you see, to organize monasticism around. Whether it be the liturgy,

[18:50]

because some people think of monasticism as being their special benediction for the purpose of the solemn praise of God in the liturgy. You can make the liturgy the center of your life as a benediction, because that's the way St. Benedict can seem to set it up in Israel. There's so much space to the divine office. He can seem that. And because of the Ocrist table and so on, there's a lot of traffic to the divine office. Or poverty and labor. Now, you can consider that monasticism is sharing a lot of the common man through poverty and labor. Or openness to the world. You can consider that monasticism basically is to offer a place to the world for its being recreated, for its finding love. So hospitality is everything in some way. Or Trappist rigorism. You can conceive of monasticism as a life of penitence, in other words, a life of return to God through bearing hardship, through asceticism. And you can devise other...

[19:50]

Also, you can have a purely mystical model of monasticism as well. There are a bunch of them. You can see it's not a completely simple form or rather it's simple and complex at the same time. Okay. We're on page 17. Right now it's a matter, like with Merton, it's a matter of moving to a new model, moving to a new paradigm, as they say, also secular science. I think I mentioned to you before that book of A. B. Adell is entitled Models of the Church, in which he sets forth five models. Previously, the institutional model had been almost absolutely perfect. Everybody thought of the church, the death of the church, as an institution, as a hierarchical institution. And the people that are faithful thought themselves almost as believers and outsiders, but not quite. And he points out that there are several other models that you can introduce to him, such as for one being the mystery of the communion of love. Another one being the most disturbing one. Another is the herald model, the preacher of the gospel.

[20:52]

Another one is the sacrament model, which is pretty deep, which actually combines a couple of the others. We don't need to go into that. But you can see that what is true of the church expanding into a pluralism of models is true also of the mysticism. And basically, at the bottom of this thing, you keep going deeper, you see, you keep finding deeper levels. If you consider the problem that Merton puts us in within the two models, if you go even deeper, you find the tension between Old Testament and New Testament. Because the Old Testament is an institutionalized religion, when Jesus came into it. Now, it wasn't meant to be that way. In the Patriarchs, it's not originally that way. Then with Moses and the law and the whole thing, it continued as heavier and heavier and more institutional until you get the Judaism described in the Pharisees, which is like a very heavy burden or a very heavily constructed building in some way. And here, of course, I'm being clear that we have to be in the church. And Jesus comes in and radically criticizes,

[21:53]

radically shakes and upsets that whole institution. And that's why there's dependence on it. So, instead, he says, this temple will be torn down, okay? And the temple that you've built in three days, that's my body. So you go from the temple of stone to the temple of the body, the personal temple, the temple of the human being, which is not only Jesus, but also those who believe in him, in some kind of an organic unity with those who believe in him. And that's the basic integration. But the point is that the Old Testament is never in the past completely. It's always with us. And we've always got mortality. And we've always got a bunch of natural laws that govern our very being. Even if we don't invent any laws at all and ask the Lord's church for us, we're governed by simply the law of gravity. And that's a kind of archetypal law because of its heaviness. And that means death. That means mortality. And really, there are a whole set of other laws that are subject to until the resurrection. So the Old Testament, New Testament tension lasts until we die and rise again.

[22:54]

Then we're liberated. Then the New Testament is really fully in the Testament. And until then, we're always sort of living in the New Testament and the Old Testament today. That's a point that I could argue about at length. But I think that's the bottom line of this thing he's talking about. So you see, we're never going to be created completely. But we're continually striving to be created, to transform the stone into flesh, to transform the institution into person, into love, to transform the law into love. It's a work that's continually being done. That's what Jesus did in the New Testament. He takes all the laws and the laws of God and says, if one breaks them, then love. Okay. So it's a work that has to be done again and again and again. And while we're doing it, we can't throw away the institution. That's the point. Any more than we can throw away our bodies or our faith or the place that we live. It's a question of acceptance, but we can't be rid of something that has fallen before you in the sense that it's not going to happen again.

[23:55]

That's right. We have to accept it and not be rid of it. Is there a gift for it? That's right. Okay, there are some things that have gone before us and are already sort of in the past. Okay, like things that we've experienced. There are other things that remain with us, like rules. We have to have them. I'd like to buy the body from you as the basic reality. The body with its mortality and with all the rules of government. But when you say we have to have them, perhaps, at the same time, we have to have strength for it. Definitely. At the same time, we have to have it. So, if they're made too solid, we find that always they're getting in the way of God. People sometimes disregard them. It's harder to throw them. That's right.

