Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and our hearts shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, you did instruct the hearts of the faithful by the light of your Holy Spirit. Grant that by the same Spirit we may be always truly wise and ever rejoice in his consolation through Christ our Lord. Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, St. Benedict and St. Erud. Well, I was always taught as a young boy to say thank you for letting me come, and thank you for having me when I left.

[01:05]

So this evening, to get what might be termed the bread and butter part of the retreat over, not that I'm leaving yet, I wish to thank Father Martin for inviting me. I'm not quite sure why. And I also bring greetings to you all from the Abbey of St Anselm, especially to many who know Father Martin, and then more recently Brother Nathan. And Father Placid was mentioned by Father Urban. But Abbot Auburn, Fathers Aden and Christopher, and Kevin and Urban, send special greetings to the older brethren, and then the younger brethren, Jude and Philip and Paul and Erud, send special greetings to Nathan.

[02:09]

Having now arrived here, I've already begun to think that it is I who have come to make a retreat. What a change from Washington. And I almost get the feeling, having been here just a few hours, that you as a community are almost on a permanent kind of retreat. You might not necessarily think so, but that's my first impression. And I hope that the talks that Father Martin has inveigled me into giving to you over these few days will be of some help to perhaps encourage you over this period of time that you set aside for the so-called annual retreat. A time of standing back, perhaps a little more than we usually do,

[03:22]

standing back with a certain amount of discipline from the daily tasks that perhaps have almost become automatic, or there's a danger that they can become automatic, to assess and reassess just what we are doing with our lives. And I thought this evening it would be perhaps useful, just for a few moments, to consider just what we are doing as monks. Monasticism as a way of life has its own strength and consistency. At best, we're told, It can only embody and stabilise experience of living.

[04:27]

At its worst, it may be misleading and remote from real life. The living aspect of it, the living, we living, comes before any self-definition. And so I begin by saying that I'd ask you in your prayer and your meditation to look at the best and I hope consider the worst. And if perhaps, as is most likely the state of affairs, we're somewhere in between, let us look up and not look down. We could also, this evening, consider two basic questions about our monastic life.

[05:36]

Is Christian monasticism to be approached and linked with the much older and more widespread aspect in pre-Christian and non-Christian monasticism? Or do we approach our monasticism in terms of the gospel message? Within Christian monasticism, Is the primary reality the individual monk in search of union with God? Yes, the community, the very fact we're here gathered in a community being necessary environment, or do we approach it from the other side?

[06:42]

Is it the monastic community? made up of individual monks seeking God, that is the primary reality. And I think when we dwell on this and think about it, we realise that both those aspects must be and have to be very important. I think when I joined the monastery in 1953, I would have said that monasticism was something that was specifically Christian. That was as far as my knowledge went. In fact, I don't think I even thought there were Anglican monks. I only found that out later on. We know now, and I know now, and I've learnt even more strongly in recent years, that we need to and have to recognise and honour many of the values in the non-Christian aspects of monasticism.

[08:07]

The very East-West dialogue that is going on is perhaps making us see just perhaps at times where we have gone wrong and how we can learn. But one aspect of the non-Christian monastic life that was often found and is still found is the rejection of the world and the rejection of its values. Christian monasticism cannot reject the world that God so loved that he sent his only son to redeem us. I remember how often Abbott Mooney, who we refer to at Dowie now as Grandfather Abbott, in his conferences used to

[09:16]

turn out the phrase that we are in the world but not off the world. You see, from a Christian point of view, monasticism is ambiguous. It has followed within Christianity, but its genuine values need to be constantly rediscovered, reinterpreted, revalued in the light of God's presence in Christ within the community of mankind as we find mankind today. And I think that one of the big challenges that was put before us by the documentation of all that came out of Vatican II was this aspect of reassess the original spirit of your founders for us Saint Benedict, but make sure that that is related to the world in which we're living in today.

[10:37]

Communion with God for us has been the spring, the starting point for monastic life down the ages. Prayer, as we know, is a search for God and the gospel message that we hear so often and especially the whole of Scripture, is something that is able to give that search new meaning, for God has come to seek and to save what was lost. What we might ask is the real link between monastic life and Christian life.

