To quickly, quickly this time, review that business of commitment, I'll sum it all up and leave it there, leave it there, finish. The big question is how can one make a permanent commitment to a specific order of community? The question that we turn over and over again. The other question is should I make a permanent commitment and when can one withdraw from a commitment, sort of depend upon that basic one. And the various ways of thinking of it that seem to be most cogent to me, one of them is simply the impulse or the desire to make an unconditional commitment. One thinks of it in terms of permanency but he thinks of it first of all in terms of making a hundred percent response just as the people who come to Jesus in the gospel and they somehow want to give their lives to God. So we look for a way to give our life to God and the way which makes sense is in terms of permanency. That's one of the few ways that we have of expressing the absoluteness with which one

[01:02]

wants to commit himself to God. Then there's the historical viewpoint and this is important because it's not as if we could start afresh. We could start from scratch and say well what would we do, you know, if we were doing this whole thing over again how would we do it? We have a tendency to think of it that way in the 20th century from where we come from that sort of you could do it anyway. But how has it been done? We have to ask ourselves that because remember that what we're talking about is a tradition. We didn't think of the Christian monastic life first, somebody else thought of it. We didn't think of it first. So what we're doing is somehow we're trying to relate to a tradition. If we're talking about monastic life at all we're not talking about it according to our own idea. In other words we become called to something which pre-exists. That's a stupid thought but it's kind of important. We are called to something which exists before we're called to it. So that means that the forms in which it already exists have something to say to us. Now this was taken for granted by everybody up to a little while ago, I think, you know,

[02:03]

up to 30 years ago. But now it becomes much more a matter of question as commitment comes into question. But the fact is that we have to look at the forms in which the monastic life has existed. Now monks have made permanent commitments from the start even though they expressed them in different forms and even though they had different forms of community or laura or whatever, different forms of attachment. But the permanence was always there, at least in the Christian tradition. And then we look for a theological reason for why that's true in the Christian tradition more than in other traditions. And we can come up with some theological reasons. The deepest one for me being the fact that God has made an unconditional commitment of himself. In other words, in Rahner's terms, the total commitment of the Christian religious or monastic life is an attempt to respond to God's total, final, once-for-all commitment of himself. You see, there's self-communication in Jesus and in the gift of the Spirit. One gift calls for another equivalent gift, in the poor sense in which we can make an

[03:03]

equivalent gift, which is to give not a hundred percent of God but a hundred percent of ourselves. Okay, and that's the response to God's gift of the Spirit which one experiences in the monastic vocation. Let me read that, if I've got it with me, that astonishing thing that Hauser says here in that article on the theological foundations of the religious life. He says, in the early days the monks never thought that they were adjoining some kind of a mystical vocation on top of the Christian vocation. He says there's nothing about monastic vocation in the antique documents, in the early documents. I think if you look in Cassian, you know you find something in that one of the three renunciations, remember, conference three, he talks about different kinds of vocation. And he says a man can be called to the monastic life. But I think what Hauser is talking about is a sense of a specific monastic vocation. These people over here are called to the monastic life. They have that vocation and then everybody else is just called to be a regular Christian. Listen to him as he goes on.

[04:04]

Everybody supposes tacitly, and this is a sign of a firm and tranquil conviction, that anybody could make himself a monk as long as he was free before the civil law. He wasn't married or something. And as long as he was in control of himself. As long as he was free in a psychological or any other way. Let us say it clearly. The ascetics of the first generations simply wanted to be or to become true Christians. They believed to be called to sanctity in force of their baptism. That takes a little digesting. And it can be a very unpalatable sentence, and yet it's a liberating sentence in the end. Because it doesn't tell us that the monastic life has nothing else than simple Christian life in the world. It tells us that the monastic life somehow is in the center of the Christian life. And that it's simply a commitment to, you know, to living and to, I don't know,

[05:06]

to make a greater, to make a special effort. A special commitment to living. It seems not, because we don't find anything about it. Except that they refer very much to the Old Testament, right? And of course to the New Testament too. But an awful lot to the Old Testament. To the prophets and to the holy men of the Old Testament. Even the names that they choose, you know. So there should be evidence that they look to an earlier pattern. We don't even know that they look to any Essene pattern or anything like that, you know, because we don't have any documentation of it. At least not that I know of. Somebody may have turned something up. Who is this writing? Oh yes, yeah, sure.

[06:09]

Well that's traditional, you know. They started doing that way back. Especially in the Middle Ages they did that. So those are, but remember that he's not one of the Desert Fathers doing that. And yet I think the Desert Fathers referred themselves back to the same people. He started out, Moses is the most important one, right? He goes way back. Moses, and then the prophets, and then finally John the Baptist, and then the 40 days of Jesus in the desert. Yeah, he does talk about the philosophers. He says if the pagan philosophers could do that much, then we should do so much more. That kind of argument. That's true. And the early monks, you find them talking about philosophers now and then. But it's as if their thing is a totally different thing, you know. They say, because remember the philosopher comes to the monks and say, you do that, and we do that, and you do that, and we do that, and you do that, and we do that too, what do you do that we don't do? And they say we keep watching over our thoughts, and we don't get mad at one another or something like that. I forget what it is. There's that one, you know. There are a couple of things like that.

