to what he considers to be the crooks, the core of stability. Benedictine stability places us in a situation where sooner or later we arrive at the heart of every human situation, the choice between despair and the total gift of self to God. It is an identity crisis at the deepest level of our being. Here you can hear an echo of Merton here, because Merton is always singing that tune, at least very often in the things that he writes. Do you remember that little essay he's got on the cell, entitled The Cell, which is in the Back of Contemplation in the World of Action, which was in Sipornos a long while ago, and where he talks about the struggle of a monk who goes into his cell, and he's just falling apart completely, and he doesn't even think he's a monk, and everything is going wrong. And he goes to the Abba, and he says, well, that's exactly the way it should be. And then he goes into that recurse continuum, that business about everything going to pieces, about despair, and about being confronted with your own nothingness. And he says that this is what the monastic life is about, so don't be disconcerted when it happens, that's

[01:07]

what you came for. If you read this anthology of Fr. Jacob, of Merton's writings, you'll find it's going on continually. Let me refer you to a couple of the sections, and then I'll read a few choice quotes. He's got a section in here, actually, the section on stability, there's not that much, it's only a page or two, but he's got one on internal struggle, which starts with number 275, not page, it's the number of the extract, and then suffering, trials, and dread. And he's continually playing this tune throughout those two long sections. The second one starts with number 317. Let me give a few samples. And these will be valid for some of the reasons that Robert talks about. You have to fight for your vocation. Anyone who wants to live the monastic life will have to battle. Merton's

[02:13]

one thing when he's being a poet, it's another thing when he's being a novice minister. What is tough about the monastic life is the business of being face-to-face with yourself. This life dumps you in your own backyard. This life is not physically hard, but after a while this life gets very tough. People think come to a monastery and your troubles are over. In fact, you come to a monastery and your troubles begin. You're supposed to have troubles. The monastery is where you run into them head on. You can see his taste building up as he gets really controlling. This is Merton. It's the other side of the monastic life. You don't find it in his vocation pamphlets. It's a miracle that he stayed there for 25 years. How do we know if we have a monastic vocation? If we endure the suffering and are willing to accept the suffering that God gives us and are willing to grow in it, they are a test of our

[03:15]

vocation. And continually you get this business that it's not what you feel, it's not whether you're happy or not, your sense of happiness. He criticizes that notion of happiness not a lot, but it's really whether you have the persistence, whether you have the will to continue. That's the thing. But you may not feel that you have the will at a certain point. You start to move in your vocation when you become convinced that there is nothing that you will refuse Christ, nothing but nothing. And the religious life consists in finding out what this means. It's not immediately clear and takes deeper meanings as you go on. In order to see this, we have to really enter into the mystery of the cross. I'm sorry if I'm repeating some things that I've read before. It's possible that I'm reading some more psalms. The great paradox of this life of infused contemplation is that one has the impression that all spiritual life has collapsed and that progress is at an end. One seems to go backwards. There is a sense of struggle and opposition. This

[04:20]

is the interior self and the exterior self doing battle. So it is precisely the fact that your whole purpose, your whole project collapses and you feel that you're not getting anywhere. And that's the test of faith. And there's nothing in it for us, a business there. And that's the test of stability, too. The person keeps going after every fruit seems to have been precluded. St. John the Cross says a lot more of the same, of course. When you go off to the desert, you're going to get the works, the business. You're going to have troubles, temptations, and you're going to have to fight to go through the ringer and be emptied out. The Holy Spirit puts you into the desert, so you will have to fight. Colossians 3.5. That is why you must kill everything in you that belongs only to earthly life, the false self, in this term. There is no vocation without crisis.

[05:20]

A vocation means conflict and crisis, and these are generated on purpose. One of the laws of the spiritual life is that crisis is a time for growth. Whereas we think when we run into a crisis, something is wrong. Sometimes even if we make the mistakes, they're salutary mistakes, providential mistakes, mistakes that we have to make. Crisis can make us, push us to transcend ourselves. It is good sometimes to be pushed to the limit. A crisis can push the soul to be completely troubled, and then the soul is set up to have a vocation. That's a surprising one. A crisis can push the soul to be completely troubled, and then the soul is set up to have a vocation. It's kind of a death resurrection thing. It's like, in a way it's parallel to the death of Jesus for the disciples. Or a vocation can be pushed to a crisis, and then the person really gets blessed enough to God to hear what he's saying. Which may confirm him in the way that he's going, or otherwise. For

[06:24]

anybody who takes spirituality seriously, there's supposed to be tension. The life sets up a tension between our goal and how far we can obtain this goal. It's dissatisfaction. You can't solve all your problems. You live with them, and sometimes there is tension and struggle, and then rest in relaxation. But you keep going. We feel if only we could meet our goal, then all would be fine. But this is false, because it implies that struggle and tension are not part of the life, and they are. Life is tension and relaxation, the alternation of the two. The monastic life is not at all being free from conflict. You came here for conflict, real conflict, and this means experiencing everything in terms of this conflict between my God-centered self and my false self, my idol. We should see world conflict in terms of this conflict in ourselves. That's important, because if we just get obsessed with our own little struggle, and we don't see it against, as it were, the dimensions of what's happening in the world, we can get really quite self-centered all over again.

