First of all, greetings to you from the community in Glastonbury, where I've come from today, and my own community in Newton. They're very, of course, interested and united by the bonds of a monastic life with you. I think more than ever our monastic communities have interests and threads of concern for the other communities. I think that's a wonderful thing that's happening. In our unique setup we have this wonderful connection with other monasteries and people are very interested in the other communities, especially in our area here in the Northeast. I had a very pleasant drive today. It was seven hours in the sunshine. It was beautiful to see some snow again, and although this is certainly spring, and our Lent

[01:08]

This time of year, its very name comes from the lengthening of days. And it's noticeable here when we have this flood of sunlight starting. I watched the sunrise this morning, six o'clock on the button, in the room at Glastonbury looking out towards the ocean. It was coming up behind the trees. It was really a beautiful thing to see. In Alaska, where I lurk lately, We are gaining five minutes a day. It's 35 minutes a week. It's a dramatic change from the darkness of winter into God's light. Wonderful, wonderful experience. These days, I was looking at our schedule. We have seven conferences, and we're ending with Mass on Thursday. So I have a scheme of things, and I'm going to try to go through these.

[02:13]

I hope to have something for everyone. For those of us who like obsessive and complicated charts and theories, we have a little bit of that. For those of us that like stories, we'll have a little bit of that. monastic retreat should be an opportunity for us to reflect on our journey. not as tourists, but as pilgrims. Big difference. And we know that there is a different way that we go through our lives. And some of us have come to the monastery when we were young, and some of us have come to the monastery in the middle of our pilgrimage through life, and some of us have come at the later time in life. And so we need to look at this as a pilgrimage that opens us up more and more to God's grace, and especially so during Lent. Some people think that Lent is the time when we work off all our guilt.

[03:18]

And what a sad vision of length that would be if we're just working off our guilt instead of trying to be open to new possibilities of grace that God has for us. I have to thank you for having me come to give your retreat. Father Prior Martin insisted on it. He was relentless. He didn't want to let me off the hook, even though I was hiding out in Alaska. and I'm blaming Christian at Christ in the Desert for that, too. The last time I gave a monastery retreat was there in the little library at Christ in the Desert, about half the size of this room, and almost twice as many people, and we were huddled around this stove that was spitting sparks, and we were sweating, and it was a wonderful experience of community. You meet people I'm amazed at Christ in the Desert.

[04:21]

They're having a population explosion as we know. I heard that Abbot Philip was saying that he doesn't know what to do with all the candidates that want to come to Christ in the Desert. But some of that may be because of landscape and not the real spiritual geography that we are invited to look at the inner terrain of what occurs in our lives. I went to Mass last Saturday night. I didn't go because I left early this morning. So last night I went to a little parish church with one of the monks. in Quincy, Massachusetts. And I was one of those rare opportunities that I had to just quietly sit among the people and experience the celebration of the Eucharist as a parish community does. And this is all a time of, I'm delving deeply into that in this past year of seeing how the church, the popular laity, how they experience the faith.

[05:25]

It's been an interesting, certainly an interesting experience. So we had Mass in this church in Quincy. I'm trying to even remember the name of it. I forgot that already. Anyway, a little rickshaw, very visually very beautiful, very ordered, very clean, very nicely done with wood and the feeling was very, very warm. But I looked around and I said, my goodness, I'm 51 years old and I'm in the bottom 5% of this congregation. I said, what's happening? And the only sign of Lent were the purple vestments. None of the hymns, or we didn't have a holiday because we had a letter from the cardinal about closing parishes. And I said, oh my goodness. Everywhere we have this, it's like a weight of sadness on the shoulders of people today. So I began thinking about Lent, this time of Lent, so important for monks.

[06:30]

This is our season, as the rule says in chapter 49, that our lives should have the Lenten character. Not that we should be paying off the debt of guilt at every turn, but celebrating the Paschal mystery in our lives, focusing on that, tuning in to God's grace, that monks of anyone should be about the great mystery of salvation. And that's what Saint Benedict invites us to be, to be about that. I saw an article recently that said, that was playing on the words of, O Lord, who threw out these 40 days? But they spelled it T-H-R-E-W, who threw out these 40 days? Well, the 40 days are an important experience for us as Christian believers, and they're not a fad. That's the thing that is probably most enriching about this season.