[07:13]

But you get the idea that the monastic thing is totally, has arisen totally independent of those other things. And then find certain similarities, you see. That they're living in the same way. But it's an independent impulse. It's an impulse of the Holy Spirit that sends this whole wave of people out there. This is an article in Italian which is in Vita Monastica way back in 1959. Entitled, The Theological Foundations of the Religious Life. It's a magnificent article. It's like a Magna Carta for Christian monasticism. How's there? This man who is professor of Oriental theology over in Rome. He wrote that book you're reading. No, he lived in Rome for many years. So he gave conferences in Italian. And this was a talk that he gave, you see. But everything else I've seen of his is in French or a little bit translated. This should get translated.

[08:15]

We should publish it into Italian. This was before Vatican II. He's got the spirit of Vatican II. But also the authentic spirit of Christian theology and monasticism. He's a Jesuit. Okay, so we have to look at things from a historical point of view. And the monastic tradition, we're talking about attaching ourselves to an existing tradition. Not just starting out all by ourselves. Even if we were starting out by ourselves, somehow we'd be starting in a tradition. Because this thing has happened before. We realize that what happens in our own hearts when we get a vocation has happened before to others. And then we start looking for other people to whom it has also happened. Because we don't know how to do it. And so we try to attach ourselves in some way to a living tradition. And then we look at the forms in which the monastic life has existed in history, in this tradition. And we find that they are forms of permanent commitment in Christian monasticism. Now, that comes first, and then the explanations come afterwards.

[09:16]

Because those monks didn't have all this theological explanation. They didn't start out with a theology saying that God has done this, and therefore we should do this. Not exactly. I think that the impulse came first, and the explanations came afterwards. And sometimes the explanations fall far short of the power and authenticity, the significance of the impulse itself. And then we need a... Which is not to say that you can't live monasticism in another way, that there can't be a temporary monasticism, or a monasticism with a more mobile expression. It's not to say that. It's only to say that this is what exists in the tradition. And after all, tradition means a lot in our church. I mean, the church is tradition, right? The church is tradition, which also is living, and therefore has a possibility of change. Okay, which arise at different times. Okay, the Franciscans come along about the 12th century,

[10:17]

and Little Brothers of Jesus in the 20th century. And remember that the Franciscans make a permanent commitment. I'm not just talking about local stability with the whole commitment. They make solemn vows, same as we do. Also, the Little Brothers, I don't know what kind of commitment they make. They're mobile, but I think they make a permanent commitment. In addition to what they make to their community, I think, because the thing to the community must be stronger. Then probably they can be moved. Okay, and then we need a concrete form for this complete handing over of ourselves to God. A complete handing over, which is the grace and the desire of a monastic vocation. It's as if the Holy Spirit gives you, passes on God's power of self-communication,

[11:18]

God's power of self-gift. He passes on that mobility. And it's strange that in passing on that freedom and that will to sort of move out of one's skin into transcendence, and to give oneself, which is an impulse of love, that then it looks for a concrete form in which to do it. Why? Because we've got a body, and because we live in this world. Because we live in the flesh, in the body, and because the whole incarnation economy, and then the death and resurrection of Jesus depends upon that, and passes through that needle's eye. So we look for a concrete situation, a sacramental situation in which to do that. That's sort of implicit in the whole thing, in the way that we're built, the way we're made. Otherwise we don't seem to be conforming to the rules of the game. And there's a death involved which can't ordinarily be gone through without an unconditional commitment. If there's any condition there, we're going to pull back. If there's any loopholes, then we will use it at a certain point, because it becomes desperate at a certain point, it becomes a matter of life and death. You can take a couple of viewpoints.

[12:23]

One viewpoint is to think of this self-donation to God in view of this death and resurrection which has to take place. The other viewpoint is thinking of attaching oneself to a tradition, a sapiential tradition, a wisdom tradition. If you read Boyer's book, The Meaning of the Monastic Life, he talks about monasticism as a wisdom tradition. Now this is much more clear sometimes in non-Christian monastic traditions than it is in our own, because we don't tend to think of our own. So it gets into so many other things. We might call it a mystical tradition, or a spiritual tradition, or an ascetical tradition, or a tradition of a life of prayer, contemplative tradition, but we don't ordinarily think in terms of wisdom. I think we should, though. Wisdom in two senses, wisdom in the contemplative sense and wisdom in the practical sense. And a lot of the young people, one of the young people that go to the gurus, you know, like the Eastern trip, they're looking for a wisdom tradition. They've got this hunger in the spirit for wisdom, and they are looking for a living tradition

