Good afternoon. Introducing Sister Mary Marguerite, I thought of saying yes to God and saying yes to the Benedictine's way of life may lead you down many unexpected paths and I think her life is an example of that. And for an example, we were sitting at a table at Monastic Institute for lunch up at St. John's and But someone said to, they knew we were from Beach Grove, a group of us were there. Oh, you live with Sister Mary Margaret? I had a retreat with her, it was really good. And my one teacher always refers to her book whenever I have a question. And so they said, what's it like to live with Sister Mary Margaret? And one person said, well, she was my prioress. Another said, she was my teacher. another retreat director, and a seminarian was there from another community.

[01:04]

He said, well, I stopped and met with some of the monks. And Sister Kathleen spoke up and said, I clean toilets with Sister Mary Margaret, all for the honor and glory of God. Monastery in 1961 at the age of 18, After making vows, she taught elementary education for four years and was sent by her community, the Catholic University, to get an MA in religion and religious education. She served as the Director of Religious Education for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. and also studied adult education and group process at Indiana University, receiving an MS there. Then she returned to Catholic University in 1982 to further her studies in Roman Catholic tradition. In 1985, she was elected prioress here at Our Lady of Grace and served eight years.

[02:07]

During that time, Lily funded a research project in which she worked on to research reclaiming, reappropriating, and retrieving monasticism for Benedictine women. And during that time they looked at Lectio Divina, Opus Dei, The Vow of Poverty, and the Monastic Aurarium of Silen, and at that time revised our office books. So she's been, so this continues. She also worked in the Institute of Apathetic Tradition of Contemplative Theology with Contemplative Outreach. Also, the second institute was on Laicio Divina with Thomas Keating and Bruno Baumhardt. And then in 1998, she published the book Thoughts Matter. which he's given conferences and retreats about across the United States and outside the United States as well.

[03:11]

In 1994, she became the executive director for interreligious dialogue, monastic interreligious dialogue, sorry, and organized a spiritual exchange of four Tibetan monastics visiting 30 Christian monasteries in the U.S. In the summer of 95, she was part of the Buddhist-Christian exchange that visited India, Nepal, and Tibet. She coordinated the Gethsemane encounter featuring the Dalai Lama and collaborated with the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane. Currently, she's working on a vigil for the millennium, a vigil of peace. and a vigil for peace August 23rd with the Dalai Lama for the Buddhist Kali Chakra initiation rite. So from all that experience, today though, her talk is mainly coming from the book, Thoughts Matter.

[04:14]

So we welcome Sister Mary Margaret. Thank you, Sister Carolyn. It is my privilege to be with you today because my heart goes out to you and your role of vocation directors because you're where it comes together. People that are seeking and those of us who are in the monastic way of life, you have to interpret both. So I'm happy to be here and happy to present What I see as my challenge is the tradition. I'd like to just teach that little switch between my formal way of life and the monastic way of life. So, and the renunciation being a way to describe that. So, I'm looking forward to this teaching myself. I've been actually pulling this together for some years and I've only given this talk one other time. So, at least you know it's been rehearsed once.

[05:16]

I never give a talk unless I've already given it, so don't you wonder who those first people are. The book talk matter has been fun also. I was downstairs getting coffee and Dallas, our chief maintenance director here, he said, I heard you wrote a book. I says, yes. He says, what's the title? I'll go get it. And I said, it's called Thoughts Matter. And Dallas said, I thought so. You know, I thought so. And you can tell from the way he keeps this place, it does matter to him, each and every little detail. So again, I'm very happy to be here and happy to be with you. I asked her, where would you start? And she said, I'll always start with scripture. And so, unbeknownst to me, the gospel reading this morning was delicious for this topic. Do you remember what it was? The topic? Who is my brother? Who is my sister? And it's those who do the will of my father, or my brother, or my sister.

[06:24]

Renunciation is a way of life. So let me read these three scriptural passages. And just before I do that, this is two o'clock in the afternoon, and I don't know if you've got a nap or not, and the heat is high, humidity is high, and you're away from home, So, periodically, I'm going to ask you to talk just to the person next to you, and I'll give you a question to reflect on. So know that you have to please help that person. Okay, we'll start right away. Would you tell that person next to them what the Gospel reading was this morning? Okay, thank you. Don't you agree that's a wonderful gospel for this topic? I've picked out three others, though, that reinforce this idea. I'm going to start with Matthew 17, well, actually 16, verse 24.

[07:25]

Then Jesus said to his disciples, whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with His angels in the Father's glory, and then He will repay everyone according to his conduct. Amen. Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in to see them. That's Matthew. Now again, you're going to tell your puzzle which one of these passages means the most to you. This is from Luke chapter 9. As they were proceeding on their journey, someone said to him, I will follow you wherever you go.