[07:34]

I was pastor for nine months at the largest parish in Alaska. And it certainly was an opportunity, a short time, to give me an experience of what it's like today in the pastoral life of the church. It was a good experience. I have this year in Alaska that I've been doing different things, but for nine months I was pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. And I said to myself when I got there, take away the mountains and you're in Tom's River, New Jersey. I mean, the people, the vehicles, the shopping, the values are suburban America in the parish I was in. 1400 families, not very large, but large enough. This time of year, there, as in other places in the Church, the great emphasis is on the R.C.I.A. There's a tremendous effort being done in the faith community of Catholic believers in R.C.I.A.

[08:39]

And I'm questioning, just myself, whether or not this is a fad. I wonder in 20 years if our CIA will have the prominence it has now. We were also involved in renewed programs and in committees and fundraising, and we had a school, and it was an amazing experience of a microcosm of what the Church in the rest of the United States is going through. But I was wondering, aren't some of these things feds? And even in a parish, you'll see things like a compassion and care committee, and they fade away. And I wonder if RCIA may not be a fed. Certainly baptism is not a fed, but the emphasis the Church is putting on RCIA. But Lent is not a fed. Lent is of the very, very heart of what we are about, celebrating the paschal mystery in our lives.

[09:41]

It gives us the chance to read from the book of experience. Now, the medieval writers, and I'm going to be hard-pressed to give a quotation on who, but they understood life made up of the Book of the Word, the Word of God, very important, important for us, important for Christians, important for believers. the Book of the Word. Then there is the Book of Nature that was read very easily in the Middle Ages, and it was done in monastery herb gardens and pharmacies, the Book of Nature. And perhaps the monks of old were even more in tune with nature. and in watching the cycles of agriculture, and we've drifted somewhat from that in our industrial society, but there was an easy access to the book of nature. There's also the book of experience.

[10:42]

And this is very important because the first two books are meaningless if we're not able to relate them to our experience. And that's what I hope to be able to share as we go through the retreat. I'll be sharing some of my experience with the invitation that you might reflect and look at your own experience on your pilgrimage, your monastic journey to God. So what do we do with all this? Appropriately, during Lent, I'm going to take a look at my old friends, the seven capital sins. And I thought that's very appropriate for Lent, but I would like to connect them to a theory of human development. that as we go through life, we may have a predisposition to one or the other of these capital sins by our stage in life.

[11:48]

And it might be worth a reflection and just looking at that as you look at your own pilgrimage or sacred journey through life. And I also would like to connect them with the 12 degrees of humility that are in the Holy Rule. And for those of you that like complicated schemes, this will delight you. But I'll try to keep that from, I don't like complicated schemes, so I'm going to try and keep that simple. That's what I'd like to do as we journey through the retreat. I'd like to take a look at them, but there really are eight and not seven, so I have to double up and and figure out how to get all of these in, but it certainly is worth a reflection. I know most of you. Those of you who don't know me, I was the abbot of my monastery for 15 years in Newton, New Jersey. I was elected in 1982, and I decided that

[12:49]

I had done what I could in that office and followed the advice of the general of the Trappists, who said, if your office gets in the way of your spiritual life, get out. And it's good advice. And I said, yes, this is time enough. So after 15 years, almost 15 years, I surrendered very without ease on the part of the people who accept those resignations. It took four years to convince them to accept that. And I carry with me my decree of, my indulge of resignation. I have a wallet-sized one. I even brought it here. I've reduced it. It's a good reminder to me because it tells me what I should be about. He gave me some instructions of that, to be of service to the community and the congregation, in the very, very last line. And so, I'll talk more about that, but after a year away from the monastery, I'm going to be very involved in the work of the congregation of St.