[24:57]

See, the church is in that crisis right now with the new COVID-19. This is what I'm concerned with. Between having the body and having a pretty complete legal structure and having more freedom. But that will always be the... The point is that there has to be a continuing turnover of law into person or law into love. It's a thing that never stops. Because somehow, strangely, we are moving forward. You see? Hmm? So both outside and inside there has to be this continual movement which the law tends to resist. Jesus does it, especially with the Sabbath. The Sabbath is kind of the archetypal law for the Jews. It sets aside the sacred space. And Jesus humanizes the Sabbath and continually violates it in order to show that the law itself has to give way to love. Okay. We still have...

[26:07]

I agree. I'm talking about solitude, first of all. The wilderness things being the core of monasticism and then there has to be community, there has to be brotherhood and so on. You can't be purely charismatic yet have rules about oneself. You have to preserve the authentic wisdom drawn from the experiences of ages when monasticism is fulfilled. Monasticism has to be more democratic than in the past. That may seem strange but there's a process going on in history that you can't deny. You can't step aside from it. Abbot will need to be a spiritual father, not a prelate. A prelate is a pontifico big wheel. A prelate is one of the bishops of the archbishop. A police chief and a corporation president all in one. He's a master, so to speak. It leaks out when you leave him even in church. More initiative, spiritual guidance rather than institutional control. All this is very difficult.

[27:07]

It's a matter of growing up. The superiors have to grow up and the monks have to grow up. It's no easier for the superiors to grow up than it is for the monks because you can remain an infant in control as well as an infant in the grave. It's an ordination. Charism and monastic vocation is one of simplicity and truth. The rules and disciplines of community life are merely created in an atmosphere of formalism and artificiality. We've had plenty of experience of that and that's why things are a little looser now because we're coming out of what Martin has kind of given. It is tragic that in the name of discipline and obedience monastic silence has been exploited as a means of keeping the monks out of touch with each other. Indeed, they're fearful and suspicious of one another. I don't know

[28:07]

whether it's really that way. It's not as if a rule of silence was ever instituted in order to keep monks out of touch with one another but that's what happens. Unfortunately, there's a kind of dovetail effect that happens where you get Saint Benedict preaching about silence and humility and it so happens that silence and humility dovetail perfectly into a certain kind of authority, a certain kind of power structure. So what happens is that human nature on its not better side takes over on both sides. On the side of authority are people who love control and love not to have to vote just to keep the status quo and keep everything in a grip. On the other side you've got the passive people who like not to have to make any decisions or who enjoy vegetating, quietly hibernating. So the two interlock perfectly. And then here you've got a virtue which interlocks with some kind of human weakness on both sides. And that's what happens. It is not deliberate. He makes it sound as if it were malicious sometimes, doesn't he? Yes. See, I think

[29:16]

it didn't start that way but with the Trappist regime it could get that way after a while. It became, could become an instrument for just keeping people quiet and avoiding trouble. It's really easy after they've been going on for a couple hundred years. It just falls into that kind of exploitation. Monastic enclosure has at times become nothing more than a means of keeping amongst ignorant of the outside world in the hope that they would become indifferent to expatriate conflicts and not create any poverty by having problems of conscience over things like war, poverty, race and evolution. Okay, now that too is a bit of an overstatement I think. It wasn't deliberate to begin with. It's there and then it becomes a very convenient way of avoiding trouble after a while. That is, it becomes invoked without fully realizing semi-consciously as a way of keeping things quiet. You just glide

[30:17]

into it and monastery drives into it. A perfect example is a book by Westfield by a man named who wrote about the life of McConnell in England. Ruth Burroughs reported it in past moments that there is you can't have the exact life of another superior who stepped up to everybody instead of an infancy. But the trouble is that the way he says this plays right into the criticisms of a lot of people who don't like monasticism at all. In other words, monasticism or Catholicism is just a pernicious thing. He's exaggerating here in a way which can be a little dangerous. He saves it for the moment. One who dedicates himself to God by vows today finds himself committed for life to a massively organized rigidly formalistic institution of existence by God. Imagine. And then you read the

[31:17]

rotational brochures and you have to go to the seminary and watch this come out of his hand. See, he's putting it on a little note. That's where he's putting And you do the same adults and of them. problem is that it's very to The institution is identified with God and becomes an end in itself, and that's where it is. You see, that's the trap of the institutional model, that's the trap of the Catholic thing. And everything has its shadow, you know, for the best things have their shadows. I guess God doesn't have any shadow, but everything else does.

