I have so many remarks that Alice is still just about seven years old. That's true. As I said yesterday, the first gift that the Father of Life had given her Then was the sensitivity, which is so important for us. We have to be able to respond to reality and to be really sensitive to everything. And then the second, I'm just going to gloss over very quickly, the second gift was the facile intellect. And not many of us have received an intellect that can be called facile, but we have received an intellect. And the important thing is that we just make good use of what we have, even if we're not great brains. And it's not so important to think profound thoughts, for deep thoughts, for original thoughts. It's important to think true thoughts.

[01:03]

So we just have to make the best we can with the grace of God, with the intellect that God gives us, and use it in the service of truth, in the service of Christ. And that's real important. Now, the third thing I want to talk more about And the third thing is that God has given her a tenacious memory. And memory had an enormous role to play in our monastic tradition. Times change and we live in a different cultural ambient. But in the 12th century, 13th century reading, was still a skill that even monks didn't have to any appreciable degree. And they depended very much on their memory for interiorizing the Word of God. So they had to make an effort, you know, to really hear and take that Word of God into themselves and then begin letting it work on them.

[02:11]

I was just reading with the juniors and the novices that wonderful monument of monastic literature, St. Athanasius's Life of Anthony. And it's just a wonderful spiritual directory that's still relevant nowadays, especially nowadays. And in it, Saint Athanasius tells about Anthony as a young man. He didn't have much of a literary background. But he had this ability to hear and to interiorize. And he uses the expression, he says, he did not let a word of scripture fall to the ground. That's a funny expression. But it goes back to what Origen says about the Word of God. He said it's like the Blessed Eucharist. And you just don't let the host fall to the ground. Because the host is the living presence of the Word. It's the Incarnate Word who's there. So you have to treat the host with enormous reverence and love, and the same way.

[03:15]

They had this attitude towards the Word of God, that you just don't let it go in one ear and out the other, that every Word of God is filled with something of God's presence and action. And you treat the Word of God exactly the same way you treat the Blessed Sacrament. Now, they have a wonderful biblical concept, I think, of the Word of God that's meaningful for us nowadays. I love words. And I love to use wonderful instruments in the library, like Hittel's Dictionary of Biblical Terminology, the Wörterbuch, of which you have copies both in English and in German here. And so the article on just the word, davar, in Hebrew, logos in Greek, is probably one of the biggest, most extensive articles in this whole Wörterbuch. It's a real interesting word in Hebrew.

[04:19]

You know, in Hebrew, their words are constructed of so many consonants. and you change the vowels that go with these consonants, and then that changes the meaning of the word. You have a noun, and you change the vowels that go with it, but keep the same consonants, and you have a verb, you change them again, you have a preposition, and all of these terms are related to each other. So at any rate, the word, Hebrew word, devar, means not only word, as we understand it, but it means event, a happening. And so when you read, for example, in St. Luke's Gospel, the Nativity narrative, and the shepherds say, let us go over to Bethlehem to see this Word which has come to pass, you can tell that St. Luke is working probably, you know, with an Aramaic or a Hebrew background, because it's the Word incarnate, but it's also a happening, a God's intervention. in history. So, there's this wonderful richness and ambiguity about the concept of the Word, wherever God's Word is.

[05:27]

There's an action going on, and God is present through His Word and in His Word. And you know, the Word isn't a very comfortable thing to have to live with. The prophets weren't all that happy all the time, you know, when God's Word just simply erupted on them. And it just changed the whole nature of their lives. You read the vocation of Ezekiel, you read the vocation of Isaiah, and it's all the same thing, this kind of horror when God's Word comes and it just changes everything from within and outside. And anyway, you had this wonderful other related words to this concept of the word davar, like the words for desert. Well, first of all, I should say, I don't think the scholars really know what in Hebrew the etymology of davar is. But some scholars, and because it fits in very well, well, that's what I would like to think.