[11:43]

Perhaps when we look at the gospel, we are inclined to force certain passages. I certainly recall that the passage, who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, is one that is often turned out. And we get glimpses in the Acts of the Apostles of the fully and permanently dedicated group trying to follow Christ. And then the fathers in the desert and the groupings of those men who went out into the desert to give encouragement. But our monastic life, in fact, is something that seeks God in a special way. We seek him in his word.

[12:49]

We seek him in his saving mysteries. Our search is normally something that is exclusive, that we consider to be lifelong, a lifelong dedication to the kingdom of God. Right from the earliest times, from the hermits in the desert to the forming of groupings of people giving encouragement, there was always a disciplined lifestyle. Some kind of agreement laid down of norms of which the group would live together. Gradually, such things as celibacy, renunciation of personal ownership, obedience, prayer and praise, that habitual listening to God's Word, were aspects that grew up and developed.

[14:01]

And some of these, as we know, are aspects of which more emphasis is given today. especially the word. Some of the aspects are questioned in a way which 50, 60, 100 years ago would never have been questioned. Areas such as obedience. And what is it that we do throughout our day? Lectio Divina, work, whatever that work might be, periods of silence and listening, and usually, for the monastic life, community with others. And all this the Church has now seen and agreed to be something that is stabilised by the commitment of vows.

[15:09]

And any community coming together must have some form of common work. But what monastic life really comes down to is the fact that a monastic community is like a sacrament in which the mystery of salvation is revealed and communicated, an outward sign of inward grace. Two things which we're told monasticism is not and yet two things that sometimes seem to creep into our thinking. A monk is not a person in search of any immediately demonstrable relevance.

[16:19]

A monk is not for anything. It doesn't really matter What we're doing, whether we're running a school or teaching in a university or doing parochial work for the call of the church, whether we're running a prayer centre, a retreat house, or whether we're doing agriculture, that doesn't matter. But so often, I think, within our monastic communities, we get bogged down in worrying about those aspects of our monastic life. Know what? A monk is, is defined as a person, a venture of faith, a person whose life will be a struggle,

[17:25]

a person who will have doubts and emptiness and be asked to die to himself. A monk is apart from certain secular concerns, has to admit also his loneliness, but what he has to do is also to find the meaning of that loneliness in his need to be open to the gift of God. And not only just open to the gift of God, but also to the gift of others, and hence the living in community. When Saint Benedict spells out in the rule what a novice should be looking for when he comes to the community.

[18:29]

He spells out that a period of time is set aside for the novice to be tested, to find out whether he is really seeking God. I don't know what you would do here, with your novices to test them. But to me, who has been a novice master, I feel that we don't have to think up tests in this day and age. There's enough testing within the community to find out if the person is really seeking God, can really join us and be with us, one in prayer, in the way that we live our lives. And yet, Saint Benedict talks about humiliations.

[19:32]

Humiliations there will be in monastic life without having to look for them. What Saint Benedict is really saying, is really asking, is how do we react When humiliations come our way, what sort of response do we show? Being misunderstood, being thought the fool when things have gone wrong. When we might have done something very often with the best intentions and an individual in the community or a group in the community or sometimes the whole community or sometimes just that superior has read it all wrong. But Saint Benedict puts it, if it were a special emphasis, within the monastic context and expects us to respond accordingly.

[20:43]

Now I know that in many ways, by saying this here in my first conference, I might be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, as we say. But I think it is important that we remind ourselves about some of these aspects of our monastic life. You see, where I think that the community side of monastic life is so different is that from the outside world, shall we put it, is that we don't choose who we're going to live with within the monastic context. But as long as we hold on to that one and only motivation that Saint Benedict gives us to truly seek Christ then we'll find that we can cope with those individuals that we didn't choose necessarily to live with.

[21:53]

And let us face it, not only novices, not only juniors, but nearly everyone in the monastic life There are times and days when we'd love to leave, pack and go. There will be times when life seems to be very hard. And here am I thinking you've got it cushy here, out in the country, agriculture, away from the hustle and bustle. But your difficulties and the difficulties in Washington or the difficulties at St. John's Collegeville are all the same. There'll be monks there who want to pack and go. There'll be monks there who feel they're overworked and don't have time to pray, as you will hear. And all I can say is that if we realise this, if we can accept this as part of our monastic living,

[23:06]

This is the testing that is constantly going on. And make sure that we hold on to the structures that are given to us by the rule, by our constitutions, by the house customs. Then we'll find that we're growing in that monastic vocation. I think I would say to you this evening, let us consider that. here at Mount Saviour in these few days that you have set aside for your annual retreat. You want to grow in Christ. That desire is still there, I'm sure. We want to grow as individuals closer to Christ, but we also need to grow as a community. I don't just mean numerically, I mean spiritually.

