Let's just continue the joy and the conviviality and the sharing that we began in the refectory. I'm not going to begin with any kind of an opening prayer. We're already united in the Lord Jesus. wonderfully well. Oh, what a great day it has been, you know, for me, particularly the liturgy and being with you, and getting to meet Reverend Father's brother, and getting to meet other people in some retreats today, and just how our agape this evening, our continuation of the Eucharist, it's just been a great day for the Lord's co-creation, and baptism of the Lord. Floating out this morning, I guess I was talking something about this discipline of the body, and I guess I was saying something about the concept of the word and memory. And when I looked at my notes, I realized there was a Hasidic saying that I forgot, which I love very much.

[01:03]

And it goes something like this, when you pray, You should not so much say the words as enter into the word, as if the word is something bigger than we are. And it's not a question of taking God's word into us. but of our entering into God's Word. Do you all know that wonderful book that you brethren here at Mt. Savior are responsible for producing in English, The Life of a Little Saint Blessed? Do you all know it? Not all of you know it? Oh, that is the greatest spiritual directory. Oh, I have to say, that's actually incredible stuff. And that amazing Mother Genevieve Galois, you know, who was responsible for that. But there's a marvelous section in that choir, about a little past in the liturgy. And the page where Little Placid says that the liturgy puts in his mouth, on his lips, words that he would never, never, never dare to say on his own.

[02:15]

But the liturgy puts these wonderful profound words on his mouth that are just absolutely transforming, and that he has to make his own. And it's so much bigger than we are, that it's not a question so much of our appropriating the words to ourselves as our being appropriated by the word with a capital doesn't serve these words. So, at any rate, this evening I want to say a little bit something more about this other important thing that little Alice has learned. Not only discipline of the body, but strict custody of the heart. And we all know when we talk about the heart and monastic literature, and an altruistic and biblical thought, that the heart represents the very deepest aspect of our being, where our life wells forth, where in deepest possible contact with God, with the ultimate reality. And so the heart is just not the seed of the emotions, but it's

[03:21]

The house is burning down. Okay, so the deepest aspect of ourselves. When we read that Alice understands we have to have the strict custody of the heart, this means that we have to know at our deepest force of being where our life wells forth well enough to know that this has to be kept pure and open to God. And if everything is okay there, then our whole life will have this wonderful purity and continuity. And so it's not just a question of superficial aspects of our spirituality, but what is most characteristic of ourselves as unique individuals, where we really are who we are. And monks have to really have the self-knowledge and know themselves and be able to understand and defer their deepest thoughts and evaluate them.

[04:35]

Now, the best story I know about the finesse tradition of the heart comes from the life of Saint Lotgard, and who was a wonderful Cistercian mystic of the 13th century. Now, I just can't understand that she began life as Benedictine nun, and this episode takes place when she's still a Benedictine nun, before she becomes a Cistercian. And the reason she became a Cistercian, I was telling someone today, was she was in a French-speaking community of Benedictine nuns, and she knew she was going to be chosen as abbess. So she hot-footed it to the Cistercian convent of Ivière, which was Flemish-speaking. And then she refused to learn Flemish for the rest of her life. So now she's this young woman who's being initiated into real monastic theology, and she's in the Benedictine community. And for the text,

[05:37]

begins by speaking about how she had this wonderful gift for compassion. Whenever she found anyone who was suffering, she would suffer more than that person because she was so identified with that person. And she would feel this pain and this desolation. And then the text goes on, and therefore God gave her a grace of healing that was so universal that she would touch the ailing member with her hand or put a little spittle on the blind eye or whatever was sick and defective, and the person would recover. And so at any rate, this is a wonderful kind of social grace that she had that put her into contact with all kinds of people. But the time came when she realized that this was taking her away from what she considered more important things, namely her life of prayer. So she asks the Lord to take away this gift of performing healings and cures and

[06:47]

give her something better. And so Jesus asked her, well, what do you want now? And she gives an answer that I think is just absolutely magnificent. Now, she is what we would call a choir nun. She's used to, she's memorized the Psalter in Latin, but she doesn't understand Latin. And like so many of the nuns and monks of that period, she's able to cope with the choir, but without having a formal knowledge of understanding of the actual words that she was singing. And so she says, Lord, I want to understand the Psalms." Now, for me, that's the very heart of our liturgical life, to understand the Psalms, which express the mystery of Christ, and to be able to enter into all of that. I could hardly think of anything better than to ask for that. So, at any rate, the Lord grants her her request. And so for a couple of days, she's chanting fervently the psalms, and all these intellectual lights keep popping on.