[32:18]

Maybe we're God's shadow, including the Catholic Church. The better things are, the bigger shadow they have, I suppose. And the shadow is precisely the kind of self-absolutism. The shadow is what shuts out the light. In other words, it's something's own size shutting out the light, right? Hmm? Well, the shadow is a place where the light's not getting there. Right? Yeah, so you have to keep out of your own shadow. Now I've become confused, you know, I have to go back to the text. I have to go back to the text. There's no alternative but to regard this institutional life in all its detail for a gratitude. It's the only way. It's a wonder it didn't break out, you know. It's a wonder it didn't get axed or taken. About sixty-seven. Yeah, the book was published in sixty-seven.

[33:20]

He died in sixty-eight. And then he goes on about the spiritual dynamo model. He's beautiful. I've never seen the book quite so. The beautiful machine, which as long as it runs smoothly, it remains infallible. It's what's been taught. Exerting an irresistible influence on you. For the institutional benefit of the rest of you too. But if you go through this, you've got to have a very good grip on the real thing, otherwise there's no way to continue to go on. So the reaction of people very often, I think one should be just to turn this off and not listen to it at all, because either that or just say, yeah, that's it. That's all. It's all at the end. Yeah. Yeah. And then he talks about the loss of vocation and so on. Then neurotic anxiety in monasteries.

[34:20]

So I see that this article wasn't really that good a choice. I'd read it once or twice, in fact I even did my color job on it. This neurosis business. A long while ago, Sebastian Moore, who's a Benedictine, wrote an article, a famous article called Catholic Neurosis. And then another fellow, a French priest, wrote one called the Christian Neurosis. Now this is the third stage. Martin was perfecting by putting a card with the monastic neurosis. It's the ultimate consummation. However, a lot of other people are neurotic too. He talks about compensations and how the stronger people compensate by dominating and the weaker people find their power by manipulating others. I never read Peter Pan. What was his personality like? I only remember that green lady swinging on the trapeze in the advertisements for you.

[35:27]

Do you know this man? Yeah. I didn't know that he was passively dependent, did you? He's very aggressive. I don't understand. Then, yeah, he goes off on this tirade about the people who love power. And it turns out that they're quite specific people. He goes to the middle of the page, page 21. It also unfortunately happens that the adjustment, these people advocate. So he's thinking two or three guys in his own household. Because he's... Because they have a particular model of monasticism. And that's this monumental mass of basically static, concentrated monastic people. Then, the kind of leaders that he wants to find that will come from the new generation. These will be kind of guerrilla ones. Yes. Well, I think it catches the spirit of the age.

[36:34]

It's the 60s. Yeah. That's right. He's got a good dose of it. From within the prison walls, he was a kind of leader. You can almost feel the Central America. But they have to have the testament formation. Creative forces at work. Those who are fully aware of the real nature of the monastic vocation. Not just to become a cog in an institutional machine. It is a charismatic breakthrough to liberation of wealth. Martin gets wiser as he gets older, too. This is kind of surprising that he polarizes things as much as he does here. Where there is nobody around, nobody can express it to him. That he is in fact. He's dramatizing the tension between the two. And... Well, it's hard to talk about this.

[37:36]

And to talk about all the monasteries in the Church. All the institutions in the Church at once. That's in a way what he has to do. Now he talks about tradition. Tradition is on page 22 of the book. It is not passive submission to the obsessions of former generations. This is charismatic. Intense sarcasm. The obsessions of former generations. But a living ascent to a current of uninterrupted vitality. And that's pretty good. The trouble is that it's hard often to find that current of uninterrupted vitality. Where we find ourselves is between the two, sort of. There are those obsessions of former generations. Like with the Trappists. You know, the obsession for penitence and for work. Which shortened their life expectancy sometimes. You know, just two years. But on the other hand, this current of uninterrupted vitality. You can find that. It sounds like a fountain of years. And it's not quite that visible. Not quite that visible. It's hidden in the mystery of people's lives.