[24:11]

Everything else, I think, follows if we put it on that basis. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. I don't know how long that was, too long most likely, some of you will say. In a way, yes. I think you've got to have a grasp of life, of living, before you can even go into a monastery.

[25:13]

An insight of what life is about. A monastic life, I think, helps us, for certain people, not for all people, but for certain people, it enables us to flower into the fullness of life that God intended for us. And if we haven't got the living part right ourselves and understood it, then if we come in, we not only very often upset ourselves, but we can upset the community life. So I think it's very, very important within monastic structure that the people coming in have that understanding of themselves. because of the difficulty of continuing the search for growth. There's got to be, that's what I mean by stabilized. What do you think is the difference between modern man that, since Danvick seemed to suggest something in addition to just living the life as a form of discipline for the novices coming in, you were suggesting that just living the life was hard enough, that that was enough.

[26:50]

and they're trying and they're testing, you know, daily kind of things. Why, you know, and Saint Benedict seems to suggest something more than that. What do you think is, how are we different? Well, I think we're different because historically we're so different that there are far more pressures which Saint Benedict didn't have to endure or the people in his day didn't have to endure. He was turning his back on a world that had gone wrong. There's that aspect. He was saying, I don't want to live in this world. I'm off this world. I don't want to be in it. The troubles, many of the aspects of today's world are comparable, I think, to his times. But I think the whole aspect of the way they live their lives, the simplicity of their lives, called for him to lay down certain regulations.

[28:01]

Now, I think what has happened in monasticism, that then we started to add to those down the ages. You know, there are ways of testing the novice without sort of saying, well, I could recall one story of a novice, say of 19, beginning of the 20th century, about 911, Aloysius Bloor, whose novice master heard him saying that he thought it was ridiculous having to go and pick up twigs in the orchard. So for about a week, the novice master took out a bag of chopped straw and sprinkled it round the orchard and said, pick it up. Now, you know, I expect it's good for one or two minutes and everything else, but what's the purpose behind it? There were better ways, I think, without having to dream up things like that.

[29:06]

I used to hate Lent as a novice because some crackpot complained to the Abbott president that Abbott Sylvester was not having chapters of faults. And he hated it as well. So every Lent, just to fulfill this sort of Abbott Byrne, for some reason, thought that maybe we should still be having chapters of 4th, so he said, we'll do them during Lent. And he always used to start at the bottom of the community and take so many each other Fridays when we had our conference in Lent. And, you know, for two years it happened to be me. sort of got caught, but the first time was the bottom novice, and I think that was the bottom novice in the second year. And, you know, you'd be dreaming up things to say. I left some fluff under my bed, and I remember Sylvester catching that I said I was doing the chickens at the time, and I dropped a tray of eggs the day that I was having a chapter of flaunts.

[30:20]

And I said, I dropped this tray of eggs. And he latched onto this with, well, you could see him almost having a job keeping a straight face. And he said, well, brother, and how many eggs did you break? And I said, 36, father. And he said, oh, do you think we ought to make you go without breakfast for 36 days? And the community just collapsed. So, I mean, what was a chapter of false? What was the intention which was brought in? It wasn't that, wasn't it? And I think that we've grown to find, you know, that superiors and the formation can do its correction. Fraternal correction is something that we should have grown into. And if we haven't, then I think we stopped growing without dreaming up those things. So I think that's the area I'm touching.

[31:23]

I'm not saying more questions. They were all right. This thought was in lots of fights like that. I was just reading today. When Durant said he was avid, He published a big thing saying novices should be humiliated. He falsely accused people in chapters, let's see how they react. He published some very plentiful work saying everybody should do this. If you don't do this, you're just not cutting any mustard, you're not little monks, you're not ascetics. Real Durantian sort of thing. And Benedict was propped up badly on to reply to him. It was pretty much the same question, apparently, that's been going on for a long time. Marmion. I thought if you were referring to Marmion, I think that's why Marmion was such a great success. That he brought, I think, into the, what I'd call, European flavor of monasticism, where a lot of it had become petty.