[07:57]

And she's understanding what she's singing, but at the end of a couple of days, she knows this is not the real thing. This is not real prayer. And I think – now listen, this is a Dominican theologian who's written her life. and Thomas of Canterbury, and he was no theological slouch. He was a very important theologian in the lowlands. And the Dominicans were founded in part, you know, to give spiritual direction to these holy nuns. And so, this man, you know, really understood the mystical life. But he was more the disciple of Lutgard, even as a young woman, and then she was his disciple. So he's interpreting this experience. So at any rate, now she realizes that this kind of intellectual understanding of the Psalter doesn't go far enough, and it's too much of an intellectual exercise. So, she says, she complains typically, typically, okay, she says, Lord, why would you give a poor, illiterate, peasant woman like myself the grace of understanding the Psalms?

[09:10]

And then Jesus knows by now better than to discuss the question with her, so he simply says, now what do you want? And so she tells him, and for me it's the most incredible answer. She says, Lord, I want your heart. Okay, I remember the heart is just the absolute core of our being. You know, we all know this when we celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart. It's the ultimate reality of the existence of the Lord Jesus. You know, here life opens up to God and God's love and mercy and life flow into us. So when she says she wants the heart of Jesus, She means that she wants to have the very deepest reality of God incarnate. And then Jesus says something tremendously mysterious, and the Latin gets a little complicated here. But he says, yes, I'll give you my heart, but in such a way that my heart will exist in your heart,

[10:17]

and your heart will have its existence and being in my heart." So now this means that for Lutgaard, her whole deepest being is just plunged into the depths of the deepest being, the merciful love, the ultimate reality of Jesus Christ. And the reality that's deepest in Jesus is the deepest meaning and reality of her own being. It's more than just an exchange of hearts. It's this kind of penetration, and Jesus in Lutgerd and Lutgerd in Jesus. And this is all the spirituality of the heart. And so, I think this is absolutely great. And so, when we speak about custody of the heart, This means being totally consecrated by God, our President acting, and our deepest being, so that everything that we do and everything that we have flows from this deepest reality and ourselves.

[11:21]

So it's something really to think about when we read in the Life of Blessed Alice that one of the things she understands is that we have to have this custody of the heart as well as the discipline of the body. And just a little bit more about the discipline of the body, you were speaking this morning about how this is taken care of in large measure by our own traditional programs of monastic asceticism, our style of life in general, monastic ritual, and so forth. And I said several times, I made a remark about what some People interested in pedagogy call the prepared environment that we can create around ourselves an environment that supports the kind of spiritual life to which God calls us through the gospel and the rule of Saint Benedict. I guess most of you have heard of Maria Montessori, the great Italian woman.

[12:22]

I forget when she was born, but I think she was the first Italian woman who got a degree as a practicing doctor or as a surgeon, something like that. And she began working with children, and she found that children, if you know how to handle them, have a wonderful capacity for learning and for teaching themselves. So she worked with children, and she developed all kinds of wonderful ideas about child pedagogy. And one of her key contributions was for teaching about what she called the prepared environment. And briefly, It's about something like this. The child grows through what she calls sensitive periods, when the child has the capacity to respond to different human values. You know, the child and the little baby begin to learn how to play patty cake, patty cake, or on your couch it's chairs and so forth, and respond to rhythm.

