So yesterday we were talking about the knowledge of God, and it's as if this knowledge has different phases, and the phases are somehow connected with the mystery of the Trinity. This is a fascinating thing about all of this, the way that the development of the knowledge of God, the development of God's self-communication, as Rahner would describe it, is related to the mystery of the Trinity. Not just that there's an old heresy called modalism, in which the word and the spirit were just thought of as ways of appearing of God, manifestations of God, as if they didn't exist from eternity within eternity. You know, that's not so. But nevertheless, there's a relationship between the persons of God within the Trinity, of eternity, before the creation and the manifestation of God, both in history, that is, collectively, historically, among men, and also somehow in the individual. It's as

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if there were a progression somehow from the mystery of the Father, from the ancient source, to the visibility of the world, the kind of knowledge which is still, in a way, outside of us. It's ours, and yet somehow not one with us, a dualistic knowledge. Finally, to a kind of unitive knowledge, the knowledge as it were, which is in the spirit. Remember how St. Paul says that the spirit of God plumbs even the depths of God. To know God in the spirit, he says that when one really is contemplating God, that the eye which sees and that which is seen and the light all are one. That one sees God with God's own vision, one sees God

[02:11]

with one's own, with God's own eye, as well as with God's own light. That which is seen, that which sees, and the light by which it is seen, are all, in some way, one. Eckhart talks like that, too, when he says that we have to know God with God's own knowledge. In this case, God has to bring his own place with him. He says we have to be so poor that we don't even have a place for God, because he's his own place. He brings his own place with him. The paradox of the fact that when God steps into our world, somehow our flaws are in a way aggregated. He makes a difference. I'm getting beside the point, but remember that the word of God itself has a progression, from the word which is exterior, which is

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a log, which is written on tablets of stone, to the word which is written on the tablets of the heart, and which is somehow the indwelling of God within us. Remember the section in Jeremiah 31, again in Ezekiel, where God says, I'm going to make a new covenant. The old covenant was external, and the law that went with the covenant was written on tablets of stone. The new covenant is to be interior, it's to be written on the tablets of the heart, which the heart had a curious resemblance to that parched pair of tablets that we usually see below the representations of the Lord Moses. And it's to be my spirit within you, he says. I'll put my spirit within your hearts, and I'll give you a new heart. Now all of this is a kind of merging of the spirit of God with the heart of man to produce something absolutely new. Something new which is the purpose of the whole business, of the whole

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history. To bring God together with man, to bring the creation together with God, through man, and therefore through Christ. So this is kind of the wedding venture, this final union of the spirit and the heart. We'll be talking more about that. That's the level of the spirit. The first level is the level of mystery, the level of sort of, I don't know, cosmic religion or something like that. And the intermediate level is that level of dualism, where God is, as it were, outside of us. Where God speaks to us, but the word remains somehow outside of us. As that Old Testament word tends to remain outside. Tends to remain a law, or a prophetic reproach, something like that. And then the word in the New Testament, when man is baptized in the spirit, and the word becomes alive inside of him. Because remember that the word is taken flesh. And somehow the incarnation,

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when the word takes on our flesh, it's the beginning of this process by which God becomes one with man. The word takes on our flesh, and out of that word which is taken on our flesh, and that word has lived and died and risen again, is to come the spirit, which comes into our heart of flesh and makes it something new. Makes it the beginning of that spiritual body that we were talking about in 1 Corinthians 15. So there's a connection between the incarnation in which Jesus takes on our flesh, the word of God takes on our flesh, and the liberation of the spirit from that word of God, after the resurrection, in which the spirit comes into our flesh and makes us what he is. And all of this is somehow symbolized, made sacramental for us by the Eucharist. He takes on our flesh, and he gives us his spirit. He leaves us a union, a communion with him in his body. He leaves us a union, a communion with him in his spirit. And somehow it's almost as if the two species of the bread

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and the wine, the body and the blood, represent, symbolize in some way, the word and the spirit. But those things are not exact. They all kind of fuse and overlap, and it's difficult to get them straight. Well, the Jews and the Christians are the people to whom God has spoken. Remember Zeus here. God has spoken, and so he screams and yells and beats his hands on the wall. And those people, those wild ones, those fools for God, have something to tell us. That often we're too rational. Often we're not excited enough, we're not passionate enough about God. God's Pentecostals, God's fools, God's Zeusians, God's Franciscans too, because Zeus is kind of a Franciscan. These people who are moved by the word, these people who don't think about it so much, it just moves them, it pushes them. And that's the Jewish word, that's the davar. It's not the logos of the Greek, the logos which become speculative, which turns into philosophy, which tends to harden a bit. It's the davar,

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it's the word of power, the word that does something. I forgot to talk about that yesterday, but when we were talking about the difference between Greek and Hebrew thought, if you consider the word logos in Greek and its meaning, and it tends to be a speculative meaning, it tends to be an understanding, it tends to be a kind of synthetic view of the world, of life. It turns into philosophy. But the Hebrew word, the biblical word for word, davar, is something quite different. It's a word which carries out peace, what it says. It's a sacramental word in that sense. It's a word which has power, a word which does something. Remember in one of the chapters of Isaiah, I think it's 55, where God says, my word will not return to me empty without doing what I send it for, but like the rain and the snow which come down from heaven and give water to the earth and give fertility to the earth and raise up a crop out of the earth. So my word's going to do what it was sent for. It's a

