Speaking about the first reading today at Mass, about the barrenness of Hannah, and Alice's experience of barrenness, and our own experience of barrenness, that's one of the big biblical themes. There's a double tradition. that sterility, barrenness, is an enormous curse, the most terrible thing in the world. But there's the other theme of barrenness, that it's a state that's preparatory to God manifesting himself with an enormous amount of generosity, so that in the Old Testament all of the great heroes, practically, are born of women who are sterile, up to a certain point, as a preparation for their becoming fruitful. So, for example, old Sarah, who's just absolutely ancient. And then she is the one who bears the children, who carry on the promise, receive the promise.

[01:05]

And the mother of Samuel is a good example. And the mother of Gideon. And the great example, first of all, St. Elizabeth in the New Testament and St. John the Baptist. She's an old, old woman. And the greatest example of all is Our Blessed Mother, who has renounced the possibility of motherhood. And she's the one then who becomes mother of God incarnate, mother of the Messiah. And so in our monastic tradition, this experience of just being empty and dead and barren, normally God's providence should be understood as preparation then for an experience of great fruitfulness. And that's true at the individual level. And true, I think, at the level of communities. How many communities have there been that, like Yosemite years ago, looked as if we were doomed to extinction?

[02:08]

And, you know, then a generation or two later, absolutely thriving, where our monastery in Tamie and the Alps, the general chapter was deliberating closing it. And now it's so fruitful that not only is it thriving, but it's helping all kinds of other communities. And it's proved one of the centers for the liturgical movement in our world. It's incredible the way God's providence works. So when you feel like Alice, completely barren and empty and sterile, well, then just wait. Just wait with real faith and love. But at any rate now, We have Alice at the point where the author is going to describe some of the characteristics of Alice's monastic schedule, her aureum, what she does in various places. And I'm going to skip most of it.

[03:11]

But he makes the point of, she takes advantage of every moment of time. She has a wonderful sensitivity to doing things that should be done at the right time. Now, she's a real mystic. But far from meaning that she spends all the time on her knees before the tabernacle, she has the most wonderful kind of balanced life in which everything supports everything else. And this is extremely, I think, important for us. Now, the way the author expresses this is in terms of the metaphor of the Transfiguration. where Jesus ascends the mountain of the Transfiguration, which few people know all about, where something of his glory is revealed and shines through his sacred humanity and just floods the whole area.

[04:14]

He takes his three favorite disciples, the apostles, with him, and those three see his glory. And Alice uses a rather unique exegesis of this text, which I don't think you'll find in the Jerome Biblical Commentary. But these three apostles who see the glory of God shining through Christ are Lectio Divina, and work, and prayer. And the comment is that without these three, you can't have any of them, that one supports the other. And this is extremely interesting, because obviously she's going to get a great deal of profit out of work, and even more out of her reading. But most of all, through her prayer.

[05:15]

And by this prayer, she means a kind of a prayer that passes beyond Lectio Divina. Some type of prayer that grows out of our reading, but goes beyond words and maybe clear concepts. But the important thing right now for him is this unity of all of these benedictine practices. And I think this is enormously important for us. There is a certain rhythm in our life, and a balance in our life. And if what you obviously have so wonderfully well here at Mount Savior, and which we, thank God, have, I think, pretty much in our Cistercian tradition, that was lost for centuries, but I think now we have it, maybe the rhythm of life is changing from what? But the idea is that all of our various monastic observances or activities, or whatever you want to call them, support each other.

[06:18]

And there's a real profound connection, not only between what we read and how we read, our Lectio Divina, and prayer, whether it's in common or in private, but our work. feature very large in this. And our reading, obviously, and our prayer in common, and where you have an imbalance in the combination of all of these three benedictine works, You have something that goes askew. I remember our Father Lewis telling me that his spiritual life really began getting fouled up when he stopped going to the common work three afternoons a week. And so, at any rate, we have to have a great trust in this kind of benedictine wisdom in which our life attains a certain rhythm and a wonderful balance through work, and work that involves our whole being and our whole intelligence, and our study and meditation, our studying the sacred text and other expressions of the Christian mystery, and our prayer in common.