[32:30]

People were petty within the monastic life. He brought a great balance. I think this is why his writings, mainly which were his conferences, Christ, the Idea of the Monk and Christ and His Mysteries, were such great works for his time, and are still now, with the emphasis on Scripture, being reconsidered still as classics. of the spiritual life. It's just a pity someone doesn't re-translate them or something or bring them up to a sort of modern, take the Latin texts out and put just the English scripture in. But they're beautiful insights into what monastic life is about. You gave a definition of Christian monasticism and I don't quite get it. I mean, you deal with the sacraments of the Church and sacraments... As a monastic community, Father, is like a sacrament.

[33:44]

Yes. In which the mystery of salvation is revealed and communicated. The last part again. Which the mystery of the sacrament is revealed and communicated. The mystery of salvation. The mystery of salvation, sorry. Thank you. I was reading Caspers, or I'm reading Caspers' book on the God of Jesus Christ. It's kind of like saying he's talking about revelation, the mystery of God. You were just trying to go almost exactly what you were saying, that somehow we got to the enlightenment of the notion that the mystery of God was an epistemological problem, and God was incomprehensible to our concepts, or something. The meaning of God is hidden, and that hiddenness is hidden in that way. Within our life, and of course it's what

[34:48]

I know myself, you'd think, if we were only a Bible community, we'd like to have a Bible community here, where people really... all this... that that would be the way we'd manifest God. But as a matter of fact, as somebody said of us, the oldest, greatest, and some of its parts, and that's precisely that addition, that hidden thing is really God's presence among us, saving us, and we can't... artificially do it in such a wonderful way as simply being ourself, somehow manifest God's love, forgiveness, support, guidance, and everything else in ways that really are astounding. Again, for some of us, the i-words, the faith, they say that in a group of people searching for God, somehow is revealed the mystery of God's presence within us. There's something that you can't set up in that way. It comes out in a different way in each community.

[35:53]

Yes. And I think also, even within this group, if we were to go try and define what a perfect community, what we thought a perfect community was, and the model community, we'd be different. The other aspect without being flippant, even if I thought my definition of the perfect community was to be discovered here, I think it'd be an awfully boring lot. Because the danger is, it's all my image. I want you to be like me. not as I am now, but as my concept. And that would deaden it. It's the fact that you have suffering, you can have someone who needles you, there's someone who pokes you to turn to Christ rather than to the world. That's the thing that makes it. But if you were all to be like I think you should be, I think you'd be an awfully dull lot.

[36:58]

Because it's the mix that makes the good community. It's the differences that makes the real community. I think that's one way that I like to look at it as well. he is absent, that that indicates a lack of growth. Has, in your experience, that critical correction is, in our day and age, not a very popular thing? For some reason it seems that it has something to do with sort of a personal concept, the dignity of the individual.

[38:16]

That it almost can't be done on a level, always ends up having a tilt to it, it has to be down, correction down. Or being uncharitable, if you correct your... It's very difficult for it to exist. I get the impression that it's very difficult to do it in charity today, somehow. Well, you see, I think one of the things that's brought that about, I think any of you older fathers, I say Father Placid, who was telling me earlier on he did his novitiate of Fort Augustus. Well, you've only got to listen to those men of that era, right down to my own era.

[39:20]

There were enough of us in a novitiate normally, that it was us against him. The novice master always won, but the novices had a jolly good time trying to get around him or to needle him in some way. I mean, I remember we being encouraged to go and get daily orders, which we got on our knees every day, and on April's full day to wish the novice master a happy feast day. Which we did. I mean, it was a stupid thing to do, but some novice suggested it. And of course, we were put on a starvation diet. And this went on for about a week. And we were really beginning to feel it. And we eventually got the men who went to get their daily orders to, you know, very humbly ask, you know, what was it necessary for us to do to get back and eat something? And he said again with an absolute poker face, when you've all come and apologized to me personally.

[40:24]

So there were 12 of us in the novitiate. We wished him a happy feast day on April Fool's Day. Now, the thing is that although the starvation side was hurtful, it was also a great thing, you know. What was going on was we enjoyed it in a way. and then to be able to revert back to it. Now, I don't think that that sort of life can go on in most novitiates now because you've just got a one-to-one basis. And you haven't got the support of fellow novices very often to say, oh, don't take any notice of him. He's just trying to humiliate, you know, a second-year novice, which often was there. Would that be right, Father, in your time? Did you hear all that? No, he didn't. I'll tell you afterwards. Yes, I'll tell you afterwards.

