be of the rule. For their needs they are to look to the father of the monastery and are not allowed anything which the abbot has not given or permitted. All things should be the common possession of all as it is written so that no one presumes to call anything his own. We know there's a gospel call to detachment, if not dispossession, that is given to every Christian. There is a corresponding obligation of stewardship that is required of every follower of Christ in meeting with the goods of this world. There certainly is the reality of grinding poverty that retards the well-being and growth of large parts of the world. and stands in judgment against the disproportionately small number of people in places like North America who make use of the world's resources.

[01:03]

And then there is the monastic vow of poverty. All of these elements intersect when speaking of how the spirit of monastic poverty contributes to free a person from the cares of the present world and can offer a compelling witness to the kingdom of God that is to come. On a number of occasions I've heard Catholic laity who know of my monastic community comment with a mixture of mock seriousness and irony that new monks take the vow of poverty and we observe it. And there's enough basis of reality in that statement to warrant a more extended reflection on how the monastic vow of poverty is played out on several different levels. It certainly operates on the level of the needs of the poor around us, both the materially indigent and the spiritually impoverished.

[02:09]

It is at work on the level of personal and corporate norms of poverty. It has to be filtered through the categories of simplicity of life and stewardship of goods. Above all, it is at work on a level of that New Testament ideal of the beatitudinal poverty of spirit, a poverty that frees us from the concerns of this world to be more open and disposed to the person and plan of Jesus Christ. All of these levels need to be addressed, but at the outset it's helpful to refer to the poverty that is rooted in the world of sacred scripture. Recall in the Old Testament that category of the Anawim, the poor of Yahweh, whose condition of powerlessness and dependence allows them, unlike so many others, to appreciate fully the lavish blessings of God.

[03:15]

It's always good to recall those words of Mother Teresa, only God and the poor are truly free. This ideal is, in turn, opposed to the abuse and manipulation of the poor that we see castigated by what we know as the social prophets like Amos and Micah, and also even the rulers of what we call Solomon, abusing all of his riches. I don't know if you are aware of Walter Brueggemann. He's a Protestant biblical theologian, still living. He's in his 80s now. He's just a magnificent writer. And he's especially eloquent on how the prophets were naming the great sin of Israel of the day, which was the manipulation and injustice done to the poor.

[04:18]

And it was not just the possession of wealth that he was castigating, but the use of wealth as an instrument of exploitation and subjection of the poor. Certainly, there is a clear obligation to assist a lot of the poor. Benedict tells us that. But there's also a fact that we shouldn't romanticize the poor. There's no validity in that, either in our Judeo-Christian tradition or monastic tradition. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on. But again, to go back to this idea of our model in Jesus. In a monastic framework, that model is first filtered through the prophetic figure of John the Baptist. And we call him, coming in from the desert, he's free of all material and sexual attachments to proclaim the Christ. He is the epitome of the person who doesn't have any other attachments with Him.

[05:22]

And then there's, of course, Mary's Magnificat that we pray every day at Vespers that announces the blessing of poverty, acclaiming the paradox of how the Lord sends the rich away empty but fills the poor with every good thing. And, of course, there's an echo of that canicle we had at office this morning from Hannah the paradox of how God fills up those who are truly poor. We've been hearing in our Gospel this last week, or the first week of Ordinary Time, the Sermon on the Mount, and there too we get this evocation of detachment from the concerns of dress, food, and drink. And we were reminded in our reading today with St. Barnabas that first Christian community of Jerusalem and the Acts of the Apostles, which we know were sharing their goods in common, ministering to all in need as they took part in the communal life. That early experience of Jerusalem gets passed on as the model for Christian monasticism.