[07:26]

Does he mean that the battle of the tension within ourselves is un-analogous to the tension in the world? He's making it the same struggle with evil, the struggle between good and evil that's going on in the world, whether in South America or between East and West, or whatever it be. In other words, our engagement, our involvement in the world struggle is this interior battle which, at a certain point, may not seem to be a battle between good and evil at all, but it is. This hanging on against all the things that would discourage us. Or this fight against the false self, which is one of the terms he's got in there. There's one thing about these extracts, you've got to remember that these are taken from different pieces, different places in Merton, and it's the collector who has put them together, so there's not a direct continuity between them of context. So sometimes I can be quoting someone which has a different context from the one that came just before, that could be tricky.

[08:29]

So he's talking basically about the conflict between the true and the false self here, and not directly, of course, about stability. There's a lot of extracts in here about the dread business. Now, dread is the thing that you get into as the monastic life goes on, and as the goal seems to disappear, and as all positive motivations get wiped out. This is Rowan Williams writing about Merton. He says, what monastic tradition calls compunction, Merton and the existentialists call dread. And I've seen that before, that's in the article in the dictionary of this virtuality on compunction. They say, well, where is compunction nowadays? The closest thing to it, they say, is this dread of the existentialists, which you may or may not be familiar with. It's Kierkegaard and those kinds of other things. Well, can you say they're the same, or can you make distinctions between the two? We have to make distinctions between the two, okay, because you've got the case of dread for a person who doesn't

[09:35]

really believe in God, right, and who is afflicted with the, call it the fearfulness of existence, he has a horror of existence and the realization of death, and so on, okay. So he's got this dread, but suppose the dread never softens his heart, suppose the dread never brings his will around to face God, or at least to have an affirmative attitude towards life and being, okay. Now that's on one side. He can remain an atheist, he can reject the, what was it called, the invitation of that dread. On the other hand, you've got the fellow who moves through the dread to a kind of affirmation, okay, whether he experienced that in compunction or whether he experienced it in another way. So compunction is the whole thing of contrition and the realization of one's sinfulness, and then this experience of gratitude towards God and finding new strength within oneself, okay, whether without tears. And that's in a religious context. Dread is not necessarily in a religious context,

[10:40]

but it can lead to a kind of a religious experience, even if the person is not that much of a believer. It may make him a believer at that point, but it depends on how he responds to it. So the two really need to be distinguished. If you read Gregory the Great, for instance, you'll find a progression from something very much like this dread of the existentialists through compunction to a kind of fire above God, the whole parable. What is Martin's dread? Martin's dread, it's a very interesting thing. He gets it from the existentialists. He gets it from people like Kierkegaard. And it's like the horror of freedom or in full realization of what the world is like. After your illusions and your bubbles of idealism have burst, and you find out that you're going to die and that the world is full of violence and that I'm not really all that good, I'm not all that virtuous, I'm not all that loving, and so on. Dread is a sense of that reality which just bites into you.

[11:41]

And for him, it's the thing that keeps you honest in the monastic way. If you read that book on contemplative prayer, about the last four chapters or so are on dread. And for him, dread is the only thing that keeps you from getting wrapped up in your own spiritual life in a kind of self-centered, upholstered monastic world. You see what I mean? When you make a meditation and you end up with a kind of feeling of the presence of God and you end up sort of consoled. Well, that can be a self-centered trip in a way. But this dread cuts into that and gives you the fear of God which cuts through too superficial a love of God, okay? It cuts through your own still ego-centered satisfaction, your own cycle of self-satisfaction. You know, back in the Middle Ages they talked so much about the sweetness of solitude and the sweetness of the monastic way. Well, if you get hooked on that and you find a way of making your life comfortable enough,

[12:45]

even with that sweetness, even with the austerities that even a hard monastic life, you can still become very self-centered. A person can become pretty phony in that way. The spiritual athlete, even the ascetical athlete, who inside is loaded with self-love. But dread cuts through that, you see? It cuts right through it and says, look, you're going to die. Look, maybe this whole thing of yours is phony. That's what it said. There are not many others among the Catholic spiritual writers that write about that the way he does. Because he's got this sort of view of the contemporary outsider as well as being a monastic Catholic. That comes out of a Protestant context and it comes out of the context of modern man who is thrown way out there into the world, you know? The existentialist situation where you don't really have that reassurance of faith. Faith is not reassurance anymore. You're sort of naked in this great big universe. Somebody else?

[13:47]

Here are a couple of extracts on it. In dread, one experiences in himself emptiness, lack of authenticity. That's a key word for the existentialist, that authenticity. In other words, I'm a phony. So what can I expect from God? The false self collapses at this point, or at least it's shaken. That shell is pierced. He faces the worst and then discovers hope for the best. Okay, now that's the experience of compunction, where the dread thing reverses itself and the person moves up out of it. And he discovers the grace of God by having nothing. By finding out that he has no love, no grace, no hope, no nothing of his own. And it's the experience of the psalmist. Only the psalmist's dread usually is pretty focused. I mean, somebody's after him, and that's what he's dreading. The psalmist, where he's sick and he's dreading death or something like that. Some disaster which is pretty concrete. But nevertheless, it's the same experience. Whereas with the modern existentialist, it's just this nameless horror of the emptiness of life, the meaninglessness of life.