[06:29]

Well, that it comes from the Hebrew preposition that means behind or some kind of preposition like behind the word. And the idea is that behind the word stands in the presence of God that's waiting to just erupt forth, to manifest itself. Very much like in the temple vision of Isaiah, which is just one of the great patristic points of reference for the exegesis, when Isaiah is standing at the entrance to the inner court called Hegel, And he sees, at somewhat of a distance across this court, where only the male Jews are allowed to be present, he sees the Holy of Holies, which is covered with a veil, and the poles of the Ark of the Covenant sticking out. And then over the Covenant, the Ark of the Covenant, these strange creatures, the seraphim, that are there in wood,

[07:32]

form. And then the symbolism of the Hekel, the center court, this temple, was it represented the whole of creation. And then all of a sudden, as Isaiah is standing there looking perhaps on one of the great, great feasts, all of a sudden God reveals himself. And he's throning on the Ark of the Covenant. And then the seraphim become animated, they become alive, and they sing the holy holy. And then we read that the skirt of the Lord covers the whole of the area, which is a sign that God's presence and God's glory are just filling the whole cosmos, the whole universe. And then the temple doors, everything begins shaking. And if this whole cosmos isn't big enough to hold the presence and action of God. So, what's the Holy of Holies called? The Devir, which is another word that comes from this preposition, because God is behind the veil, and you just have to wait until God

[08:41]

removes the veil, and his presence and action become absolutely palpable. And so Isaiah is this great seer, this great visionary who sees the reality behind everything. And so when our fathers and our people and our monastic tradition you know, approached the Word of God, it was something that was instinct, with a living dynamic presence, that if you gave yourself to it, it could really work and open itself to you. And so they took their Lectio Divina and their spiritual reading extremely seriously. It was, for me, I think the concept of the Word is one of the great unifying realities in our monastic tradition, that when we celebrate the liturgy and we see the sacraments, this is one form of the Word of God that's present and acting in our midst in the sacramental form. When we do our real spiritual reading, that takes us deep into the Word of God, and Scripture is related to that.

[09:47]

It's the same Word that's active and present. And, you know, when we're working, and of course we do mostly different kinds of work now, but ideally when we're working we should be able to be meditating and mulling over the Word of God and keeping it, you know, as if we were tabernacles of the Blessed Sacrament always present to us. But at any rate, we really have to have this awareness. of the reality that monks do get when we share somewhat in the vocation of Isaiah, when we see the reality that lies behind the veils of the letter and the sacraments. I think a lot of you probably know the wonderful play by Thorsten Wilder, Our Town. Not all of you? for so many years. Beginning of the century. Maybe a little bit later other than that. But you know this wonderful scene towards the end.

[10:49]

Emily has died. There's this great love story behind these two young kids. And they've got married. And Emily dies in childbirth. And then she wants to come back. And she's heard that there's some possibility of people returning, at least for some time. And so she finally comes back on a day in the past history when she was celebrating her birthday and the day she first knew that she had fallen in love with the man who was going to be her husband, this young George Gibbs. And so at any rate, she comes down from her bedroom and her mother is getting breakfast ready. And this is just a typical day in their life. And the father, I guess, is, I forget what he's doing. But the conversation is just going back and forth in a very ordinary, maybe not trivial way, but just an ordinary way. And Mother Gibbs is busy with the breakfast and getting the bacon ready.

[11:52]

And they're just exchanging commonplaces. And Emily begins getting somewhat frantic. She says, I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful, her parents. Why did they ever have to get old? Now, Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all. Everything. I can't look at everything hard enough. And then Mrs. Gibbs, you know, she just responds on such an ordinary level. Dear, just wait and be patient. And then I know, look, they're finished, they're going, and just the conversation goes on. And Emily gets more and more frantic because she wants to make this kind of contact. And the parents just don't see what's there. And Emily says, oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, 14 years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama.