[38:37]

And usually you don't see communities of movement in that mentality. There are period sections. It is a living spirit marked by freedom and by a certain originality. Fidelity to tradition is not in the enunciation of our initiative. Faithful to tradition. Feministicism is nothing if not created. Now, that's hard to reconcile with the fact of having rules, externals, which were handed down from an early century. Because the individual can always be created. The community can always be created. There are certain things that cannot be basically created. And today that really seems to be true. To be created is quite a basic word. Because it's as if we find ourselves suddenly shot five centuries away from where we are. By what is happening at that time. Well, it depends on which level you talk about it.

[39:54]

It's not creativity just in the sense of superficial change. And it's not creativity in the sense that you're introducing something absolutely new. But he means it in the sense that if your life today is not a fresh response to what you need, then monasticism is not alive anymore. And he means that on the level of the individual, on the level of the community. So if our response to the situation of today is not created, if we are not able to take the same vocation, the same thing, and realize it in a fresh way today, then we're not alive as much. I think that's true. And also the fact that monasticism is meant to give growth. Growth is basically true. Because it's always being new. And always being something that you weren't before. You're still the same thing. Especially in the monastic tradition. But growth always means reaching to somewhere where you weren't yesterday. Becoming something you weren't before. Or stretching yourself in some way.

[40:57]

Now the stretching could be in an uncreative way sometimes. You can stretch yourself on a rack. You can stretch yourself in all kinds of ways. You can tie yourself in knots, and that's the kind of stretching. Or the stretching can be creative. But the track is like a stretch here, but not always in a creative way. I don't want to have my words too much. But I believe in that notion of creativity. See? It depends on how we line things up. If we line monasticism up with Christianity, and we say Christianity is basically creative because it's bringing the new world into the old world. It's bringing the new system into the old system. Then you see the creativity. I'd like to talk about that some other time in terms of the word creativity. In creative words, it's beautiful. Creativity in monastic life springs from pure love. The natural desire of man for truth and for communion.

[42:00]

First of all, truth and communion. Talk about the contemplative life or contemplative community. That's what we're talking about. So the contemplation is not just a kind of sporadic or isolated experience. But it's a breakthrough of that truth in which we are bathed. Or that truth which is what we're flowing through. That truth which is the matrix and the medium of our life. And in which we have communion. If we talk about monasticism as a wisdom tradition, that's what we mean. Truth and communion. The truth of love and communion in the certain truth which is handed down. Like the trunk of a tree. Now here again Martin is swinging into his best keys because he's talking positively about what monasticism is. And then the supernatural gift which is simply an elevation of truth and communion in the mystery of Christ. And that mystery of Christ is the key to all things.

[43:01]

He talks about tradition and that's what we have to be interested in. Then he starts throwing his rocks in the opposite direction. To restrict vocations to this or that narrow area. Now here he's talking about people who don't admit that monastic life is a valid vocation. So we have to go out there and mark it first. Be with the speaker. So he disposes of that. Down to bottom. The specific value that draws a Christian into the desert in solitude. And for him that is the monastic life. He's very different from Martin. Martin would say the monastic life is living in a monastery. In a cenobitical society. Martin says it's living in a desert. There's a deep sense that God alone suffices. Now that you can chew on to see whether you agree with that or not. I think it stands pretty well. See Panikkar talks about the monk as being the first Christian center of the center.

[44:03]

Involving the center. Now I think this is the center isn't it? The center is that which alone suffices. And the ultimate center is God. And then there's the center of our own person. And we know that if we live a simple life. We can move back somehow into that center. Which we find is sufficient. And so we can let go of a lot of other things. So the monk lets go of all kinds of things. Wife and family and business and all those things. In order to reconcile with that center. We come to this God. Which is God himself. The life of God himself. We'll be talking about that later. And then he gets to one of his key affirmations. They realize themselves to be called to a totally different mode of existence. Outside of secular categories. A. And outside of the religious establishment. B. Oh. This is the very heart of monasticism. Now that would be contested. Because in that other model of monasticism. You see monasticism sort of being an inner bastion of the church.