[13:24]

or color. And some children will develop a very great sensitivity to music. They develop linguistic skills very often at an early age. And just as they grow, they pass through different periods where they're sensitive to various areas of human experience. And so what Maria Montessori wanted to do was to create an environment in which the child would have everything that's needed to elicit a real wonderful response from the child, so that the child could develop all of these wonderful innate skills and sensitivities in the child's nature as the child matures. And obviously, you know, applied to our monastery, We're all growing. I have to work with the Holy Spirit. And we're all passing through these sensitive stages. And so we create an environment around ourselves that helps contribute to this sensitization, you might say, of all of these potentials that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ.

[14:35]

And so this is an important aspect of our monastic And change the environment and you touch on a great deal that's very important for our life in Christ. It's something that I picked up in a book on—I forget what the name of—what the book was really about. I just remember one chapter. The name of the book was, in French, Culture et Civilisation. And it was by two authors. I only remember the name of one. His name was Lallou, which I used to pronounce as Lalloup until I was corrected. by someone who knew French. But at any rate, this opening chapter talks about the distinction some French sociologists make between culture and civilization. Now, I read that there are a lot of people who are experts in this field who reject a distinction between culture and civilization.

[15:41]

For example, T.S. Eliot doesn't hold to it, but it works out fine for me. And what the French sociologists define by way of culture is our spiritual vision of the universe, the whole complexes of all of our inner spiritual experience and spiritual values, the way we experience and interpret the whole universe, this vision of reality that we have. And then what they mean by civilization is this material environment that we create outside ourselves and around ourselves. Now the idea is that we create an environment that corresponds to what we see and understand from within. And you see this all over the place. I mean, you can walk through Times Square and 42nd Street in New York and you can tell something, you know, about the spiritual values and the experience of this part of contemporary society.

[16:53]

And you can walk into Mount Savior, Abbott, and tell it from your church, and from the way we live, and from our liturgy, pretty much something of the way that God is working in us as individuals and as a community. So, for example, in our Christian context, it's overwhelming when you go into a well-preserved 12th century Cistercian church, and you see the simplicity, and the beauty, and the harmony, and the closeness to nature of everything, and the enormous poverty of everything, and you can tell something about the spiritual experience of those monks. those communities. And so, once again, the idea is that we have to create around ourselves an environment that corresponds to our deepest being. And if you change the environment, that's going to affect the quality of our spiritual life.

[17:56]

And it's very important that in our communities, when you have a really a good, well-founded community that the newcomers are able to enter in and they can't interiorize all of these values right away, they have to grow. But it's going to be in large measure the environment that will help to open up these possibilities within them. And we have to be very careful, you know, if you have a big group of newcomers and so forth, if you have a really healthy community that has its own civilization, its own environment, that not everything is changed, you know, in favor of all these newcomers who have to adapt themselves and have to learn. and just have to be taken in the community and transformed by it. So at any rate, this discipline of the body touches very directly on our spiritual experience. And the environment itself is tremendously important.

[18:59]

So I'm sure you appreciate and you love all the wonderful things that you have here. And you understand the relationship between that and your prayer life and your deepest being. And that so long as we're really living faithfully, I believe, in vocation and according to the grace of this particular community, you're going to be creating this beautiful environment around you that everyone can feel that somehow God is present and acting in this community. It's a community that is filled with beauty, and seriousness, and simplicity, and all of the marks of your liturgy, and your devotion, and the way we comport ourselves. It's just absolutely wonderful. So at any rate, Alice has entered into the Cistercian community where she's plunged into all of this. So the custody of the heart is important, but also the discipline of the body. Now, our text goes on

[20:00]

As I said, she's reached the years of discretion and I've lost the latitude. Here we go. So you have to have those two things. And now she takes stock of herself. And she feels she's just beginning. And this means she's one very smart person, because we're always, in a sense, just beginning. This is one of the joys of the monastic life, always kind of plunging ourselves again into new beginnings. There's always a continuity. But I remember one of our monks, Fr. Placide, just saying, going out into the desert in Egypt and talking with a lot of these old desert fathers that are still straight from the 34th century. And he found this old hermit who'd been a hermit, they set out there for about 60 years. And so Father Placide asked him, Abba, Father, how long have you been a hermit? And Fr.