[41:24]

I'm sure it is because I've heard all about the Fort Novitious novices. It's given me an insight, Father, when I came here about the fact that Regan was a novice. He said, we don't celebrate birthdays. I suddenly realized that Father Nemesis was born on the first day. With this kind of paternal correction, it seems to me that our perception is one thing that doesn't help. That if somebody, for instance, And you have to quarter some of the things on the phone because you can't do it. Maybe it's a mistake as a man that I think that you're fooling around the phone and stuff like that.

[42:27]

You'll think, you know, you can't take it sad because, you know, who are you thinking of? But at the same time, if I feel that somebody's too over on the phone, it's a kind of challenge to make it reflective. Is it really needed to speak that long? But I won't say the question. I'll just say, I think you're too over on the phone. But maybe if we say it in a different fashion, it's in ways that... No, I'd step away from that altogether. That is, you see, I think that within the community it's either the procurator or the bursar's job to or the superior's job if it's not delegated to the procurator to make assessments like that.

[43:31]

And it's when the community meets to talk about finances or too much has been spent on the phone or, you know, we've only got one phone and some people feel they can never get on it. That comes through the community meeting through a superior or whatever. If it's the procurator telling the superior, that's the level it's done. Where I think our fraternal correction often goes astray is that we see a person suffering and we don't hold out the hand to help in any way. And in fact, one area where I think it's very dangerous in the community is when a person is starting to slip away from observance in some way, instead of giving encouragement, often as novices or as a community, we can become critical and cynical

[44:36]

And in fact, we push the person even further away. And I think that is the area in fraternal correction which we need to be considering in our monastic life. You know, just think, oh, he's always late. And you know, that filters through all the looks on our faces. or if someone makes a mess of the reading that we sort of almost mock him. Now, that's what I feel is lack of fraternal correction or doing things in the wrong way. We need to be corrected. And I think we need to grow in an openness that eventually we will be able to say far more. But the trouble is we normally lean the other way of being critical rather than correcting. Do you know what I'm getting at? I'm sure a lot of you have experienced that.

[45:38]

I wanted to come back to this example of the phone. It seems to me that sometimes there's the idea of responsibility that seems to be forgotten, or the idea of charity, or even a case like that, somebody is in contact with other people outside. Maybe he had less contact with us than he can have contact with anybody. And it sometimes, my concern would be, seems there's really something, something's important or things that they are avoiding. Well, having dealt with this at various levels as junior master and as a novice master and now as a superior, you can often, you often hear said back when those sort of criticisms are made, but I've been driven to this. Because, have you ever listened to the talk when we're together in the califactory?

[46:45]

How childish it is or whatever it is, you know? No one respects me here, what I'm trying to do for the community, but people do outside, what I'm trying to do for them, whatever it might be. It's a delicate area, but what I'm saying is, it is something that any community, any family, can grow in. You know, rather like a brother or two brothers or brother and sister can help each other grow within a family, yet how often do we hear them saying, don't you talk to me like that? Daddy can tell me to do that, but no, you're not going to tell me to do that. And because they consider themselves as equal. there, so why should they be corrected? But later on, perhaps, when they're still brothers and sisters, in their older life, they'll only be too grateful for a brother or a sister to come round and offer some help or give some advice, because they've grown.

[47:54]

I think this is what, you know, each monastery has its level at which it has grown for that fraternal correction. And you know, I think, as a group, where that level is. How much, you know, that you can take personally without feeling, well, why is he always on my back? Your definition of paternal correction Yes. In fact, I would say that is what real fraternal correction is. Fraternally, I think the superior, whichever level it's at, but the superior has that right to not only encourage but also correct, as Saint Benedict spells out, you know, on the abbot.

[49:00]

On what sort of man the abbot should be. And think how delicate that chapter is before he moves into the correcting side at all for the abbot. I think that's what the superior of the house is, is therefore the father. But the fraternal correction, I would say, is more fraternal encouragement. You can get in your little correction by the encouragement very often, And it makes a much happier family. Do we have Compton? Yes.

[49:48]

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