[08:26]

Jesus answered him, foxes have dens and birds have the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. And to another he said, follow me. But he replied, Lord, let me first go bury my father. But he answered him, let the dead bury their dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God. and another said I will follow you but first let me say farewell to my family at home to him Jesus said no one who steps his hand to the plow and looks to what he has left behind is fit for the kingdom of God third passage this is again from Luke chapter fourteen Great crowds were traveling with Christ and he turned and addressed them. If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

[09:32]

Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for his completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers will laugh at him and say, this one began to build but did not have the resources to finish. Or what king, marching into battle, would not first sit down and decide whether, with 10,000 troops, he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with 20,000 troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. In the same way, Every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple. So those three passages in the Gospel this morning, so those passages kind of meet you between the eyes, don't they, of Christ's words.

[10:41]

And since you and I are Christians following Christ, What may surprise you first off is those are for all Christians because all Christians are following Christ. So the way of renunciation is the Christian way of life. And it starts with baptism. Baptism is the ritual whereby we are initiated into the Christian way of life. And at baptism there is a promise, a promise, and it's a threefold promise to renounce Satan, to renounce evil, and to renounce good. that you didn't know you pronounced good. But Satan of course is that personified force of evil that comes in many ways, but distinctively our Christian tradition teaches evil is not casual, it has intelligence, It is pervasive. It's in our times. It's in all times. This evil is spirited. It is matter.

[11:41]

There are devils. There are demons. So we renounce those counter forces to good. So that's the first thing we renounce. The second, though, is the evil that maybe comes from us or from someone else, or those evil that we are the origin of, or that our culture is the origin of. It's not an outside force. It is truly a consent that we construct. So that is something we renounce. But third, we renounce good, the allurement of good, it says in the Baptismal Rite. And that means There are many, many goods, but for the sake of following Christ, you have to renounce some of the goods for a better. You can't do all goods. And if demons or evil forces can't allure you by evil and darkness and hindrances, often we are allured by good. And if that doesn't describe our times today, it's the good that allures our young people, that allures our monastics today.

[12:46]

So those are the three promises of renunciation that we have at baptism and I'm going to return to those. Now, I'm going to go through our tradition, the monastic tradition, from the Benedictine point of view. And this is what I've learned over the years. And you teach all of this yourselves. I know many of you are novice masters, novice mistresses, some former prioresses. You've come from many walks of life. You've done it all in this room. So I'd like a little critique. If I haven't yet, or if you teach it differently, I'd like to know also. But let's first start out, where did we get this idea of the spiritual journey? Spiritual journey, the first one we know in antiquity, early antiquity, would be origin. Origen constructed that line, spiritual journey, and he took it, of course, from the journeys that were in the literature of the times, Greek literature and Roman literature.

[13:47]

And he, of course, was an Alexandrian, which they looked at scripture through the spiritual senses. And Origen was one of the great allegorical teachers, where allegory means On top of or beneath or over and above the literal meaning of the text is another meaning, a hidden meaning, a spiritual meaning, an invisible meaning that is as meaningful as the literal meaning. That's allegory. It's got another storyline. So he's the one that crafted that the Exodus story really is a story about the people of God, the church, the baptism, and the crossing the Red Sea and renouncing. Satan and going towards the promised land. So the spiritual journey was Origen's construct as much as I can tell. Now, it was Fimo, I think, who did a tropology, T-R-O-P-O-L-O-G-Y, tropology meaning a moral sense of scripture, that took some of those scriptures and applied it to the individual more than the group, more than the church.

[14:52]

And then later in one of Origen's works, I think it was on his commentary on the Song of Songs, he took the spiritual journey and hooked it up with the individual soul going to God. And so he's the one that crafted that tri-part division of the purgative, the illuminative, and the initative stages. Now, remember I said that he was the master of the allegory, the invisible. So, when we talk about the spiritual journey, we're talking about the interior journey. So, when somebody comes to the monastery, first question is, do you want the spiritual journey? That's the interior journey. And so in order to embark on the spiritual journey, you must renounce your formal way of life, which is the external journey. So monastic work, monastic way of life, is a construct to help people to the interior life, to the spiritual journey. It's not an external journey.

[15:53]

It may have a ministry, it may do good for the world, it may be a way of life outside, but that's secondary to this interior life that Origen talked about, the spiritual journey, the spiritual journey. So we would have to then help we'd have to go back to our other sources to know what is this spiritual journey and what are the stages along the way. So I'm going to use Poconius actually who does I think one of the best descriptions of renouncing your former way of life because he was very specific that they had to leave certain things. You know when you're not an anchorite, in an anchorite setting like Abba Anthony, the formal way of life went away by virtue of the environment of just being alone. So that kind of took care of things, you know. And also, you'll find the traces in these teachings are in Anthony. But for our purposes today, I'd like to go to Tacomius, because I think he had a very handy, nifty set of renunciations that he asked his monks to do at the time.

[17:05]

And the first was to renounce Possessions. Possessions. So now I'm in this external way of life. I'm going to put them before we even do the spiritual journey. So over here we have the natural possessions. Now possessions, what's wrong with possessions, it's in the category of goods. It is a good, but it's not a good for the sake of the spiritual life. We're going towards the invisible, we're going towards the unitive, the one thing necessary, so to have a multitude of things and to be caring for things divides the mind and makes us a custodian over using things. And my friend Lily is here, and I know the distinction in Hinduism that's so good about a householder and a renunciate. A householder needs things for the sake of children, for the sake of their household.