[13:23]

in which they can find a pound of wisdom. They've tasted it and they're looking for the pound, as it were. We can talk about wisdom, we can also talk about freedom, and four or five other words which overlap with it. That's the one that I want to mention now, because that's connected very much with the tradition. And for us it's connected with the Jewish tradition of the word of God, which is our wisdom, and then which becomes expressed in the New Testament with the gift of the spirit and a special contemplative depth that that gives. And then the reality of the trinity in man, and then the monastic desert movement, which is a particular wisdom tradition of a particularly, what would you call it, invisible kind. Because the Desert Fathers are wise men of a most peculiar kind, with none of the flash of the Zen Roshis, for instance, who are, you know, there's very little mystique about them. They're very plain people, and yet they're teachers of wisdom, these Desert Fathers, of a totally invisible wisdom, a totally incarnate wisdom, wisdom in the spirit,

[14:24]

which looks like foolishness very well. Gary. Is there a wisdom tradition in North America which is the Eastern Gnostics? Oh yes, I think so. You say Gnostic or wisdom tradition, okay? Gnosis or Sapientia, one or the other, or Sophia. Whereas in the West it tends to get lost, it tends to branch out into something else. The Benedictine tradition doesn't look much like a wisdom tradition. And it doesn't look all that contemplative, often. It spreads out into all kinds of other things. But there's always a contemplative current in it. The Cistercian current tended to be contemplative, tended to be a wisdom tradition. If you read Saint Bernard, you know, he's a wisdom teacher. This may be kind of a far-fetched comparison, but it almost seems like there's a difference between the so-called Sapientia, either there's a Benedictine Gnosticism, and there is a Gnostic tradition, which is the Eastern Gnosticism. Yeah, there are rough comparisons and analogies like that which are valid. Or the Carthusians, for instance, would compare it to a more contemplative,

[15:29]

more contemplative current. I see it sort of like the same thing, like sitting is enlightenment. Yes, yes. You can say the Benedictines would say working is prayer. Okay, they say life is prayer or work is prayer. It's a kind of Catholic thing, okay? Catholic thing which tends to diffuse contemplation into life. With the enormous possibility of freedom there, and of a kind of a very true and deep and free spirituality, but the danger of just losing the contemplation into life. It's frequently happening nowadays. Whereas the way of keeping contemplation protected, separated from life, the hesychast way, is typically Eastern. That's a wisdom tradition, okay, a Gnostic tradition. The other comparison that comes to mind in non-Christian religions is the two currents of Buddhism, the Hinayana and the Mahayana. Because the Hinayana is very much like Eastern orthodoxy, and the Mahayana, the broader vehicle, is like Catholicism. And then later on you see how in the West you get into Protestantism,

[16:31]

and the wisdom thing dries up completely almost, and you're left with a kind of thin layer of knowledge which doesn't somehow penetrate into those depths. It's lost that depth of mission, and now it's only theology without the Gnostic, or wisdom, or depth dimension to it. And that's typical of our time, and also of the theology of our time. I've been unclear about what you mean by the term wisdom, or the spirit of wisdom. It's not necessarily academic or intellectual. No, it is certainly not academic, okay. Intellectual, there's a word that needs to be discussed, okay, because intellect meant something else in the time of the Fathers, in the time of St. Thomas than it does to us. To us, intellectual means somebody that moves around a lot in his head, who thinks a lot, okay, it's that discursive, rational mind that's working.

[17:34]

Maybe like a computer, or maybe more subtle and so on, maybe more humanistic, but at any rate it's in the head, right, that intellect. But the intellect for the Fathers and for St. Thomas is not in the head, it's that noose of the Greeks, which is really the spirit, which is like the heart. Wisdom has more to do with the heart. Yeah, wisdom pertains directly to that deep intellect, the intuitive or contemplative intellect, which is almost synonymous with the heart. In some way it's at the same level as the heart, okay. And wisdom, you talk of wisdom as being a loving knowledge, okay, either a loving knowledge or a contemplative love, one or the other, because it's the point where the two of them come together, knowledge and love. Okay, I think that that's a notion of the monastic life which should be revived in our time. It's absolutely got to be, the whole thing about wisdom. And then with the other dimension that I mentioned last time, which is a feminine dimension, the feminine mystical dimension of the wisdom tradition, Lady Wisdom, Agni Sophia,

[18:38]

as being something related to the Holy Spirit and also to the notion of glory we've seen, okay. Very important for the monastic life. And in our masculine, rational, Western way of thinking, even about the monastic life, we've lost that, we've pushed it aside, and so our monastic life has tended to dry up and become an asceticism, a moralism, or a discipline of prayer, or a theology also. But without that integrity, that wholeness, and without that depth, and without that savour, without that savour and glow that's in the wisdom, spirit, glory. Okay, now this is a matter really to get back to the Trinitarian pattern again, into which we should fit it at the end, I think. The monastic vocation and the response to it is a matter of handing oneself over to the Father, in a way, all right, in imitation of Jesus in some way. Trying to pass through the Passover of Jesus, the Paschal Mystery of Jesus,

[19:42]

his death and resurrection, putting oneself into the hands of the Father in a sacramental way by submitting oneself in some way to the tradition of the Fathers, you see, because the monastic tradition is always spoken of in terms of the Fathers. It's a patristic tradition, the tradition of the Fathers, and so Benedict took over the Holy Fathers and the whole deal. And then the abbot comes, of course, in the prologue, of course, as being the Father. So it's a sacramental submission to the Father to pass through the Passover of Jesus, his death and resurrection, in order what? In order to obtain the Spirit, in order to obtain the fullness of the Spirit, which is that glory which Christ has been given, you see, by the Father. And that's how it fits into the Trinity, which everything that we theologize about has to fit into ultimately. Let me read the end of the prologue of the Will of Saint Benedict, which leads us up to that point, I believe. I hope this translation is okay.