[07:38]

And all of these constituents are enormously important if we're going to see something of the glory of God shining through Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration. There's a crazy little story from this collection of 12th century stories I love so much from our tradition. It's called the Dvordium Monument. Another story. It's about a holy old novice master who's dying. He's a monk of the Abbey of Grand Salve in the southern part of France. And in the community, there's a young monk who loves this old man very much. And his name is, of all names, Pontius. I can't imagine any mother or father giving a child the name Pontius, like Pontius Pilate, but that's what his name is. And so this Pontius, who's going to become the Bishop of Clermont later on, as I said, has this great love for this old man who's dying. And, you know, they're very, very zany and familiar with each other in those days.

[08:46]

So Pontius tells the old novice pastor, he says, well, you're dying, and if you're able to arrange things after you die, I'd like to know how things are going for you. And so the old man dies. And then a few days later, he appears in enormous glory to Pontius. And the description of his appearance is extremely interesting. It's just all light, all crystal. And the terminology is taken straight from one of the Desert Fathers' sayings, where someone says that when a monk prays, he should be all I-E-Y-E, which is awfully strange. But at any rate, here is a novice pastor coming back to speak to Pontius to give a progress report on how he's doing. And he's blazing with light, like crystal, and he's all I. Now this is a very profound thing.

[09:50]

You can't visualize it. Our I is our organ of sight by which we see reality and can penetrate into it. Now imagine if our whole physical being were I. This would mean every pore of our being can penetrate into reality and just see everything, just receptive and open to everything, not just these little tiny organs here, but our whole being. That's something that's really quite profound. So, at any age, you're just blazing your gloriant punches. Well, how are things going? And obviously very well. And then there's this interesting discussion that goes on for about two paragraphs about the nature of the body that the novice master has now before the general resurrection. And so it's just a body that's loaned to him temporarily for purposes of apparition. And after this kind of philosophical discussion, Pontius notices that the guy is blazing with glory except there's one blotch

[10:59]

on his big toes. And he says, well, I wonder what's this? And the former novice master says, well, it's my own fault. He says, because when I went out to manual labor, I did so with less enthusiasm than for the other monastic exercises." And he always sat back and he laughed and said, ha ha ha. Now, he went out to manual labor, there's no doubt about that. He followed all the monastic exercises, but he didn't give himself to this particular monastic exercise with the same enthusiasm he had for the other things. And what they're obviously saying is that all of the aspects of our monastic day and our monastic horarium are extremely important and have to be taken seriously, and that they all support one another.

[12:01]

Now, obviously, we all have our preferences and our special talents for this or for that. I don't want to take a hoe and go out to the garden, but the lay brother who was in charge usually traveled. You know, and the damage that I was about to inflict on the garden and our frustration economy. But nevertheless, okay, we should be able, you know, even if we don't like dishwashing all that much, to take it very seriously and give ourselves to it with a real enthusiasm. You know, enthusiasm means that God is in it. And now, this doesn't have to mean a kind of wild, delirious type of enthusiasm. Generally, in our monasteries, the brethren who are enthusiastic in an enormously demonstrative way become something of a pain in the neck, or they're converse. But there's an enthusiasm that really is a kind of a quiet seriousness.

[13:05]

That means we give ourselves to what we're doing with real understanding and real depth. For me, one of the best examples that I know of, of this kind of quiet monastic enthusiasm, is an old monk, Father Bernard, from Mount St. Bernard in England. I think he's an old Irishman. And a very devout monk who loved the Mass intensely. And he spent quite a few months before his death in the infirmary at Mount St. Bernard. So in those days there was no consolidated Mass, nothing like that. But he was able to celebrate mass lying in bed. And so there would be a lay brother who would come at the proper time and set up things on his bed for him. And he had his missal and the chalice and everything on just a special tray on his bed. So it was the middle part of Lent. And it was the Saturday when the first reading of the Epistle was the reading about the chaste Savannah that maybe some of the Ulsters might remember.

