A reading from Paul's letter to Phobians chapter three. All I want is to know Jesus Christ and the power of this resurrection and to relive within myself the pattern of his death. A number of years ago, probably 25 years ago, we had a sister visiting from Stanbrook Abbey named Richard. And she wanted to visit Mount Savior. And I said, well, I'll drive you up. So after matins one morning, we took off, hoping to get here in time for Mass. And on the way, we were keeping silence basically, and I was continuing, it was Feast of St. Francis, and the epistle was that reading from Philippians. And I thought, I'll just repeat that phrase, all I want is to know Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection, and to relive within myself the pattern of his death. So I kept repeating that to myself as we were driving.

[01:02]

We got here, and I opened up the door of the chapel, the church, And the reader was reading the epistle, all I want is to know Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection. I think somebody's trying to get a message to me. But it's very interesting the phraseology there. to relive within myself the pattern of his death. That word pattern would be in Greek, I don't know Greek, but something like archetypos, that there is a pattern to spiritual transformation. Actually that pattern is the pattern of the Paschal Mystery and the Vatican document on relating to other major religions, Nostra Aetate, very, very succinctly and wisely says it's the pattern of all the great religious traditions, that the Paschal Mystery can be identified in some way in all these great religious traditions.

[02:05]

We use the word Paschal Mystery as kind of a shorthand for that ongoing process of death and resurrection. But as I said the other day, it's the suffering, death, resurrection, and the release of the spirit. The Paschal Mystery, the Pasch is the Passover, the transition. They're going from the past to the new, the old person to the new person, from willfulness to willingness and so on, as I talked about yesterday. Esther Duval says that the Paschal Mystery is the very key to the rule of Benedict, but in reflecting upon that, I thought it's the key to all Christian spirituality. It's not just monastic or Benedictine. But it's important to underscore that element of the paschal mystery. I would like to recommend a book that perhaps you know of with

[03:08]

published back in the 80s, The Art of Passing Over, by a Norbertine priest, Francis Dorff. A little paperback, not very big, from Paulist Press. And Francis Dorff lays out in that book another look at the Paschal Mystery. And he identifies that pattern in creativity, in psychological growth and in spirituality. It's a very accessible book, not that hard to read. I've given it to many retreatants at our monastery who found it very helpful, especially if they were in times of transition and big change and so forth. It's, I think, an amazing study because of the pattern he sees in these various areas. And that pattern is threefold. It's about leaving the past, being in that interim space called liminality, and then return.

[04:12]

It's the pattern of the hero in the hero myth, if you're quite a good Joseph Campbell. But it's that middle phase, from leaving and going to the new, that can be very difficult. It can be disconcerting. We can feel lost. We can feel Uncertain, you know, all the old symbols are working and we haven't gotten to the new. It's that in-between period. Limit means to cross a threshold, to step out, to leave the past behind, to leave what's consolidated and certain, even interior attitudes, leaving it behind to go into the new. I have a friend in California and she told me that a few years ago, she loves camping and being outdoors and so forth, and she went on a a retreat which was set up like a vision quest of the North American Indians.

[05:15]

And it was out in the desert in California. So they prepared people for this and they explained, you know, what it would be like. They would be out in the desert alone for three days. I guess they were told they could have a cell phone in case there was any emergency, they could call. okay, for help. But she was not afraid at all. She thought religious. Listen, I love being in the desert. She had camped in the desert. So they got everybody prepared and the ritual that they set up for going out into the desert is they put a rope on the ground and they said as soon as you step across that rope, you're on your own. You have to go out and find a place of solitude and set up your camp and so forth. She said as soon as she stepped across the rope, her throat dried up. She began to realize, you know, all the things that could happen even though she was an accomplished camper. That's liminality.

[06:17]

That's moving into the unbound, uncertainty. It's moving into a time of testing. But it's also the time of encountering the numinous, the sacred, guiding persons and so forth. So it's when we get sort of unhooked from that consolidation that we've had before that we can be open to the Spirit touching us. It's for this reason that the Exodus is an important theme. You know, it's certainly the heart of Hebrew spirituality, the whole Paschal, Passover experience of the Hebrew people, the Exodus. And it's a very popular theme in early Christian spirituality and monastic spirituality, because that dynamism of leaving Egypt going into a time of testing and wandering and so forth, and receiving the covenant, all of that, and then going into the promised land. It's not literally a return, but it's a kind of reconsolidation.

[07:20]

In fact, John Christenston has a wonderful comment. He says, it's easy to take the monk out of Egypt, but it's hard to take Egypt out of the monk. So that our interior separation and non-attachment is a harder thing to accomplish. John Navone, SJ, who is a theologian who worked in the area of story theology, has a book called The Christ Story, and the subtitle is Our Life and Story in Christ. And so that Christ story is a model for our transformation. He identifies the pattern this way in this language. It's the same pattern. He identifies it in the life of Christ and in us. He calls it home. homecoming, the homelessness and homecoming. that we're at home, but then we move into homelessness, a transition phase, liminality. Liminality, by the way, is very important in liturgical studies nowadays.

[08:25]

And then homecoming, okay, a deeper consolidation. It's as if the spiritual life is a kind of spiral, you know, of moving out, going into a wandering, and then coming back to the center again. And it's a continuous passage of transformation. William of St. Thierry, my favorite medieval theologian and spiritual writer, kind of overshadowed by Bernard. William was a Benedictine abbot who joined the Cistercians because of the influence of Bernard. He has a sermon on the Exodus in which he says, we're all people of passage. We're all in via. We're all, you know, as we pass through this world into the next, we're people of passage. It's a theme taken up by Thomas Aquinas, homo the author, where the person in transition, where all people of passage.

[09:26]

One of the ways that St. Paul talks about that passage of transformation, it's become very important for me as a way of understanding the Christian life. And I don't hear it preached about very much, surprisingly. I think that's accidental. But St. Paul, he's talking about what difference the Resurrection makes. This is in 1 Corinthians 15. And he says, he talks about Adam and Christ. And he says who we are in Adam and who we become in Christ. He says in Adam, we are psychikos, psychikos. In Christ, we become pneumaticos. Now, it's not that the psychikos is wiped out, you know, canceled. That's the way the Chancellors would have looked upon it. But it's radically changed and transformed by the neuma, the spirit. But he goes on in a couple other sentences explaining what this means.

[10:30]

And I think there's a lot of insight here. He says, in Adam, in the psychikos,

[10:36]

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