And I welcome all of you to celebrate our feast day with this particular gathering. So actually when I first came here to look the place over, there was a Belgian priest and it just I just thought of it this moment, and I'm trying to think of his name, and at my age, the harder you try to think of something like that, the farther it goes into your shoes, so that's gone. But anyway, he came over to attend the World Council of Churches meeting, which was in Evanston at the time, and he was forbidden by the Vatican to go inside the conference hall. He could stay outside and take an exit poll on the people, but he couldn't go in. But anyway, he came back and gave us a series of lectures. And then I was living, and some of the guests were at St. John's, which is no more. But anyway, after this wonderful lecture and all, I was almost afraid to approach him.

[01:01]

And he was looking in a little so-called library down there, and put a real intense look, and he said, do you have any detective stories? And so it was wonderful. As you know, we try to keep the introductions to a minimum to give our speakers a chance. And we're extremely happy, as I said this morning, in these later lectures with Sister Marie-Juliane and Dr. Sinara, and then Sister Camille, Lorenzo and Bob Ivers, we have people who know the monastery well, and though the general topic is the contribution of monastic life, not meaning Mount Saviour, but monastic life to the Church and the world, It is wonderful to have people who really know our life from the inside out, so to speak. And so we're extremely grateful that Dr. Sonner is with us.

[02:02]

And then we're advertised for next week. Sister Camille is going to speak on the challenge of living the gospel in an unforgiving world. So we welcome Dr. Sonner with a great deal of joy tonight. Well, thank you, and thank you for coming. Brother Sebastian, thank you for giving up whatever football game you're missing this afternoon. I appreciate that. Fifty-eight to nothing yesterday, so we're undefeated, we're 9-0, and we're on our way to a championship for sure. Now, today's gathering falls under the rubric of no good deed goes unpunished. See, about a year and a half ago, I suggested to Father Martin, as part of the 50th anniversary, wouldn't it be great if we had a lecture series? So as I was scrambling to put this together, I said, no good deed goes unpunished.

[03:08]

And as I'll mention in a minute, this community has known me and them for 33 years. So there's the story about the second grade teacher on parent-teacher night. And the second grade teacher said to the parents, If you don't believe anything they say, said about me, I won't believe anything they've said about you. So with that, and then two weeks ago I was in Rome. Sagrada University has just started a new venture with the Pontifical Institute for Oriental Theology to develop a program of collaboration to try to do some work with the theological dialogue between the Eastern churches and the Western churches. And I was sitting at dinner with an 87-year-old Jesuit and Father Spivak. Father Spivak has written about 300 articles on Eastern Christian spirituality, and he's a delightful man.

[04:12]

And he said to me, Tony, do you know why the Jesuits are not Catholic? And I said, Father, no, I don't, having had all of my degrees from the Jesuits. Well, how is this the case? Because I've often heard this. And he said, well, the Jesuits, they don't teach what Jesus taught, and they don't teach what the church taught. I said, oh. I said, you know, there are a lot of people of America who say that. He says, yeah, but remember this. The Jesuits, they teach what Jesus should have taught and what the church should teach. So I hope that this afternoon I'll teach what Jesus taught and what the church should teach, I don't know, some combination of both of those. I come to these reflections this afternoon deeply aware that I have grown up here. I came to Mount Savior Monastery 33 years ago, December 10th, 1968, as an 18-year-old.

[05:13]

I got off the bus in downtown Elmira and took a cab, and it was snowing, and it was after Compton, and as we came up the hill, the cab driver, who was old enough to be my grandfather, had a little transistor radio hanging from the rearview mirror, and it was playing Kumbaya, and the sign that I saw coming up the hill said, Dead End. And 33 years later, I have thanked God every single day for the gift that Mount Savior has been and is to me. And I recognize at 51 that I'm one who is not only grateful, but also one who desires and intends to live the rest of my life as an oblate of Mount Savior Monastery. We just built a very big house, and if you needed an affirmation of the fact that I expect you all to be here 25 and 50 years from now, I just put all of my investments in that house, so I hope that we'll be celebrating 75 years and maybe even 100 years.

[06:32]

As I was preparing this paper, I realized anew what I have known for many years, namely, that I love this place. and that I love this community, this particular group of people, and that I have been deeply and extraordinarily loved here every time that I have come and every time that I am here. What an extraordinary gift in my life. How could I ever find the words to give full expression to these bonds of love and to the gratitude that I feel? I thought of the psalm that we pray together at Vespers on Monday. How can I repay the Lord for his goodness to me? I will take the cup of salvation and I will call upon the name of the Lord. The response that has made the most sense to me, the way I have tried to take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord,

[07:38]

is by choosing to live my life according to the way of Saint Benedict as I have received it and experienced it here at Mount Savior. I desire to live my life as an oblate of this community. in the most ordinary and sometimes in the most extraordinary of ways, I have been formed and reformed here and have received the grace to fulfill the vocation that God has given me. Now, no one is ever an oblate alone, apart from a community. One is always an oblate of a particular monastery, just as the monk is always a monk of a particular Benedictine community. We go to God together and God comes to us through a particular community. So I'm an oblate of this place, of this particular community, one who belongs to this community and place at this particular time in history.