[14:14]

It was about five pages long. It goes on and on and on and on. There's an abbreviated version that's not half so good in the modern dictionary. But anyway, it was the Saturday of the chaste Savannah. And so Old Father Bernard begins reading this long, long text, and the lay brother is standing there, you know, serving him and waiting for this interminable reading to finish. And he goes on and he goes on, and he really obviously likes it, and he reads it very slowly, savoring almost every word. And finally, finally, at long last, he gets to the end of it. And this is amazing. Thank God. And then Father Bernard looks up and he smiles quietly and he says, Oh, that's lovely, lovely, lovely. Let's read it again. Now, this, brethren, is enthusiastic.

[15:18]

It's the sort of thing, you know, we have to be able to really give ourselves even to the reading about the Chaste Savannah, okay, where that kind of acquired personal involvement, that's so necessary. And so we really believe in the kind of work that we do together, and that we do by ourselves, and the seriousness of our reading of our Lectio. The extremely interesting thing here, our author, he worried about the younger generation. Look how the younger generation Just can't measure up to the ideals of the more senior generation and so forth. And I hear this sometimes nowadays even in monasteries, but it seems to have been a chronic problem even in the 13th century. But the way he expresses this is in this interesting text from Lamentations of Jeremiah, chapter 4, how does the gold become dim?

[16:26]

The finest color is changed now. The stones of the sanctuary are scattered in the top of every street. The stones of the sanctuary. And these stones of the sanctuary he identifies with our monastic exercises, with our spiritual reading, and our manual work, and our prayer in common, and our prayer in solitude. And so these are the stones of the sanctuary, and if they're all scattered around, and they don't support each other, or some of them are lost, you've destroyed the sanctuary of the living God. And so when we have all of these stones, so to speak, collected, and united with each other, then we have a place, a tabernacle, where God is present and where God is acting. So, have enormous faith in the fecundity of our life and everything that makes it up.

[17:27]

Now, just think of the wisdom of Dom Damascus, you know, when he founded your community and made a big point to ensure, you know, that the brethren would be able to follow the rhythm of the Benedictine rule without getting involved in a lot of the wonderful works of apostolate and so forth that you have in many other monastic communities. But this is something that you should be enormously grateful for and really protect. And obviously the nature of our economy and our industries and things, that's going to necessarily evolve. But if you can only think about this unity and balance and the support of one thing with the other, that's enormously important. So at any rate, there's this unity and a rhythm of life. And I'm not going to get started about Lectio Divina, because that's an enormous reality. As far as I'm concerned, one of the first things I would look for in a perspective postulate is whether this person, under God's grace, can really develop a taste for spiritual reading.

[18:39]

Now, there are all kinds of definitions of Lectio Divina. And with Fr. Martin, I was speaking about this the other day. And yeah, for some people, you can pick up the newspaper. I read it as Lectio Divina, this divine word that's speaking to us through contemporary events. That's just wonderful. And I know a lot of Benedictines who just think that any spiritual reading is this divine reading. But historically, Lectio Divina. Amen. the sacred reading of the Word of God, the living Word of God, in which you read it slowly and meditatively and repetitiously, and meditating on it and interiorizing it. I know a lot of Cistercians, for example, who, when they speak about Lectio Divina, they say, you can't do it more than 15 minutes a day because of such an intense type of contact with the Word of God.

[19:42]

And which is not a question of taking your text and finding some intelligible content in it and getting that into your brain. But the sacred text becomes the occasion for something between the text, the Holy Spirit working in you and helping you interiorize the text, as if it becomes something just newly inspired, newly written, newly created. And so it's a very intense form of interiorizing the Word of God that can be very draining psychologically and spiritually, and very fruitful. So not every kind of reading is the kind of reading we're talking about here. And it's something that passes beyond words very often, and a very simple kind of contemplative prayer. And that's a wonderful, important aspect of our approach to reading in the monastic life.

[20:44]

Now, we all have to read for different purposes now. We all know that. And you have to read to get a lot of information, and that's necessary for our vocation, just purely for information. And we have to know how to do maybe speed reading, to know how to skim and be selective. And all of that, if we're not careful, can militate against this real monastic lecture divina that Amnesis loved so much. And I'm sure he must have spoken often about this divine reading that we do. But so this is an enormously important thing for our lives. And this is something that Alice understands very well. Now, this reading obviously is supposed to pass and draw a very deep kind of prayer. And I'm just going to touch briefly maybe on a problem that we do have in some monasteries or some communities.