[20:53]

To conclude, I am to erect a school for beginners in the service of the Lord. Okay, a school for beginners. Now, this is... Yeah, this translation is a little strange. It's the only one I have. Remember, this whole notion of a school of the Lord's service and the wisdom tradition come together, which I hope to establish on laws not too difficult to grieve us. As we advance in the practices of religion and in faith, the heart insensibly opens and enlarges through the wonderful sweetness of his love, and we run in the way of God's commandments. If then we keep close to our school and the doctrine we learn in it and persevere in the monastery till death, we shall share by patience in the passion of Christ and hereafter deserve to be united with him in his kingdom. Amen. The kingdom is the Holy Spirit. The kingdom is the full gift of the Spirit. And this is already anticipated in his life. Saint Benedict talks about it there as if you simply lived in a monastery until death and then you could hope for a blessed eternity in heaven, okay?

[21:57]

But somehow the monk hopes to participate that kingdom, that fullness of the Spirit, or that fullness of holy wisdom, if you want to call it that, wisdom which is connatural with glory, which blossoms, which matures and expands into glory, even in this life. And therefore he submits to this death prematurely. As Raner says, asceticism is a premature acceptance of your death and a little of stallness. And if you accept your death prematurely, you can hope to experience your resurrection before time. Awesome. Saint Benedict? It's hard to tell from the rule, you know, because most of these rules set things down with a certain rigidity and then you know that there are exceptions

[22:58]

from certain things that are said here, like about silence in the rule, you know. You think that the monks almost never talked until he says at a certain place, well, during Lent they should talk less, joke less. Similarly, you think it's good for the monks to be inside all the time So the historians guess about those things and write about them and study them. I don't know much about that. For instance, to be able to say how it was in Saint Benedict's time, I just don't know. Certainly the monastic life had nothing of the breadth then that it has now because life and society were separated in this way. And yet they had a lot of things inside the monastery, you see. The monastery was a little city, according to Saint Benedict. And then remember the criteria for the commitment. Criteria not only in the beginning, but criteria throughout. But actually somehow it's the same criterion always.

[23:58]

The same criterion which is the criterion for the validity of a vocation to the monastic life is also a criterion for the commitment afterwards, whether it's bearing its fruit or not. And that's that communion that Hoy was talking about, which he also called indwelling, which is being in love, or which we could express in terms simply, I think, of the experience of the Spirit, the experience of baptism, perhaps with a contemplative slant to it. But that's it, basically. If we acquire somehow the presence of the Spirit, if we walk towards the fullness of the Spirit in this life, then it's validating itself. But to do that, in the end, we may have to walk through many dark and twisting ways. Hoy didn't write particularly about the monastic life, but what he says is immediately applicable to the monastic life because that's in the centre of the other kinds of vocation that he's talking about,

[24:59]

with the exception of the married vocation. The Book of the Apostles was anybody who wanted to be a monk or to be a priest? Yes, that's what I was reading before. Now, what does that mean, though? It means that you've got the gift, presumably, but that the monastic vocation is not a special category to which you have to be called to especially, but it means that you've got a strong vocation to be a Christian and not in such a way that precludes this. And he's talking about the way that they thought, but I think it's largely true. I think it's largely true. He didn't say the way that they thought. No. They think of it in these terms. You've got a vocation to be a carnalite, you've got a vocation to be a Baptist, you've got a vocation to be a priest and so on. Very specific kind of thing. Now, priestly vocation, that's one thing that's probably more true. It's a special charism in the Church. The monastic thing, I'm not so sure, because of its centrality in the Christian life.

[26:00]

It's very difficult, it's kind of like that wave particle thing in physics, as to how much it depends simply on your desire, your determination to live the Christian life to its full, and how much it depends on the special gift of God. The two somehow work together, and the more we say about one, the less we know about the other. The more we push the other out of the way, it's almost impossible. It is impossible to understand one another. I think that you do, but what kind of a call is it? I don't think it's a very specific call. The Lord touches somebody very strongly and says, I want you to seek me, or I want you to obey me. And then the person runs off and he starts looking for a place to do it, you know, a community or something. But who's to say that God calls him specifically and absolutely to that one particular place where he winds up? I think it's a kind of general thing where God says,

[27:03]

I want you to serve me, I want you to be very close to me, I want you to give yourself entirely to me. And then somehow it's left up to the development of that personal history as to how exactly that's to be done. Because God is there all the time. I don't think God right at the outset says, you're going to be this, you know. At this point, would you say that the form of the call fits into, eventually starts to invoke all of your abilities and tendencies and things that have a lot to do with where you feel at that moment? Sure, yeah. Now, with all of this, when we talk about these things, it's always like talking about one side of everything. And the Lord can always, he can simply say, I want you here at a certain point, too. He can give a grace in a particular place for a particular action or a particular commitment, which also, I don't know that this is the rule. Very often I think it's a question of a person saying,