[08:41]

The word is made flesh here and now. The paschal mystery is lived and celebrated in this place as it has been for 50 years. For 50 years, the monks of Mount Savior Monastery have borne witness by how they live together to the presence and activity of God in our midst. This is what the monks of Mount Savior do. As a community, they give witness to the presence and activity of God in our midst. even perhaps most especially when what we often experience is not God's presence and activity, but God's seeming absence, his seeming indifference to our plight. A witness to the presence and activity of God in our midst. What an extraordinary vocation and what an extraordinary ministry

[09:48]

in the life of the church and for the world. What an extraordinary gift these monks are to us because they invite us to share in that witness. I have three themes today. The presence and activity of God, our awareness of such presence and activity, and the character of monastic witness in today's world. And thank God, Vespers is only an hour and 15 minutes away, so we can't go on that long. Saint Benedict reminds us that we are always in the presence of God. It is a theme that is present throughout the scriptures. Oh Lord, you search me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I stand. You understand my thoughts from afar. The God in whom we live and move and have our being. Over and over and over again, the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament reminds us that we are in the presence of God, in whom we live and move and have our being.

[10:55]

Yet, this abiding presence of God is, if we're honest with ourselves and one another, is an elusive presence. And we can experience that elusiveness as absence. On Tuesday mornings in this chapel we pray, week after week, year after year. My tears have become my bread, by night and by day, as I hear it say all the day long, where is your God? These things will I remember as I pour out my soul within me. I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do you go about mourning, oppressed by the foe? With cries they pierce me to the heart, my enemies revile me, saying to me all the day long, where is your God? So the God in whose presence we live and move and have our being

[12:02]

is so often the God who is elusive to us, seemingly absent, particularly at times of our greatest need and yearning. So what guidance does the scriptures give us for this? I'd like to suggest that we listen to the third chapter of the book of Exodus for a minute as our point of departure. Meanwhile, Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock across the desert, he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in fire, flaming out of the bush. And he looked on, and he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed. So Moses decided, I must go over to look at this remarkable sight and see why the bush is not burned. When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God said to Moses from the bush, Moses, Moses.

[13:09]

And Moses answered, here I am. God said, come no nearer. Here I am, he answered. Remove the sandals of your feet, God said to Moses, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father, he continued, the God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, the God of Isaac. Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. But the Lord God said, I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers. So I know well what they are suffering. Therefore, I have come down to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and to lead them out to the land into a new and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So indeed the cries of the Israelites has reached me, and I have truly noted that the Egyptians are oppressing them.

[14:15]

Come, now, I will send you to Pharaoh to lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh to lead the Israelites out of Egypt? And God answered, I will be with you, and this shall be the proof that it is I who have sent you. When you bring my people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this very mountain. But Moses said to God, when I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, if they ask me what is his name, what am I to tell them? And God replied, I am who I am." Then he said, this is what you shall tell the Israelites, I am sent me to you. We have in this passage Israel's fundamental experience of God.

[15:23]

God imminent, transparent, and transcendent. I have heard the cry of my people, and I want to do something about it. I'm here in the midst with them in their suffering. And what does God choose? What does the one who is imminent choose to do? He chooses to work through Moses. I'm so concerned about the affliction of my people that I'm going to send you, Moses, to do something about it. And I'll be with you. The imminent one is also the transparent one, the one who works through Moses. And when Moses asks God's name, God gives an answer which is elusive. I am who I am. Or as John Courtney Murray in his lecture at Yale University on the problem of God in 1949 said, I shall be there as who I am shall I be there.

[16:31]

God, imminent, transparent, and transcendent, is Israel's fundamental experience of God. The Christian community's encounter with God is similar to Israel's fundamental experience. Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Abba, Father, The crucified one whom these first Christians came to know as the risen one was the anointed one of God, the Christ, the Messiah. He is one like us in all things. Jesus was truly human, yet a human who so pushed the dimensions of what it meant to be human one who was so receptive to the reality of God that God was indeed incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, God imminent in our midst.