[18:09]

A renunciate, in the monastic way of life, we renounce things. And as an individual, as Glick says, we own nothing. Now the group, the community owns things for the sake of the monastery, but the individual renounces all things. and that's to make this clear break between the formal way of life and the monastic way of life. Now, the title of this talk is Formal Way of Life. In the monastic literature and in the teachings I know you've done, when we teach the vow conversatio morum, conversatio morum, the emphasis of that is not so much the conversatio because the turn happens, that happens, but it's the way of life. that I want to attack today. That way of life is different than the way of life of those in the world. So we want a way of life in the monastery. And it's almost hyphenated, way of life.

[19:10]

It's almost an idiom. And so renouncing things gives us a way of life that you don't have if you have all your things. If you bring all your things with you and you set up housekeeping and you've got, let's say, an apartment and you have your car and you have your credit card, what happens? The way of life is not distinguishable from the way of life of the monastery. So the renunciation is to take up an external way of life because of your internal shift. So the external doesn't shift. You're going to see me come back to this, the external life has to look different for the sake of the training of the person undergoing this monastic way of life. Until you're very high, maybe a very high person with all the training that has no attachments can possibly look like they're a householder. But for most of us, we need the training. We need the training. So the first thing is possessions.

[20:11]

And so the possessions means anything that you consider yours, your possession, rather than arusam, for your use. So this is the origin of obedience, that you only have things for your use by virtue of permission from the habit. So, again, the first renunciation is about things. It's about possessions. And so, when Abba Anthony went to the desert, he had to renounce his things. When we come to the common, we have to renounce our things. Now, you may get things. This is the idea behind a habit, actually, so that you don't wear your clothes. It's not so much what the clothes are, it's that you don't wear your clothes. you know, that your clothes are put in the wardrobe so that if you leave, you take your clothes back. It's that possessiveness. Because truly, you don't have anything. All I get is to seek God. To seek God is the monastic way of life.

[21:13]

Okay, the second thing that distinguishes the external life from the internal life is to renounce social status, all the social ties. But you know, before I go on to social, I think you should talk to the person next to you about things. Ask your person if they've renounced all their friends. You might have had a few things left to talk about. Are we doing okay so far? Can you see where we're going? We're going to go through the whole religious life in two hours, but we can do it. But in the light of this topic, and I think it is good to get those teachings down again from this point of view.

[22:14]

Okay, the second area that Pacomi has stressed that is so brilliant in his the life of Pocomius, is to renounce social ties. And they come in about five categories. First, of course, is family. Family. And, you know, you just have to renounce your family. You renounce your mother, your brother, your sisters. Because family, if you bring them with you, then you tend to be, unless they all shift to the monastic way of life, You haven't left your former way of life, because that is your way of life, is your relationship with the family. And then you need things for mom and things for dad, and things to give to your brothers and sisters. So family has to be renounced. And there's two wonderful stories in Procomius. He talks about Theodore, whose mother wanted to see him. And the mother got a permission from the bishop to come and came all the way to the desert, you know, to see her son. And she brought the younger brother along.

[23:17]

And so Theodore said, I will not see my mother because of this gospel passage I just read to you. And Pocomius said, well, come, come. I mean, that's against charity. Look what your mother has done. She's come all this way. She has permission from the bishop. I don't think I'll hurt you to see your mother. And he says, no, I will not. It'll hurt me in my vocation because I'm living the gospel literally. And so Pocomius says, well, probably for me to force you. But then Pocomius make sure that the mother stands on this hill so that when he goes out to the church, you know, the mother gets a slide of her son. Well, then in the meantime, the young brother that was there got talking to some of the other monks, and of course when the mother was ready to go home, the heave wanted to stay. So when once the mother was punished because she lost both of them, and so the younger brother stayed also.

[24:18]

Then there's another story whereby there was a young monk who was very homesick and he wanted to go home and the family wanted to go home. I think the father was dying. So Thakomya said, in this case, you should go home, but I will send another devout brother with you, and this brother will stay with you, and make sure that you come back, because he judged that he had a vocation. By the way, it is Pocomius. If you want to go back and read through that, there's much literature in there about discerning a vocation in Pocomius. I'm always struck by that because they're talking about who makes a monk. And remember he had three failed experiences about the monks. He got that vocation and first the communists tried to lead by, he just let people come and he led by example. And then that time they were just being lax and terrible. So he just pretended like they were going to do prayer service outside the gates and then he ran in and pulled them behind.

[25:19]

So he took care of those monks. Then the next monks, he thought, well, I better teach them. I better actually instruct them on what the monastic way of life is about. And so he started doing that, and then he found, much to his chagrin, some couldn't even learn it. So then the third time he started taking monks, he started selecting them, the ones that could learn, both by teaching and example. And so, but again, you know, he still failed because he put Theodore in charge after he died and the whole thing fell apart. 7,000 monks, you know, because he didn't have a way of succession. There wasn't a way to elect monks that could both teach and lead. So, you know, I'll bet he got that from Bogomis. That's a wonderful teaching. But that's the shortest teaching you've ever had of Bogomis, huh? But nevertheless, go back and read him about his discernment, how he discerns who has a vocation and what questions he asks them and what he's listening for.