[45:06]

Hence a firmly established monasticism is a self-contradiction. So you can see. Remember we were. When we were talking about history. We had a conservative. Church. And here we came to. A different world. You can go to all of the kind of. Monasticism. All of it. Put the message down here. And he says it's outside of the world. It's outside of the secular category. It can be in the world physically. It can be religiously. It can be physically. He says also that it's outside of the institution of the church. Where the church is established. He's describing monasticism. Yes, very good.

[46:09]

So that's how it's affirmed. There's a benefit to monasticism. It tends to lead to an establishment. Which is, let me say. It's harmonious with the fact that. A micro tradition of the church. So that's a monasticism. It's just like the monasticism. But this way. As an institution of authority. Identity. Structure. Solidity is monasticism. But his model. His model. We see it. Maybe here in the heart of the church. Monastery. The heart of the church. We think we have it. But you have it. And it's a mythical church. It's a genuine church. Other people that say that monasticism. Belongs over here. In the world. It's a monk. In some way. He's a secular Christian. But. Even though usually. Even though here it happens. There's a little bit of monasticism.

[47:11]

There's some monks amongst them. None of the big ones. The point is. It's. Neither one of those. It's not very complicated. It's a little bit of both. But it's kind of outside the way. It offers a kind of. Prophetic. Feedback. That's what it's meant to do. It's actually a good place. We didn't know much about. A lot of what it was. More about. Just the scene itself. And I think a lot of it. Was because of. What we see. Using it as a monastery. Monastery. We were censored. We were told. We were told. And to have an infomercial. You see. So a lot of it. Might as well call it that. But. I mean. I think it's like. To get. Communication. That right. In my opinion. It's.

[48:14]

That's all I can do. I use the right. To do it. There's lots of things. That's what. Only. I reside. That's what. Physically. Traditionally. Something happens. I think it was a citizen of it, so I missed it. He probably would have wanted to have a number of experiences that he wasn't able to have. And even free to travel, I think he would have, but he lived in various monastic centers. I recall reading in the Civilian Journal that one of the other people who was in a drama company,

[49:19]

I don't know who he was, but I don't know his name. I just feel that he might have been able to do what he was trying to do. They've disputed about that since that time. You think he wrote it? No, one of his friends, I don't know, maybe not whether he wrote it, because he was able to think different ways at different times, especially in that book, he'll say things that sometimes don't seem to reconcile perfectly. One of his friends at least said that he had time to leave the monastery. And there was a strong motive, he wanted to be a hermeneuticist, that's pretty much it. But that would have been, of course, a different story. Okay. Then he gets to the core that really interests him, which is, the true creator spirit must require a love and authentic desire for God. This is the mystical dimension of all of this. Monastic vocation is one which implicitly is not explicit.

[50:20]

It seeks the experience of union with God, of contemplative. Humility and obedience is his prime, to purge his desire. But it can't take the place of that other thing. The need for spiritual liberation, the need for vision. These are kind of universal goals of monasticism. But these are systematically frustrated with institutional formalities that substitute it for them, right? This is the real problem of monastic renewal. Not a surrender to the secular city. See, that would be a rather modern term, I'll leave it there. But a recovery of the deep desire of God that draws a man to seek a totally new way of being in the world. Now, how can he say that? So is that his definition of monasticism? A totally new way of being in the world. That's the desire, is the desire for the kingdom of heaven, I suppose you'd say that. The desire to be totally transformed in God, which is, in a way, a new way of being in the world.

[51:22]

In a way, the reason for a monastery is to give people a try to do that, give them a chance to do it. Even though the monastery can never claim to be the kingdom of God, sometimes that is my temptation to do that. It's not enough just to say no to the world. And the problem of the young monk, if I'm not mistaken, is 24. In quest of renewal, looks for something to say yes to. The only thing he'd say yes to is the world. He comes up with the same message as the world itself. So monasticism has to have its yes inside of itself. Those are both, that total repudiation of the world and the yes to the world, it simply sends a person back into the world, are both mistakes, he says. And then he gets into a discussion which is a little hard for you to see precisely. The monastic life is neither worldly nor unworldly. Now, it depends on the term and the way in which you say that.