[17:43]

Yet the Christian community's experience of God's presence and activity also invited the disciples of Jesus to acknowledge that the Spirit of God was the first gift of the paschal victim. They recognize the experience of Pentecost, or in the experience of Pentecost, that this Holy Spirit not only dwelt in their hearts and in the hearts of the community, but is also the one who breathes where he wills. moving and shaping the whole direction of history and deed of all of creation. Thus they also experience God working through them, in their midst, beyond their community, in history. God as the transparent one, Yet the imminence of God and the transparency of God did not exhaust the experience of God for the early church.

[18:54]

God was also always the gracious mystery in their midst. Abba, my dear own father, gracious, loving, abiding, yet fundamentally beyond their grasp or control. Thus God was also experienced as ever mysterious, always beyond, even while in their midst. I shall be there as who I am, shall I be there. God is the one in whose presence one must take off one's shoes and be silent, listening in awe and in wonder, in praise and thanksgiving. For all of the images and metaphors and symbols that the early Christian communities used to express their experience of God and of God's activity, there emerged one that was the least insufficient.

[20:05]

It was from Saint John. God is love. God is agape. Love unconditional, total, and forever giving. God is not an isolated monad. No. The revelation of God in the Christian community is that God is agape. The father giving God's self completely to the son, and the son who gives himself completely back to Abba. Their unconditional love for each other is the Holy Spirit. The eternal communion that is God's inner life is agape. The eternal presence and activity of God is love. Love made visible in Jesus the Christ, finally and most fully on the cross.

[21:10]

The imminent, transparent, transcendent One in our midst is present and active as unconditional love. The word that God speaks is love. The action that God does in the world is love. and the being in whom we live and move and have our being is agape, is love. God, who is ever mysterious and beyond our comprehension, always calling life out of death, is always calling good out of evil. God is always inviting us to live in that love and to be that love for one another. God is always laboring to bring the creation to its fulfillment in agape so that God may be all in all.

[22:16]

That is the reality that we are immersed in. That is the reality that the monks give witness to every day. Yet immersed as we are in that reality, we human beings, we miss it. We forget it. We tend to live as though it was otherwise. We are blind and often uninterested in the saving presence and reality of God in our midst. So the judgment. Let me reflect on some of the elements within our culture that foster that blindness and then to reflect on the personal dimensions of that blindness. In his book, Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker wrote the following. Every few hundred years in Western history, there occurs a sharp transformation.

[23:22]

We cross what is called a divide. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself, its structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world, he goes on. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born. Drucker concludes, we are currently living through just such a transformation. It is the creation of a post-capitalist society. We live in a world obviously undergoing a profound transition. Our times are one of those epic making moments in history like the emergence of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution. The scientific, technological revolution in which we are in the midst has presented us with changes so profound that most of us don't even begin to comprehend them.

[24:23]

However, we know in our hearts, in those quiet moments of reflection, that there is a fundamental shift occurring in humanity's self-understanding. Epic making moments like this provide the human community with the opportunity to make a quantum leap in its evolution. However, this shift has also caused us to experience a fundamental dislocation, perhaps a hermeneutical dysfunction. For many of us, the old language to explain life simply doesn't work anymore, and we have yet to create a new language to explain our experience. For many of us, the old metaphors are no longer adequate, and we are in search of new ones as part of our quest to understand our place in the universe. Second, in addition to this profound and often baffling sense of change, there is the emergence of what I call an excessive individualism in our culture, and this also makes us blind to the presence of God.

[25:36]

We don't have a language to name our experience, and we're battered by this excessive individualism. We live in a society that cherishes the right of people to choose for themselves. We take it as axiomatic, as one of the uncritically accepted assumptions of our world, that each of us should choose his or her own pattern of life or lifestyle. This sense of the self as individual was won in no small part by our freeing ourselves from older moral horizons. In the past, many people saw themselves or understood themselves as part of something larger. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, the great chain of being. In such an order, human beings figured in their appropriate place among the archangels, the cherubim, the seraphim, and other angels, as well as other earthly creatures.

[26:38]

This hierarchy was reflected in the hierarchy of society. Many people were often locked into a given place, a role or station in the world that was properly theirs, and from which it was virtually impossible to imagine Deviating. The older folks in the audience just need to remember the wonderful music, the sound, the fiddler on the roof. Sound of music is my favorite, right? Tradition, everybody has their place, right? Very few of us want to go back on this achievement. Indeed, there are many who would say that much more needs to be done in this regard, that our freedoms are still too restricted. However, Many of us are also ambivalent about this aspect of modern civilization. While recognizing and affirming the good that has been achieved, there is also a recognition that this enlightenment value needs to be critically appropriated in ways that we have not done in the past two centuries.