[14:55]

Okay. After faith has really... The earlier faith, the naive faith, has been lost completely. It's a purifying thing if a person goes through it, but it can drive a person to real despair. Anyway, when he talks about despair here, that's coming out of this background of Merton, where Merton talks about despair in connection with dread. So, it's quite relevant, you see. Sir, is Merton... Is he trying to say just go through it? Go through it, he says. In other words, what can you do? You can go and have a cup of coffee and a donut and pull yourself out of dread for a few minutes at least. Maybe. Not if it's deep enough. But he says, stay with it and go through it, all right? And that's very simple, and the only answer is to stay with it and go through it. When it's this genuine dread, that means it's coming from God, really. If a person is a monk and he's in the context of faith,

[15:55]

then this is the desert for him, because dread is the desert also. The desert is the place which is empty, where you're exposed and at the mercy, as it were, of who knows what. And where God's presence is there, but it's invisible, and it's not giving you consolations. So, it's the desert experience. And go through it, and then it will change if a person faces it. But the tendency is to turn away in discouragement because we can have no hope in ourselves anymore, you see? This is the point at which you're burned out. I mean, you have nothing left. You've got no love of God, you've got no hope, you've got no anything. And you don't see yourself as being a good person. You may hate yourself at that point. Because you've disappointed yourself, you know. It seems like there's got to be some purpose of it, why you're in it, and why you do what you do. What would you... Do you have to have a purpose, or sort of a purpose outside of yourself? You have a faith, right? You've got the promises of God, you've got the word of God,

[16:57]

and you've got a certain commitment that you've made, right? In other words, your life has been given a certain direction, and you've confirmed that direction by your vow, let us say, okay? Confirmed by the fact that you're in a particular style of life. Okay, that sets the whole context. So it's not as if you were just there, motionless, but you're moving in a certain direction because you started yourself in that direction with your vows, okay? So the desert, just like for the Jews, they're not just in the desert, they're going somewhere through the desert, all right? Since your whole life is committed to that. But at this point, even though your whole life is committed to it, everything drains out, and you're left with nothing. So it's a question of whether... Like for the Jews, whether to turn back. They said to Moses, let's go back to Egypt, you know? Or whether to go ahead. In spite of the fact that you may seem to be going around in circles. So here, stability means stability, first of all, in the resolve that you have made to go through the desert until you get to the other side. And it's a faith in God's promise. And then, in a more concrete way,

[17:58]

it means stability in what one is doing in a particular community. To go through the thing, instead of seeking to relieve it by changing place, changing direction, changing way of life. The key decision there is, is this meant for me by God? Is this part of the game? Is this part of the work? Or does it indicate that I'm off the path? And this is the real crisis, you see, where a person can easily decide, look, this is the wrong path for me. This shouldn't happen. Merton says it should happen. And a person ought to be able to tell, simply by the way his heart has been, the way his heart is. If he's had a deep enough love for that way of life, and for that particular promise, the particular promise of that vocation, that kind of contemplative union with God, then he's going to know, somehow, deep in his heart, that nothing's changed. That this is just part of the game. If he doesn't have that, he's going to simply wonder what it's all about. And this is going to be so strange that he'll run away from it.

[18:59]

But if he has that, then once he thinks about it, and once maybe he reads a little bit about it, and talks a little bit about it, he'll say, well, this is right. This is the way it should be. This is what they all promised me about the contemplative life, the monastic life, that this is the way it's going to be. So it's all right. That's what I bargained for. But if he doesn't have that vocation, and that sort of deep love and acceptance of the way of faith, he won't be able to do it. Sometimes when you're in darkness, you're talking about a real once-in-a-lifetime crisis. Well, it can be for a long time, I think, in greater or lesser dose. Right. So when you go through a little darkness, when you're in it, you think it's never going to end. Yes, that's right. While you're in it, you don't see anybody. That's right. So it really takes that leap of faith to say, OK, I'm going to go through it. But it might be a month, it might be a year, two years. You've got no guarantee. It doesn't say on your ticket how long you're going to be in it. And what's more, you've got no feeling

[20:00]

that you're coming out of it or anything like that. You're just there. But you could get in a space where you feel it's never going to end. That is a strong point. You say, relieve the tension that I'll go through my whole life like this. That's right. And then you can really end it and find another way. And the tendency nowadays is to think, well, this is sick. This is neurotic. This is depression or something like that. There's room for a little depression, also in the monastic world, before it gets really weird, before it gets real sick. There's room for a little pathology on the spiritual journey. And that's the confusing thing. Because we tend to judge black and white. This person is on the right way, or he's neurotic. What if there's a little neurosis, and more than a little neurosis, right on the right path? It depends on the end of the story, actually, doesn't it? It depends on the outcome of the story. And yet you can see people who have taken decisively a wrong turn. And usually it's their own thing. I mean, they've taken that turn, and they've got a phony idea of the monastic life, the religious life, or a solitude.