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word of power. It's a personal word. It's a word from an I to a thou. And it's a word which is spoken by a personal God. And this is the thing that defines our religion. This is the thing that makes the Judeo-Christian tradition stand out, is that God has spoken and he's identified himself. And this is unique. This is unique. God has spoken in a very different way. God has done this one thing which makes the Jews stand out to the people from the other people, and which is continued, if I'm not confirmated in this church, that God has spoken. The tradition of the church is the handing down of this word. But this handing down, too, has several levels. There's the handing down of the word in Scripture. There's the handing down of a kind of teaching in tradition which surrounds the Scripture. And this, of course, was rejected by the classical Protestants who said, no, not tradition, but just Scripture. Not an interpretive tradition of the church,

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the teaching magisterium, but just the Bible itself, just the word. We have to remember that the word comes out of the tradition, and that it has to exist in a living tradition. Otherwise, you get a thousand different interpretations in a thousand different churches. Every man becomes his own church. Every man becomes his own magisterium, his own pope. There's the tradition of the word. There's the tradition of the Spirit, which interprets. And this somehow is connected very much to the monastic tradition. And then there's another tradition, which is called the sacramental tradition. Remember in Ephesians and Colossians, where St. Paul is talking about the idol philosophy, which is endangering some of the Christians, which may win them over. He said, well, don't be deceived by vain philosophy, by the poor elements of this world. Look at Jesus. In him bodily is contained all the fullness of

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the divinity. In him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Bodily. He keeps emphasizing this bodily thing, this physical thing. Because the tradition of the church is a sacramental tradition, which passes on a living organism, which passes on a living body. Now this is what the Eucharist says to us, and this is what it gives to us. If the tradition, ever since the institution of the Eucharist by Jesus at the Last Supper, in the direction, is the tradition is a living organism. Tradition is identical with the church in the sense that it's the living body of Christ. And it's sacramental as well as doctrinal. So it's as if you've got these three levels. There's a level of the word itself. There's a level of the Spirit. The interior understanding of the word. The very experience of God, which somehow relates especially to the interior life, the life of prayer to the monastic life. And then there's the tradition of the sacramental body. Once again, it's a kind of trinity. There's the tradition of the sacramental body of the church, which is its exterior, as it were, which is the organism. Now this, again, is the thing that

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distinguishes Christianity. The sacramental identification with Christ, so that we belong to him, so that we're part of him. That's why, when we look around us, this whole challenge of the world's religions, you know, of Buddhism and Hinduism and so on, and all their very persuasive doctrines. What's different about Christianity? What is it that makes our religion somehow different, even though many times the ethical doctrines may be the same? Many times the, I don't know, the contemplative growth that you see in Hinduism more than Buddhism, that may be very persuasive. They seem more spiritual than what we have in some ways. What is it that distinguishes our Christianity? It's this fact that God has spoken, and this personal God has identified himself. He's opened up a conversation with us. He's spoken a word which has become flesh, and a word which somehow has come into us so that we are his flesh, and therefore we belong to him. In other words, we're personally identified

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with him. We are of his family. Now, this business of Jewishness that I sort of like to talk about is all connected with this. This matter of belonging to God, it's a kind of, it's a kind of inequality. It's a kind of privilege. Talk about election, and the theologians like to talk about choice, election, God's free choice. But the fact is that we're chosen not for ourselves, but we're chosen for the world, just as the Jews are chosen not for their own sake, but for the sake of the world. The Jews and the Messiah somehow go together, so that in the tragic history of the Jews, you can see reflected somehow the history of the cross and the crucifixion of Jesus. And remember the servant poems in Isaiah, how they're at once collective and individual. And that mysterious figure who we identify as the Christ is also somehow Israel, the Jewish people. So we too are Jews, and we too belong to this lineage. We too are of God's family in Christ. Especially

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the monks, because they're the people who somehow base their life on a tradition. The people who are trying to live the truth which is immemorial, the truth which is without beginning almost. So the monks all over the world, they sort of live from a thing that goes past history, that comes from beyond recorded history. The Hindu monks and the Buddhist monks and so on. They seem to be living from a universal and timeless tradition of man. But with us, the tradition here is that Christian monks do have a beginning. The beginning was when God spoke. And so we sort of identify with Abraham. We identify with, and the monastic calling somehow identifies with Abraham. And Cassian wants to talk about Genesis 12 where God calls Abraham to go out from his family, from his people's house and come into a land that he's going to show us. Somehow that's the prototype for the monastic vocation of exodus. An exodus by which we become God's people. The whole desert thing