[27:46]

In his important work, The Ethics of Authenticity, the Canadian political scientist and philosopher Charles Taylor writes this about the older moral horizons. That they gave, and I quote, meaning to the world and to the activities of social life. The things that surround us were not just potential raw materials or instruments for our projects, but they had the significance given them by their place in the chain of being. He goes on, the eagle was not just another bird, but the king of the whole domain of animal life. By the same token, the rituals and norms of society had more than their merely instrumental significance. The discrediting of these orders has been called the disenchantment of the world, and with it, things lost some of their magic. The worry has been repeatedly expressed that the individual lost something important along with the larger social and cosmic horizons of action.

[28:56]

Some have written of this as a loss of the heroic dimension of life. People no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for. Alexis de Tocqueville sometimes talked like this in the last two centuries ago when he talked about people in America being caught up in the small and petty pleasures of life. In another articulation, we suffer from a lack of passion. Kierkegaard saw the present age in these terms, and Nietzsche's last men are at the final nadir of this decline. They have no aspiration left in life but to be that of pitifully comfortable. The loss of purpose was linked to a narrowing. People lost the broader vision because they focused only on their own individual lives. Tocqueville reminded us that democratic equality can draw the individual towards himself.

[29:59]

In other words, the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, making our lives poorer in meaning and less concerned with others or with society. This worry has recently surfaced in terms like the permissive society, the me generation, the prevalence of narcissism. The senses that lives have been flattened and narrowed and that this is connected with an abnormal and regrettable self-absorption has also blinded us to the presence and activity of God in our lives. From a different perspective, Michael Sandel, in his book, Democracy's Discontent, distinguishes between two rival views of freedom and politics that have informed the American tradition. Now this is on the test in a few minutes. One, which he sometimes calls procedural liberalism.

[31:03]

emphasizes the rights of citizens as free and autonomous selves to choose their own values and purposes. The other, which he calls formative republicanism, emphasizes the challenge of self-government and the development of citizens who have the kind of character, virtue, moral ties, and social solidarity essential to the tasks of a democratic society. Now procedural liberalism claims to be strictly neutral about the ultimate goods of life, a claim which its critics consider illusory. Formative republicanism affirms the need for at least a minimal notion of a common social norms and ideals. We have lived in a society steeped in procedural liberalism, which takes us away from any sense of being part of a community.

[32:09]

And how can there be any awareness of God's presence and activity when there is no sense of community. Third, and this for me is critical in terms of what blinds us, is what I'll call the triumph of instrumental reason in our society. By instrumental reason, I mean the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end. The measure of success for us is the maximization of efficiency, the best cost-output ratio. And we're stuck there. We're overwhelmed by this. We make our decisions both communally and collectively on the basis of this. There is a widespread unease that instrumental reason not only has been enlarged its scope, but also threatens to take over our lives.

[33:13]

The fear is that things that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in terms of efficiency or cost-benefit analysis. that the independent ends that ought to be guarding our lives will be eclipsed by the demands of maximizing output. And how is it possible to remember the presence and activity of God in a society where the maximization of profit and instrumental reason has taken over our way of seeing the world? There is a significant withdrawal of citizens from active involvement in the civic and political spheres of American society. We see rapidly emerging a society in which people end up becoming the kinds of individuals who are, in de Tocqueville's haunting phrase, enclosed in their own hearts.

[34:16]

And people who are enclosed in their own hearts, how can they possibly see the presence and activity of God in our midst? One of the blessings of the tragedy of September 11th is that we have been shocked out of being enclosed in our own hearts. In such a society, though, few people participate actively in government, and few people recognize the presence of God. Coupled with this, we have watched, except for the moments of crisis, like these last few months, we've watched religion pushed increasingly out of the public square of American life and allowed to exist merely as a private affair of the individual, to be conducted exclusively behind one's closed doors.

[35:20]

We watched a very disturbing news piece the other night at home of a mother in a town in Westchester County objecting to her son being subjected to having to sing God Bless America in a public school. Religion is only something we're allowed to do privately. Now Irving Kristol, who's not one of my favorites normally, says this about the place of religion in contemporary life. Not that it is openly hostile to religion, it simply treats religion as another consumer good. The individual is free to shop and choose among all the religions that exist or have ever existed so long as he or she takes care to keep his or her religious beliefs and behavior a private affair, never impinging on the public square.

[36:28]

He goes on, but religion that is merely a private affair has been, until now, unknown in the annals of humankind, and for good reason. For such religion quickly diminishes into an indoor pleasure, a kind of hobby of one or more individuals, like reading a book or watching television. So it is not astonishing that the search for spirituality has become fashionable. It is what individuals liberated from religion desperately seek as a substitute." An interesting critique. We've also lost sight of the presence and activity of God in our midst because not only have we pushed God to the side, we have forgotten about the poor and the needy. We live in a world where hundreds of millions of children are hungry, and hundreds of thousands of them will die of malnutrition.