[12:54]

I'm married to George Gibbs, Mama. Wally's dead, too. That's her brother. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip in North Conway. We felt just terrible about it, don't you remember? But just for a moment now, we're all together. Mama, just for a moment, we're happy. Let's look at one another. And then the conversation goes on in exactly the same way, and they can't see the reality that's really there. And so Emily finally says to the stage manager, sort of like a chorus, and there's a go-between between the action and the audience. She says, I can't, I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. So she breaks down sobbing. The lights dim on the left half of the stage and Mrs. Webb disappears. I didn't realize, so all that was going on and we never noticed.

[13:56]

Take me back up the hill to my grave, but first wait one more look and then this beautiful scene. Goodbye, goodbye world, goodbye Grover's Corners, Mom and Papa, goodbye to clocks ticking, and mama's sunflowers, and food and coffee, and new orange dresses and hot baths, and sleeping and waking up. Oh Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. You know, that's one of Newman's great themes, to realize the Christian mysteries, to really have them become real for us. Oh Earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly through her tears. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

[14:58]

Every minute? And the stage manager says, no. And there's a pause. And then he says, the saints and poets, maybe, they do some. So remember, you know, all of us monks have to be saints and poets and be aware of what's really going on, you know, at least in some, in a coherent, indeed, instinctive way, even if we're not called by our vocation, you know, to have to express all of this in clear conceptual terms. But just in our monastery, we should be developing this kind of awareness of what's really going on. That's what it means to be a mystic, what it means to have this prophetic vocation, to see the reality and to be able in some way to respond to it and proclaim it. So, at any rate, when we read scripture and we're in contact with the Word of God, that gives us an insight to God's action and presence in our community, in our own hearts, and in the world at large.

[16:07]

So, for the medieval people then, To have a good memory means to be able to take the Word of God inside ourselves, and it has its own efficacy, and it's always working and acting on us, even if we're not all that aware of it. So, as I said before, it's like being sort of tabernacles of the Blessed Sacrament. The Word of God is there. And we probably have all known loads of people who have had this wonderful God-given capacity to memorize things. I'm just thinking of my sister. When she goes about the house doing housework and the radio is on, she'll hear a popular song maybe twice, and she just has it memorized. And people who come from a non-literary culture are very often just tremendous, you know, at being able to interiorize text. I've read, for example, in Egypt, still, when you get out in the boondocks, and it's mostly the peasants, you know, who go to these long liturgies and at last,

[17:17]

for four hours. If they don't go to church for four hours, you know, they haven't gone to church. It's an enormously lengthy liturgy. And, you know, I read about Deacon made a mistake in chanting the Passion and all the peasants start beating on the floor because they recognize, you know, that a mistake has been made. And so that's absolutely wonderful. Now, I don't think that we sophisticated intellectuals nowadays with our university degrees are so privileged when it comes to memory aids. But also, we have to make up for it, maybe by other ways, just to ensure we have a constant contact with the Word of God. But I'm thinking of Don D'Amico's sentence. I don't know whether you've told them or they've heard it from Van Damme himself, how when he entered Maria Law, he'd been studying philosophy and comparative religion. And when you study comparative religion, this enables one not to practice any particular religion.

[18:21]

He had this wonderful conversion experience in the Department of Comparative Religion. Was that Bonn where he studied? I forget where. Well, they had vividly speakers, and for some reason they asked the prior of Maria Lach to come, and he talked to them, of all things, about the glory of Christ and the transfigurations. And this has made an overwhelming impression on Damned Amethyst. And so he ends up in Maria Lach. And the great abbot of Idelfon, Sjöregen, wanted to do something to help clear up a bit of the Nordic fog. So he sent him to St. Anselmo in Rome to follow a course of philosophy, of all things. And the great teacher of philosophy at Assata and Salomo in those days was a guy by the name of Grett, Dom Grett, a great Buddhist scholar who wrote these two enormous tomes on Neotimistic philosophy, just dreadful stuff.