[26:21]

And then this other teaching that is so brilliant in there is communction and tears and how that, and I'm going to talk more about that. A little bit later. But for the purpose of family ties, the other story was when this monk went back to his family and he sent another monk with him to bring him back. And so the guardian of this other monk was, they kept all the prayers, they did all the prayers together, they slept together. They did the herrarium together. So in one sense, by a companion that did not, that went with him, that was not tied to family. Remember the old rule, they always had to take somebody with us? And remember the old, old rule that we couldn't stay all night at home? You had to go to a major company. So it comes out of this tradition that if you go into the herrarium of the family, you watch the news, you eat, have a couple beers, and then you you know, whatever, if you get into the family life instead of, you know, the monastic way of life. So, Pakomya's second story is to send the monk home, but with another monk, to keep the monastic way of life, and then it's easy for him to transition back to the monastery, because he indeed has never left, because they kept the rules while they were there, the rule of life in their hearts.

[27:38]

So the urgency and the absolute strictness of the family life has to go. When you leave, you leave the family. And those rules were good. And unfortunately in our times, we left the family without very good catechesis. Then after Vatican II, when we returned to the family, We return to the family with a vengeance, and the family return to us, and the merger has happened, and this particular teaching has lost its effectiveness. And yet newcomers that come really desire to renounce everything and to follow Christ. So we need to reclaim and reinterpret and reappropriate this particular teaching for our times. And it does seem like it means exactly what it says to our little dimension. You renounce your family, your father, your mother, your brother, your sister. And should they want you, you would minister to them as a monk, but not as a brother or sister or a father or a mother. And you would provide for their care, or you would leave the monastery to care for them.

[28:43]

But you can't do both. An interesting phenomenon. So not only do you renounce your family, both in your heart, and that's another reason in the 30 sections of Benedict about things, not to accept gifts from family, because those are subtle ties. Immediately you're back into the family, Christmas and birthdays, and you're into gift-giving in a big way. And then to give the gifts, then you have to have the money, and to have the money you have to go shopping. you know, then you end up with all the things again because you're part of that network of things. So, we just have to instruct our family, take the loss that they incur, you know, they love the things we give them, but we just have to retrain them and start that all over again to renounce the family. Because we've taken up an invisible family, the mystical body of the Church, this relationship with Christ that is our family, our monastic way of life, we become the primary community. I know many examples of this about being the primary community.

[29:48]

In the apostolic communities, it is not clear who is the primary community, because this vow isn't as monastic, it isn't as clear. Like when somebody dies that's an apostolic sister, they're often buried at their place of ministry, or even with their family, with a brother or a sister. But a monastic is to be buried in the cemetery, the place of their vows, where they made their vows. and the stability until then. So that whole idea that in health care and in all decisions, the family relinquishes its being the primary community and the subordinate community takes over and in the name of the privates or a health care representative, whatever, but it's stated very specifically that your family is the community. So, then along with family, the other four things, one is titles. And in an aristocracy time, titles matter. But times now when people come in as doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, they have to relinquish those titles.

[30:52]

They are not a doctor, they are not a lawyer, they are not a a health care person, nurse, those titles are gone. And they may use their skills in service of the community by virtue of obedience, but they relinquish those titles. I was in a group recently. There was a medical doctor entering some community that was there at Skyward last week, and he had to give up his medical practice and even his license because they could not assure him that he would be able to keep it. And so he was willing to do that. So that's the kind of thing. We just can't take any ties. We can't take your brother or your sister. In fact, that's what's wrong, this brother or sister thing, with having married people come to the community. There's no way to give up the ties of a child. You know, that we've tried conceptually to do that, and somehow that child is a claim that nobody else has. And we don't take spouses with the living spouse. So when there's a living child, we've never been able to make those cuts in a good way.

[31:57]

Maybe we'll learn to do that, but that's difficult. But the second area is the titles. You can't take any titles. The third area is you can't take entitlement. There is no entitlement that can come with you. Your social security, your inheritance, your promise of a better housing. It's interesting, when we were in northern India and we stayed at some of those Tibetan monasteries, they didn't have a good way of financing those nunneries. So a couple of nuns that came from wealthy houses, they would bring a maid, and they could also bring money and set up the dwelling. They would have their own dwelling paid for by their family, and you could imagine what that set up among the other nuns. We could tell them that that doesn't work in the West. Now, again, that was the only way they financed, and maybe in their culture that worked out. But that doesn't work here.

[32:58]

We have to put in escrow or put in another account. You know, there's that idea of use protection. conditional assignment, you cannot have use of any money, no entitlement when you come to the monastery. The fourth one you can have is an expectation. of prayer. This is interesting. You must renounce your former spiritual practice. And I bet you're kind of surprised at that. What's wrong with my spiritual practice? If you live this monastic way of life, you cannot bring your former practice because it has to be governed by obedience. And that too is stripped away from you because the main practice is to have no ego and to just surrender yourself entirely to God. And even if you bring spiritual goods, spiritual practice, spiritual achievement, spiritual whatever, that has to be left at the door.