[37:33]

And this occurs in a world that has the capacity to feed all of its children. We can feed every child on the face of the earth. We just haven't. Today in the United States, one out of every five children lives in poverty. The poor and the needy have become the forgotten people of our society, often blamed for their condition. How can we remember God if we have forgotten the poor? What results from much of what we have suggested above is a loss of the sense of the meaning and purpose of life. In the face of the rampant instrumental reason and the excessive individualism, there is an eclipse of concern about our end or goal as human beings.

[38:40]

Abraham Heschel, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, an American Orthodox rabbi, pointed this out in his book, Who is Man? One of the most frightening prospects, he wrote, we must face is that this earth may be populated by the race of beings which though belonging to the race of Homo sapiens, according to biology, will be devoid of the qualities by which man is spiritually distinguished from the rest of organic creatures. And here's the critical piece, according to Heschel, to be human we must know what being human means, how to acquire it, and how to preserve it. To be human, we must know what being human means, how to acquire it, and how to preserve it. And E.F. Schumacher, the author of that wonderful book, Small is Beautiful, described it this way shortly before his death.

[39:46]

After all, everything we do and talk about should be oriented to and derived from the answer to the question, why are we here in the world anyhow? We are not using the facilities the Creator has put at our disposal for the purpose of attaining our end. We don't even think about what our end is. We're using things only because they're there, he says. Our engineers and our scientists produce something more we could use, so we must use it. We do things because it's possible to do them. We're a society that's rich in means and poor in purpose. These elements within our culture foster a kind of communal blindness to the presence and activity of God. Human beings are made for communion with God and one another. We are not isolated egos, but beings who find life in relationships with God, with other human beings, with the Earth and the universe.

[40:53]

Our challenge is to bring people back to this fundamental truth about what it means to be human. We are blind and we need sight. We have been invited to the feast but have lost interest. We need once again to rediscover the source of the invitation planted in the very fabric of our being. In so doing, we will recapture the passion for the goal of our existence, and I believe we'll also be able to rediscover the presence and activity of God in our midst. However, it would be a mistake if we just blamed all those things happening out there for why we neglect the presence and activity of God. The reality is that we also have problems in the way we think and the way we see. To give an adequate answer to the question, why is it that we neglect the presence of God, we would have to work our way through the whole Bible and the entire Christian tradition.

[41:59]

For the attempt to name and heal spiritual blindness is one of the basic motifs of our tradition. But perhaps a simple answer can be given in these terms. We see and know and perceive with a mind of fear rather than with a mind of trust. We see and know and perceive with a mind of fear rather than with a mind of trust. When we fear, we cling to who we are and what we have. When we are afraid, we see ourselves as the threatened center of a hostile universe, and thus we violently defend ourselves and lash out at our potential adversaries. And fear, according to so many of the biblical authors and so many of the mystics and theologians of our tradition, is a function of living our lives at the surface, a result of forgetting our deepest identity.

[43:06]

At the root and ground of our being, at the center of who we are, there is what Christianity calls the image and likeness of God. This means that at the foundation of our existence, we are in communion with God, who continually creates and sustains the universe. We are held and cherished by the infinite love of God. When we rest in this center and realize its power, we know that in an ultimate sense, we are safe. And in classical religious language, we are saved. And therefore, we can let go of fear and begin to live in radical trust. But when we lose sight of this rootedness in God, we live exclusively in the tiny island of the ego, and our lives become dominated by fear.

[44:12]

Fear is the original sin of which the fathers speak. Fear is the poison that was injected into human consciousness and human society from the beginning. It is the original sin. Fear is the debilitating and life-denying element of both our psyche and society. To overcome fear is to move from being a small soul to a great soul. When we are dominated by our egos, we live in a very narrow space. a space between this fear and that fear, between this attachment and that attachment. But when we surrender in trust to the power of God, our souls become great, roomy, expansive. We realize that we are connected to all things and to the creative power of God in the whole universe.

[45:19]

The great soul of the Christian tradition is like the Mahatma of the Hindu tradition. Both mean great soul. When Jesus calls for in metanoia is the transformation from the terrified and self-regarding small soul to the confident and soaring great soul. Seeing the kingdom of God is not for the small-souled, but for those who are magnanimous, for those who have the great soul. Christianity, then, in some ways, most importantly, is a way of seeing. But what is it precisely that we see? Let's go to the first chapter of John Malk's gospel for a minute. After his baptism and temptation, Jesus goes into Galilee and begins to preach. What does he say? The time has come and the kingdom of God is close at hand.