[28:08]

well, this is the best way that I can serve God, and he does want me to make a commitment, you see. I don't have to make it here, but this is the best place I can find to make it and so on. But that interaction of his grace and our free self-determination is impossible to pry those apart. I think this morning, when she asked us, she said, you know, I thought that I was a monk or something, but I didn't finish. She was a monk in an earlier existence. And she said she had such an attraction for the commitment of her life, you know, with the devotion to God. And so I said, well, I never wanted to do that. Everybody has this phenomenal attraction to God inside, you know, it's something built in, yes. The inner monk. The inner monk. And the work for most people is coming out,

[29:09]

but everybody has this attraction to God. And it also is meant for us to be reincarnated. Some people try to talk about it in terms of reincarnation, but you don't have to jump to that. It's just a vocation. There can be another vocation inside a given vocation. I mean, a person can be married, then there can be a vocation to a deep life of prayer with God, you know, a vocation to a kind of monastic life within married life. It's an inner monastic life. It just doesn't have all the properties of a monastic life. This is Anthony Bloom. This article is about my monastic life and Cistercian studies by Anthony Bloom. A lot of you have read this already. Victor's passed it around before then. He talks about two things in here which I wanted to refer to from it. One is the question of vocation. The other is the question of stability. Maybe I'll just talk about the vocation thing and then let it go. But this is Bloom talking about vocation and we can compare it with what Hauser was saying.

[30:11]

The first thing in the monastic life is a call, a vocation. A vocation is something that does not depend on us. The answer depends on us, but the call is an act of God. And if God calls, one can't say to him, Lord, the circumstances of life today are such that I cannot carry out what you call me to do. A call from God is a certitude that what he calls us to do is possible. The only question is how. We three who felt ourselves called to a life of evangelical renunciation never asked ourselves whether it was possible. We asked ourselves how God willed us to carry that vocation out. They wanted to form a community, but this is back in wartime, and it wasn't even possible for them. There's a call which is definite, which asks you to move forward. To come close to God, to respond, to give yourself to God. And then there's an interaction somehow of his grace with your freedom,

[31:13]

with your originality, with your courage, whatever you want to call it, to discover that way, you know. And in the end, it's impossible to say, did he do it, did you do it, who did it? It's a hundred percent his and a hundred percent yours. Sometimes theologians like grace very well. He talks about it again here. I've told you this story firstly to make you understand that the monastic vocation is an act of God which there is no escaping. It seems like completely the opposite of what House Harris said. There is no vocation problem in the sense that one cannot ask oneself, is my vocation legitimate? One can only ask oneself, has God called me? There is no external criterion that can make anyone say that I have no right to be a contemplative if I'm conscious that God has ordained me to contemplation. Of course, be a contemplative doesn't mean necessarily live in a monastic community. This is something very important in our times when there are community crises of vocation.

[32:14]

There will always be personal vocation crises, but we have the right to be contemplatives of anything else that God has commanded us to be. And no human judgment can forbid us. He's talking as if there were an inner certitude that God has called one to the monastic life. An inner certitude that God has called someone. Can you have that? You can have an inner experience of God which says, I want you at least, I want you to live on the level of this inner experience. I want you to live on the level of this grace that I have given you, okay? Now, he may not tell you how you're going to do that, but that particular grace may itself suggest, may point in a particular direction. And at that point, one can say, yes, I have received a vocation from God, absolutely, I know that. Yet, I don't know the details, you know, of exactly what kind of vocation it is. Or maybe he's pretty sure that it's a monastic vocation because there's no other indication, no other marker on it. And he doesn't know what kind, doesn't know what communion.

[33:16]

At a certain point, our act of will and the act of God just are superimposed. Our desire for the vocation. But there has to be an experience there, really. The desire and the experience somehow are one thing as well. If it's just our desire, if it just comes from us, then it ain't there. Okay, that's enough about that. Unless there are some questions, we'll go on with this next chapter, which is an attempt to synthesize what he's been saying about the vows. Let's follow Roberts for a bit and then make some comments on his treatment. Chapter 7, Spirituality and Profession, starts on page 123.

[34:32]

Now he says, we've looked through all these commitments and there's a little dissatisfaction perhaps because we haven't got the picture together and so he wants to take a more synthetic approach. He says, the vows form a unity and they circle around a central axis. Somehow there's something that runs down the middle that holds them all together. And so now he wants to study that. The present chapter attempts to explain Benedictine Cistercian spirituality in terms of the specific spiritual means or methods which characterize it. It is true that there are other, perhaps even more important elements of monastic spirituality, the gospel values, the lifestyle, the fundamental religious insight, or the basic experience, but what he wants to talk about now is the methods. And then he talks about spiritual methods. And this is a big problem now in Christian monasticism, because this thing we've experienced so often that people who come to the monastery,

[35:37]

or people who come to Christianity, find themselves very frustrated, young people especially, because they want to be told something that they can do. And nobody seems to know what to tell them that they can do that is going to get them where they want to go. Now, people give them words, but they don't give them a method. They don't give them a practice. They don't set them on a practical, concrete, physical path, something physical they can do very well. We have a few things, like the Jesus prayer, that I think that people can be given. But in general... Yeah, the Orthodox tend to have a lot more confidence in a set pattern that's laid down there, you know. You give somebody this, you do this, and you'll get where you're going. But Catholics in the West, we don't have that much confidence in one pattern, because there's such diversity in the Church, for one thing. So much so, because I've carried the Desert Fathers, there just doesn't seem to be a pattern.