[06:33]

And underlying this is, I think, the poverty of Jesus, but also the immediacy of having to make a decision for Jesus. And of course, we get the life of Antony there, that quintessential story of a monastic call. And go back to how that call gets started. Antony is there at church. He's listening to the Word of God, and he's hearing, if you would be perfect, go sell all that you have, give to the poor, and come follow me, and he does just that, providing for his sister as well. In a more communal or centimedical framework, we see the monasteries of Bacchomius in the first generation of Christian monasticism helping the local population with the harvest in time of need. In fact, they were really a social safety net for the marginated of Egypt at the time. Basil the Great, in the 4th century, we know enlisted monks in social ministries of care, emphasizing that the charism of the Cenobite was one in which a community is entrusted with goods, but those goods are always for the service of others.

[07:51]

Early monastic tradition also gives us the flip side of poverty, which is the vice or the demon of avarice. I think we get a steepened sense of the spiritually destructive capacity of this vice in the writings of Vagrius Ponticus. Vagrius writes, the demon of avarice, it seems to me, is extraordinarily complex and baffling in its deceits. Often when frustrated by the strictness of our renunciation, he immediately pretends to be a steward and a lover of the poor. He urges us to prepare a welcome for strangers who have not yet arrived or to send provisions to absent brethren. Vagranes goes on to show how the demon of avarice attaches itself to pride. And that's a psychological insight that gets reinforced by a lot of monastic writers, including Maximus the Confessor, who spends a long time showing the close link between greed and vainglory.

[09:02]

The same question is taken up in Augustine's rule. You know, we were reading from Augustine and Biggles this morning, and what he was saying about salvation and the problem of pride comes in in another place. He says, what good is it to dispense gifts to the poor and even become poor oneself if giving up riches makes a person prouder than when he possessed a fortune? You know, just look how humble I am. Look how poor I am. And of course, we know we have a safety net that the Truby Corps don't have. What's amazing to me is how, at the time he writes the rule, Benedict is synthesizing, as he does so well, all of this previous monastic tradition. And again, he has this eclectic gift for really giving us the principles of poverty. And the first of these is the communal distribution of goods that's based upon the ideal in Acts that we cited earlier.

[10:09]

So in chapter 33, Benedict leaves no doubt that private ownership must be uprooted from the monastery. He quotes almost verbatim from John Cashion, who we know in the seventh book of the Institutes is giving us a very detailed treatment of the vice of avarice. And for Cassianus, for Benedict, avarice is particularly insidious because it can never have enough, and therefore it has to be rooted out, pulled up from the roots like a weed, or in an even more graphic description, amputated like a diseased limb. I think the acquisitiveness of the culture in which we live can acknowledge that sometimes you need drastic remedies. We can't just talk about avarice as part of an academic debate. It's very relevant to any effort at living community life today. And one should also add that the point of exclusion of private ownership for Cashin and Benedict is to eliminate all material concerns for the Cenobite, which, of course, can lead us to the more positive aspects of chapter 34 of Benedict, where he draws upon Augustine

[11:29]

to emphasize that when goods are shared and people in the community are sensitive to different needs, then there's going to be peace in the monastery. Again, we see that same peace prevailing in the descriptions, lucruses, and acts. My own Swiss-American congregation, I think, puts it well in our declaration on monastic life when it says, the community of goods expresses their community life, helping to bind them together in dependence on one another for earthly needs. There's a social leveling that takes place through this community of goods, but it should never contradict our sensitivity to individual needs. There is this diversity of backgrounds that is more and more evident today. We should remember, too, that it had its counterpart in Benedict's day. And read the dialogues.

[12:31]

You have these sons of affluent patricians from Rome, and you've got the poor underclass of 6th century Italy. I mean, that was a pretty bracing confrontation when they rubbed against one another in the monastery. And I think it's good to have that type of mix in our monasteries. You know, we don't want to be too class-conscious in the advantage, and again, we're talking about the roots of this community. The great advantage, Damasis Winston, I know he was all taken up when he went into Maria Locke. You know, he wasn't a Rhinelander, and there was an aristocratic hierarchy at Maria Locke, and you knew it when you got in there, even at his time. He got to America and he was very aware of the fact that there was this openness and lack of class consciousness.