[19:24]

And Dom Damme said, the only way you could get through the course was by memorizing these two tomes of Neotimistic philosophy. So he developed this incredible memory. And those of you who knew Don Genesis, I think he must have known the whole of the New Testament in Greek and Latin by memory. It was just incredible. Whole swatches of the Old Testament. So he always had these texts, you know, present to his mind where he, as soon as he wanted to consciously, he had all of this interiorized. Well, we certainly can't do that, but we can do the best we can. Now I want to say something about a different aspect of memory. Now, I think that the author just means that Alice had a good memory, in the ordinary sense of the word. She had a retentive memory. But I want to speak about a different aspect of memory that's more mindfulness than actually remembering something specific.

[20:29]

Because for us monastics, this mindfulness of God is really, really important. I think in a lot of 17th century, 18th century classical literature, they would refer to it as practicing the presence of God, which can be sometimes a little bit on the artificial side. But I prefer to use the word just as mindfulness of God. My points of reference for mindfulness of God are not any spiritual tractates or books on spirituality, but a couple of people that I've known. And I remember, it must have been about 15, 20 years ago, I was staying in Paris. at a Catholic hospice run by the Yudist fathers. And so every day on my way back from the library to this hospice, I would get my grocery provisions from a little family grocery store run by an Indian family.

[21:37]

So I would have bought my baguette, my loaf of bread, and then I would stop off at the store and get my camembert cheese and my bottle of wine. And the young fellow who owned the store, as you said, was Indian. He was a very wonderful fellow. And every time I would walk in, he would have this enormous smile on his face. And he was just filled with something that was just palpable. And then I soon realized his wife was pregnant with their first child. And it was clear that this guy couldn't get over this wonderful thing that was happening. So, you know, I would get my one, my chief, and he would tally up the bill, and we'd exchange a few words. And, you know, it's extremely ordinary for an exchange and a chit-chat. And through it all, you could tell, you know, the thing that he was most aware of

[22:39]

was this marvelous thing, this gift of life, he was about to become a father, his wife, a mother, and this wonderful expectation. And I think that everything he was doing, behind it all, there was this awareness of this great thing that was happening in his life. And that's just like the mindfulness of God, I think, for us. That no matter what we're doing, there is, deep down, a kind of implicit awareness of this reality of the mystery of Christ in which we're plunged, which is just the heart of a monastic experience. So we're walking in dishes or we're carrying on a conversation that's just fine or maybe even trivial, but deep down we're waiting to surface. It's just this real deep experience that's always there. And that's something like what Thorstein Wilder was talking about in this business about Emily and new people. Does anyone ever realize everything, every moment, saints and mystics and poets?

[23:45]

Well, so that's just one example, I must say. I don't go back to the store when I'm in Paris all that often now because things are much cheaper at local supermarkets than Monoprix, I've called, and there's another one called Uniprix. But I have gone into the shop occasionally and he doesn't look so happy there. I think, you know, he has three children and he's probably worrying about drugs and getting the kids to the university and keeping them out of the gangs and so forth. But I never will forget, you know, what an overwhelming experience that was. And then the other thing also happened. embarrassed it was on one of the subways and the Paris subways can get as crowded if not more crowded than the subways in Rome or in New York City. And so I was just pushed right next to this young couple And they were obviously just gaga for each other, you know, it was just absolutely beautiful just to be aware of this overwhelming love that they had for each other.

[24:51]

And I couldn't help overhearing what they were saying. So they were just carrying on, you know, a very ordinary kind of conversation. And the young woman said, well, my Aunt Caroline is sick at short. And for the weekend, I have to go and spend a day or two with Aunt Caroline. And the boy was having, he was preparing for a law examination early the next week. And so at any rate, while she was talking about Aunt Caroline, she just had her hand already on his arm. And she just, you know, dressed his arms and gave him this kind of token. a sigh of presence and awareness and love. And then you think, oh, I'm worried about this law professor and he leans over and he kisses her gently on the forehead without being the slightest bit aware, you know, I think of what he was doing. And it sounded maybe mushy, but it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

[25:54]

And you could just tell, you know, that no matter what these kids were doing, you know, there was this kind of awareness. of this marvelous thing that had come into their lives, an awareness of each other that was there. I don't know if I have. They're probably fighting like cats and dogs. Is that right? But it seems to me, you know, the contemplative experience has got to be a little bit like this, that we're carrying with us this great, great love, this great awareness of something so beautiful and so deep. And sometimes, you know, very, very thankful too, because that's part of the contemplative experience also. So, at any rate, this is something that I think should be very commonplace in our monastic communities, this kind of implicit awareness that we carry around with us that can be described as an awareness of the presence of God. In some religious order, there used to be some questionable practices.