[34:01]

So, you know, that's a hard one. Again, back to the third promise of baptism, the allurements of good, there are spiritual goods that you must renounce, and that's one of them. And now in speaking of the fifth one, I want you to talk about the fourth one to your partner. May we be ready for the fifth one? We'll go to three o'clock and then we'll take a little break because you can see this is a big topic actually, the whole monastic way of life, in case you're wondering. Well the fifth one is to renounce its status, actually status, any kind of status, which is rank. which is rank. And that's a little bit more than entitlements, but it's like rank because you may be a priest, or rank because you may be older, or rank because you're handicapped, or rank because you're not handicapped, or rank because you're smart, rank because you're not so smart.

[35:07]

So any kind of a special Yes, any division, any dividing thing of status because of some external circumstance. In the monastic way of life, nothing matters. Isn't that exciting? When you walk in that door, nothing matters. And if you don't know it, then you'll know it later. But, you know, we get all those statuses. And there's just, you know, I've been challenged on this. Well, certainly there's this. Well, there isn't anything. We have to love the elders. We have to love the younger. We have to love the sick. We have to love the guests. We have to, you know, so nothing, nothing matters. As you come in, you become a member of the community. And so any possible, if you're an artist, if you're a woman, or you're not a woman, it just doesn't matter. So that has to be renounced. And any sense of it seeks to renounce the sense of it, because it is something that has been bestowed on you as you came along.

[36:13]

Or maybe because you're a Kennedy, or a Kunikunde, or your family has a great name. or you own the entire town, or you don't own the entire town. Your father's in the prison or the penitentiary or he's a murderer. Nothing matters. You know, it can be up, it can be down. It doesn't matter. So that's any kind of status. And again, that was the reason for silence at meals. I'm only talking of recreation so that you don't start bragging about how good you are or how bad you are. So your form of life really is gone. That's the point. And in some very strict communities, they're not allowed to talk about their formal way of life. This was the reason behind changing your name, not using your last name, wearing the same identical habits, having rank at table, rank in church, rank. So this was to neutralize that status that all are good, all are good like the eyes of God, all are, you know, it's a very positive sign, and that there's no one better than another.

[37:17]

You know, it's the forecast of heaven, where, you know, we're all God's children. So, we say that we renounce possessions and all social ties in those five ways, and you'll find those five ways described in Placomius, in Anthony, and in Cassian. I'm going to move along to the third big area of renouncing in the formal way of life because I want to get on with the spiritual journey. And the third big area is you have to renounce sex. This starts right away in Anthony and it's in all the fathers. The hermit goes alone and deals with relating to God alone. And so the deepest inbred instinctual need to propagate ourselves and to be joined with another is purified and sublimated and removed from our

[38:19]

desires through a lot of effort. But in order to do that interior work of loving God alone, and God becomes our spouse, God becomes our other, God becomes our children, you know, it's who we relate to in that most deepest primary sense, then we can't have this sexual partner that is in the way of the world That way, that's the difference. You can go the way of the world through a partner, or through a household, or through titles and status and service, or you can separate yourself out as a renunciate, and you have no things, you have no status and social ties, and you renounce sex. That's sex and sexual partners, and it's again, another good. It's not a bad, it's a good that we renounce for the sake of God. But it's very, very difficult and very, very sneaky. And it's also very challenging. And it's also the family yanks you back because they want little funks.

[39:22]

They want children. And it's unnatural not to have children in this life. So you see, and then you want a partner, and partners want you. Again, and there's this longing, there's this even experience of it, some people have before they come to the monastic life, of being deeply in love and even actually sexually engaged with someone, and then they renounce that and go to the monastery. But the first step to renouncing sex is no sex. No sex. And no partner. And no dating. It's just as simple as it sounds. No sex. I was with a superior from a community I won't mention so I can tell the story. They have a vocation exercise in Germany, it's two weeks long, and they bring these students together, these people that want to interview the sisters, and they just watch and observe to see if for two weeks they don't have sex.

[40:27]

Then they can go to the next tier. That's the first cut. But for two weeks, nobody comes, stays all night, you know, and they're not dining with each other or they're not, you know, so that's the first cut. But interestingly enough, you know, we're pretty forgiving, aren't we? Well, that's not so bad. Well, that's the first cut. No sex. So, you know, and then to expect somebody to be doing dual is in order to say, well, you need to have some experience of dating while you're a seminarian or while you're thinking about community. I have one that I'm in consultation with this summer, and she, you know, through this kind of talk, she said, how do I know I can be a nun? I said, well, I don't know. She says, what do I do about dating and all that? And I said, well, you have your choice. Either date and see how that feels, or don't date and see how that feels. And the one that is don't date is closer to this. And she caught it.

[41:30]

She said, yeah, you know, why should I go feel like I need a man and have all that when I'm trying to discern this? Why don't I see if I can refrain from dating and not date this summer? It'd be better not to date one summer than my whole and entire life. So she's not dating and she's celibate, practicing celibacy this summer. And then she's watching, it's gone down the chain. She can't watch some TV shows she likes. She can't, you know, have some pictures in her room that she used to have in her room. You're reading material. She can't read every novel that she used to read because, you know, they're too alluring. Because it doesn't help her with her choice just this summer to be celibate. So, again, no sex means no sex. So that's the renunciation of the former way of life. So those are the three areas that the Kogis would say you must test before they get into the monastery. If they've just had sex recently, you hold them off.