[13:58]

Ottilien. I took a year off from monastic life, from living in the monastery, for the sake of the new abbot. so that what it would not happen as often happens the monks would come to the old abbot and say see what he's doing and that doesn't serve for the sake of monastic growth or peace because as you probably notice we never tell the people who should hear uh... those things directly because it's so difficult for us we sort of ease the uh... the pain of that by telling someone else and hoping that they will act. It's not an easy thing for monks to be about that kind of fraternal openness. Without being harsh, without being cruel, but I thought it would be best if I bowed out for a year, and I decided to be of some service to the Church, and so I went to Anchorage, the Archdiocese of Anchorage, for a year.

[15:09]

Our community had been working very, very hard in discussions with a facilitator for a period of time. And we did something very unusual. We elected the abbot ahead of time and prepared him for office by a conversation that the community had with him over a period of a year. and almost a year. So he was, he knew what he was uh... accepting and it is my classmate uh... who is elected the uh... and and uh... really designated as abbot-elect before the election occurred. Interesting way of going about that. I hope they, I hope the community writes that up sometime. It would be worth putting in a journal process that that was used because it was uh... it was, we tried to do it with as much openness and charity and dialogue, which is so difficult. When we live together, it's not an easy thing.

[16:14]

We don't dialogue well with each other, especially after living years and years in the monastery. It becomes very difficult. It's like a monastic retreat. What can you say to monks? They've heard it all, and they've heard it all so many times. And we even wonder whether a retreat, what is the place of a retreat in the monastery, because the life itself is a retreat. The life itself, the rhythm of the horarium is a way in which we go to God. In fact, I have to tell you, that was the most difficult part in being away from the monastery, was the divine office. That's the thing I miss the most, the rhythm of the hours. I live with a community of Dominicans, and we pray in common, and that's why I'm there. But it's like breath after a while. And I've heard this said from a number of the monks in the monastery at home, it is the rhythm of the psalms that nourishes and feeds the spiritual journey.

[17:23]

They are a very, very important part of our life. Well, let's take a look at experience. and the capital sins. I just would like to talk a little about stage theory or developmental theory. This is something like building a house of cards, and that's the problem with any developmental theory, is that if you miss one of the steps, the whole house crashes to the ground. I'm going to follow a little bit the human development writer Eric Erickson, who gave a very simple approach to life. It seems that we can divide life in stages. The Hindus do it. We tend to do it sociologically. We have people who are infants, and then school age, and then adolescence, and then adulthood, and then we have working years, and then we have retirement in our culture.

[18:33]

We more or less follow that pattern, but it's very hard to say that monks fit in a retirement scheme. That's really unusual. Monks don't seem to fit in that category. But it'll give us a framework for reflecting. And I want to connect them with the capital sins. Cardinal Ratzinger would be very happy to hear that, because he's very much in favor of capital sins. That reminds me of another cardinal. There was one of our priests, a missionary in South Africa, Father Andrew, was telling me once that the cardinal came to visit a remote parish, or a visiting cardinal from England. And he was giving a long sermon about the gifts of the Holy Spirit to a confirmation group. And the translator was going on and on and on, three times as long as his long sermon. And afterwards he said, well, does it take that much to translate what I said in Zulu?

[19:36]

And he said, oh no, I wasn't giving them gifts of the Holy Spirit, I was giving them the capital sins, that's what they're ready for. It'll be interesting to see how these things might be connected and I'm going to let you imagine as a bit of homework What one of the capital sins will be number one? That will be interesting. That will be like a reflection for yourself on who you've read and who has had the most impact on you. Which one of the capital sins would be first? in a discussion of capital sin, and how might it be connected with the earliest stages of life? That will leave to your imagination. As I said, though, the danger of sage theory is that If you don't make it through one stage, how do you go on to the other?