[21:01]

And that's their thing. And so, there's not such a problem there. But where a person is open and gets into that thing, that's where there can be questions. Is there any recommended method or way of dealing with the situation of treacherous, the sort of thing that you just experience passively, and just try to kind of hold your vehicle together, so to speak, until you get through it? You may not think that there's much that you can do at that moment. But the basic thing is to, as it were, hold firm. And not to let negativity begin revolving in you. In other words, if you start dialoguing with the weird thoughts, and with the fears and everything, you can get swept into just a whirlpool of negativity. So, the best thing is to hold firm on your faith, and just let the thoughts drift by and so on,

[22:01]

but not pay any attention to them. It's a little like Ulysses there on the boat, with the sirens singing to him. He has to be tied to the mast. Only these sirens are not so beguiling. But you have that sense that there's something in you that wants to deal with this thing, and kind of get you on into it. Yeah. Well, there may be. I mean, that's not necessarily part of the dread thing. The dread thing may be total horror, in a sense, with no desire to interest oneself. It depends on the person. It depends on what baggage he's carrying along. What it's going to be like. Because whatever negativity you have, will tend to reassert, to raise its head again at this point. It seems almost like there's no criteria for judging whether you're going through, essentially, a healthy, though difficult time, or if you are getting off on a neurotic sidetrack. Depends on how much you're putting into it, you see. If it's a sidetrack,

[23:02]

that means you're going to be entertaining yourself in some way. There's going to be a sideshow if that's a sidetrack. But if you're on the right path, the simple path, it's going to be very simple. And you won't listen to the negativity. You just go through. And there's a kind of openness about that, and the fact that you can talk about it with somebody else, without fear of your thing being punctured, because you can't fall anywhere from there. You're as low as you can get. So you can talk about it without fear of losing anything, and there's a kind of reassurance there. But if it's a sidetrack, then you're going to be in an individual thing, which you're going to start protecting from anybody else, and it's going to have its whole ideology and everything, and it's going to be unreal. And somebody else would be able to see that, so you'd be afraid to show it to anybody else. They'll say, well, nobody else understands me. It's more God and me putting this thing together. Nobody else understands me. So there's a certain openness, and a certain simplicity about that other attitude. And it doesn't have to have a lot of notions and thought about itself. It's just nakedness, and exposure, and poverty.

[24:03]

Well, everything is taken away now. Absolutely everything is taken away. Whereas the other thing, the person is still hanging on to something. He's got an illusion. He's got a picture of his spiritual life. He's got some kind of a phony spiritual composition that he's traveling in, some kind of a vehicle. I think of somebody like Teresa, the child of Jesus, whom Martin, in his first book, says that when he was making much of her, he felt that she was a great saint. He put it, despite her can be angels. Yes. And it seems that she must have gone through that sort of dreaded experience, that she had dry periods that she didn't write about. But then it seems like she would return to those periods where it seemed almost idyllic, the constellations and all that. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't read a whole lot of her writing. But I think that towards the end of her life, everything was pretty dry. It seems to me that she would say that she had no constellations. And also that she never really had

[25:09]

any of these exalted mystical experiences. She was not in the same place as St. Teresa and John of the Cross, as far as mystical experience is concerned. Her life was basically a life of dryness. I think you have to avoid confusing that sticky cultural language that was around her and in the family and everything, and probably with the nuns, and that she picked up and used, with what was actually going on. Because she was really tough. She was really a courageous person and went through a lot of dryness. Now maybe that was precisely the purification of that gooeyness, you see, was the dryness that she had to go through. But she's noted for that, the emptiness of her spiritual life, eating at the table of sinners. What does she say about it? No constellations for a long time, at the end of her life. Quite the opposite. And it was, I think, a dread thing, even though it would never come out in the existentialist language because she was another kind of creature. Yeah, I guess it was more just a part of her vocabulary. Yeah, it would be a sense of estrangement from God,

[26:10]

a sense of the absence of God. Dread divests us of the sense of possession, of having our being, our power to love. The only full and authentic purification is that which turns a man completely inside out, so that he no longer has a self to defend or protect. Such a man may simply be, in perfect openness, a defenselessness that is utter simplicity and total gift. That's quite a bit different from the situation of a person who has got a spiritual life and who is somehow hanging on to it and sheltering it and sheltering himself with it. You see, that other thing, that somewhat neurotic thing. Because a neurotic trip always seems to involve some kind of phoniness that we're hanging on to. It involves a lie that we're hanging on to and a refusal to face the truth. But somebody who is as naked and as poor as that, he can have problems, he can have neurosis in him,

[27:12]

but he's not hugging it, he's not feeding it. And so, his journey is basically an authentic one. That's the kind of sign. There's no payoff. No, there's no payoff. He's not hugging anything. He's just letting everything go. And so somehow he's getting healed even while he goes through that hell. He's not contributing to his pathology, whatever it is. I think that's the way it is. No, no, absolutely we shouldn't seek it because any seeking of it... In fact, you've got to be very careful with this negativity thing. Christian asceticism sometimes gets focused so much on the perfect, the mortified, death to self, that we espouse negativity. Then we get sick right away. It's a sick attitude. As soon as we turn away from the affirmation of being and life towards denying life as first principle,

[28:14]

make our first principle, that's the danger of the monastic life. The first thing is the Christian life, or call it even the Jewish life if you want, the life with God which is affirmation. The second thing is death to self. But if you put the second thing first, you've got it upside down, and a total negativity and sickness comes into our life. It may not appear right away, but it doesn't actually. In effect, we turn ourselves against life, and we don't really want to do that. That's a real distortion, paradox, and turnabout of our nature. It's a kind of sin, you know, under the mask of virtue. There's been quite a lot of it. We don't want to pin that on everybody who gets caught in a little bit of negativity. They like to say that we're Manicheans, or Manichaeism, and so on, around the Christian spirituality of the last few centuries. We'd better be careful about accusing people. But what we have to be clear about is our own attitude, how we read, interpret, and apply those spiritual writings to ourselves.