[26:54]

They would be having their recreation. Someone would ring a bell at certain intervals in the presence of God, and everyone would stop and think of the presence of God. Well, I think that's good, maybe. That's good in a certain context. Now, you found a different one, didn't you? But for us monastics, there should be enough in our monastic environment for us to be mindful of the presence of God in maybe a less dramatic way. But now, what this mindfulness is not. It's awfully important, too. It's not concentration or anything artificial like that. There's a great Benedictine who I love so much, Don Hezbier. He wasn't a great theologian or really that much of a liturgist when it comes to the theology or spirituality of the liturgy, but he had a computer-like mind before there were computers.

[27:57]

And he did all kinds of wonderful statistical analyses and ways of tracking down archetypes of manuscripts and so forth. And just a marvelous man, built like a football player and a kind of dynamic person. But I remember him telling me about or writing something about a retired, or an army. a member of the army, an officer, who had left the army and went to Salen as a novice. And he'd read something about the presence of God, so he wanted to practice the presence of God. And he impressed the novice master very, very much. And all of this willpower and all of this ability to concentrate. And this is a guy who was always used to doing everything that he wanted to do if he could just apply his mind to it enough. So he started practicing the presence of God. And every few days he would go to his novice master and he said, well, I lost it for three minutes.

[29:02]

And then the fellow begins developing headaches, and then they get rather furious headaches and migraine headaches, and the novice master is just too numb to know what's going on. I kept it, but there was a gap of about a minute and a half during dessert and the noon meal. And thank God, thank God, the Lord intervened. The Second World War broke out and Finland was under enemy occupation. And the monk had to go back into the yard, so his mental balance was bad. But this is not what prayer is about or what the presence of God is about. So I think if we just give ourselves in our monastic life, like little Alice is obviously going to do, to just what the things that we do in the monastic life, that this is a kind of an awareness that will just kind of emerge of itself with the grace of God from the general nature of the kind of life that we lead.

[30:14]

And so we have to have great confidence in this sort of experience. Well, now, there are a couple of other things that she's very good about, but I'm not going to dwell on those. She has this tenacious memory, I've been talking about that, grace in her way of life, her conversation, efficacy in her work. In other words, when she does something, she does something and it gets finished. And we're not all that good when it comes to things like that in my own modesty. I can think of any number of projects begun that haven't come to any successful conclusion. But it's very important to take things seriously and see things through to the end and not to undertake things that aren't worth seeing through to the end. And then, so she makes progress. her very pursuit. And so it says that with the help of these natural gifts now, and so I think a novice pastor and the Father Abbott and everyone who has anything to do with suffering vocations, they really have to know us.

[31:26]

and to be able to help us appreciate what it is that God has given us, so that these talents, feeble though they may be, can be in the service of Christ, in the service of truth. And because these become the basis of our spiritual life, all of these have to be just filled with the grace of Christ, so that they can grow and bring us deeper and deeper transformers, more and more, in this mystery of Christ. So I think that's awfully important. I bet we've all known in our communities, you know, monks who, in the ordinary way of things, are particularly spectacular for their gifts of nature, but what they have, they use, and the profound, profound spirituality. and wisdom and depth of experience that they enter into. You never knew, I guess, Tom Girard, the founding ambet of our Ledger of the Genocide?