[13:34]

Another principle that is underlined by Benedict is that there's a value in material goods. He explicitly says that to the seller when he affirms that all tools of the monastery are to be considered as sacred vessels of the altar. We're familiar with that. But then in the next chapter, chapter 32, he's speaking to the whole community and he prescribes that anyone who fails to keep the things belonging to the community clean or treats them carelessly should be reproved. And this is part of, I think, the understanding of Benedictine self-sufficiency. Now here, too, it's important we have an understanding of our tradition. We're not mendicants. We're not out to be begging. That's part of what we have to do from time to time, but the nature of the Benedictine understanding of poverty is that we're entrusted with material goods, especially land and resources.

[14:38]

We're not Buddhist monks of begging. The people should not expect penury from us, they should expect charity. So we have to exercise our gospel stewardship with care. I know outsiders who come to my monastery expect they will come to a space that has a medley of both human and material resources. And those resources should be used to glorify God. So, we're expected to accent what is beautiful and make it accessible to others. And that's part of our patrimony. And I think Mount Savior has certainly had that as part of its history. You know, you've had artists, you've had symbols that express with beauty what our faith, what our monastic life is all about. You don't hide those under a bushel basket. They want to have uplifting art. They want to see well-stocked libraries.

[15:42]

And, of course, we know they're not cheap to, you know, keep up or to staff. For the same token, I think the stewardship that we exercise should always take note of the gospel directive that more is demanded of those who are entrusted with more. And part of that, of course, is this aspect of the vow in which we have to embrace the poor themselves. Now this is especially timely now with Pope Francis's renewed emphasis on this. And recall how many times in the rule that comes up. You know, chapter 55, we have the special wardrobe for the monks and the poor should be included in that. In chapter 53, the poor get special attention in their reception as guests. And in chapter 66 too, when the poor man comes to the gate, you know, there's this sense, this is Christ at the gate.

[16:45]

And that wonderful instrument of good works in chapter four, to relieve the lot of the poor. I mean, that's, it's not, if you can, it's an imperative. We are to relieve the lot of the poor. It certainly is something we see in the dialogues, again, of Gregory the Great, where he has Benedict, his monks, share their grain and oil with the surrounding countryside during the time of famine. And there's that story of the desperate debtor who was provided just enough money to pay for his creditor. And, you know, that's very redolent of what we've come to see in our church, this preferential love for the poor. which of course is nothing other than the reflection of Jesus in his earthly ministry. My monastery at Marmion has had now for almost 50 years a foundation in the third world and that's typical of a lot of our monasteries.

[17:49]

I had the privilege of spending a couple years there and in fact we're getting ready, our students go every year and we give them an experience of this. We're going to be going at the end of the month But it's helpful because, you know, we can get too attuned to life in our easy, and in my case, you know, affluence of West suburban Chicago. And one of the lessons I learned in spending time in Guatemala was on this whole issue of poverty. I know my first months there, I came across a Peace Corps worker who had worked with several religious communities in Central America. And he told me that we should always remember we, meaning the gringos of North America, always had a choice in making ourselves poor, whereas the underclass, the people we were serving, didn't have much of a choice. And we need to appreciate that difference.

[18:53]

And simplicity of life, however sincerely lived, and you obviously do that here, it doesn't equal poverty. I know one of our monks in Guatemala, who was probably the most frugal one, and served the poorest of the poor at a parish, took ill in the last part of his life, and he was given care at the priory, and I remember talking to Matthias, and I asked him if he missed his people, and he did, but he said, If I was truly living with them, I wouldn't have the care and all the wonderful support I have here." And he was right. He had that option. And that's very different. But again, avoid romanticizing the poor as well. And to know that in Benedict's rule in chapter 48 on the Daily Manual of Work, he has this wonderful phrase, palpitas loci, the poverty of the place.