[21:46]

And that's when the men and women, some of them are really men and women of deep prayer. And the moment they begin trying to meditate or trying to read, they just pass into a state of what some spiritual masters call the prayer of quiet or the prayer of simplicity. And I've known a few instances, very few, very few, not to have this tradition, but a few instances You know, where it is really remarkable, like I know of one Trappist teen nun, this is before Vatican II, and her confessor, was faced with this rather funny situation. She didn't have much imagination. The penance was usually three Hail Marys. And the dinner he would find was none three Hail Marys, and she'd start saying her three Hail Marys, and she couldn't get beyond the opening words. I mean, she'd just black out. So she used to have to write out her three Hail Marys.

[22:50]

Now, that's not a problem for too many of us. Or I'm just thinking of one of the, you're speaking with the group today of somebody about some of the women mystics you think are off the wall. Well, this is one of them. Now, as a woman who no one knows about, she's a former of a group of Bernadine nuns in the 17th century. And she's one of these girl abbesses, you know, who become abbesses at the age of 10 or 11. Well, at any rate, she used to live for a part of the year with her family, and then she would go back and persecute her community. But she wasn't a very devout little girl, and I guess the community really deserved her. She went through a conversion when she was about 12 years old, and she learned all about mental prayer.

[23:54]

And this was a big, big rage. This was the time of St. Francis de Sales, for example, and people were learning how to meditate in a very systematic way, and everything organized. And this is one of the most beautiful phases, you know, in the evolution of French spirituality. And it's a school of mental prayer and meditation. So at any rate, she had learned how to meditate, and she was so wildly enthusiastic. And she's one of these do-gooders that we can do without in our monastic community. She immediately finds out something, and she tries to cram it down the throats of everyone. So she had this impostor that's going around spreading the word about mental prayer. And so one of her victims, one of the peasant fervents of the monastery, this little girl who can't speak French, she can only speak Patois, and no education, obviously, but so little Marie de Pontfenat tries to initiate her into the wave of mental prayer.

[25:03]

And the little girl says in patois, she says, Oh, I want to pray so badly. I've never been able to pray. I've never learned how to pray. Can you teach me how to pray? It's terrible. I want to pray so badly. I begin saying, Our Father, And then I get to the word Father, and I think of what it means that God is my Father. And that's so big, you know, I just can't get any further. That God is my Father, and obviously she's a real mystic, she's a real contemplative. I mean, she's a real woman of prayer, and this little girl learns the lesson from her. Well, you know, there's some people like that in our communities. And for those people, it's real, real important that they don't spend their whole prayer life and this state of very simple absorption in God and the things of God, because they have an intellect too.

[26:07]

And it's all wonderful and very important, you know, like the Desert Fathers and Eastern spirituality, that the intellect descends into the heart, that we have this profound unity And I'd like to pray for an adoration. But don't forget that the intellect remains the intellect too. That the intellect doesn't get destroyed in some kind of monotheistic type of experience by the heart, or completely overwhelmed by the heart. So the intellect is one of the greatest things that God has given us. So always be sure to use it. And so we're not going to be in a state of highest or deepest contemplation all the time. So we've got to use our old noggins, our intellects, to know and love and serve God too. And so we have to know sacred theology, even if it's not in a scientific way or anything like that. And we have to know our scripture. And we have to be able to read intelligently for information that's useful for the spiritual life and for our relationships with others.

[27:14]

So I think that this is enormously important. I remember Gethsemane, the ill-fated years when I was Father Master of the Juniors. There was one young monk, he had been in Vietnam. Wonderful, wonderful fellow. and really deep graces of prayer. It was really just palpable. I learned so much from him. But I was taking him through some sections of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, and I know there are a lot of Theologians would say, you have to read St. Thomas directly, not the commentators. But I found some commentators just absolutely wonderful, too. So I was reading through one of the articles about God with this particular Brother X, and with the help of Cajetan's great commentary on the Summa.