[42:30]

If they are attached to their things and cannot put them in storage, hold them off. If they need to have their social ties, they should, just like the Gospel passage in Matthew, Anyone who looks back is unworthy of me. So, you know, this is where they can enter. It's where they can renounce themselves of their former way of life and just pick up our way of life. Now, the last time I gave this talk, and I think Tracy was there, someone in the group says, well, you don't live that way either. There's some former way of life stuff here at Beach Grove. And I said, well, you probably ought to find a place closest to a monastery that doesn't have a former way of life in the monastery. so that you can live a monastic way of life. And our challenge of those of us monks in the monastery is to root out this formal way of life as much as we can. But it's an ongoing process. And this is where the monastic way of life also has that conversatio part. We are in We are always turning, always changing, to always root out this formal way of life.

[43:35]

And that would make a wonderful chapter someday. What is our formal way of life? And how much of it do we have around here? And I would recommend asking the younger ones what they see. You know, do you just live like they do in their apartments? You know, how do we live? How does it look? So that's that part. Now, I'm going to go on and then we'll take a, this is just a little cut. I want to go and give you the story of Benedict, not that you don't already know it. But let's look at him as an example. How did he renounce his former way of life? And did he go down those three things? Right, we know he was born around 480, 490, and he was born of, kind of, middle-class parents in the legal profession, perhaps, we don't know. But he was sent to Rome with his nanny for an education. And in Rome, he discovered that not only his former way of life, was there, but a very evil, promiscuous way of life is there.

[44:37]

This is a little ahead of schedule, but in Keshen, there's three calls to religious life. You may have a call from sin, from a bad experience of being sinful, and you've fallen to your knees and you repent. So those kind of people come to the Manan Monastery because they've repented and they have a call from sin. Another group have a call from the inner voice that keeps absolutely penetrating their consciousness. I think you need more. I think you wanted to give your life to God. You don't need these things. You don't need a family. I want you. So an inner call. an inner voice. And then the third call is from without. Some teacher that sees your soul, sees that the way you're living is outstanding and you could have the kind of support you need to sustain that your whole entire life through the monastic way of life. So you get those three calls.

[45:40]

One is from sin, One is from an inner nagging, but just a kind of right order of things, and the other is from the outside, somebody sees the virtue of your life and calls you from without. Okay, so back to Benedict, what was his call? He didn't sit, he didn't sit, and he didn't want to. But there was no outer call at that point. It was an inner call. So he and his nanny went to, how do you say it, AFFLE, how do you say that, athlete? What do you say? He'd moved out of Rome and he went to AFFLE. But anyway, he and his nanny were there, and they lived in a little village. And his nanny, of course, this clay pot rolled off the table. They didn't say it was an earthquake, but, you know, perhaps that area of the country had a lot of earthquakes. And it broke to smithereens.

[46:41]

And, of course, Benedict saw the enormous problem that his nanny had with breaking this pot. It was a big deal in those days because that's how they got water. You know, that'd be like us breaking the whole plumbing system here. So, you know, she was in distress. And so Benedict, through his holiness, put that, minted that pot into one whole pot again. Well, and it was at Public Mirror. He He left Astley and then he went to Supiaco. And he has three phases in Supiaco. Supiaco, you know, is kind of a wilderness area with these man-made lakes that Nero made to help pipe water into Rome for his warm baths and kind of good lifestyle. So Benedict created some lakes and some caves and things like that. So Benedict then, at this stage of his life, left his nanny in that town and went by himself and there he was clothed in the traditional whatever is known as a hermit scarf and he went to a cave and he was kind of commissioned let's say by Romanos and he was fed very sparingly but nevertheless he received his food from outside source

[48:00]

In other words, he did not bring any food with him. He was totally dependent on God, and he spent a hermit life. We don't know really how long that was. The dialogues doesn't say. But it was a long time. It was at least year two or three, maybe. You know, again, they tell the story about he didn't even know it was Easter. until some came and said he had to celebrate mass because it was Easter. So Ben was a long time in silence as a renunciate by himself without family, without things, without titles and any connections with the outside world. So soon His Holiness then appeared and these wandering monks said, hey we would like for you to be our leader. So they agreed and he went to this monastery that he didn't stay very long because he found that at that monastery those monks were still living their formal way of life. That was what was wrong. They weren't renouncing anything. What they said was good was what they did.