[19:58]

I know when I was in Guatemala, people would ask, well, was it really poor? And I said, the poverty for me was not having silence. We were living in a place that was just full of noise. And if third world countries, I don't know, does South Africa have any noise? You guys didn't. It's really, you know, Where we are in our monastery, we're used to at least quiet and peace, and that's decidedly not the case in a lot of the places. I took our oblates at Marmion. Once a year, we go to a different monastic community to visit their oblates. Now, we went in Chicago, and Holy Cross Monastery, of course, is in the city, but there's a community of women on the north side of Chicago who are living in the city. And I overheard one of our op-lates asking one of the sisters, do you like living here?

[21:02]

And she said, you've got to like living in the city. And that's part of it. The baying of sheep is not necessarily the first sound you hear. So that's part of the poverty of the place we have to come to experience. But you know, Benedict envisions a community that's not as poor as possible, but as rich as possible with peace. And that condition can only exist where there's a spirit of communal sharing and personal respect. And that can't exist when a spirit of greed exists. Nor can it exist when we're always making comparisons with someone else. Again, we go to the rule, what's the norm for Benedict in exercising poverty? It's that Latin word necessitas. What does a community member need? You have to differentiate between want and need. Benedict says need should dictate all decisions with respect to the use of goods.

[22:07]

I think the best indication of that comes when he says in chapter 34, the abbot is to provide omnia quesut necessaria, all that's necessary. But what is necessary for one may not qualify as what is necessary for the other. And things change. I mean, when I first entered the monastery, I remember I had a little fan I was bringing up to my room. And our Admiral was a very holy man. Who? No, you can't have that. I remember talking to him much later on. Now people had credit cards and all this. It was an incredible transformation over several years of what? with our technological gadgetry. I mean, you go into a room now, you'd see a personal computer, you'd see all types of things that would have just scandalized people years ago, but I think you can make a very good case of the fact that they do qualify as a need.

[23:19]

And it should be done with permission, and it should somehow be in accordance with the role we have in the monastery. some people with jobs in the monastery are going to have need of more stuff than others. The key comes when the job is no longer yours, and you have to let go of the stuff. And as superiors can tell you, that's where the rubber hits the road. I think, too, a surefire way of returning the peace of a community of goods is what Benedict calls a voice, the vice of murmuring. There are a few practices that appear more endemic to community life. So we get this recognition that taking into account all the differentiation, there are things we don't need to know. If Brother So-and-so has that particular gadget,

[24:23]

okay, he's going to use it, and he's going to use it wisely and prudently, and he has permission, and we don't have to, you know, wonder where we can get something that's a little bit better. You know, Albert de Volgway, who lived poverty, a wonderful example of it, in his scholarship described poverty well. He wrote In a society where money is of no use, each person is literally at the other's mercy. Everything becomes an affair of direct relations between persons. The enunciation of goods not only supposes charity, it demands it. An effect and sign of union of hearts, it deprives those who embrace it of the protecting screen of possessions. This is a great phrase, the protecting screen of possessions. Dispossession for the monk is like obedience, complete and perpetual.

[25:30]

And that may be one of the reasons why poverty in the rule is subsumed under obedience in the promise the monk makes when he goes into his profession ceremony in chapter 58. You know, I had some contact over the years with your David Steingel Rast, and perhaps he was the first person who introduced me to the phrase, and I think he coined it, grateful detachment. And I think that's part of poverty. And we, there are some, in fact, I get a lot of uh... books whenever uh... april fifteenth comes around you know we work in a school and these people are feverishly doing their income tax returns and just you know pulling their hair out and I say I never made an income tax return boy oh boy and they they like part of the positive side of grateful detachment of poverty you know it's clear absolute dispossession

[26:43]

is a practical impossibility. We need cards. We need computers. We need credit cards if we're going to exist in this world. But that's all the more reason to be mindful of the words of Gregory the Great, who had some experience in coping with the things of this world. He says, if you cannot give up everything of this world, at least keep what belongs to this world in such a way that you yourself are not kept prisoner by it. Whatever you possess must not possess you, and that has lost none of its relevance. You know, again, we see this paradox. We have to go by way of dispossession to possess what is most prized, and that certainly is imitative of the canonic Christ of the Philippian sin, that self-emptying. So poverty has to be about clearing away the things that get in our way.