[36:41]

If you look at the Desert Fathers, you see a great freedom. In other words, one fellow will come up and say, Father, tell me what I must do to be saved. And you'll tell him, go and sit in a cell. And another one, he'll tell, go and do something else, you know. There's a lot of variety. They seem to be able to intuit what the person needs. And sometimes they'll do one thing for a time and then do another thing. They'll take up one practice for a year and work on one virtue or work on one type of prayer or one type of self-restraint, and then they'll turn to something else. And prayer. Oh, you mean the different ways of prayer? Isaac. Yeah, he ends up with something that's a lot like the Jesus prayer.

[37:45]

Oh, God, come to my assistance. That's his panacea. That's his prayer for every occasion and to acquire continual prayer. At a certain point, a person can become impatient with subjecting himself to a spiritual method, too. There's a time in your life when you want methods, and there's a time in your life when you're tired of methods. And that can make a bit of a jumble within a community, among the different people. In Bloom's article about his monastic life, I was going to say something about stability. It turns out the first thing that they're looking for is stability of a certain kind. They don't know what kind of stability. To find that centeredness in themselves, that's what they're looking for. They see that as a kind of goal. So an inner stability is really what they're looking for. And they're looking for ways in which to discover this inner stability.

[38:50]

And they come across things like obedience and poverty and chastity, of course. But it's as if that's the goal that they set before themselves. Whereas, for Gershon, it's purity of heart. Remember that place in Loof's book where he talks about this problem. He's talking about it in connection with prayer, but it's true all around the horizon. It's in the first chapter of his book. And the time passed, and not very long ago at that. The church's structures formed a solid edifice. There was nothing ambiguous about the rules and injunctions. Sometimes we felt we were well rid of the need to do our own thinking. This is true of methods, too. A while ago, there was no doubt about praying as such.

[39:51]

Prayer was then one practice, one exercise among the rest, prescribed and sometimes dished up according to rule like other spiritual exercises. There were prayer methods in plenty. In fact, there were so many that people were flooded with them. He had books and books on methods of prayer. You know, he had one book with about ten different traditions or methods of prayer, the French tradition and the Spanish tradition and so on. And you take your choice. But how can you do that with conviction? How can you sort of pick up a recipe book like that and accept one of those things with conviction? You've got to feel somehow that the thing is for you. It's got to have a kind of uniqueness about it. Otherwise, you can't commit yourself to it, really, if you get it out of the catalogue. But nowadays, everything has suddenly become quite different. No longer are we able to say whether we're still engaged in prayer or even whether we still believe in the possibility of prayer. He's really getting kind of hysterical here in his attempt to put himself in the place of... He doesn't mean it, you know. He's very happy with his own prayer.

[40:53]

In the old days, prayer may have been far too easy. Now it's all of a sudden become unspeakably difficult and so on. The set phrases, methods, instructions, including the rubrics attached to every conceivable form of prayer that were invoked some 30 years ago have fallen into disuse, are ignored or at any rate have been fundamentally altered, in certain cases completely replaced even by something else. Prayers are no longer real though. There's a prevailing attitude of distrust towards set prayers tacked on from outside and so on. The truth is we are at our wit's end. Remember this. We've lost the sense of prayer altogether. We're caught in a blind alley of an illusion. Many of us have touched zero point. Then he says, thank God for now we can make a new start. As a matter of fact though, I think Luf is very methodical in his monastic life. I think he's very devoted to the traditional practices of monasticism in his own Trappist taboo. And he's a trainer of monks, a real spiritual father.

[41:56]

I believe very traditional, but very intelligent about the tradition at the same time. So he's there expressing a sort of subjective panic, which is not really where he is at the time, because then he sets out to write a book about how to pray. This whole thing about methods, it's good to think about it a bit, because we want methods and yet at the same time we don't want methods. We want methods and at the same time we don't want anything that's going to get between us and the gold, okay? A method is very apt to become an Old Testament. A method, if you're already where you're going in a sense, you don't want to then put a long road in between yourself and where you're going. And yet we know where we're going and we're not where we're going. And so we need a method to get deeper into that presence that's already with us. But there's a kind of knowledge, there's an instinctive knowledge today that you don't have to build an enormous ladder to get to God and somehow that God is present before