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somehow relates to that. We'll maybe talk about this later. But what I wanted to stress was the relationship of the monastic vocation to God's word, the relationship of the monastic vocation to God's people, and specifically Judeo-Christian things. One of the big problems for monks I think is to understand the Old Testament, to get a way into the Old Testament really, to learn how to relate it to our lives. What does it mean to us? So much of it seems to be superseded, so much of it seems to be unacceptable, the violence and all of that. We were talking a little bit about it last night. This is one of the ways in is to realize our Jewishness, to realize that it really belongs to us. And also somehow that the experience of the psalmist, for instance, is going to be reflected somehow in our own experience. But that we'll leave for later. Olivier Cormat had an article in Cistercian Studies, which he translated from French,

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in which he distinguishes two traditions in the Church. He distinguishes the tradition of the word and the tradition of the spirit. I don't know if any of you have read that article. It's very interesting. Cormat is one of the best Orthodox theologians we've ever met. Unfortunately, there's very little of his text in English. About four articles have been written. And he says that there's a tradition of the word in the Church, which is identified with the hierarchy of the Church, with the magisterium, with the clergy, and with the sacraments. Okay? And he says there's a tradition of the spirit in the Church, which is identified with monasticism. Which is identified with monasticism. There's a tradition which is more exterior, more visible. And there's another tradition which is more interior, charismatic, contemplative, of the experience of God. Almost the transmission of this experience. And that he identifies with monasticism. Now, monasticism is also a kind of tradition of

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the word. When Luke writes about the word and the monk, he talks about the passing on of the word by the spiritual father. But somehow this word that he writes about is a word of life. It's a word of spirit. It's not just the word of Scripture which the Church passes on. It's the word of Scripture which has somehow come alive, which has somehow burst into flame within the heart of the monk, within the heart of the old man, the spiritual father. And this fire is the thing that turns on the young monk. It's the thing that awakens the same spark in the young monk's heart. This is the creation of spiritual fatherhood. It's a tradition, actually, very nearly a handing out of the spirit. How can man give the spirit? How can one man give God to another man? Well, it's impossible. It can't happen. And yet it very nearly does happen. How many times have we received our own vocation, the spark of our own vocation, of our own conversion, our own intendment to somebody else? Because

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God wants to relate to us, very often through other people, relate to us through other people. That's the sacramental way. The same thing that he did in the Incarnation. When God became man to relate to us through our own divinity and our own language. The word became flesh so that he might speak to us in the language of the flesh, in the language which is flesh, which is the language that we understand because it's the language that we are. A language which is pre-verbal, pre-lingual, the language of our life, our body and soul. Thinking about the Old Testament and monasticism, remember the beginning of the rule of St. Benedict the Prologue, and also the beginning of chapter 7, where it's a question, first of all, of listening, and then a question of remembering, of being aware of the presence of God. Now

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this business goes very much back to the Old Testament. If you read Deuteronomy, the beginnings of the chapters, that Shema that we were talking about, chapters 6, chapters 4, chapters 5 and so on, it's a question of remembering. Hear, O Israel, and remember. Remember, remember. Don't forget. Now this is the business of the monks too. This remembering, this listening, which refers to the heart. And this listening to what? This remembering of what? Remembering, listening to the word of God. The word which is not only what God has said, but what God has done. Because the word achieves its effect with the word of power. And the word of God is also an event, a thing that is done to us, a thing that is done to the Jews. The history of the Jews turns into the word of God. But the word of God produces the history of the Jews from us. It's the same way with us. A matter of remembering, a matter of listening. Recollection. That memory of God is said to be sort of the essence of monastic

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prayer among the early monks. When you boil it all down, what they were trying to do, with all the different ways that they used, their thing was to retain the memory of God. It's a very, we talk about that later when we talk about prayer. It's a good way to think of prayer, though, because there's not the strain of having to move towards God in a particular way, of having to do a particular thing. To give one's consciousness to God, as we give our time to God. The simplest and maybe the most satisfactory way of thinking of prayer in the end, but it seems to include all the other ways. Almost all of them, anyway. Listen and watch, says Jesus. Listen and watch. Two ways of attention. We're listening more in the Old Testament. We hear more about watching in the New Testament, when Jesus speaks to us. Watch and pray, depending on how good you can take it. This watching seems

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to refer to a couple of things. It seems to refer to watching for temptation, but also watching for the coming of the right one, for the second coming of the Lord. What about the listening? The listening seems to go in two directions. It seems to go in the direction of the interior silence, like the hesychast, where you sort of listen for the Word of God, listen to the voice of God, discover the presence of God. And the other direction is the direction of obedience. I think Benedict says, listen, he means obey, he means do it. He means run in the way of God's commandments, or get up and walk, as he says in the Koran. There's a listening which turns to doing and obedience, and it's particularly among the fathers related to the cenobitical life. There's a listening which pertains to the presence of God, to prayer, to contemplation, to interiority, and which in Cashin, for instance, is particularly

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related to the baromedical life, the solitary life, the interior life. Cashin makes a very sort of crude distinction there between exterior life, which he relates to the cenobitical life, and training in obedience, and interior life, or contemplative life, which he relates to the solitary life, and to the presence of God, and to prayer. It's an oversimplified thing, which tends to make the lines much too hard, and which doesn't do justice, especially to the cenobitical life, and is in danger. It doesn't do justice to either one. It's kind of a very crude first approximation. It's also helpful in a way, because it tells us something about the functions of community and the function of solitary. But we'll talk about that later, too. I just wanted to get over it, and get across that this listening to God, these are those two directions. The exterior direction, as it were, of obedience, the interior direction of the presence of God, and ultimately contemplation.