[27:45]

I think monastic communities, at this time too, are having to deal with the society that is materialistic. It's not as if that was not the case prior. In fact, I was hearing again from Damases Winston, he was talking about when he first went to Keyport, how there were so many wonderful uh... qualities about uh... americans and i think he added at the end despite their materialism which is everywhere and it still is there has to be uh... you know uh... an awareness that this bloated consumerism this uh... profit motive that seems to be staring us in the face everywhere and the immorality that's part of it. We saw that, sad to say, with the recession in 2008 in an understanding of things.

[28:47]

And you know, the English Bantican Congregation in that wonderful book, Consider Your Call, I think it still holds up as one of the best statements in the period of renewal, that period maybe 67 to 72. They came out a little bit later with theirs. And they speak here of how we deal with this. It says, the thrust of affluent societies is towards constant increase of what is considered necessary for the efficiency of their work. Living in the midst of such societies and working with people who take their increase for granted, monastic communities are apt to raise their own standard of living without being sensitive to the demands of the gospel. It's so true. And you know, it's not, it's capitalist society. At a time when Notgar Wolf, I remember talking to him, and we were talking about making their foundations in China, and of course, what they see in China is, you know, a communist government that has capitalism run amok, in terms of making money and having materialism dominate the society.

[30:02]

a monastic presence there has to be giving a witness of poverty. You know, another helpful norm for the witness of our poverty is offered by the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Life, where we were told, remember, let them avoid every appearance of luxury, of excess wealth, and of accumulation of goods. Certainly in the monastery, not unlike any domestic family, it's easy to accumulate things. We get books, we get convenience items that neither conform to Benedict's standard of what is necessary, nor to our communal ideal. You know, logically, if we advance in the monastic life, we should be able to restrict ourselves more and more to necessity. But it just isn't the case. My parents moved from a house they lived in for 60 years, two years ago, and they're not hoarders.

[31:09]

And the rest of our siblings, we decided we could take care of going through the house in a couple of weekends. Little did we know. It's just, oh. And one of the things I helped the Abba with as archivist, when a monk dies, we have to clear out the room. and I mean clear out the room, and you know, we had an abbot who actually warned several monks as they were advancing their time of death that something had to be done beforehand because it's like a tell, you know, in a biblical archaeologist, you're going through one layer after the other. You know, we have another practice in our community I remember when we first came in, we were to do a Lenten inventory, and there was a form that was attached, and it went down to how many pencils you had, and I, you know, this is ridiculous.

[32:17]

And then, I mean, I soon came to see, you know, if you don't start unloading on a regular basis what's in the closet, you are going to be embarrassed big time when it's time to move. And it happens, you know, we just have to see. And there are reasons for it. I mean, there were some monks in our community who grew up during the Great Depression. I mean, I don't know enough people. And they just, you know, there are hoarders and then there are pack rats, you know. And the sad thing is you've got these monks, you know, we can't get rid of it because poverty demands we keep it. Oh, gosh. I mean, I just went, we had to move among this, there was Joel, he was bending from third floor to the first floor, and there was a reason for that, which we don't need to go into, but, you know, he just, he knocked on my door and said, here, and boom, it was this huge, you know, load of stuff, and, you know, do with it what you want, which was commendable, but where did this come from?

[33:27]

You know, the point is, you know, this is not what we're talking about when we're speaking of poverty. And, you know, there's what we can call exterior clutter. We can go into anyone's room or office, and I'm not a big fan of neatniks, you know, everything breaking place. But I just know, you know, if there's exterior clutter all around, there's going to be some interior messiness with that, too. The two go and they conform with one another. So again, I remember teaching the novices once, going through that section of the rule in chapter 55 where the abbot is supposed to inspect the beds. And again, we just have to adapt that. And Benedict inspecting the beds is equivalent to an abbot occasionally looking to a monk's room and saying, OK, we need to do some rearranging. But again, giving a quote, Sander Schneider, who is very good on this point, says, it's not easy to work out what the vow of poverty means in today's world.