[46:25]

Repent and believe the good news. The moment has arrived, the privileged time, the kairos, something that human beings have been longing for and striving after and hoping to see has appeared. And the time is now for a decision for action. Jesus' very first words are a wake-up call, a warning bell in the night, a summons to attention. This is not the time to be asleep, not the time to be languishing in complacency and self-satisfaction, not the time for delaying tactics. The Byzantine liturgy, we find often the repeated call to be attentive. Be attentive. Be attentive to what? That the kingdom of God is close at hand. Now there are libraries filled with books about what this kingdom is, but I think this can be our way in.

[47:27]

The metaphor of the kingdom of God has as its primary referent the person of Jesus himself. Jesus wants us to open our eyes and see him More to the point, to see what God is doing in and through him. He himself is the long-awaited kingdom of God. The passionate and aching desire for deliverance, the cry of the human heart towards God, from whom the people feel alienated. If only the power and rebellion were ended and the friendship of God and human beings re-established, peace, shalom, the all-pervasive well-being would reign. What Jesus announces in his first sermon in the hills of Galilee, what he demonstrates throughout his ministry, is that this wild desire of our ancestors, this hope against hope, this intimate union of God and human beings, has been accomplished.

[48:32]

something which can be seen and heard and touched. And what the gospel invites us to is not just to be someone who admires this from the outside, but rather invites us to participate in this mystery, in the fullness of this mystery. What the gospel wants of us is that we allow ourselves to be deeply immersed in this reality. In John's gospel, Jesus speaks of himself as the vine onto which we are grafted like branches, and he compares himself to food which we are to take in. These beautifully organic images are meant to highlight our participation in the event of the incarnation, our concrete citizenship in the kingdom of God. We have been summoned to attentiveness and we have heard the word announcing the coming together of the divine and the human.

[49:37]

How should we respond? Mark tells us, repent and believe the good news. What does repent mean? The Greek term is based on two words. meta and nous, beyond and mind or spirit. It means something like go beyond the mind you have. It's not primarily about moral behavior, but go beyond the mind you have. This is what Jesus implies. This new state of affairs has arrived. The divine and the human have met in Jesus. And the way we customarily see is going to blind us to this reality. So change the way you see. Minds, eyes, ears, senses, perceptions, all have to change. And if we can begin to see what God is doing in our midst, then we have no reason to be afraid.

[50:42]

We can be at peace. We can be saved. So Jesus invites us to open our eyes, to see the coming together of the divine and the human, and to learn to live in the power of that incarnation through metanoia, through changing our attitude, our orientation, our way of seeing, to believe the good news. But to believe the good news is not first about some acceptance of some intellectual propositions. No, to believe, to believe for Jesus is first and foremost about a way of knowing as a way of being known. To have faith is to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the power of God, to permit the divine power to reign at all levels of our beings.

[51:47]

It is to allow ourselves to be grasped by ultimate concern. So Jesus invites us, urges us, not so much to adhere to a new set of propositions, but rather to a letting go of the dominating and fearful ego and learning once more to live in the confidence of God's unconditional love for us. In this context, then, What monastics do is to invite us to live life according to a map about what life is all about. First, that every human being is of infinite value and worth, that we are not determined by what we possess, but we are valued and of infinite worth because we are made in the image and likeness of God. Monastics call us to the affirmation of the principle of the common good.

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Such a principle affirms that creative activity is more important than profit, that people are more important than things, and it seeks patterns of work that liberate and enhance the human spirit. The Benedictine map of life is that human beings are made for communion with God and with one another in the company of saints. That our goal is not isolated existence, not you against me, but about us together in communion. We are made for communion in God. When I reach out to another person, to God, in love, in fidelity, in commitment, I become more myself than I was before. The simple and yet essential truth that monastic life brings us back to over and over again is that we find ourselves only by giving ourselves away.

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Unless the grain of wheat fall and love one another as I have loved you, though he was in the form of God, he did not cling to his equality with God, but emptied himself. Monastics call us to remember every day two vital dimensions of human life, remembering the past and radical openness to the future. remembering and dreaming our critical human activities. And for us, we remember every day in the liturgy of the hours and in the celebration of the Eucharist. And monks remind us by the way they live of our acceptance and the need to accept both our finitude and our creaturehood. So in many ways, we are like Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus in Mark's Gospel, who recognized that he was blind. Son of David, have pity on me.