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The direction of community life and essential obedience, the direction of desert life, solitude, and contemplation. We think about the word in history now. God has spoken, and after God has spoken, nothing is the same anymore. The world is not the same. You look around and it looks the same, but something new is happening. It's as if the world is quiet and dark, waiting for the word and waiting for the light. The word is spoken, the light shines, and the world is different. Even though we may not see that difference. The world is empty until God comes into it. And we still feel that emptiness very much. So much of our, what would you call it, our frustration is that emptiness simply of the world as a creature which is waiting for its God. Sort of the other way of looking at what St. Paul

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is talking about in Romans 8, he talks about the groaning of the whole creation, the groaning of the whole creation which, even until now, has been trying to give birth to something. Similarly, the groaning of the whole creation which is empty, the creation which is full and trying to give birth, the creation which is hungry and empty and waiting for God to come into it. The creation which is trying to produce something out of its own heart with the spirit in it, groaning within it, trying to burst out. The creation which is waiting for the word to come into it. The strange ambiguity of this expectation of God who is both coming from without and who is already within. We have a choice since God has spoken of what we're going to base our life on. Do we base our life and our understanding, first of all, on that word which he has spoken or do we base it on something else? What do we make our context? What do we make our framework?

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Do we make it the word of God? Do we make it the scriptures? Do we make it revelation, what he has said? Or do we make it something else? Now this collision always happens, you find, because whenever we hear the word of God, whenever it's heard in history, people try to integrate it with some kind of scheme. And we have to do this in order to get it into our own terms, in order to digest it, in order to chew it. We need to combine it, to bring it together with something else. So this happened in our Christian tradition with Greek philosophy, right? With Plato first, with George, and then Aristotle. This synthesis, this marriage of the word of God with human thought. But the question in the end is always what is going to be the context? What's going to be the ground? What's going to be the framework? What's going to win out? Which is going to swallow which? And too often it's happened that the philosophy has swallowed the revelation. That the thought of man has swallowed the word of God. So that the dominating framework and structure, and the conclusions in the

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end, result from the philosophy and not from the word of God. It either happens a little bit in one sector, or it happens totally. In our time, one of the ways in which you see that most clearly is with Jung, because we were talking about Jung the other day. Jung can be a big help to understanding our interior life, what happens in our psychological experience. But a lot of people have read Jung, and allowed Jung to swallow up their Christianity. In the sense that there's a kind of principle of balance, and there's a principle in Jung, a philosophical principle, which is implicit there, which is capable of swallowing up the principle of, what would you call it, the principle of God's historical revelation, the principle of God's plan and God's work, without your even knowing it. It's a very subtle thing, but it happens fairly often. And so the whole of theology sort of gets interiorized. God gets interiorized, evil gets interiorized, and you begin to think

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of your whole life as, the whole meaning of life, as achieving some kind of integration, some kind of individuation within yourself, losing sight of the objective reality of what God has done, what God has spoken. That's one of the ways that it happens in our time, but there are probably a hundred other ways in which God's words get swallowed up by human thought, by some kind of philosophy, explicit or implicit. We have that choice which is presented to us continually. It's presented objectively, you know, with those philosophies, but it's presented also subjectively. Whether we believe the word of God, or whether we believe something else, whether we listen to him in our hearts, or whether we listen to something else. Do you remember in the Garden of Eden, the first choice that was given to man, or given to woman, to eat? She had the word of God which

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said, don't eat of that tree, or you'll die, remember? The devil comes along and he says, well, you won't die. He's just fooling you. The devil, his first thing was to question the word of God, as Father Rachel pointed out yesterday. The first thing that he did was to try to, like that bird that Jesus talks about in the parable of the seed and the sower, try to pluck the word of God from out of the heart of Eve, by telling her that it wasn't true, undermining her faith in the word of God. And then he makes his own suggestion, he gets his word. So that choice is presented to us from the beginning. It's as if there are those two trees in the garden, there's the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And you've got your pick. The tree of life is the word of God, and ultimately is faith in Christ. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, in the book of Genesis, of course, is something very sinister. It's the tree of sin, which opens man's eyes. But the alternative for us is not always so clearly the tree of sin, the tree of death.