[29:16]

For the other person, it may have been healthy, perfectly healthy, in the culture of his time, the context of his time, to write like that, to live like that. But for us, it may turn into total negativity. It may make us sick. We have to discern for ourselves, not so much to get this way. Saint John of Cross, for instance, we have to apply him a good caution in this, because it's so easy for us, where we are, to turn that around into a negativity. Well, he's the prince of that kind of asceticism, of asceticism of nada, of nothing, of total rejection of the natural. Boy, that's a razor's edge. It's very easy to slip over into sickness, into hatred of life, which means hatred of oneself, and just all kinds of horrible consequences. It seems like the age that you're in has completely changed the context and the applicability of those symbols in the spiritual world.

[30:17]

That's right. That's right. It's really surprising that somehow a thing which is the best in one age could be extremely dangerous in another age. But it's so. And which throws the burden back on us to be very attentive to the Holy Spirit and to really find our own way in the end. Find our own way, even though we have all of these hopes. None of them is an absolute. The only thing that's absolute, actually, is the Gospel. And even the Gospel can be interpreted in all of these ways. So it's not like God has to be speaking to us directly in the end. And then there's this principle of openness to someone else, of being able to talk about it. A monk can never be on top of the situation. There is really no such thing as a good religious. You are all bad. Sounds like he's really got a complex. If anyone thinks that keeping all the rules

[31:20]

and regulations is going to take away his feeling of unworthiness, he's badly mistaken. Martinus could have told you. I don't want to read him to you all morning. In fact, I could have quoted a couple of... This is about happiness. There's a mistaken idea that there's a wonderful fulfillment just around the corner. This is the idea of today. Especially in California, it's not even around the corner. It is right there, you know. And all this mentality ends up in is immense unhappiness. Happiness is not just around the corner. Don't kid yourself. If you stay here for the rest of your life, you're going to be struggling with constant dissatisfaction. Here you can't forget your dissatisfaction. But this is a fruitful part of this life. It is a good part and can be handled correctly and does not have to become

[32:20]

a sterile, frustrating thing. You come here expecting trial and this means suffering, dissatisfaction, living with the worst in yourself and others. Living with the part of ourself which we think shouldn't be, but we have to live with this all of our life. This is purgatory. Living with the seamy side of life but it isn't all that bad. Then we see that it's livable. This is one of those things where you can't talk about both sides of the thing in the same paragraph. So here he talks about the seamy side in this paragraph. There's a whole other side to it. When he says you'll be struggling with dissatisfaction all your life, that's true. At a certain time of day, at three o'clock in the afternoon, dissatisfaction. But there'll be other times when you're full of joy or when you're just serene. You can't say it all in one word. Who says you have to be happy? There's no law. There's no law that says you have to be happy. There used to be a trapeze rule that you had to be unhappy. There's an inordinate worry about whether you're happy or not happy in our present age, culture, country.

[33:22]

We are surrounded by happiness images. The real question is not am I happy but am I free? And there he falls right back into St. John of the Cross. And with the universal, you know, spiritual tradition, the real question is not am I happy but am I free? Suppose I'm free from my happiness. Suppose I'm free even from my happiness. That's where we're supposed to be. And that's to be in the gospel. That's to be in the Beatitudes at that point. We are? Especially in the New American Bible, it says happy are those who are happy are the poor in spirit. Happy are those who are happy.

[34:31]

Happy are those who are unhappy. Well, it was blessed because of what comes next. So it's coming, it's in the future, the reward and the blessedness, but it's already there because he says rejoice and be glad and he wouldn't command it if he couldn't do it. So some way you claim your happiness, your blessedness, by rejoicing in the middle of that unhappiness, okay? So the Beatitudes are where those two levels come together. The level where we can't expect to be happy, where we should be kind of indifferent. And the other level where the real happiness is. And that's what it's about. So when Martin says don't expect to be happy, there's no promise that you're going to be happy, he's pointing the way to that deeper happiness. Sometimes people contrast the two words happiness and joy. Happiness is good physical health, it's just your organism is running smoothly on all levels. But joy is something else and can exist in the middle of suffering. It can't.

[35:34]

It doesn't always. That's another mistake to think that joy is always in the middle of suffering so we should seek suffering. It doesn't work until we're ready for it. Okay. There's a right type of dissatisfaction in this life which can lead us closer to God. The kind of loneliness, desolation. The kind of a sense that there is nothing whatever on earth that's ever going to fill this gap which is in us. This is that contemplative hunger that he often talks about. It is absolutely useless to look for something which is going to fill this void. Nothing is ever going to do it. If we try to fill this void it hurts very bad and we get disgusted. If we turn to some kind of amusement, some kind of delusion. But somehow or other this loneliness, this need, this lack which is a need for God which we know we can't fulfill or satisfy. If we stay with it it will be okay. But we don't stay with it and instead turn it

[36:34]

into the wrong type of dissatisfaction, frankly. That expresses this whole thing of vocation and stability pretty well. In terms of the sense, the feeling of a contemplative vocation and the thing that brings us here which is a kind of void that the world can't fill. And we bring that void, that hunger with us here. And maybe when we get here we expect that it's going to be pretty immediately filled. But we find out that it isn't. Except for an occasional experience of God maybe. An occasional reassuring touch right in the center of our heart which tells us that we're on the right path. But it doesn't get filled but instead you become more conscious of it. Remember that whole thing about Martin in the book on contemplative prayer where he says, this is the paradox of monastic life that the greatest desire is no desire at all. A desire which is so great that it's no desire. So that's what happens. This hunger keeps growing. And meanwhile, I don't know, it becomes deeper and deeper and swallows up other desires and things.