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Bartimaeus, who ran after Jesus, threw himself at Jesus' feet and asked to be healed. And Bartimaeus, who could say, I want to be healed, I want to be saved, could hear the words of Jesus, go, your faith has saved you. And hearing those words, he was able to follow Jesus up the road. So in such a context, let me conclude by suggesting a few things about monastic witness. If what I have said has some semblance of truth to it, then it is clear that monastic witness to the presence and activity of God in our midst is absolutely critical. By your fidelity to the presence and activity of God in the world, you remind the Church and you remind the world of what is most essential to us and for us. Like all things Benedictine, your witness has made this manifest in the simple and ordinary things that you do each and every day.

[56:07]

which in and of itself points to the profound truth about God's presence and activity. Monastic witness is prophetic, contemplative, compassionate, and communal. Like the prophets, monastics call us to listen deeply to the dialogue of the Word of God embodied in the tradition of God with the Word that God is speaking in the signs of the times. Monastics call us to listen attentively to that magnificent dialogue that goes on of God's Word in Scripture and God's Word in the midst of our history. Since we live in a society that has lost its way and is in many ways without hope about its future, monastics, by being contemplative, remind us to look deeply at what it is that God is doing in our midst.

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We are invited because of your witness to discover even more deeply what God is doing in the midst of our lives and in the midst of our history. In your contemplative life, you help us, you help us who are fellow travelers and pilgrims to see the great dawn that is ahead of us. Monastics are called in a special way to help us to affirm this good news, that we are redeemed by God and that God's Spirit is working in our midst. Monastics are called in a special way to help us to see and to make visible in the daily events the fact behind the brokenness, behind the pain seen in the tangible things of life. By your contemplative life, you invite us to see the face of God in whose image we are shaped.

[58:22]

And we so desperately need to see the face of God. In your hospitality, in your generous acceptance of all of us unconditionally, you show us the compassion of God. You show us the God who says in the face of our brokenness and pain, like the leper who runs up to Jesus. Master, if you want to, you can cure me. You show us in your hospitality the answer of Jesus. Of course I want to be healed. Of course I want to. It's why we don't have a retreat house, but a guest house. It is why we invite anybody to come in and we offer hospitality. so that all can hear those wonderful words of Jesus when we cry out to be healed. Of course I want to be healed.

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In that fidelity to hospitality and all of the pain and discomfort and problems that it causes you guys to accept us, you show us something of the compassion and mercy of God that we so desperately need to see. And finally, by your courageous willingness to live together, by being companions with one another, you remind us of the basic and fundamental truth of our lives, that we go to God together. And so, let me end with an old Hasidic story. The story goes like this. Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing evenly the grain that they had ground together during the day. One brother lived alone.

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The other had a wife and a large family. Now the single brother thought to himself one day, it isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly, my brother and me. I have only myself to care for, and my brother has his children and his wife to feed. So each night the single brother secretly took some of his grain to his married brother's granary to make sure that he was never without. But the married brother said to himself one day, you know, it isn't really fair that we divide grain evenly because I have children to provide for me in my old age and my brother has no one. What will he do when he is old? So every night the married brother secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

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Then one night, the brothers met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and they embraced one another in love. The story is that God witnessed their meeting And God proclaimed, this is a holy place, a place of love. And here it is that my temple shall be built. And so it was. The holy place where God is made known to his people is a place where human beings discover each other in love. To the monks of Mount Savior, Thank you for your faithful witness to the presence and activity of God. Thank you for creating and sustaining in the midst of all of the trials and tribulations of 50 years this holy place where God is made known to his people.

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This place where human beings discover each other in love. Your faithful witness makes the world more the place that God wants it to be. It makes this a holy place. It allows each of us to be holy and so to participate with God in bringing his kingdom to completion. We love you very much. Thank you very much. So thank you, Tony, very much. It proves again that no matter how much we give, we always receive more than we have given. And certainly in your

[63:49]

association with us and tonight we have received more than we have given. Your words about the kind of dawn of our salvation reminds me of in our crypt when Ron Cassetti redid the chapel as we have it and painted the ribs down there which were supports in such a way that they always are visible in the gold or the yellow there, that no matter how dark it is, with Our Lady and the Child, it really is the dawn of our salvation. No matter how dark it seems to be, it's really that darkness before the dawn. And so it's very encouraging and kind of knits up that ravel sleeve of care that we all have at the end of the day. But at any rate, we're enormously grateful for your gift to us tonight and the gift of yourself and of your family and all the Abolites really who belong to the community.

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Now, do you have any questions or suggestions or alterations that you'd make in Tony's presentation? Bob? Question was, how do we preserve the gifts of individuality and yet also be able to foster community?