[49:02]

What they said was bad was what they didn't do. And so they were serving themselves, their own wills. And of course, Benedict started laying down total renunciation and saying that that's not the monastic way of life. And one monk said to another, well, we know how to take care of him. So they set up his wine cup for mass, presumably, and they poisoned the wine thinking that he would be out of their care pretty soon. It's kind of a serious way to let go of a leader. is to kill him. But of course then this is kind of like a full circle story. Just as he mended the broken pot, this time he smashed the poisonous pot in their midst. And of course they saw the symbol and the evil was smashed and that Benedict fled from their evil ways and presumably went back to the wilderness until then the second phase in Subiaco

[50:05]

is when he, I guess this would be the third, he himself started 12 monasteries with 12 monks each, and he started his monastic way of life, and he was their teacher. We also know that phase didn't last too long, and it also didn't work very well. There weren't enough good teachers, I bet you, maybe my guess, I don't know, to find 12 people right off. Mother Teresa's having that trouble right now. You know, again, to find enough leadership for a big, growing community. So anyway, what happened is he fled from that experience and started Monte Cassino. And there, you know, he was the abbot. And from there, they probably serviced those other monasteries in Subiaco. Now, notice those movements from Norcia. to Rome, to Affle, to Subiaco, three different things in Subiaco, to Monte Cassino. And each time he renounced.

[51:06]

And the deepest renunciation, of course, was in the desert. But then he went back to a monastic, Semitic life, and then they were in their formal wave life, so he left them, and he created a new group that would live the monastic life. And then he created a larger group. But in our model to imitate Benedict, as you and I are Benedictines, we must somehow replicate Benedict's life in our life. That's the point. And we are following a renunciate. His way of life was one of renunciation. It was not one of going to Rome, staying in Rome, and serving in the bathhouses. He really did withdraw from people. He withdrew from the world. He did not overestimate his gifts and spiritual things. He took some training. He took solitude. He took prayer. He disciplined his thoughts through, you know, the inner experience.

[52:08]

And then he chose not the Aramidical life as a way of life, but the Cinnabatic way of life with an Abbot over them. So a combination of the Aramidical and Cinnabatic life. But it's all one strand of renunciation. all one-strand pronunciation. So with that, I'm going to stop at the 3 o'clock hour. JoMarie, how much time do you think they need to recuperate for their second part of pronunciation? About 15 minutes. Sound good? Then we'll come back at 3.15. Okay, thank you. Okay, let me just start again. I wanted us to eat before we had to talk about fasting. Including me, I saw those cookies being made by Sister Norma, so I knew they were going to be good. What we've done so far is to get a feel for what we were renouncing from the teachings in antiquity. And from this I can go many directions, but I'm going to

[53:13]

move along in the spiritual journey. I think if we look at now what it is that we want the new person to do in the monastic way of life, we will see, first of all, who's able to do that, who's ready, who's willing, and we'll also get a sense of why, why do this. You know, why should people renounce? What is it for the sake of? So I want to talk about this spiritual journey now. And I want to talk about the stages on the spiritual journey. And for this, I'm using basically Evagrius and Kashin. And the Kashin, as you know, talks about three renunciations. And the first one is to renounce your former way of life. So that's this split. That's the first. And then the second one is when you are in the monastery or the cave, whatever, you renounce your thoughts of your former way of life.

[54:25]

We're going to come back through this. But then the third renunciation, you have renounced your thoughts of your former way of life and the goal of the monastic life is God. The goal is seeking God and to seek God in contemplation. So the goal isn't to remove your thoughts of anything that isn't God. you would achieve the proximate objective is this peace, this equanimity, this apathia, this purity of heart. And that's what happens if you renounce your thoughts. The fruit of renouncing your thoughts is this purity of heart. And then the third renunciation is to renounce your thought of God. because your thought of God is still not God.

[55:47]

And so in this third renunciation, you renounce image prayer, you renounce attachment to a form of God, you renounce your attachment to consolation and prayer, you renounce your addiction to theology, or even your passion for scripture, you renounce anything that is not God. That's up there in renunciation. And that is in Cachan Conferences 9 and 10, where he talks about pure prayer, where you are in the Theoria, you're in the purity, not just purity of heart and yourself, but you are experiencing God as God. Again, this is a very lofty state, but It happens. It has happened. Now, I thought I had these three renunciations down until I was reading Columbus George's book on Cash in the Man from Oxford Press.

[56:49]

And lo and behold, he talks twice in there, so clearly about four renunciations of Cash in the Man. So I go scampering back and say, how could I miss the fourth one? And it is a very, very lofty one. And it would be a steady state of union with God. It would be to renounce. It's where you have absolutely no passions that rise. and you have no interference with your experience. But it is in this lifetime that you just dwell in God, so that's the fourth renunciation. But not being there myself, I see why I missed it. In the original spiritual journey stages of origin, he talked about the purcative, the illuminative, and the unitive. Now, you would think the purgative corresponds to which stage of cashing? Is it first or second renunciation?

[57:52]

Right, it's a second renunciation. So this is the news for you to tell people that are coming to the monastery. You're not even on the spiritual journey yet. You haven't even begun the spiritual journey until you've made the internal turn. until you deal with your thoughts, until you are in interior work. And that work is called asceticism. The work on the inside is ascetical work. That just means work, effort, right effort. So you have not become the spiritual journey if you are simply dwelling on the external life. So then to origin like this, it would be This is PURVITIVE. And then the third renunciation corresponds to the ILLUMINATIVE state, where you are illumined and all is light and you are one with God.