[28:20]

And the article that we were dealing with was, God as the Supreme Good. And the article begins with a kind of platonic axiom that, bonum sui di perceivem est, that Literally, the good is diffusive of itself. What it means is that if you have something good, because it's good, then it tends to communicate itself outside itself. I mean, if you see something, you know, well, just take a novel or something that's very good. People want to read it because they recognize in it some kind of a good. So, all the good that's been in the author and the book that's been written will tend to communicate itself to others. Now, if this is true in just the ordinary order of creation, how much more true is it of God who is the supreme good, the absolute good, the good beyond which there is no good, So then the article is just absolutely stunning of how God communicates Himself in a supreme way.

[29:28]

First of all, in the order of creation, anything that is, is because it participates in some way in God. If it weren't for God, it wouldn't have any existence. And then how intelligent beings, angels, us, participate in this supreme goodness of God, and how God diffuses his goodness to us and through us. And then in a supreme way, in the hypostatic union, in a narrow realm, how God communicates himself supremely as supreme good, and Jesus Christ, who is God, wonderful, wonderful. Well, so we started in on that, and after about 15 minutes, Brother X is just out of our I mean, he's just in contemplation. We just had to stop and put off the discussion of the rest of it till the next week. And so the next week rolls around, and after about 12 or 15 minutes, Brother X is out of it again.

[30:33]

And by that time, I wasn't so wildly enthusiastic about his states of contemplation. And by the third week, it was just no go. And I just wished that he had been able to keep out of these states of contemplation. He used to have to stay in choir sometimes a few minutes extra at the end of an office. This had never been any problem for me. But it was for him, and eventually he had to leave our community, and he's doing wonderfully well now, happily married, and it worked out well for him. But at any rate, this kind of contemplative experience That's extraordinary. Extraordinary, oh thank God. And it would be terrible if we had too many like that in our communities. No work would get done, no meals would get cooked. But at the same time, it would have been better Maybe. This wonderful fellow had been able to cope with the ordinary constituents of our monastic regime and have more of a happy balance in his life.

[31:45]

God put a finger on him in a very special way for a very, very special purpose. So you don't question that at all. But just to remember then that we're contemplatives. And we're heading out for the beatific vision, and we want to anticipate all of this as much as possible here, and now with a kind of a holy impatience, a holy greed, you might say. We have to wait for God's time, always with patience. But this is what we're headed for, and some get more of a taste of it than others do. And when they do, that's absolutely marvelous. But in the meantime, Everything is preparing us for that. And so our reading, and our manual labor, our intellectual work, and our obedience, and our mutual relationships with each other, all of these things are so precious for us in the community. So that's important. And then speaking about the unity of our monastic life, there's a kind of unity, community,

[32:55]

in which each of us realizes that our brothers maybe have particular talents, spiritual talents, well, natural talents, and we all support each other. And some just have graces in one area that we couldn't begin to have. There's a wonderful sermon by St. Hildreth. Her feast day is tomorrow, by the way. Sturgeon Abbot of a monastery in England. It's on St. Benedict. And I think it appeared in monastic studies years ago in translation. And it's all about Saint Benedict as the new Moses. And the idea is that just as the Old Testament Moses leads the people of God through the desert to the Promised Land, for Saint Benedict is our new Moses. And he's leading the people of God, which is ourselves, through the desert of this world to the Promised Land. But in the desert of this world, they have to build a tabernacle where God can come and dwell and be with his chosen people.

[34:04]

And so Saint Benedict builds a tabernacle in the desert where God can come and dwell with us. And then he quotes the text from Exodus, I guess it is. about how everyone of the people of God, all the individuals, bring their precious possessions and contribute them to the building in the tabernacle. And so everyone contributes personally, in a very individual, personal way, to the building of this place where God can be present and dwell and be active in our midst. And that's exactly the same way in the monastic community, St. Benedict says. Now, he says we're all doing the same things, and we all are living under the same rules, and are sharing in the same exercises, but some have one talent, some have another. Some have one richness that they can contribute to the building of the tabernacle that's different from what another person has. So one of us can be just absolutely great at Lectio Divina, another can be remarkable for fasting, or for manual work, or for what have you.