[20:40]

Well, we sort of do. We sort of manage to get through life, and there are proclivities that we have, or tendencies, to certain, within our personality, to a certain weakness in sin. And the capital sins. And that might be a good starting point for us. Capital sins and development. I'm going to connect them also with the degrees of humility. I've read a fascinating book that's not been published yet by a former member of two monastic communities. He's not a monk now, but he was looking at the degrees of humility of Saint Benedict with new eyes. not with the vocabulary in which they are written, but asking himself, what is behind this?

[21:43]

And how might this be translated in contemporary ideas and words? And a fascinating thing emerged from that. So, what's behind what Saint Benedict writes about in the culture? Because the rule has been used as a guide, and especially those parts of it that are well, like the degrees of humility and the instruments of good works, there's a substance there for real spiritual life that has been used for centuries. But I mean, you give them to a young man today, reading the 12 degrees of humility, and they, you know, they'll say, well, what do you do with that? But looking at what might be behind What is the idea behind the words? And there might be a rich use for us to rediscover 12 degrees of humility as a way to go to God.

[22:52]

I was sharing a little bit about my experience as the abbot of the monastery. I came home for the first time in a year, two weeks ago, and went to choir for Matins and Lords on a Tuesday morning, and there were 21 monks in the choir. And I said, my goodness! It was just, there were two visiting, and the others were made up of my own community, which is very small, and some Africans and Germans who were taking some of the programs that were holding at my monastery. We are very small. We're 12 people at Newton, and five of the community are over 80. We have four abbots. Three of us are resigned. I think we're the only monastery in the world with four abbots.

[24:02]

Someone once mumbled in Statio on the way to Vespers that, we've got more abbots than monks. uh... charles the first habit is eighty-six i think and then uh... augustine the second habit has parkinson's degrees he's uh... disease he's sixty-eight then there's me at fifty one and the the present habit is also fifty one so uh... uh... four habits and and five men over eighty and the others i'm the youngest man in my community i'm fifty one of the youngest member We have a novice who is younger, but I understand I didn't know him very well, because I had started on this stage of my pilgrimage before he began to visit, but I understand he's leaving around Easter time, which is not surprising these days, because people come and go. We've seen a lot of that in the last 20, 25 years in monastic life.

[25:07]

So my community is very, very small and floundering. We decided that we would try a program of getting more people to be in the house, to make the experience of our life more viable. Something like you do in the summers here. You have people come in, and you've done that for a long time. Well, we've brought over Six, seven, seven members of our congregation, two of them are taking a English as a second language program in the local county college, and the other five are involved in an ongoing formation program designed for monks somewhere in their monastic life of how to internalize all the stuff that they've been given in their head. How to make this part of their experience of life as a monk rather than something that they can get out of a book.

[26:11]

how to form them, how to have an experience of continuing formation without it being intellectual only. In other words, how to help them see that they are on a sacred journey. and how to deepen their experience of monastic life. And so we've had different speakers come in. We've had Sister Donald Cochran and Abbot Matthew, and we've had a number of speakers do presentations on different topics, always with the hope of having these monks internalize it. Now, the difficulty they faced was the cross-cultural stuff, because here we have Africans from the bush, and trying to understand the language and then the concept of how to deepen or to make the experience of monastic life something else than a heady or a textbook experience.

[27:16]

It's brought tremendous life to the community though. With the older members there's a nice interaction and there's a nice participation and sharing in that. We even got it funded from the Arch Abbey in Germany. That was a nice, that was a very nice arrangement. So I would like to invite you again to try to be open, to try to listen with the ear of your heart, and that maybe during these days something I might say may spark within you again. the voice of the Lord, not only in our common prayer, but in your own reflection. There might be a word or an idea that triggers something within you, especially as we get into the content of our retreat. There might be something, a memory or a surprise or an experience of grace.

[28:20]

a memory that you might experience as God's healing work happening within your heart as we journey together on the way of the Lord. Let us pray. Lord Jesus, be with us as we seek to follow your way. open our hearts with your healing touch. Help us see in the experiences of our lives grace, again and again, healing grace that leads us to the Father. We make our prayer through Christ our Lord. Amen. Oh yeah, if anyone has a... Oh, there's not some, some people asked. We've been having meetings after a long time.