[42:59]

you begin. And a lot of things like that, that a lot of the methods of the past somehow were an Old Testament, which somehow is not necessary. And yet there is a need for a method. So that's another paradox. I don't want to talk too much about it but just to leave it there, maybe we can return to it later. The impatience with any kind of thing that inserts itself between you and God and at the same time the need that we have for a discipline and for a method. Remember how Luther at the time of the Reformation tended to throw out monastic life along with any other way of works, way of gaining merit before God, a way of climbing up to God, putting anything between you and God. And that's got two sides to it if you think about it. One side is perfectly right, you know, nothing should be put between... For instance, you put the monastic life between people and God, the religious life between people and God, and then the people who are not religious or monks begin to think that

[44:02]

they can't get to God. The contemplation, the experience of God, the presence of God, depth of prayer is something for those special people inside the monastery. And that's not true. So he's right in that sense. And when the church gets in between God and the individual person, the individual Christian, then something's wrong, something has to be corrected. That's what Tillich calls the Protestant principle, is that there's nothing in between you and God that can really give God to you. And yet, on the other hand, that is really God, the destruction of idols. On the other hand, the baby gets thrown out with the death world. On the other hand, the church gets thrown out, but more in our own sector. What do you find after 400 years or 500 years of domination of the Protestant tradition? You find a lack of depth. You find that somehow there's been a failure to deepen that presence, or even to keep that

[45:05]

presence, or to be able to rediscover that initial experience of the Spirit, and to allow it to mature and blossom by virtue of not being willing to accept those means, and being willing to accept the monastic discipline and things like that. So those traditions have been lost. And they've largely dried up in the Catholic Church, too, in the same way. It's as if we can't go into a method anymore like children, expecting that after we go through this tunnel we're going to come out of the other end, and that's going to be enlightening. Somehow, we're not able to play games anymore. And yet, at the same time, we need methods. But they have to be kept strictly relative, strictly in place, strictly subordinate to sort of the realization of God that's already in some way there, that you already have before

[46:06]

you begin. You don't have an experience of God, for instance, in baptism, and then sort of push it aside in order to go into some dark tunnel, in order to find God more deeply. And actually, ultimately, the methods have to give way to something else. The methods have to give way to God's own disciplining of you. Just as every other kind of thought, every other kind of philosophy eventually has to give way to the Word of God, all right, has to give way to the framework, the context and the truth that's in the Word of God, God's own revelation of truth. So every discipline, every method in some way ultimately gives way before what? The method of God, the discipline of God that you read about in the letter to the Hebrews, remember, where the author says that any son who isn't disciplined, who isn't chastised is a bastard, isn't a legitimate son, because God chastens and disciplines every son. And the history of the Jews and the history of Christians and the history of monks is the history of God's disciplining, of God's method, okay?

[47:06]

What was the basic thing that they, why did they go out in the desert in the first place? To go out in the desert somehow is to set aside man's techniques, man's methods, and expose yourself to God, expose yourself to God's method, expose yourself to God's discipline in some way, the same way that the Jews did when they went out in the desert in the Old Testament, even though that's the last thing they wanted to do. When they went out of Egypt into the desert, and the same thing that Jesus did when he went out into the desert before he started his ministry, after his baptism. They go out to submit themselves to God's method, to God's formation, to God's discipline. And that's ultimately what happens. If you read Saint John on the cross, the passive purifications are the ones that really cut deep, the ones that really count. And those are the ones that God does. That's God's method. So our methods, all they can do in some way is dispose us, and in a way train us, prepare us for God's method, God's discipline when he takes over.

[48:12]

This is true in prayer on one side, and Luff talks about that in his book, and it's true also in the ascetical life, which is not to say that these practices of a monastic life are to be thrown out, not to say that at all. But that's kind of a first principle, and then you go from there. Because somehow, throughout, we have to keep that perspective, that main principle, that number one principle of priority, which is the end and the means, or what God does and what we do, or simply God and us. Got to keep that thing always right, or we inevitably get into finality. And then God's spirit takes over. So we've got to remember here that Roberts is talking about Benedictine life,

[49:22]

and therefore he's talking about the cenobitical life, and therefore he's talking about a school, he's talking about a school of monastic life. And then there's the solitary life, where somehow these things are supposed to have been interiorized, and the person goes off and he exposes himself to God, because that's what solitude is about. It's to just open yourself sort of defenseless to the presence of God, and let him work on you, and work in you. And so we shouldn't put too much importance on these methods, but we have to talk about them. Now, I have to confess that I'm not good at this kind of thing, this whole method kind of thing, and therefore I tend to play them down. So... Please excuse me. Sure. It's time to say goodbye. Oh, goodbye, Brandon. Thank you, everyone. God bless you. May it have your best. Yeah. Are you going to the desert now? Yeah, Saturday I'm going to the desert. I'm going back to the city, the great city of San Francisco.

[50:24]

Please operate in one so unqualified. So Brandon's graduating to the desert now. He's going out into the place where there is no way. He's got a trailer out there in the desert. Where is it? Well, it's pretty deserted. It's near Las Vegas, Nevada. Now he wants to live as a hermit. Okay, so you'll find me playing down the methods too much, and idealizing too much. So you can balance that in your own thinking over your own suggestions, because we really do need the methods, and a lot of our own poverty is due to lack of dedication to the concrete means of monastic life. Yeah.