[35:16]

But collectively, we all give what God has given us. And this builds the tabernacle in the desert, Mount Saviour, you know, Gethsemane, wherever we are, what our communities are. And then, because each of us is given, we're able to build this tabernacle where God can be present and live among us and live with us and live through us. And so this is a very important idea, too. There's a wonderful aspect of poverty as they understand it at Taizé. At Taizé, for them, poverty isn't just a renunciation of material goods. Poverty means a sharing of everything they are and they have with each other. And so there's this openness to each other and this communication with each other of all the graces that God has given us. So, remember, it's not for ourselves alone. So, at any rate,

[36:18]

I guess I've touched on most of the things about this idea of the unity of our life. I think it's so important that we not pick and choose too much. when it comes to the things that make up the monastic life. I mean, we have to have our special graces and special attractions, there's no doubt about that. But what I mean is, when you enter monastic life and you want to become a real contemplative, and then you begin playing that off against everything else, I think we get into trouble. And I think this has been in my own community, not so much now but years ago, a very, very special problem. Everyone was deeply concerned about being real men of prayer. That was one of the most palpable realities that you would become aware of when you entered our community.

[37:24]

But a lot of them had come from maybe reading, quote, too much Thomas Merton, in a way, had very clear ideas about the nature of the contemplative life and contemplation. And so they would put up with things like manual work for the sake of the contemplative experience, or they would get upset because they had to sing these long offices in Latin, which they didn't know very well, or all these complicated notes going up and down and so forth. And what they wanted, you know, was the time for real prayer. And then they would begin getting frustrated because obviously, you know, the superiors didn't understand what the contemplative dimension of our life really was. And it was just a bad situation. So they were really thirsting for something that was authentic, but rejecting, in the practical order, important aspects of our life together, the things that will lead and open up to the real deep contemplative experience.

[38:30]

So it was very important not to do that. And then most of the time, you know, they ended up, they wanted to find the right button to push to produce instant contemplation. And of course, at the end of the month, they were totally frustrated. That sort of thing. So if you want to be a real contemplative, then learn how to open a door and close it quietly. I mean, all that sort of thing. is kind of necessary as a preparation for the real thing. And then you have the deep experience of the presence and action of God is just going to well up in God's good time, you know, through just kind of the integrity and the fullness of our life together. So this is something that Alice really understands. As she said, she's this woman who's described as being socialis, as a relationship with all of the others. That's just beautiful.

[39:31]

Okay, so a real contemplative, so far as I know, All the remarkable for the simplicity and the service of each other and the love and humble obedience and deep faith. I mean, they have it all. And it's just that they are able to enter deeper and realize these things a little bit more deeper because they didn't become turned into real contempt of those. Okay, now about one and only miracle. that occurs just about this time. Oh, I might mention there's a description of Alice in the various parts of the monastery when she's working. When she's in the refectory, and I was just astonished to read, this is a medieval hagiography, but it doesn't say anything about her fasting, her enormous austerity in the refectory, which rejoices my heart.

[40:33]

It's just that she's sparing, frugal, and she just seems to be able to do everything in a real balanced way. And then it even mentions her in the dormitory. This is profoundly monastic literature, and she never makes any noise that disturbs her sisters in the common dormitory. This is a good aspect of architectural life. But now there's just one little miracle that occurs at this point, and you find the same miracle in half a dozen lives of medieval saints. And the only reason I realize now that it's put there is because it confirms a light, a candle. And as I said before, this theme of light is going to be important in the development of this little life of Alice. She eventually is going to become light herself. But on TV, little girls at this time, there's a flashback. And the author says, oh, of all the thousands and thousands of miracles she tossed off, it would be impossible to enumerate them all, so I will limit myself to this.

[41:39]

That usually means in hagiography that they really didn't do very much by the way of miracles, and they're really scraping the barrel to be able to find this one. But I think he's scraping the barrel. But there are conflicts. And it shows that it's a rather degenerate community, because St. Benedict says you're supposed to celebrate Compton by the light of day still, and they have a candle on the oratory. So the candle falls off the candle stand, and the light goes out. And all that happens is a little Alice, like an eager beaver, picks it up, and she starts to dash to the sacristy with it, where they had a light going. But as she picks it up, the witch just lights by herself again. Now, as I said, this has happened in any number of lives of the saints. So that's not so significant, except that this is going to be now the turning point

[42:39]

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