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It's the tree of human knowledge, the tree of the world, but it's equally able to swallow up the word of God, to swallow up the faith in God in our hearts, and to leave nothing other, to carry us away with itself. And so we end up in that strange world of ambiguity, the land of unlikeness, as the brothers like to talk about it, where good and evil seem equally balanced, where really there isn't any meaning, where really there isn't any truth. The world in which, as Ecclesiastes says, there'll be time for everything, there'll be time to live, there'll be time to die, and there's nothing new under the sun. That's the fruit of the tree of good and evil, the knowledge of good and evil. We grab for the sweet, and we find on the other end of it death. Or we have a choice of taking the fruit

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of the tree of life, which is the word of God, and really swallowing it, really making it our own, really letting it transform our hearts. And then we begin to find meaning. We begin to find ourselves on that tree. We begin to find ourselves to be trees somehow, we're supplanted in God. We begin to discover ourselves to be the tree of life. Remember the image of the burning bush in the Old Testament, that's Exodus chapter 2. Moses goes into the desert and sees this bush strangely burning. What does that bush represent? In the end it seems to represent the creation of particularly man on fire with God. Man on fire with the Spirit of God. Man living with God's own life, a life which would devour it because God is a consuming fire, were it not that God is love, were it not that God is mercy, had come down to us in flesh and given us his Spirit in a way in which we can live with

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it, in a way in which his fire comes inside of us and instead of devouring us gives us life. We become the burning bush. It all comes through the Word of God somehow, allowing the Word of God to come into our hearts to take over and to plant that fire in us. Like Jesus said, I've come to bring fire onto the earth and all of my constraints towards him can rise. There's a great mystery in the interplay between the Word of God and the Spirit of God. The way Jesus comes as a Word made flesh then is to breathe the Spirit into us, like he breathed it into his disciples on the evening of the resurrection. But he has to die in order to do that. There's a strange unity between the Word and the Spirit. Think also that the Lord is the Spirit, that Christ somehow, the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit somehow is Christ. That relationship between the Word and the Spirit is very mysteriously foreshadowed in the Old Testament under the image of wisdom. Remember

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that feminine figure which is personified in the Wisdom Book, and which is both knowledge and somehow experience. It's something I think we need to rediscover. It goes along with that rediscovery of the feminine in our own inner life and our own spiritual life. Rediscover what is meant by this feminine wisdom, this lady wisdom of the Old Testament. There's a kind of a koan I'd like to throw out to you. We're going to be talking a little bit about this spiritual theology of the monastic tradition especially in which man is seen as being the bride of the Word of God. And it's as if it's a little unsatisfactory for some since we don't feel that we have an urgent need for a bridegroom. There's another kind of spirituality, another kind of theology which is very much neglected, but which you find in the Hebrew tradition, which is wisdom as the bride of man. Wisdom as the bride of

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man. And somehow it's as if Jesus when he comes, comes as the bridegroom but brings with him a certain bride, brings with him a certain bride in order to make another bride, brings with him as it were the bride which is the Holy Spirit, which is the glory of God, which is the Shekinah, which is God's mysterious companion, wisdom. And he confers that bride upon us when we've gone through the same journey, when we as it were sat down at his right side. His gift to us is that bride which makes the church his bride, which makes us somehow his bride, but which is his as it were companion for eternity, which is the Holy Spirit. Maybe that doesn't work out eventually. I sort of throw it out to you. I throw it out to you that, who is the bride after all? Who is the bride? If we live a life of celibacy, what is the outcome, what is the culmination of that life of celibacy?

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What is that gift for which we sacrifice the good of marriage and the good of feminine companionship? It has something to do with this wisdom. Remember that article of Martin on the cell? It was reprinted and contemplated and all of that, where in the end this mysterious maiden appears to console the hermit who is about to give up in solitude, in his emptiness, in his boredom, in his mediocrity, in his despair. That seems to me to be another reflection, another image of that lady wisdom, who somehow is the companion, the friend of the monk, the consolation which makes life not only tolerable but joyful for the celibate. I'll just leave that with you, but maybe we can come back to it later on. Let me read something from the first letter of St. Peter. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this canticle of thanksgiving to God,

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for what? By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. Now, we pass over to about 20 verses later on in the same chapter. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, for sincere love of the brethren, love one another earnestly from the heart, you have been born anew, that's what he was thanking God for at the beginning. Not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, our image of seed once again, through the living and abiding word of God. So that being born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is being born anew through the living and abiding word of God. The word is the word of the resurrection, the essential preaching, the essential and complete word of God is the word of the resurrection. How is it that the preaching of the apostles seems to have this right in its core,

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and almost as its fullness, as its totality, that Jesus is risen, Christ is risen, and in that is the whole of the message. It's the interpretation of that which constitutes the understanding of scripture. The interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus, everything that means, the drawing of the conclusion of the consequences from that one fact, that one historical premise, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, remember, who have the risen Jesus walking along beside them, and they don't know it, that's the way it is with us. And yet their hearts are burning within them, and he opens the scriptures to them. He talks about the Old Testament, and as he talks about the Old Testament, he's revealing where he is, latent in the Old Testament. But the thing that's the light, the fire, that's illuminating all of this, is the risen Jesus himself, the risen word incarnate who is walking along beside them, and that's what enkindles their hearts. And then finally he manifests himself in a kind of a Eucharistic gesture, and then he disappears.