[32:29]

Yes. You know, Gethsemane, under old Don Frederick, who died before I entered Gethsemane, he was infirmarian, I think, for some time. I think he gave a few retreats, but mostly infirmarian. And with us, in those days, being infirmarian meant nothing. You had doctors come from outside, and they would prescribe the pills, and the infirmarian just simply gave the aspirin at the right time. And so Don Frederick, he thought that Fr. Girard wasn't all that practical, and he could keep out of harm's way an infirmarian as well as anything else. And so, Dame Girard, for a number of years then, had very close contacts with these wonderful old lay brothers, you know, in their old age and when they were getting more and more abundant. And just by contact with these lay brothers, he imbibed an enormous amount of real spiritual wisdom.

[33:29]

And when finally he became abbot and was taken off the shelf, you know, then he really came into his own. And the wisdom, you know, just used to pour forth, and it was all stuff that he got from these lay brothers, who had no background in scripture to speak of, you know, no technical formation. I think almost all, most of our lay brothers are brighter than what our choir monks used to be, I mean, if you're wrong. But at any rate, this was an older generation of lay brothers. But they had acquired this monastic wisdom and this monastic experience. Now, it's just overwhelming, and when I think of men of prayer, I think a lot of those elderly lay brothers. Now, I really have to be very honest. Our monks, the Kitts family, what we used to call the choir monks, very much the same way. I just never saw any great distinction so far as really deep piety and holiness between, say, lay brothers and choir monks.

[34:36]

There was this same kind of spirit of prayer and simplicity that was just absolutely wonderful. And so there was a marvelous community experience, and we really felt we were all sharing in the same kind of thing. And you had this great encouragement, because you could look at these old keywords, and you could see that God had really touched them. And that all of the stuff which we were learning, and just sometimes seemed to be kind of theoretical, as far as we were concerned, it really worked, and it was for real. And you just could see it in the members of our community. And I mean, you could look around here, huh? It's embarrassing, you don't want to talk about it, but you can see God working the same way in this particular community. Okay, so she's growing more and more, and now she comes to the age of 15 or so, and there's a summary statement. There's two things that she realizes just on the verge of making her what we would call solemn profession at this ripe old age of 15 or 16.

[35:41]

She's learned that you have to have what she calls the discipline of the body. And the other thing is a strict custody of the heart. Discipline of the body, strict custody of the heart. And the author says you can't have one without the other. And with this, he says, she attained to a more mature year. So now she is a mature woman, ready to make this ultimate decision and give herself wholly to Christ in the monastic life. Now, just a little bit about the discipline of the body. This is often important, I think, for us, and sometimes people outside the monastic and even Christian traditions seem to understand this a lot more than we do, when they go in for nature foods or Zen or yoga.

[36:47]

or all kinds of bodily techniques and organizing their whole life in such a way, you know, that their potential can be developed and so forth. Well, we have our own monastic tradition for these things, and maybe it's a more subtle thing. But we do have a program of monastic asceticism which has to be taken very seriously. And we have our lifestyle in general, which we should love and really live and appreciate. We have a monastic ritual, even. You know, sometimes I think there's not that much left of it. But it's kind of a style of life which some people might find a little bit artificial. Well, I'm not going to talk very much about that. But just our general traditional monastic lifestyle has something to do with forming us in this very deep and very beautiful discipline of the body which we should come to appreciate and which our whole being is in the service of the spirit.

[37:56]

And if we neglect this great tradition, then almost always that really has some attenuation of our spirit of prayer or our spiritual life. So we shouldn't make a fetish about it, but we should just have this deep faith in the monastic way of doing things and really love it and appreciate it. And if we change something in our lifestyle, do so with a real amount of awareness. I don't want to sound negative, but I do get the impression that in the past couple of decades, a lot of people or a lot of different kinds of religious groups of people have been doing an enormous amount of changing without knowing exactly where they're going or what they're doing. And change is absolutely murderless, and change is imperative as part of life, if it really springs from a certain continuity with the real thing, if it's an expression of real life, of the concrete situation.