[51:39]

Yeah, the point is if the wisdom is there, if the presence of the spirit is there, and if the freedom is developed, and if the enlightenment somehow is present in the Christian monastic life, then the methods can be or not be. But there has to be a sense of the path, so that you have a sense of the trajectory that a person has to go. And these or those methods could be used. Different methods can be used, but you've got to know where he has to... the countryside he has to go over, right? In order to get from where he is to where he wants to go, that kind of thing, because there is a road there that has to be gone over. That's the important thing. But somehow it gets very difficult to sit somebody down and tell them, well, you sit there and you do that for a year and then come back. It's very hard to do that. Very hard to believe in. But there's something about this freedom, which is in the core of the person's heart,

[52:50]

which is really the thing you want to get in touch with. It's not as if you want to subject him to some game, subject him, even the best of games, you know. You say, well, this is a good practice, try this. But what you really have to do is get together with God in your heart, you know, is to search in your heart and try to keep the presence of God, that kind of thing. And then, you know, you can do this or this or this. But isn't Robert, he calls Benedictine? He does, yeah. I mean, just about anyone can talk to you, you can speak to him, you know. But for me, I'd like to know if it involves some kind of... Oh, sure, it does. It does. But as he says at a certain point, people are disappointed in the Benedictine life very often because it doesn't have concrete enough methods. I mean, you go to a Zen monastery and they'll sit you for how many hours a day, you know. And everything is very clear-cut. I mean, you do your work and you do your sitting and you do your begging and this and that. The Benedictine life is much more, much less clearly organized

[53:51]

and even much less clearly organized in terms of methods than something like hesychasm and Eastern Christian monasticism, okay. Where you take the Jesus prayer and you do that 13,000 times, you know, or this many vows and this many prostrations. The Benedictine thing is much freer than that. And the freedom often turns into a kind of, what would you say, amorphousness, a kind of shapelessness and lack of depth, lack of determination. So that's something we need to continue to think about and discuss because it's a very concrete importance for us here, where we need methods, we need concrete, something concrete, external, physical even, to keep you at the work and you have a kind of freedom with respect to it, okay, a kind of freedom. Can you, there may be a particular discipline for the whole community, like for one person, understand what he has to do to draw close to God

[54:54]

and in that sense he has a discipline of his own and for another person it would be a different thing. He has a discipline of his own, doesn't matter. Okay, for a given community, I think you can have a certain minimum of common discipline, choir office and then some common meditations and things like that and certain other minimal things and then there should be variation for the individuals depending upon what they need. Now, this is what you find in the good monasteries, I think also over in the East, although the minimum for the community may be more exacting over there usually than it is for us. More times that you have to be together in church, more of this, more of that, it's heavier. Not always, but usually. Sometimes there's a remarkable amount of flexibility with respect to the individuals. One monk will be doing this, I mean, you know, as a religious practice, another one, he doesn't do that at all, he does something else, depending on the judgment of the abbot. That's right.

[56:03]

So one way you have a uniformity, another way they have those things laid down with a spiritual approach. Yeah? It seems almost as if there's a progression from the old covenant to the new covenant even when the chief religion is the spiritual one, after both of the methods and all that stuff. That's right. And at some point, all of a sudden, like Christ comes and starts directing the whole thing and we have the doctrine and it's not followed but he's doing it. I think that's true, yeah. There will always be some method that will be retained but it can become very flexible and not really determining. It's kind of a basic guideline afterwards, I think, rather than an imprisoning structure. But there is an Old Testament, definitely. And just like when you're learning anything, if you're learning music, you know, there's a terrific labor in learning to read the music and then learning to use your fingers and so on to get the music through you. But then once you know it, it's an entirely different, there's a freedom there, you know. This is true with anything, learning to read and write, learning mathematics. But especially in the spiritual thing

[57:09]

because the spiritual path is the discipline of freedom. In other words, what you're training is your freedom, in a sense, what you're working on. So the paradox comes to its sharpest there, where it's a kind of subjection of your liberty, first of all, and giving up of your liberty by subjection to some kind of rule, which may seem very arbitrary and very childish. And then in the interest of that liberty actually being opened up later on, which all implies that we have to have an understanding of what we're doing. That in the monastery, there has to be an understanding of what the goal is, because otherwise, it can turn out to be a futile process with the Old Testament followed by the Older Testament, where you never get out of it. So okay, we'll go on from there. It's kind of interesting,

[58:10]

this whole attempt at a synthesis you'll find. If you want the key to his treatment, look on page... At the middle of page 134, he lets the cat out of the bag. He has those three levels and then hooks them up to the three levels of man. And then his diagram on the opposite page. The whole thing can be criticized quite a bit. I mean, everybody wants to do a thing like this, but any pattern, any structure that you set up like that is going to have its faults, and so does this one. But it's helpful as a... No, it's supposed to be. That's the point, isn't it? The purpose of this kind of thing is to make things complicated. That's what we mean by method. The idea is to make you forget what you're doing, forget what you're after. That's right, it's a koan, it's a geometrical koan.

[59:16]

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