[29:22]

Some people asked, could we have it at nine? Yeah, nine, six, seven, eight, [...] nine, six, seven, 8.30 or 9.00 maybe just my problem, but we're on the intellectual stuff from rising until, and some of us maybe nothing by that time.

[30:25]

By 9 in the morning? By too much input and stuff like that. But I would prefer 8 to 9. Brother Luke, any preferences? When would you rather start, Brother Luke? Sure, why? camping out on the trail, on a well-used trail, with a black bear chewing on his knee. A remarkable place of danger and strange, unusual deaths. Almost every time one picks up the newspaper, there's a story about some said incident. Now those are only the encounters with the wilds.

[31:29]

The human encounters are a frightening thing, too. It says the last frontier on the license plate, and the people there aren't kidding. There's a lot of frontier mentality. It seems that it's on the edge. There's a roughness and a wildness. Alaska is a reminder to me of wilderness, of real wilderness. It is a desert with snow. And in the desert, all of those wild and strange things emerge. Kathleen, I believe her name is Kathleen Norris, who wrote Dakota and the Cloister Walk. I guess the Cloister Walk is very popular. But I especially enjoyed her book Dakota, in which she writes about spiritual geography. And she writes about it with real care and reflection. She calls the Dakotas a similar thing to the great desert of Africa, because it seems that it is a place in the midst of our culture, our society, that nobody wants to be, that's being emptied out.

[32:45]

The people are moving to the cities. The pattern of migration is to the cities. We have the same thing, of course. in Alaska, we have many of the people from the villages, the subsistence livers, moving into the city. And as a result, downtown Anchorage is loaded with drunken Indians, Athabascans, Indians, and Eskimos, and Aleuts, and they seem to migrate in the hope of finding work and fortune in the city, and instead finding disappointment. It seems to be happening in our culture and society. Whereas in the early time of the monastic fathers, there was a great movement of people authentically to the desert, going to the desert. After the book The Vita Antonii by St. Athanasius, the bestseller in the early church, people by the hundreds

[33:51]

were going to that experience, and if not that, it accounted perhaps for the great development of monasticism in Europe. There was this search, and it seems that in our time, people are migrating towards the city in the search. All the young people in our area, where my monastery is about 50, 60 miles from New York City, The great thing for all the people in their 20s, after they finish college, is to go to Manhattan and make their fortune. That seems to be the great attraction of our age for young people. And the biggest obstacle they seem to have, they don't understand any longer the way of life that involves celibacy. Young people, it seems, look at us, they treat us with respect, But they're not signing on the dotted line. And this, too, is an experience of our desert.

[34:54]

That place where we encounter temptation, but it is also the time that we spend with the Lord. During these days of Lent, we are invited to the 40 days, the traditional 40 days, to be with the Lord in the desert. And that's why the desert has become for us a place of not only temptation, but a place of quiet blessing. The desert is where we gather with Jesus. I made a quick reference yesterday to Christ in the desert as a romantic landscape, which people find very, very easily an avenue to God because of its great beauty. But for most of us, the desert crosses our lives, and it is a harsh place. Not so much of romantic beauty, but a place of struggle and a place of wrestling.

[36:01]

and yet it contains the hope of blessing. Here we wrestle with sin in the desert. Here we encounter ourselves and are naked before God. So the notion of spiritual geography is a rich one for us, and we need to ask ourselves, where is the desert in my life? Where is the arid place of temptation? of struggle and yet encounter with the Lord. I went to see that movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, some years ago because they made a big fuss over it. I wanted to see what that was all about and I think it was Cardinal O'Connor who said that Christians are old enough to make up their own mind. And they had a wonderful portrayal of the desert scene in that. A snake in the desert and a fire in the desert. But the image is very important for us and it is an invitation to look within our own lives and ask where the desert may be in our spiritual geography.