[21:05]

Placide said that the old man just broke into tears, completely spontaneously, when he was asked the question. And he said, fun, I've just begun. After the tear, you'd think that little Alice had arrived, you know, years of enormous wisdom. But she realizes that she's just beginning all of this new life in Christ. And anyway, she decides, Her spiritual life has got to be based on, of all benedictine realities, humility. And then the language—I'm afraid there's a certain mixture of metaphor here. I think this is based on Kantian. Humility is going to be the foundation, so that's something down below beneath the foil. And remember, humility comes from the Latin word humus, which means earth, you know, the ground, something that's very lowly. So it's going to be the foundation, but it's also going to be a tower. And the way it's explained is, you know, the whole spiritual edifice has to be based on this humility.

[22:10]

But it's also humility that is a tower so that you can see two things. She can see the enemies as they approach over the horizon. Okay, so these are all the foes of the spiritual life that come to us from outside. So, this gives her first perspective. And she can also look inside her spiritual castle at what she calls the domestic enemies. namely the servants. I guess the Chatelaine, the lady of the castle, had a hard time keeping the staff in order at times, but she's obviously referring to all of her faculty. So you have to keep track and discern our memory, our will, our judgment, all of our passions and everything, all the things that have to be in the service of Christ. She has to be able to look at and discern objectively and see what they're doing and see what they're not doing. So, humility, then, is the thing that gives you the proper stance where you can see things in real perspective.

[23:16]

You know, I have to edit a stupid little liturgy magazine. It's called Liturgy OCS, so Liturgy of the Cistercian for Restricted Observance. And I always have to write an editorial page for the Philly magazine. You know, it's not all that bad, but it should be much better than it is. But a couple of—well, I guess the last issue or two or three issues ago, I told about a movie I saw when I was in France a year or two ago. And apparently it was already a fairly old movie by the time I saw it, but I saw it in French. And in French, the name of the movie was Le Cercle des Poètes Disparus. And I think it was Troyes, I thought, and there were English subtitles. And so I didn't know what I was going to be seeing. I mistranslated the title. And I thought that it was the circle of poets who had disappeared, that is to say, who had been kidnapped. But in the French, disparu in that context just means dead.

[24:18]

So maybe some of you have seen it. Dead Poets Society. Yeah, the Dead Poets Society. Someone has told me what the name of it is. What was that? It was an absolutely marvelous movie. And so it begins with this substitute teacher coming to this posh boys' school. And it's on the opening day, and so they're having these ceremonies inaugurating the new school year. And the stuffy old pompous ass of a headmaster gets up to give the allocution. You've seen the movie, right? And I forget what the big things were, maybe discipline but tradition. was the big motto. And he's jowling, joggling around. The great thing now is tradition. And you know, obviously, he means a horrible, dead form of traditionalism and something that's moribund and has no life about it at all.

[25:22]

And everyone knows from the opening shot, when you see this substitute teacher that's going to teach English literature and poetry, that he really understands that he has to fight against this oppressive environment and bring to these young kids, you know, some really life-giving experience of great English literature. And you know exactly from the beginning, I guess, that this is going to end disastrously. There will be a pyrrhic victory of some sort, and the fellow will just be beaten by the oppressive forces. So there's these wonderful scenes in the classroom where he develops all kinds of wonderful pedagogical tricks that he could have learned from, say, Ezekiel, you know, who had a prophetic way of acting out messages and so forth. So he had remarkable teaching techniques. And I remember the scene where he began by having them read a definition of poetry, was it?

[26:22]

This was in French, and very rapid French, so I only caught about half or three-fourths of it. So he has them read the definition of poetry, and then he says something like, this is utter nonsense. Tear out the page! And they all look at it. And then you, one by one, with enormous gleaming, tear out this moribund definition, dry as dust, of what real poetry is. There's this wonderful, wonderful scene where all of a sudden he's teaching in class. And he jumps up on the top of his desk and he says, you know, from here you have a whole new perspective of things. Is that the way you said it more or less? Yeah, okay. And then he has all of the kids come up and jump on his desk. I'm not going to jump off. But they all see, they see the classroom and they see everything from a new perspective, from this new vantage point. And that, I think, is just absolutely wonderful. Now, what is the vantage point of Alice and our vantage point as Cistercians and Benedictines?