[37:35]

But it's a dissatisfaction. And yet the dissatisfaction paradox is also a kind of satisfaction it's like that pearl or that treasure that you have buried there and you know it's yours but you can't taste it here. Okay, that's probably enough. He really, I think that the monk who collected all of these must have been in quite a state because he really concentrates on these things. We have suffering which centers around our vocation itself. Suffering of doubt which is sometimes necessary. Our vocation has to go through the test of doubting about it. In order to be free it has to be able to be doubted. In order to be free at some time you have to really wonder, you know, whether you've got it and then you have to do that little cycle and come back and rediscover it again. But you have to be able

[38:36]

to step away from it and to doubt it. That's freedom. You have to be able to realize you can say indefinitely no, you weren't thinking. Maybe. It depends on how you understand that because there are people who have such a deeply convinced monastic vocation that it depends on the shape of your life because for some people that question is already solved. In other words, God has grabbed them so strongly that they know pretty much that they'd be out of their mind if they said no. But nevertheless they could sort of tranquilly contemplate another possibility. Let's suppose I went off and got married or something like that. Picture that and come back. They could put the whole thing together, the two options and then say, well, no, I know. There's no question for me. This is it. So it's not that you have to be able to get to a place where you don't feel your certitude of monastic vocation anymore. You have to get to a place where you can put it together with something else without this compulsive feeling that I mustn't look at that other thing. You see what I mean?

[39:37]

This compulsive feeling of no, I better not look or I'll be tempted. I better not look because it's that insecurity of not being sure that makes us afraid to put the two possibilities together and compare them. You see what I mean? You should be free enough to do that. And you could, what I'm emphasizing, you could be free enough to do that and still you can be as sure as daylight that you're called to be a monk. You see? Because that other thing is just so solid in you that as soon as you question your heart, this is what I want. I don't want anything else. And yet I can imagine the other thing and it too is attractive. The other thing also has its, it's a possible thing. That's the best situation. If something else is possible but when you're here you're at a monastic vocation really talking to you, it doesn't leave any doubt. I was talking in front of Luigi last night about the proper monastic attitude toward women and he was talking about this attitude which has prevailed for a long time. You have to have your eyes downcast as soon as

[40:37]

a woman enters the room and this sounds like kind of a similar thing. It's almost like you're putting yourself in a vulnerable situation by making the thing a taboo. That's right. That's right. By resisting it you give it power. You give it power and pretty soon at a certain point you may find that the whole weight of your life has swung over to that other side and you're gripping onto your monastic vocation by a twig whereas your whole center of gravity is over on that other side and that's the point at which you snap and explode and just walk out. Because somehow reality has escaped your monastic vocation because you've been existing on it with nothing but willpower and kind of fragile conviction. But you've let reality get away from you. You've let your whole nature get away from you and you get into a phony notion of God and of the monastic vocation in which God really wants to deprive you of every satisfaction and you get mad at God. You get an image of God as being the sort of Oedipus figure Oedipus' father who wants to

[41:38]

deprive you of every possible satisfaction and take all joy out of your life. Maybe he's going to give it to you in the next world but no joy in this world. And what happens is that you get into a diabolic bind of a kind where you just have to snap pretty much at a certain point. Either you remain in a very fragile and phony kind of monastic life or you follow as it were your whole nature and you go the other way. And who can say which decision is best at that point because it's a totally false dualism at that point because that's not God and that's not the monastic life it's not Christian life to be that way. Nevertheless monks don't get married and so it's a question of being able to love and yet being able to love without violating one's primary commitment to God. In other words finding an inclusive love for God rather than conceiving of something just as exclusive that kind of thing. And being able to be totally faithful to that commitment to God. There's no question of that. There's a difference

[42:39]

though between the monastic life and the same disconnection. That's right. That's merely a practical matter. There's a kind of peace in this. That's right. There's a difference there though between the person who can do that sort of serenely and knows what he's doing and the person who is compulsive about it. Okay? In other words the person who has gotten a bit into the wrong track that thing becomes too important to him. And it's as if as soon as a woman were there he's driven into a corner of sheltering himself and so on because the distraction because of this process that Jerry was talking about of giving an energy the distraction has become so powerful that he somehow is in a wrong position in regard to it. He's too concerned with it because you can be too concerned in one of two ways you know either by attraction or by by defense and either way is bad. So that serenity that you're talking about which yet is prudent and doesn't you know doesn't get curious that's the right right thing

[43:39]

for a man. It's hard to arrive at when people are sheltered from women you know for so many years and it's better if somebody has kind of experienced it before he comes in so you won't have to go through all those things in the monastery it's harder in the monastery getting that straightened out. We should in this life question our vocation test the authenticity of our vocation even though it makes us feel insecure we grow in essentials in this way. We should question test the authenticity of our vocation even though it makes us feel insecure we grow in essentials in this way. Your vocation has to be real enough for you so that you can walk around it question it compare it with anything else put it side by side with all the other possibilities and still come up with the same answer.