[65:52]

Of course, if I knew the answer to that question, I would be in great shape, wouldn't I? I think the thing that I keep coming back to is if, in fact, what it means to be human is to live in communion then if we are fostering a way that allows me to flourish in communion with others, then we also build community. I think part of the problem is we have a notion of individuality that sets us against one another and isolates us from one another. So if we can change the dynamic that in fact what I love you and when you love me, I'm more me because of that, not less of me. And I think that's where this kind of excessive individualism gets in the way is that somehow it's a, you know, well you go 50 miles for me, I'll go 50 miles for you, but we've just got to break away from that.

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In fact, when I pour myself out in love, in the model that Jesus gives us, then we're all better for it. And I come into a deeper possession of my, Tony is more Tony. I'm more fully me when I'm allowed to live in a context that allows me to love. And then when you separate me, what happens? Well, I try to preserve myself. And so we get more and more isolated from each other. So we've got to just change the dynamic of the discussion. And changing the dynamic of discussion means changing the way we see. It really is a call to conversion. isn't it? We're in this together and we'll reach the fullness of life together, not by you pursuing some isolated agenda from me, but us finding a common agenda and living that together.

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And it's a challenge because everything around us tells us otherwise. Our advertisements, the values that we hold up. And then we get a crisis like these last two months and we realize that in fact we've got, we're in this, you know, our life is a life together. So it seems to me that it's a matter of choosing unity that's nurturing. You know, in the ideal sense, the Christian community had Christ in addition, but even Christ was growing. And it seems to me that's part of the universal, maybe eternal, There's a time, you know, to be together, there's a time to be alone.

[69:16]

I was wondering if anybody would like to say anything about it. Well, my first assumption is, was it Brecht's? Whose Galileo was it? Oh, that was Larry. He did a play based on it. you know this is an enormously complicated reality of being a catholic is that we continue to hold on to that we trust that by sticking with this community. that we're better off than by dropping away from the community.

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And I say that with all of the complexities and difficulties of what that means in a time like ours or a time like Galileo. But what we need to, I think what we need to keep doing, Frank, is to figure out the ways that we can stay connected. in some sense, despite all of the stuff that we might judge for a legitimate set of reasons as being ridiculous. How do we keep staying together? How do we keep doing this as part of a community? I recognize sometimes people do need to leave. And for the sake of their consciousness, they can do no other. But Galileo found a way to stay connected to the community. Teilhard Desjardins found a way to stay connected to the community, although unjustly and terribly treated in many ways. And yet he stayed. And people like Dorothy Day, you can go on and on and on. And their witness, now those are the great saints.

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Those are the people of great soul who soar beyond their own fears. But in a time like this, when so much looks like it's going in a direction other than we would like it to go, The great souls are the ones who can keep finding the ways to stay connected. Because we're better off if we can find the ways to stay connected. And of creating the kind of future that will... Tensions are very real. Absolutely. And they'll never go away. You know, when we reach a stage where there's no more tension, we're probably dead, right? Would that it was otherwise. Camille? The last two questions go from me to you. I'd like to take the question of community issues with you, and go back to two things that you said.

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The first was your affirmation of a woman who protested her And, you know, quite simply, how could we measure God if we had to divide him in two? Now, this is better said than if the child of another nation would be deserved. But I wonder, in this context, where our option of creating more poor, especially in Afghanistan, when the child is so strong, With a lot of pain and suffering, I find it very hard to find myself saying that there may be a just reason for war here.

[73:41]

And yet I can't, I'm in a box that I have never imagined finding myself in before. When you listen, when you read what the Pope has been saying through this conflict, he keeps talking about restraint. And I keep asking myself, what does restraint mean? And how can we be restrained? And yet on the other side, something terrible happened to us. Now, you don't want to respond in a way that just keeps compounding the terror. On the other hand, what does it mean to do nothing today? What would it mean not to try to stop this terror? I'm not trying to justify the bombing. I don't know if that's the answer. But I am struggling with the fact that

[74:44]

Terror has been unleashed and there may be there's a legitimate We may have caused some of that terror ourselves, you know, but leave that terror was unleashed on innocent people I know people who died in that building who were very very good people About as close to innocent as I know in some some cases So, how do we respond to that? How do we stop the terror? Without adding to the terror, isn't that really what the question is and Camille? I don't have an answer to that question My heart's broken and I'm in real anguish over that one. And what I have been, you know, I have said since September 11th in every public setting that I've had to speak at the university and otherwise, pray for George Bush. Whatever you think about George Bush, pray for him because he is in the office of president and he will make decisions that have consequences on the lives of millions of people. And I pray that he will have wisdom in this moment of real difficulty.

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How do we stop the terror? I don't know. Which is probably a good reason for us to get ready for Vespers now. Thank you very much.

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