[27:30]

It's this humility. that gives us the possibility of seeing things as they really are. And when we are approached on this vantage point, we can see things coming over the horizon, see things that are from within. And so this is very, very important for us. Now, I want to caution you, if any of you If you decide that you want to read something like St. Bernard's treatise on humility, which is just a marvelous work, don't get fooled by some of the opening pages. Because these 12th century monastic writers loved to quote, when they were writing on friendships, or prayer, or things like humility, classical definitions consecrated by tradition. So when St. Bernard begins early in this treatise by giving a definition of humility, he's quoting preceding persons.

[28:34]

And it's a definition of something like, humility is that virtue by which, through a most true self-knowledge, we become contemptible in our own sight. There's not one word about God in that, not one word about Jesus Christ. It's almost, you might say, a purely anthropological or philosophical type of definition. Now, you turn the page and he forgets completely about this very traditional definition of humility, what St. Thomas quotes, and everyone who's writing about humility, they all quote St. Bernard's definition of humility. You just turn the page, it's an excessive page, and humility is no longer this knowledge by which we become contemptible in our own sight because we know ourselves so well, but it's assuring in this lowest state the humility of the Lord Jesus Christ, who though he is God, you know, the Son of God empties himself.

[29:36]

And goes, you know, so far as being identified with us, even to death, and death on a cross. And, you know, this is just being plunged into the ultimate, the depths of the human experience, where he takes everything about our human nature that's poor and helpless and lonely, and then transforms it. And so, for St. Bernard, in our monastic tradition, that your people understand so well, and Bob Damasys did too, humility is essentially a condition of the incarnate Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. And our monastic humility... has got to be a sharing in this state of Jesus emptying himself out for love of us, this descending charity of God that Father Adamus was all the time talking about. Because where do we see most concretely this self-emptying, this pure gratuitous love of God? It's in the Lord Jesus Christ and the mystery of redemption, his love on the cross that leads to his resurrection.

[30:41]

And so humility is basically the Christological reality. And I must say, I don't begin to understand the degrees of humility. I'm always puzzled by them as a young monk, and I still am, but they're absolutely life-giving. And I never will forget how depressed I used to be as a young novice when I would be trying to cope with Chapter 7. And you begin with the first degree of humility. A person should keep the fear of God before his eyes and beware of ever forgetting it. This commanded, blessed thoughts, constantly recurred to the hellfire, which will burn for their sins, for those who despise God. And then all this business about being aware of the vices, all our possibilities for sinning, that God is always looking down, but there's this vast, infinite distance that has to be bridged by the angels, which would report all of our deeds to God, rather depressing, in a way.

[31:44]

And then the degrees, you know, I followed all of these spiritual writers who explained about the progress and the degrees of humility. You begin with your experience of what it means to be a sinner, and then this gradual progress in freedom. until you can relate now with your brothers and your spiritual fathers, until finally, in the twelfth degree, you reach this perfect love that casts out all fear and leads you to perfect liberty and perfect love. But, when you get to the twelfth degree of humility, it's that a monk not only has humility in his heart, but also, by his very appearance, makes it always manifest to those who see him. That is to say, Whether he is at the work of God in the oratory, in the monastery, in the garden, on the road, in the fields, or anywhere else, whether sitting, walking, or standing, he should always have his head bowed and his eyes towards the ground, feeling the guilt of his sins at every moment,

[32:48]

He should consider himself already present at the dread judgment and constantly say in his heart what the publican in the gospel said with his eyes fixed on the earth, Lord, I am a sinner and not worthy to lift up my eyes to heaven. And again with the prophet, I am bowed down and humbled everywhere." Now, what I thought When you get to the twelfth degree of humility, you're not really any better off than when you're at the first degree of humility. I mean, it's the same overwhelming experience of being a sinner. Until, all of a sudden, one day, I was worrying about this. I just noticed in the text about the head being bowed down, the Latin text says incinato, capite, and that rang a bell. And the bell was that this inclinato capite comes straight from Saint John's Gospel. And it's about Jesus bowing his head on the cross and giving up the spirit.