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The resurrection of Jesus, the sacramental manifestation of Jesus, the opening of the word of God which is within our hearts, the opening of our hearts themselves, the fire of the spirit burning within our hearts, the relation of the fire of that spirit and the word which is in our hearts, the word is in our hearts waiting to be enkindled, waiting to burst into flames. Our lives are a kind of Old Testament, waiting to be ignited at their core, right in the center with that spirit of God, like already burning there somewhere, waiting for the manifestation to illuminate, waiting for Jesus to manifest himself, waiting to see him face to face. You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, born through the seed of the word of God which is the resurrection of Christ.

[39:05]

The word is that, the resurrection of Jesus, which is our resurrection, right? So our birth and his resurrection somehow correspond, our birth and his resurrection. And our birth in grace is the foreshadowing of our birth in glory which is our resurrection, right? Through the living and abiding word of God, for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides forever. That word is the good news which was preached to you, and the good news is summed up in the resurrection of Jesus, which is our own life. We've heard it a thousand times. It's a word that never grows old. Everything else perishes, but that word doesn't perish. We've got to focus on it like we heard in our reading this morning. We've got to fix our eyes and our ears and our hearts on that word of the resurrection which has been given to us.

[40:07]

And if we do, and if we let it work on us, sooner or later it will open up and the shell will fall away and we'll see what's inside of it. The shell will fall away from our hearts, it will be cracked, and we'll discover what's in there. St. Paul talks about that in 2 Corinthians. He talks about the Jews and when they read the Old Testament, there's a veil that's over their hearts. But when a man turns to the Lord, turns to Jesus, somehow the veil is removed. The veil is removed from his heart, the veil is removed from the word, from the word of God, from the letter of the Old Testament. And then he sees the light and the fire that's inside. And he discovers the light and the fire that's inside his own heart. The word and the heart open up together and somehow are joined and made one in the Holy Spirit, in the fire of that Spirit, which is God himself. St. John talks about that same word in his first letter where he says,

[41:11]

What we've seen with our eyes, touched with our hands. I keep repeating that, but you can sing that all day long. What we've seen with our eyes, what we've heard with our ears, touched with our hands. The word of life, which is manifested to us, which is Jesus. The word of life. And that word somehow has opened up, has broken itself, like that alabaster jar of wine has poured out upon us, this fellowship that we have in the house of God. This fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. And somehow that fellowship, that presence, is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God. And so our life is the life of divinity. Through this word which has been given to us like a seed, like a shell, and which has been broken open for us. Only somehow, in order to drink, in order to enjoy what's in that word, the kingdom, the banquet that's in that word, the wedding banquet that's in there,

[42:15]

our own shell has to be broken. The shell of our own heart has to be broken. Ultimately, our own body, our own shell has to be broken, and we can really move into that kingdom. Move into that world. The word has to have a kind of a history. I guess I've gone on enough this morning. Maybe we'll pick this up in a second. I'd like to talk a little bit about the way this word develops in us. The word follows a history of Jesus. The word becomes flesh, the word is incarnate, it comes on the earth, and yet he has to walk a whole path, he has to go a whole journey, a whole trajectory through suffering and death. Remember Hebrews again? He learned obedience through what he suffered, even though he was a son. He started out at the finish line, as it were, but he had to go way down. Like St. Paul said, he emptied himself. So he was equal to God, he emptied himself. He took the form of a servant, took the form of man, walked the way of obedience even unto death. Then he was exalted, then he was filled, then he received his glory,

[43:17]

even though he had it before somewhat. But he divested himself of that glory so that he might take on our humanity, so that he might take on our glorylessness, you might say, our heaviness, our darkness, and so that he might pick it up on himself and carry it back up there into the glory of God once again, bring it back to be glorified. St. Paul can say, well, he seated us in heavenly places with himself. It's inside of him to be opened up, to be entered into, to be diversified. Any questions on this one? Question from the audience.

[44:30]

Well, it isn't written in the right way, because why? Because it isn't written in faith, right? There's a kind of a law there which you can call the law of faith or the law of invisibility, okay? So that you never see sort of a net gain. So that the action of God in the world never jumps out at you, except in rare miraculous instances. And even there it can be denied. Just like Jesus comes and the Pharisees don't see anything in him, right? They say, well, he's casting out demons by the Prince of Demons. They say, he's got a devil, he's crazy. They say, you know, he's a sinner and so on. They don't see it. Now, there's that law of faith and the law of invisibility. First of all, that you're never going to see sort of an obvious net gain in history, which is an indisputable proof that, for instance, the Church is the Church of God, or that Jesus is the Son of God, or something like that. It requires that leap of faith, or that gift of faith. There's one history which you see on the surface, and it's like an opaque surface.

[45:40]

You can't see through it. You can't see through it to see what's underneath. And then there's another history which is read with a heart, and which is read in faith, and where you do see it. But there's this tragic dimension also, like the tragic dimension of the destiny of Israel. Look at the history of the Jewish people, and you see what I'm talking about. You don't see a net gain there. They're God's chosen people, and they're treated worse off than anybody else. They're God's chosen people, and they get persecuted and banged around more than any other people. So there's a kind of a compensation there which creates this invisibility, which you see also in the history of the Church. I don't know how to explain it, but in some way it's necessary. Thank you. He's somehow missing something.