[37:16]

We have a biography. All of us have a story that we bring to the monastery and we bring to our our sacred pilgrimage to God, there's also a geography that we bring. We've come from somewhere, we've grown up somewhere, we have been impressed, and with different images we're formed, formed in a sense, by our environment, and the environment of our biography, and also where we are, where we spend our time, has a tremendous impact on our lives. That's why one of the abbots in Germany said that monasteries need to be places of quiet beauty, especially dining rooms and libraries and places where monks spend their time, because this needs to be uplifted and enriched. And this is a That may be the chapter on spiritual architecture.

[38:20]

But anyway, we have a geography in the course of our lives, and we bring that, and that has a bearing on our formation and growth as we go to God. In the desert, Jesus is tempted. His first temptation, second temptation, and third temptation are a worthwhile reflection. They come to us on the first Sunday of Lent, and yet they are certainly enough there to reflect upon. In the desert we find sin, or we find our own sin, and we grapple with it. Evagrius of Pontus, John Cashion, listed eight sins. Gregory the Great is responsible for our list of seven. We find them occurring in the ancient writings, and we don't find the list quite the same in all of the authors.

[39:31]

We also find the list of sins, of deadly sins, in some pagan authors. We find references to some of them, in the New Testament, but our list pretty much takes its shape from Gregory the Great. Fighting devils is a noble monastic activity, and of course the great model in literature and in art is Anthony of the Desert. He's the model of the Christian soldier, the battler, the contender with Satan. They were very popular in the Middle Ages, the notion of deadly sins, and they have been preached against from the pulpit to the confessional and enjoy a popularity as a vehicle for self-examination today. We find them the subject of plays, novels, films, and poetry in our times.

[40:34]

It's curious as to why we have seven. Perhaps it's because it's a sacred number. However, if we add melancholy, tristizia, we have to deal with eight. Seven, though, has been convenient in the past, and it may indicate that because of seven days in the week, We may have a day of the week for combating each of the capital sins. For example, on Sunday, pride. We combat pride by church attendance and making God the center of the universe. Envy and anger might be Mondays and Tuesdays sins involving injury to personal worth and dignity and requiring a continuation of the struggle against pride. sloth is Wednesday's sin because it's the midweek and the furthest from Sunday.

[41:38]

Greed and gluttony are Thursday and Friday sins of self-indulgence flowing from indifference from the indifference of sloth and gluttony to be combated by fasting on Friday and they culminate in Saturday the sin of lust which is most self-indulgent and deadliest on the last day of the week when the effects of the day of worship are at their lowest ebb. So that's a hebdomadarian look at the capital sins. I wanted to link these with stages of development and growth in life. Now, we know we go through stages of development, naturally, and the Church has accepted this in our sacramental theology. We baptize infants, and the latest practice is to give them First Communion when they're children, and Confirmation when they're teenagers, and young adults get married, and then we have the Sacrament of the Sick for old age, so that there's something occurring throughout the life cycle with the sacramental life.

[42:43]

And it certainly has a focus there. The Church in its sacraments wants to connect us with stages of life and development. The Hindus certainly have given us a theory of development and stages in life. They see four. Childhood is one, and then a student is another, and then there's a householder, and then there's a person who seeks to be released. Those four classical Eastern stages of development. It's more difficult to see where they are clearly defined in our society, but Eric Erickson who was a professor at Harvard for many years, was the one who popularized this notion of development as a life project, that we go through life continuing to develop, and he used his own experience

[43:45]

as the laboratory for examining this. And he's given us something that modern psychology didn't. Most of modern psychology was concerned about early childhood development and infantile development with Freud and Jung and Adler. They were focusing on being dropped on your head when you're three years old. and trauma at that stage, but Erickson was the first of them to look at the whole of life and say that that person's spiritual and psychological and human development is something that goes across the board. He sees eight stages of development that have become pretty popular since the 1950s. Infancy is the first one. and then early childhood and then the play age and school age and adolescence and early adulthood, adulthood and mature adulthood. And it might be worthwhile to look at what goes on at each of these stages of development and see if there is a tendency or a proclivity toward

[44:57]

one of the capital sins that emerges in each of these stages of development, and that might be worth our reflection. Likewise, we want to look at St. Benedict's degrees of humility and see what we can make out of that. Well, the first stage is infancy. And Erickson, since he has a dynamic psychology, he says there's a conflict that happens in infancy, and it's the conflict of trust and mistrust. Now, some say that this is the area of life that is most, most important. for us to, and if we don't successfully, and it's unconscious, if we don't successfully move through this, we do get handicapped for life. Now I asked you to try and reflect and see what you might think the first sin, capital sin, connected with a stage of development might be.