[52:24]

The monastic life is worldly. It depends on what you mean by worldly, obviously. It is not artificially otherworldly. We merely intend to be liberated and simple. But that means, when we let go, we move ourselves out of the world in a certain sense. I'd like to point out, once again, one of the problems that's involved here is that the specifically monastic things that we think of are usually renunciation and so on, which in a very real way are negatives. They're letting go at some point, okay? And if we forget the basic positives, then we're in trouble. If we forget that the more important word in those two words, monastic life, is life, as in monastic community, that it's somehow more important to be a human being and more important to be a Christian than it is to be a monk, we're going to be in trouble. If we let the specific, which in the case of the monk, is in a way negative, positive, chastity, and being a total overthrow, negative, in a way,

[53:25]

because obviously they're not in another sense, but if we let that specifically monastic thing, monastic renunciation predominate over the positivity of life, then we're going to be in trouble. And we'll find that psychologically, that it takes over. It takes over. Yeah. Except... Except when you replace those things which are in our mind. That's what it says. Except when you replace those things which are in our mind. That's what it says. You've got to find... Except the place... You've got to find your positive ground in some way, in which this will be built. Knowledge is simply a being for creation.

[54:26]

Let me put it this way. Here's monasticism. And it can look a little negative, if you want to look at it, because it's renunciation. Monastic renunciation. Now, this is built on top of Christianity. What's Christianity about? Well, by God, Christianity is a philosophy. Right. It's possible. It's possible, so... It's common. I won't put a fire in the reservation, but... Well, that's built certainly... What are we going to do? I think it's like the creation. The creation finally is a big part of it. And part of the

[55:28]

creation comes from the word. That's all for crude. But in a sense, you can have a And that's part of the Christianity. See, here's the crude old Judaism, which comes along with marriage, and family, and youth, and the cross, and all that stuff. And Christianity comes along with the cross, and purifies the world. And then there are other things that come along with the cross. But everything that turns into the negative, which we somehow forget that there's a presence of the cross. I don't know how to put that right, but there's a very important principle there. Because it's essentially because Christianity, and religious life, and the essence of Christianity, are seen as only the cross, as only the cross.

[56:28]

As if the whole revelation of the cross was only the cross. And it's not because it's only the cross, it's because it's all one big part of it. It's part of one thing. Do you read the Bible like Christians do? Huh? Do you read the Bible like Christians do? No, does that sound like that? No. Oh, I was going to go over it. The negativity. The negativity. And most of the people in the secular world see it that way. It's the cross, and it's guilt, and it's sin, and it's punishment. So the most important thing in the world is that we recover that positive, recover that upward power today. And without

[57:32]

recovering the earth and the creation, I don't think we can do it. That's what your analysis is out there. Because you've got that. It hasn't left the ground yet. But as soon as we get focused on a specific thing, it's another form of that isolation thing by which my gifts, my thing is the most important thing in the world, you know, the artist trip and so on. It's another form of that, but it's much more general and primitive. It creeps in also with religion. Okay, I wanted to finish this today, so I guess we can probably let go there. He finally addresses himself after going into one of his favourite ways of looking at the monastic life, that liberation into the lucid and terrible darkness of the contemplation of no tempting experience and no rationalisation of contemplation. He can be so sarcastic. He's all broken glass and razor blades in one place and then here, of course, his poetry, his nectar comes pouring out out of his article. And then he speaks a word to the monks, he

[58:39]

says, do not be discouraged. Be patient, do not be afraid, hold on. Okay, next time, I would like to go on to that article by Luke. And I think there is a kind of continuity here between what we've been talking about now and that, because we are trying to find our ground. And the ground really is the world, and even creation comes out of the world. And if we have a central practice in our monastic life, the monastic lecture, it sounds like some kind of a head trick or some kind of a scholarly ivory tower or something like that. It's not that, it's another finding of ground. And finding the tradition that Martin was talking about, which is not only monastic tradition, it's got to be the broader tradition, the tradition of simply what God has spoken. So, okay, we'll Things, you know, it's not likely to change the situation, because his father knows when

[60:15]

he died, but apparently he's helped his mother as much as he can. Maybe his sister is going to help him. Did you say anything about his sister? I didn't hear. I'm going to make a check with the man who is going to make a note of my sister. Oh, yes. And he hasn't had any, but I noticed him over at the guest house. Oh. It's on the left side. Can you take my notes? Sure, go ahead.

[60:55]

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