[44:39]

Maybe not every day maybe this conviction has to grow in you but if it's real you know it will. Just like Christianity you know we can't be afraid to say look at Christianity alongside other religions. If you really believe in it if it's really in you nothing else will stand up against it. And it's the same thing with your vocation. If it's real then in the long run nothing else is going to stand up against it. There may be times when that's not so clear and I'll claim that it's always clear but... And there's something about the monastic vocation that as you look at it and as you question it and as you draw out by questioning and thinking and discussion and meditation what's in it you really find how rich it is you see. It's enormously rich but if you have to put it in a bottle defensively and say well that's it that's the way it says in the book that's the way the church says that's the way my profession says that matter is closed and we're not going to consider it anymore if you do that then it becomes very fragile and you're never quite sure that it's true. If you open it up and look at it and let the riches come out of it then you find out what it really is

[45:40]

then it becomes your whole life the other way you've got to put it in a corner and you've got to put your life in a corner so it's very unhealthy at the moment now it's not always the time to be doing that because it depends on where a person is in his spiritual journey there's not always the time for questioning and that can become a big distraction too and a big problem so there's a time when it's prudent to put the questions aside but this has to be done eventually it has to be done and I've repeated it this kind of thing you don't have to be afraid that you're going to come up with the wrong answer whatever answer you come up with will be closer to God that's the important thing okay let's go on just a bit with Rutherford's Rutherford used to say if a temptation arises where you're living don't leave your dwelling in the hour of temptation so there's this business about encountering

[46:41]

a temptation you can't make that an absolute rule of course because suppose the Lord does want somebody in another place however there's a good argument for making a good fight of it where one is for encountering your enemy right on the road where you are rather than going off somewhere else to try to find him because very often it is the same enemy and the monastic life is the thing about trying to encounter him directly rather than sort of putting your energy into something else in other words what the monastic life is about is precisely this encounter of your problem of your life of this identity crisis that Roberts was writing about and that Martin writes about so much whereas other ways of life very often work objectively exteriorly in some way that tends to put that problem in a shade or confront it indirectly rather than directly the solitude the emptiness of the monastic life is designed to bring you into confrontation with it directly so in a sense

[47:43]

what the monastic life is about is a perpetual crisis identity crisis that's an exaggeration because it's not always needle sharp like that but it's true right the whole world can't be in crisis all the time so you've got the desert and you've got the city there's a time and a place and a person who is called to confront the ultimate reality to confront death in that way but he's called out to do that from the city from society and society itself can't be in contact with that all the time or at least only in a very diffused way not directly and that's why there are different charisms in the church that's why there are different roads different locations within the same church it's very subtle it seems crude to us at first but it's very subtle and very beautiful in a way that that's able to happen and that these people

[48:45]

for a while are left untroubled by that problem from time to time one of them will be called to go out and confront that and maybe go back and say something about it to them that's the pattern but at the same time realize how the world is treated in the New Testament that the world is treated as a place of illusion and deception in the New Testament under the power of the evil and other pricks of this world but even in the church even in the church people are not continually looking death in the face there are countries in which they are and some of those places are the places where the church is most alive and certainly the American church is some very different even in the monastic life you know there's the community level of life in which we don't talk about these things for a long time notice the gloom that tends to settle on the community during Lent when those readings are continually hammering away at you about sin and about all of the darker side of reality and of life and penitence that can knock you

[49:46]

down into depression you know and it's too much to take and too much to have in a community for a long time because it weighs down the atmosphere and breathes an unhealthy atmosphere if it continues too long and if it's too uncompensated but the individual from time to time is just called into that and forced into it by the Holy Spirit and he just has to go through it but not the community see a community life has to be tolerable and the same thing is true with respect to other things like poverty you know and some other things there's a certain community level and the individual may be called much more and solitude I was thinking about that how we have certain periods set aside for a more consistent meditation on penitence and things like that in the Lenten season and then there's the season of religious letting and joy come out during Easter whereas it seems like the world kind of denies the cyclical nature of things

[50:46]

and they're like there's this illusion that somehow progress is moving in a straight line towards a golden day when all problems will be resolved whereas the Church seems to recognize that things are always going to return to that starting point and they go through this cycle again and again Heschel is good about this in that little book on the Sabbath because he says that time belongs to God space has been given to man to operate and so man does his thing and the world is constructed in spaces where man has power over space that's the external reality and so he makes it he fixes up in such a way to keep himself cheerful to keep himself comfortable and so on but time belongs to God and so there's this rhythm of time and of life and death which is in his hands and which we try to hide from ourselves and which we try to protect ourselves from you get it? and we do that by sort of plugging ourselves into that exterior thing which we construct for ourselves the exterior rhythm and the excitement

[51:47]

of progress and all of that and meanwhile that thing of time is inescapable and time for us means what? means life decline and death that's inescapable and that's God's thing so we're in his hands but we don't like that we control the outer we don't control the inner he controls it and by question we're giving up control and then Heschel brings the sabbath in there you see it's the place where eternity breaks right into that time thing and that's where the New Testament comes into it and the coming of the Holy Spirit I don't want to get too far aside from this so man doesn't want to have to face the inevitability of that time thing which all is summed up under the name of death naturally for us Anthony used to say humility is the country to which the Lord wants us to go and offer our sacrifice humility is