[46:50]

He's a prophet. I believe Teilhard is a great man. He's really brought a lot of light into the Church. Sometimes he talks about the struggle, okay? He'll talk about the struggle and so on, but he doesn't really have the tragic sense. He doesn't have the sense of death, and he doesn't have the sense of Jewishness. I like to call it that, okay? In other words, he's working on a kind of... It's a case of the Word of God being swallowed by something. And what's it swallowed by? It's swallowed by a kind of evolutionary optimism, so that everything has to go like that, okay? It's a kind of a smooth, upward continuum. Instead of that law of invisibility, because everything that's achieved by science, for instance, is ambiguous. You discover nuclear energy so you can heal people with cancer, or you can blow them to bits with an atom bomb. And everything that science comes up with has that same ambiguity. There's not a net gain the way Teilhard sees it. A kind of a smooth, what do you call it?

[47:52]

A causeway or a ramp that leads up into the Kingdom of God. Most of it doesn't happen. Because why? Because the whole of history is a kind of a drama, a kind of warfare between good and evil, and Teilhard leaves that out. If you look at the history of the Jews, you see that. Look at the history of the Jews in the Second World War. There's a malicious, demonic power which is trying to wipe out God's people, okay? It's not simply a matter of people gradually getting the light and working things out in a nice, rational way. Nothing. There's something else at work there, which in part accounts for this law of invisibility that's not holy. It's kind of that demand for faith that's asked of us. And I think that Teilhard, despite all the light that he brings, all that prophetic vision that he has, he really misses an important dimension. Thank you.

[49:13]

Yeah, I think Vatican II is an important turning point in this way. No longer do we consider that the other religions are simply demonic, diabolical. No longer do we say that there's no salvation outside the Church, you know. Things like that. At least not in the narrow sense. If you're not a Catholic, you can't get to Heaven. There's a kind of maturity that has to happen in the life of the individual, in the life of the group, in the life of the Church, and in the people of Israel, too. Whereby they begin to see their life not only in function of themselves, and the gift which God has given them, not only for their own sake, but for everybody. And where they begin to see that their life has to be given for the others. That life is a matter somehow of sacrifice, or whatever you want to call it, so that the gift that's been given to them can be passed on to all. Okay? Now, Jesus has to do the same thing. Remember when Philip comes to Jesus and says, there's some Greeks that want to see you. And he says, now is the time when the seed has to fall into the ground.

[50:46]

If the seed doesn't fall into the ground, it remains alone. If it falls into the ground, that is if he dies, if he gives up his own life, his own individual life, then it will bear much fruit. That is, what is in him can be spread to all. But the shell has to be broken, you see, so that that can happen. And that's what we resist. That's what the Jews resisted. The shell didn't want to be broken, so that that salvation could be passed to all people. And that's what we resist. That's what the Church resists. It tries to keep it all for itself. It sounds kind of condemnatory towards the Church, but that's just humanity. That's the human fragility of Christendom and of Catholicism. But the way they interpreted it often was in a kind of imperial way, it seems, you know. Like they were going to rule all nations. All nations would be subject to them. Whereas actually it turns out to be in a sacrificial way, you know.

[51:50]

But if you read the last chapters of Isaiah, Isaiah 2 and Isaiah 3, you see this light shining out of Jerusalem, out of Zion, the holy city of Jerusalem. And that's the way it's going to happen. After they've passed through their death and their resurrection, you see. And Paul talks about the conversion of the Jews, being like life from the dead, like the resurrection from the dead, like the second coming somewhere in the moment, you know. So their destiny remains very important, but not in the way that they would have looked forward to it. Not in a triumphal way, but through the way of death and resurrection. It's the same with us, and maybe it's the same with the Church. It's hard to expect, but it's always the path of Jesus, always the way that the education is taught. Similarly, the apostles, you know, they wanted... The mother of James and John comes up to Jesus and says, well, grant that my sons can sit on your right hand and on your left. They wanted the same deal, the same kind of power, privilege.

[52:55]

Without... And Jesus says, well, can you drink the cup I'm going to give you? Can you go through my passion and go through my will? That's the question. For the chosen one, that's the question. The more chosen they are, the more of the cup they have to drink. And the Jews have drunk a lot of it. ...getting ready to... ...to go down to the 6th grade... ...with the... ...with the so-called... ...the power of the kingdom... ...and the head of the kingdom. And the reason, you know, is the... ...that, you know, the name that makes plenty of use... ...of... ...promises given in the nature of the world... ...and, you know, to go down to the 6th...

[53:58]

...that we would take the 6th. I'm interested in the... ...in the proposition of the gospel, and... ...and... ...that it's... ...it's... ...that we... ...that we... ...can... ...good things... ...for the... ...ladies... ...to... ...be more powerful... I'm just hoping that they are. But then, the, um, it's just a recruitment. It's a good way to go. You have a good, you know, we came to be an idealist or a historian. But you're, [...] No, not at all.