[34:41]

In the concrete, it's probably re-evaluation of holdings and lifestyles and an abandonment of the privatized exclusivity of the religious subculture. There's a loaded phrase, privatized exclusivity of the religious subculture. I can point some examples of that. To work out details of such an approach will not be easy, but a poverty of this kind which renounces both the childish irrelevance of an artificial dependence and the romanticism of useless and unreal imitation of the destitute. Concentrating on alleviating misery while building structures of solidarity can make sense to the religious who vows poverty today." You can tell she's a sociologist by all those clauses, but she's on the mark. You know, we need to see this too in terms of our prayer life and spiritual balance. If we have not a spirit of poverty, but insufficiency, we're not going to be able to pray as well.

[35:47]

But we also need a certain precariousness about our existence that reminds us daily, God's providence is essential for our continuing existence. And I think, you know, that precariousness, I don't want to harp too much on, you know, this history of the community, but It was part of Mount Savior. It was not something that was a sure bet. And that's always good. If we look at our beginnings and we think it was some golden parachute given us, that's not the ground where the Holy Spirit works. And I think the histories of most of our monastic communities have stories of the pioneer generation, in survival mode and somewhat unsure about the financial viability. I loved, you know, when the poverty healed. That's a great place, you know, to start your community.

[36:52]

And you talk about the Benedictines having high places. You do. But sometimes the soil is not as good, and you know that. Our monastery is the same way. We have some very rich farmland. We had the worst farmland, but it was the reason we started planting Christmas trees. I think monks today have the things we need. We've got food, clothing, and shelter. We also have such intangible resources as a good education, a safe environment, a stimulus where we have social interaction. And, you know, truth be told, there are quite a few elderly and lonely poor who would be happy to exchange those resources for a vow that renounces private ownership. And again, there are functional qualities of poverty. I think it should enable us to pray better. It should free us for true leisure.

[37:56]

You know, we don't have to be so concerned about the habitual needs so we can consider the ultimate concern. There's this clutter of non-essentials that allows us to confront the essential. And certainly, if where our heart is is where our treasure is, then the pathways to the personal and communal heart should allow the vow of poverty to put us close to Christ. Some of you may have known he just died in his monastic stall, praying wads, Claude Piper from St. Pete's Abbey in Illinois. Before he became abbot, Claude was treasurer and he wrote that poverty is an expression of confidence that should liberate us. And liberation is certainly from the prison of greed, but also from the expectations of the world around us, which is always a world of buying and selling, investing and profiting.

[39:07]

And, you know, we're pointing to a different way of doing things. Gregory of Nyssa, who reprises the Sermon on the Mount, tells us not to be anxious over what you have, but over who you are. I think we're back to Luke's famous gospel parable about the farmer building up his silos to store up his grain, and then someone comes to take him. Poverty should also remind us again of that wonderful Pauline example, Christ became poor for our sake that we might become rich. And the extent of our willingness to empty ourselves in imitation of Christ should be a measure of our awareness of God's gift. And there too, there's a sacramental consciousness here, an abiding awareness of God's presence in our life as it appears in the natural, the humanly constructed resources around us.

[40:10]

Poverty is a powerful symbol of the trust we have, not only in God, but also in one another. If that trust is not present, then any genuine witness of poverty is going to erode. Possessiveness is usually a sign of insecurity, a sign we need things to fill up our life rather than God. Poverty shows that we have our life completely lived for the one who fills us with all that we need, Allah Kisla, and that love He's at work in us as we serve other people, especially the poor. And like celibacy, as we said last night, poverty attains its full meaning as an eschatological sign, one that anticipates the fulfillment of the promise that we will pray again this afternoon. The rich he will pull down from their thrones, and the poor he will fill with good things.

[41:10]

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