[46:00]

Here's an infant, certainly not capable of conscious sin, But the disposition that occurs in the conflict of trust and mistrust in an infant, being completely dependent upon a parent, gives rise to something, gives rise to a tendency within the person's development, within the person's progress as a human being that might be a source later on for sin. It happens there. So it's certainly not going to be lust. We can cross that one out. It's not going to be the occasion. Is it going to be pride? Is it going to be anger? The first sin that might be connected with that stage of development is good old gluttony. The child is the center of the universe, and gula, gluttony, might be looked upon

[47:04]

as the first tendency towards sin. The crisis in the development of a little baby centers on trust and mistrust, dependent upon other people for one's life needs. The infant learns either to trust that the providers are going to be reliable, or the infant will learn mistrust. No one can meet the demands of an infant completely. No one. You would have to be there 24 hours a day, and so it is inevitable that some mistrust, and perhaps with the result of fear and a number of other things, will arise in an early infant, the conflict of trust and mistrust. The child may fail to develop a rudimentary level of self-trust.

[48:11]

Now, none of this is conscious and none of this is deliberate, but it occurs in some of the behavior of little babies. Whether or not the person will learn to exercise self-control is an issue here. But gluttony, the insatiable desire for food and drink, is a disposition that can, as a result of mistrust, arise in the child. And its fulfillment will not be in infancy, but later on in life. Now remarkably, some of the psychologists have said that addiction Addictions, the great curse of our time, start in this early childhood development. Way back then, before, an infant is aware or conscious that somehow because of the battle of trust and mistrust,

[49:18]

Addictions have their roots way back there. Freud had a fancy name for it. He called it the Anaclytic Period of very early development of the experience of addiction having its roots and its seed in this early development. Gluttony is certainly not a sin of infancy. Gluttony is a sin of adulthood, but it may have its roots in that basic battle of trust and mistrust. And it might be worth our while to look at our own addictions and ask ourselves if the battle of trust and mistrust is raging within us. Ultimately, in the monastery, we are asked to trust God. More and more, as monastic life unfolds in our time, and we see lots of small monasteries, there really is an issue to trust.

[50:26]

To trust that God is working in our community, in our life, and that God continues to be the one who is trustworthy. The danger then for us is also to fall into the trap of gluttony, addictions, gluttony, being satiated by our desire for food and drink, a disposition that underlies life, a careless attitude towards life and beauty. It's a not caring for others that underlies this first step of development, not caring for others. If we have fallen into that trap, then we're opened up to the experience of gluttony. Saint Benedict, in his degrees of humility, tells us that the first degree of humility

[51:38]

Is that a person keep the fear of God before his eyes, beware of ever forgetting it. Let him be ever mindful that of all that God has commanded, that his thoughts constantly recur to the hellfire which will burn for their sins of those who despise God and to the everlasting life which is prepared for those who fear God. Let him keep himself at every moment from sins and vices, whether of the mind, the tongue, the hands, the feet, or self-will, and check also the desires of the flesh." Now, reading that and looking at that with the eyes of today might make us keep one eye over our shoulder looking for God ready to throw a lightning bolt at us. Underlying this passage, though, is a wonderful reflection on the moral order.

[52:50]

Saint Benedict, in the first degree of humility, wants us to set our moral life on the right direction. Saint Benedict is concerned about health in the first step of humility. Physical, mental, but most of all, spiritual health. He wants us to be in harmony or to be right with God. And here is a very refreshing attitude occurring at the first step of development and the first degree of humility. that we need to direct our lives and our hearts towards what leads to health. Whether it be exercise, or the right eating, or the use of food and drink in our experience. In talking about gluttony, you always run the risk of alienating eaters, drinkers, and smokers.