[33:56]

Now this act of perfect obedience and perfect love and perfect self-giving And Jesus on the cross is perfectly identified with the whole of the human experience and the whole human race. And remember St. Paul says he didn't not only accept our sins, he became sin. For us, when God the Father sees Jesus on the cross, Jesus is taken to himself, the worst of everything, all individuals, the whole collective humanity, the bomb, the abortion, the genocide, absolutely everything is there. on the cross with Jesus, but his love and his obedience are bigger than all that, and that's why he has the last word. So all of a sudden—now, this might be eisegesis, okay, reading something into the text than reading something out of the text that's objectively there, but I don't care. It helps, for me, make sense out of the degrees of humility.

[35:00]

And so that the monk who has arrived at this stage is now perfectly identified with Jesus in this perfect act of love. And now Jesus is the one who, in the name of the whole of humanity, is standing there before God, receiving God's love and forgiveness. And so the 12th degree of humility is absolutely incredible. We're perfectly identified with this kenosis, this emptying out, this self-giving love of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. And this is going to be Alice's experience in her monastic life. And I think basically it's got to be our kind of experience, too. And I think maybe nowadays, in our historical situation, this is something that's becoming clearer and clearer, with more and more street people and genocide going on all over the world. I mean, just as bad as under Hitler and Nazism.

[36:02]

and AIDS killing off whole generations of people, and this kind of breakup of the human family, and no matter what we do, things seem to get worse. And maybe in our communities. In some mysterious way, more people are being called to be identified with Jesus in this type of experience. There's something very deep, and I can't understand it, and I don't want to suggest to you that I do. But I just knew that this identification with Jesus and this mystery of His love and His redemptive action is the realest thing in the world. So I think that if we live the degrees of humility, essentially it means an entering into a redemptive act of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I remember being just so overwhelmed by one of your great Benedictine monks, Don Guilain Lafon.

[37:06]

He's a monk up here. Have you been with him? Did he visit here? The first time I met him was at a symposium in Oka, years ago. And someone was mentioning the great riot, the week of riots at the Verbonne in Paris, and someone woke up and realized, oh, Dumbledore woke up and realized that the whole era had ended. And you know, I could never understand this because in those days we were having a riot in universities about every other week. But in France, this cultural revolution just, you know, meant the end of an age and the beginning of another apocalyptic age. I still don't understand that. But at any rate, it was a big, big, big thing for them. who was just a consummate Thomist, and just a perfect monk, who had lived a peer-to-peer, all of his monastic life, except for a few years in Paris when he used to, of course, he used to go back to his monastery frequently.

[38:17]

He was deeply affected by this and he became obsessed with the question, can we really experience God? How do you experience God? What do we mean when we speak about experiencing God? All these things I never thought about if I'm just not that sensitive or bright. But we're having this symposium up in Oka and he came by to visit us on his way to this great city of God, Chicago. And he talked about this problem that he was facing. And this was during the time when Altheiser, the modern great Protestant theologian, was the high priest of the death of God movement. And all this was bound up in this question of the experience of God, and God being dead, and all that business. So, at any rate, Tom Helene explained what the problem was for him and what he hoped to find in Chicago. Well, he was in Chicago for a year, and then on his way back to France, he stopped by Gethsemane, and he spoke in chapter, and I thought, oh, dear God, I'm going to have to sit through what's happening with Altaïr, you know, the death of God and all of these, what I thought, you know, were obviously for him very personal questions.