[39:02]

Then you have to make adaptations. But for the kind of change that comes about because you're just floundering around, you don't know where you're going, that's a bad kind of change. So that's not the kind of change that we have in our monasteries. This is Vatican II. What we have is this change. That means an evolution and becoming more and more who we really are in our monastic tradition. Something that's in continuity with our tradition and springing forth in a real life-giving vital manner. It's like Don Genesis, you know. He was long before Vatican II. But when he came to the States, you know, with the founding of Mount Savior, that wonderful article that you wrote about Don Genesis and the relationship between Maria Locke I mean, that shows, you know, how he wanted to receive everything that was most vital, most beautiful about the Maria Lacka tradition, and then transpose it here, sometimes in a new setting, or with certain changes that corresponded to its real nature.

[40:07]

And he certainly succeeded magnificently well. So I think that's about enough of this morning. I'm going to say some more now, though, about the strict custody of the heart this evening. So, okay, she's about 15 years old now. She's 15? Yeah, 15 or 16. She's a mature woman. She's only a few years away from death now, isn't she? That's right. She doesn't know. Well, you know, the life of Anthony is about 18 or 19 when he comes to these mature years of discretion where he can make an ultimate commitment. I was chatting about this with the Donna since in junior year. So I made the unfortunate remark that maybe The mature year for us is now closer to 45 or 50, 18 or 19. But we all have to arrive at this age when we can really, by the grace of God, make this total commitment. Anyone have anything to object to? Would there be a commentary on on Anthony.

[41:09]

Some of our people, when they were in San Anselmo, got some very good courses. I remember the Nazis had some boats and things, but is there any... And Thomas Keating, he gave us, yeah, but it's a very long time, a thing, and it was mostly on the life of Anthony. Oh, that's great. And I have his notes on what is, is there anything in English? Not in English, but if you could get someone to translate the work, it would be a great boon for all of us monastics. And that's Father Bourdieu's study, Louis Bourdieu, and he wrote it at the time he writing a rather controversial book, what I think is just a great book, The Meaning of the Monastic Life, which we do have in English. And I remember, I was a student at Monticello in Rome at that time, and there was a big fight going on, especially among you Benedictines, you black Benedictines. And I remember picking it up at Solenne. So here's this Louis Bourdieu, this man who's not a monastic himself.

[42:16]

He takes it upon himself to discourse on the meaning of the monastic life. And he is there in Paris in his apartment with his own cook. A Christian life, but not quite a monastic style of life. And he's telling us what real monks are and what does he do, but he goes to the desert fathers, you know, as the point of reference for monasticism and all the other kinds of monasticism, namely philemonasticism, boy-roon style. monasticism, I suppose Maria Locke monasticism, he did name names, but all that is kind of a deviant form of the real McCoy, which you find in the East with the Devitt fathers, and of course all my Benedictine friends, practically. are sort of outraged by this and pointed out that we in the West do have our own tradition that's as perfectly valid and as deep and as authentic as anything that you find in the Eastern foreshocks.

[43:25]

And I was too dumb, you know. I was very gullible. I just appreciated almost anything that I read. And I love Salem. I still do, passionately. And Nam Phu used to always address me as, And I really felt that that's true. And that's a tradition I love so much. But at any rate, Father Bourdieu, I think, has marvelous things to say about monastic life, seen against the background of what happened in Palestine and Egypt. So at any rate, I think it's one of the offshoots of this book on the meaning of the monastic life. He studied carefully this life of Anthony. And so you have to have a life of Anthony, but he doesn't reproduce the text. But you read this book parallel with that, and I think it has some wonderful, wonderful things in it. Now, you mean his reading of the Vastu Triforce? No, his book on St.

[44:27]

Anthony himself. So, I think the book on St. Anthony is the fruit of his earlier survey of Eastern monasticism. But if you do such a wonderful thing about the monastic experience, I never have felt attracted to the idea of writing a book, because I'm just not an author. But if I were, there are two books I would like to write. And one would be the diversity of the monastic experience. Because, for example, just take the rule of serpentity. It's given rise to so many wonderful forms of monastic life and experience. And the other book that I would like to write would be the unity of the monastic experience. You know, the fact that I can go to Mr. Schwarzbach, you know, missionary congregation in Germany, or a minaret for St. John, for Monsignor, and there's just something there that's uniquely—I think, I think Jerome was talking about that in his particular letter.