[54:01]

and these are the addictions that seem to, that sometimes creep into a monastic life. My experience has been too many Eskimo pies up north and it's very easy in a winter to be locked up in the house and not really get the balance of health. There's a wonderful refreshing attitude in monastic life and the balance between work and prayer of sitting and standing in the whole of monastic life to keep our bodies, our minds, and our spirits healthy, in tune with God. There is a prayer that our bodies do in monastic life by the work and by our posture and choir. There's a whole approach to health that Saint Benedict invites us to in the rule. In the first degree of humility, he's really concerned with moral illness, but the challenge for us as seekers and spiritual searchers is to find what is healthy in the everyday situation of our lives, and to reject and turn from the things that do not contain the seeds of higher aspiration.

[55:33]

Health is our birthright. Health is an invitation to attitudes and outlooks in which we are not the victims of circumstance. One of the common experiences today that everybody goes through is the notion of stress. Stress, as we see, causes all kinds of ill health. headaches, backaches, the body doesn't lie is the theme of people today reflecting upon a holistic view of health. What can we do to adjust our attitudes? The important thing is not to look at these as simply psychological or mental notions. Here's an invitation. Find an occasion in your life when you can refrain from self-defense, when you are wrongly accused of some trivial thing.

[56:37]

Now this is very practical for monastic living. Find an occasion in which you can refrain from defending yourself when someone accuses you of some trivial offense. And an implementation of this, of how to foster good spiritual health following Saint Benedict's rule, is to avoid criticizing the foibles of another. Living close together, it can be very easily a source of amusement to criticize the foibles of confrere. Two occasions where we might practically put into effect the first degree of humility and using that as a way of fostering our spiritual health, not defending ourselves when wrongly accused of some trivial offense, and secondly, avoiding the criticizing of the foibles of another.

[57:44]

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, look upon us as your sons gathered around the center of our lives, the Lord Jesus. Help us to be open again and again to the grace that he brings us. Help us to see in our experience, in our life story, in the landscape of our hearts, the mystery of your love. We ask this of you who live forever and ever. Amen. This is really good.

[58:56]

A friend of mine says that, this refers to, I'm an alcoholic and I go to Alcoholics Anonymous for almost 25 years. My sponsor says, the first thing, if you can't control what comes out of your mouth, how can you control what goes into it? And I said, wow. Wisdom arising from unsuspected sources. I think was in tune with the fact that Adam and Eve are in the garden, and the first sin is eating the fruit of the tree, and that's why he likes to tune in on the first sin of the body and eating sin. But sometimes we might say, oh, this is removed from us, but it's worth looking at our own addictions, our own things that we get attached to. If you can't control what's going on, how can you control what's going on?

[59:56]

What was the parallel with the first degree of humility? Well, Saint Benedict, in the first degree of humility, is looking for a moral health. He certainly is being aware of vices and that God is... And what he's promoting is a moral health, an ordering of things in life the way they ought to be. And health is that gift that orders our experience of mind, body, and soul the way things should be. It's being in harmony. perhaps the underlying invitation and the first degree of humility of promoting health, looking at the first degree as an issue of health. Now, you know that the traditional virtue for combating gluttony was abstinence, temperance, and sobriety, that approach. But we might look at it with new eyes as hope

[61:11]

hope at this first stage of development, at this kind of basic element of the landscape of our spiritual journey, health and hope leading to God. Rich words and rich concepts that might be helpful for us. So you're saying that they are the trust and mistrust. The battle hope would be, right, trust and mistrust is Erickson's conflict. He's a dynamic person, so there's going to be a conflict occurring at each of his stages, and he sees it as mistrust and trust as the battle. I have to depend on myself, and then you do get gluttonous. Or dependent upon other things. Trust or reliance. Dependence.

[62:18]

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