[39:36]

But, well, I wasn't all that personally sympathetic to him. And I was practically weeping before he had half finished saying what he was saying. Because he began by saying, you know, I've been in my monastery 25 years and I haven't had the experience of being outside and seeing the life objectively. And he said, now what is it that I've learned in these 25 years? And then he began by saying, well it seems to me when you come to the monastery you have to forget a great deal and you have to learn a great deal You have to learn how to walk, you have to learn how to speak furiously, you have to learn how to eat intelligently, and all of these things which seem to be exterior and seem to come to us from outside. They don't spring from our inmost nature. They do a certain amount of violence to our nature as it is. And then he was using the French expression, being comfortable in your own skin.

[40:36]

And he began talking about how as you go on in the monastic life, you begin feeling more comfortable with this Christian way of doing things, adopting these Christian attitudes that at first seem artificial and something coming to you from outside rather than springing from your inmost nature. So it becomes something more familiar, and it changes your way of relating to things, and you begin becoming maybe your real self in Christ. Then he began to speak about how this begins leading to a kind of an interior liberty until And he did speak about the epilogue to the degrees of humility. We begin doing the things spontaneously because they spring from a purified deepest being. And we do things for the love of God, because God is God, and not for any motivations like fear of hell or thinking about our heavenly rewards, which are all good motives, huh?

[41:38]

But you do the right thing because this is your nature to do the right thing. You've been transformed by the Spirit of God working within you. Now that's where St. Benedict stops. Dhammakī Land went further than Shaitan's dictated, and it was just absolutely incredible. He says, all right, now, when you are in this state where you're truly spiritually free, What is it that you choose? And then he said, you choose what Jesus chose. So it's the same life of simplicity and self-giving and humility and emptying out. You choose to be with the Lord Jesus at the heart of the redemptive mystery. I think this is so true in our monastery. I have known very few people who I think really have gotten to the twelfth degree of humility. I might get to maybe the second degree, and then I slide back to the first degree. I mean, Don D'Amicous has hated people who got things counting.

[42:44]

our perfection is a lack of perfection. He wanted us to leave the question of our perfection and our virtue up to the Lord, and this is monastic wisdom. Okay, so the degrees of humility, you know, they're absolutely marvelous, but they don't necessarily reflect, you know, any consistent pattern in our belief in Christ. But having said that, you know, all with this goal of this perfect liberty in Christ and being identified, that's so important. And I think that that's what the whole business about humility is. And so when little Alice, you know, chooses humility as the foundation of her spiritual life, it just means becoming more and more identified with the Lord Jesus Christ. And that we're going to be seeing now how this has worked out in her growth in the monastery. And so we'll be talking more about that then maybe tomorrow. But I might say a couple more words about this Christological dimension of humility.

[43:46]

We have nothing, absolutely nothing, no virtues in the monastic life unless they're rooted in Jesus. Or we're not going to be men of prayer unless our prayer is a sharing in the prayer of Christ. There's no possibility of any real chastity unless our chastity is something of being rooted in the perfect consecration of the Lord Jesus to the Father. There's just absolutely nothing that we have in the monastic life that doesn't take its essence from our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. So whether it's prayer, whether it's charity, whether it's obedience, what's monastic obedience? if it doesn't mean sharing in the obedience of the Lord Jesus. It's all Christological. It's all a question of being truly disciples of Christ. And this is, I think, the essential thing about humility. It's a sharing in the way Jesus emptied himself for love of us. So we have five minutes to get to Compton.

[44:47]

What time are you having Father tomorrow? Is it 11 o'clock? No, it's 7. We have a special schedule tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll launch at the regular time. And then mass? Immediately afterwards, which is essentially 7.30 by the time we do a big mass. Okay. And I was going to ask the people, it seems like if we have the Yeah, 8.30. My people sometimes have a lot of trouble getting here by 8.15 for our own meetings. Same as tonight, but a little bit difficult getting here by 7.15. It seems like 8.30 would be better. Okay. It's more realistic. Now, what do you think? 8.15 is ideal, but we never make it, so 8.30 would be better. I don't want to wait too long. On the one hand, because of Father Plaston, his interest to heaven. Are there difficulties? No, no. His control over certain faculties and functions isn't as good as you'd like it.

[45:48]

This is a fact of human nature. He's been dead too long. So, 830 would be? 830, for reference. Thank you very much.

[46:07]

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