[45:31]

He finds all of the monasteries have their roots in the rule of St. Benedict, and yet there's such a diversity when it comes to forms of expression. And we Cistercians, we have our own little order, and our own peculiar, crazy tradition, and it's not the best in the church or the most important, but it is ours, and we just have to live our vocation, and you people are exactly the same way. And I think there's a unity and at the same time a great variety that we should appreciate. And so I think we can learn a great deal from someone like Fr. Bourdieu. He's getting more and more disgruntled. You pray for him. That man is such a great scholar. He's always got it better. I never could quite understand that. I remember he went to Spencer to give some conferences. And one of the young monks had devised, I don't know, some scheme for the distribution of psalms.

[46:32]

And he'd worked so hard on it. And, you know, he'd thought through everything. And as he got him closer to the psalms, and so he takes to Fr. Bouillé, and Fr. Bouillé just thought, you have no right doing anything like that. Who do you think you are? Here's this wrong, here's that wrong, and that's wrong. And the guy just tore it up and never looked at the psalms again, I guess, for the rest of his life. But yet the man is great. He's suffered so much, I think, and he's gotten awfully reactionary, and people were entranced now to start reading his stuff, in spite of the fact he's written some great stuff. I was talking with a textbook about him, and he's speaking about how disgruntled he was, how reactionary about everything, and just so negative about Vatican II now. And he's written some really great books, like his book on the Eucharist, The Meaning of the Monastic Life. Every year he comes up with a new book. And he says, yes, it's true, but he says, Every other book is one of these very disgruntled, negative kinds of books.

[47:33]

And so he says, you can read Fr. Louis Brouillet, but you just have to begin reading at the right year and read every other book. I think it's a great case for the Church. And he knew wonderful monks, like you all know about Lambert Bourdoin, the founder of Chevron, you know. And they were close friends when Louis Brouillet was still a Calvinist, a Huguenot. And the first time Dame Lambert-Bournois had any contact with him, I think it was in an ecumenical context. And so Louis Brouillet was staying at the Protestant Theologate, which is just a block or two from where I stay, but I'm in Paris. And so Dame Lambert waltzes in, and he introduces himself. And it's obvious he doesn't know how to address a Protestant pastor. He begins by saying, your reverence, pastor, and he gets more and more confused.

[48:35]

And finally, he just blurts out, Louis! And so that was the beginning of a great, [...] great friendship. And so, so Father Bouyer knows a lot of monks, you know, personally and intimately. And I think he can understand monasticism too, against the background of these wonderful personal relationships. Okay. Oh, what time is it this evening? 7.15pm again? 7.15pm. Oh, no, it's now 2.15pm. We do it this evening by 7.15pm. Oh, excuse me, do you want to have the concert this evening or not, or what? Would you be ready or not? Oh, sure, sure. But since it's the Lord's Day, I don't want to deflect anything. I don't know when you usually do it. We usually have kind of an informal kitchen supper. I imagine it's a buffet type of thing on Sundays. Oh, that's wonderful. But we don't have... I mean, we cut down the guests because of the retreat, so I should think we'd be able to do it by 7.15. Or I'll be here 7.15.

[49:37]

And if no one shows up, I'll understand. Or should we say 7.30 by 7.15? Vespers are at 6. 6. Vespers are 6. We're on it. About 6.20 in the week. We're starting at quarter to seven. We're starting at quarter to seven. There was a disciple, Ramakrishna, who was just a horrible lecturer, and he had to teach philosophy in another university. And so the student just stayed away and drove. But the guy was so simple and so holy that one day when no one showed up, he delivered the lecture as usual. I'll do the same thing. My help is in the name of the Lord.

[50:27]

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