[55:28]

Nowadays, the scholars use the word myth pretty freely in talking about Scripture. For instance, I've heard talk about the story of Adam and Eve and the first sin as being, you know, being a myth. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily untrue, but that it pertains to that kind of literature. We're beginning to appreciate the difference between the different kinds of literature that there are in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. And that ought to be taken as straight up to it. Yes, sir. I'd like to know about the one part of the series that you have here. A lot of it is a live jam, a live jam, and then twice a year. Yeah, a double portion. A double portion, I guess. But it's not going to be every Father's Day. That's our obligation, really, in the Church. We're reflecting on how we do that.

[56:31]

Oh, yeah? That's the deal. You've been with the Father, you know, how that's been for you. There's a paper that the Father is saying, well, I have this. And there's another one, which I'm just going to be open to, but I'll just let you know. Yes, sir. I want you to change on the Father. Yes, sir. The rest will be just fine. Maybe that's our part in the world today, you know. Yes, sir. So, working with the Father, there's a real concentration on faith, and love. Not really going out to other people, but more about being a believer in the Father God. I don't know.

[57:33]

Remember that burning bush in the desert? It was the site that Moses went off his path to see, in the tractus Verona. And remember when Jesus talked about John the Baptist, and he's talking to the Jewish people, and he says, well, where did you go out in the desert to see? And it seems to me he's alluding to that burning bush, okay? In a kind of oblique way. Where'd you go out there to see? Now, the monk is in that position. He's like the fire out in the desert, or the tree, or the bush, you know, the humble, sort of worthless bush that's out there, but it's on fire. It's strangely on fire out in the desert. And people go out to see it. And he doesn't have to go out and preach to the people. He doesn't have to have a better understanding of theology or anything else. That's not what he has to press on. He maintains the reality of that fire that's out there in the desert, which is God's fire, which is his own being on fire with God. That's all. If he can show it to people that it's possible to be on fire with God,

[58:37]

that human nature is combustible, well, that's his job, really. And that that fire still exists. That's a good thing for us to keep in mind as we go through the retreat, that mission of the monks, which is somehow connected with a number of things. It's connected with compunction, that maintaining that fire and witnessing that fire somehow is paradoxically connected with the gift of tears, connected with grief. And this is another thing that hooks up with our Jewishness, because the Jewish people are the people of grief, I believe. The people who long for God, the people who grieve over their exile, who grieve over the exile of the Shekinah, the spirit of God, who grieve over God's absence. And the people who sort of stand there against the wall weeping and waiting to be admitted into the city, waiting for the coming of the Messiah,

[59:39]

the coming of God's kingdom. Grieving and longing, grieving and longing, to look backwards in tears, to look forward in tears. It's as if these are the two movements of the heart of the monk in which this fire is expressed. The fire is related to the fire that's in the risen Christ, that's where it finds its source. And as long as we keep our eyes on him, the eyes of our heart, the fire in our own hearts keeps us going. If we turn away, then it tends to go out. It all comes from there. Tradition of the Spirit. The Orthodox are pretty good on this. They distinguish a couple of kinds of tradition. I remember this. I forget who it is, I wrote a, I think it was in Eastern Churches Review one time, I wrote an article on tradition, which he talks about a horizontal tradition, where you pass along something from one generation to the next. So you pass down sort of the teaching of doctrine,

[60:43]

the interpretation of the scripture, whatever you want, from one generation to the next. That's horizontal tradition, that belongs from man to man. And there's another tradition, it's called vertical tradition, which is direct like a lightning bolt from God to man. And that's the tradition of the Spirit, they distinguish in the tradition of the Word. Vertical tradition, which is a lightning shaft that comes down and illuminates the heart and the mind of man, comes straight from God. That's the Spirit, they distinguish in the Word, which is more exterior, when you pass down from man to man. There's a Pentecostal guy who says that God has no grandchildren. God has no grandchildren. His tradition is vertical, his tradition is direct, his transmission is straight from heart to heart. In other words, you don't receive God through an intermediary. And yet we do, we receive the Word through the Church, but we receive the Spirit directly. And if there's an intermediate, if it's an intermediate which is not between us and God, Jesus has come to be us and to be God at the same time. It's an intermediate which, instead of separating us,

[61:43]

joins us. Vertical tradition. Saint Paul, when he talks about tradition, he talks about the Eucharist. He says, and I receive in the first place what I've passed on to you, the traditio, that's the Greek word, paradosis, I guess. And then he gives the words of the institution of the Eucharist, the Eucharist. Once again, we've got those three traditions side by side, the Word, the Spirit, the Sacrament. The Word and the Sacrament somehow are over here, in the Church, the visible Church, external. The Spirit is over here, over here in solitude, but we live in the busy, it's where the monks are. They've got the thing inside of them, so outside of them you may see nothing, nothing different. But that fire that's inside should flash through from time to time so that people know that it's still alive in the world. And even though I like this, we want it to be a good one. That fire

[62:43]

should be in the center of it, and will be in the center of it, the memory of the living Christ is in it. Okay. Okay.

[63:02]

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