[52:49]

the country what does that mean remember that internal journey that we talk about in Martin's book the interior journey the last unpublished book of his the idea of giving up an external journey in favor of an interior journey the idea of not making not moving not spreading out expanding having motion variety options on the external level so as to make the change the journey in the interior dimension and that journey is towards what Martin would say from the false self to the true self to the country of humility the land of humility you can also say from the land of unlikeness to the land of likeness anyway it's the sacrifice of exterior movement in favor of interior movement the only thing is the sacrifice of exterior movement really has to eventuate in that interior journey you really have to go somewhere interior as we've seen however the difficulty is at a certain point you're going to feel like you're not going anywhere you're just standing still and then disarmament is needed

[53:50]

but the exterior pilgrimage and then the interior pilgrimage one way or the other they're not absolute exclusive mutually exclusive alternatives obviously because a man can make an interior journey on an exterior pilgrimage as many people have okay then he quotes some Cistercian writers here and we don't need to go into that in detail I wanted to bring William St. Theories golden letter over today because after all that's on he wrote that to the Carthusians and that's about stability in the cell or the limit maybe we can talk about a bit about it next time in a quote that's right in a line with what Martin writes about the article down at the bottom of 109 here this business of roots and the relation with wisdom it sounds like it ought to be a commentary on psalm number one remember the man who's like a tree planted by foreign orders the waters being wisdom the waters

[54:51]

being the holy spirit but here he's talking about the parable of the sower he's going to return to that image of the plant seed the plant or tree in the ground and so on which is basic for this whole discussion on stability it's the most potent image for the whole business it seems so we'll go back to that next time maybe we should quit there today and continue next time i'd hope to finish this earlier but remember that now as we talk about stability we're coming around and we're talking about the whole question of commitment which sort of envelops all of the vows the whole question of making a permanent commitment to God next time i want to spend some time with this book of father gory that's how you pronounce it should anyone say forever he's the one who more realistically than anybody else i've seen seems to approach the question of whether you can break a commitment at what point

[55:51]

you can change one commitment for another or whatever so he gives you some criteria for that so useful for us to talk about because most of the people who write about these things in monastic terms they're all on the side of stability to such an extent that they don't give you the real arguments or the real criteria for the other thing or at least not from the side of experience which he does oh it's h-a-u-g-h-e-y how do you pronounce it i can never remember that animal it's a rough one he's got one called a place for you is it this time i'm gonna have to look because and it's on commitment because that would enter right into his i'm gonna

[56:52]

have to look and see if we've got it because we've got most of his books but i'll look it up and see in that other book a place for you i don't think he talked so much about the question of yeah he's talking about the question of that finding yourself and dying to yourself but i don't think he talked about it precisely i'll check on that all there's also an article in here the studies informative spirituality by father david knight about the desert experience i don't know if any of you read that article this is a new thing it used to be called humanitas it comes from van cam's school an institute of formative spirituality and he equates the spirituality of the desert or the journey of the desert with two things with going without consolation all right this business that merton is

[57:52]

talking about no feedback no return you just go on faith non-commitment and with commitment itself which he says distinguishes christian spirituality that's important for us to reflect on that's the thing that turns a lot of people off on christian spirituality here's the commitment that it asks for all right and with catholic monastic life or whatever it's also a strong point and we need to be able to find a value in that strong point not just to sort of classify it as being institutional or something and throw it aside perhaps it's our strength and then we have a business about when there's no consolation when there's no apparent fruit of continuum this is a very jewish thing tourism because the jews are the people who go on and on and on in a kind of crazy fidelity after every vote has been wiped out i think other well it's

[58:52]

also a jewish too let me let me release this because i don't want to just go off on that the strong point of christian spirituality resides i believe in its emphasis on commitment from the very first days of his novitiate a christian candidate to religious life monastic or otherwise knows that he is faced with a choice of a lifelong commitment the challenge of an unconditional covenant with god all is geared towards this all builds towards this all follows upon it no christian enters a monastery or enters into marriage either with the idea of continuing in this state of life for as long as it's meaningful satisfying fulfilling you get the idea compared with christian monasticism or say buddhist monasticism to either of which does not require such a permanent commitment hindus have this idea we stay in a monastery for a certain length of time we go out and try another path and also the ones that come over to the west usually it's all in terms of realization fulfillment experience and so on and not in terms of permanent commitment

[59:53]

to the extent that you don't have a personal idea of god right idea of a personal god any idea of a personal covenant and therefore a fidelity you don't probably either have a notion of commitment either or commitment becomes relative to what not to the person of god not to a relationship but to your own realization to your own fulfillment right or your own sanctification whatever but that's the see how different I really think that's critical I was thinking of that question I think unless we see clarity in this question of mutual affinity mutual god I don't think we see that clearly mutual god and I think that you can't really keep god within I say yeah otherwise it really in the end it doesn't make sense because why does any abstract commitment hold up for me in the long run you know I mean even the best of them

[60:53]

you say at a certain point well this is dried up you know this is not doing any good either for god or for me anymore why should I stay on with it it's the only thing that will keep you or hold you and it's the parallel is marriage of course where you don't decide at a certain point well we don't seem to be getting very much out of this let's call it a date form another relationship I think there's a totally different orientation this way yes yes that's right the other the other extreme sort of is reflected in the biofeedback thing where you put electrodes in your ears and you sit with this this time you get up to 110 and you're going well and you stay in this but if you get down to 40 you throw it away do something else that's enough that's enough for today that's enough for today that's nothing

[61:42]