[59:06]

And then beyond that is the UNITIVE. But frankly, the unitive stage is where you have nothing left to renounce. You're union with God as God and there's nothing left of you to be renounced. So that being the case, can anybody be free from renouncing? Do you see the point of renunciation even in your contemplative life? Because if you're in the illuminative stage, you still have to renounce all your experience of God. all your attachment to either your own experience or what you think is God, because God is beyond both your experience and beyond any thought you may have of God. So this is renunciation. Renunciation is the interior journey, that spiritual journey that Origen talks about, that Cashen talks about, these renunciations, until you reach union.

[60:12]

And they're talking about this lifetime as carnal beings. We're not talking about heaven, you know. So there is a absolute possibility where we could experience equanimity, apathy, tranquility. Our passions can be reduced in this lifetime. And our experience of loving God as God can happen in this lifetime. And it should happen with monks and nuns. It should happen, you know, with people that we live with. And indeed, it does happen. And I've been at many of your monasteries. You're now at my own. I have been with some of our sisters that I think are quite illumined. You know, maybe not the whole of their life, but I was just with someone at table. We were talking about Sister Valeria. She was definitely illumined those last years of her life. Cashman talks about learned people know the scriptures, but it's only through an illumination that you know scripture as God.

[61:18]

And you can, you have your choice. You can do an exegesis, or you could just sit before the scriptures till they unfold themselves. And he recommends sitting before the scriptures till they unfold themselves. And that is the illumined Alexio. Alexio Divina is in service of this illumination. So, in the spiritual journey. Now, if that is the spiritual journey, and this is the renunciation, so you can see where the book, Thoughts Matter, comes in. That is the beginning of your interior life. So, I'm going to, I apologize again for the Peach Grove sisters that have heard so much of this, but I think, how many would like to hear just a little bit of Thoughts Matter? Just a little summary of it. And if you don't, I'd say exit now. In fact, why don't I just give you a little break to tell the person next to you what is the spiritual journey and why is renunciation a spiritual journey? I'll move right along with Quartz Matter.

[62:21]

That book got reprinted in England and the title is called Peace of Mind with a new cover and everything. You never know how people take these questions. They say that I said that, that you get peace of mind if you have your thoughts that matter. Okay, quick catechesis on thoughts. This is Cassian, and he kind of from Evagrius, and this is Logis Moi, these little thoughts that rise. And what happens when people leave their former way of life, but their former way of life comes with them. And they come with you in these eight standard ways, the thoughts of food, sex, things, anger, dejection, insidious, pain, glory, and pride. So we'll go through each one of those. And these thoughts are thoughts of the body, the mind, and the soul. The Neoplatonic understanding of a person in those days was pretty ingenious, really.

[63:27]

They noticed that thoughts come, thoughts go. Thoughts come, thoughts go. I remember I was a little kid swinging my feet on a radiator, and I remember looking up and saying, which is real? Those people out there were my thoughts inside. I remember kind of puzzled. Who was more real? Me or them? And which one was me? So thoughts come, thoughts go. And if you think about your thoughts, they stay and they go up the ladder of thoughts and desires and passions. If you don't think about your thoughts, an unaccompanied thought goes away. Thoughts come, thoughts go. They just kind of sail off to the atmosphere. So whose thoughts were they? They weren't yours, they were just passing through. You know, so you are not your thoughts. That's the main teaching. You are not your thoughts. They're just, they arise. They come from, you know, sitting next to somebody else, you could get their thoughts, you get their viruses, you get their heat.

[64:32]

Thoughts are just little patterns of brainwaves. So, you know, higher people can kind of consciously zoom in and see what you're thinking. Oh, gosh, good. So thoughts come, thoughts go, you are not your thoughts. Unaccompanied thoughts go quicker. But if you accompany them with another thought, they get more intense. And the first stage is just a desire. Good desires become virtues, you know, when they become willful and done with good deeds. That's a virtue. Bad thoughts, when Yeah, it's consented to, and they become deeds, become vices. So good thoughts are virtues, bad thoughts are vices. Isn't that easy? You know, some people are virtuous, some people are, you know, vicious. I don't know. Villains.

[65:33]

Now, also, sometimes you have a thought, and you can even think about that thought. A second thought is called a motivation. you know, like I think I need a cookie. That's just a thought. But I need it because I'm hungry. I need it because somebody else is going to get it first if I don't eat it. So your thought about the thought is a motivation. So when you check your thoughts, or you consent to your thoughts, you have a double consent to the thought and to the thought behind the thought. And they talked about intention and motivation, and you could see why in the moral life this was extremely important. To know your thoughts, consent to your thoughts, and they consent to why you're consenting. So those double things is very important. So they just borrowed this platonic thought, which said that there is a image in your mind, and then these thoughts conform to those images.

[66:36]

but that you have the right to consent. See, the genius of this is thoughts don't matter if you don't consent, but they do matter if you consent. Consenting is what matters, but it doesn't sell books. So it's the consent to your thoughts that creates a sin or creates, you know, action, the will to act. And that distinguishes a rational being, you know, whatever. So that's about thoughts. Then they discovered that there's different kinds of thoughts. These people, you know, slept in caves, so they have a lot of time to think about their thoughts. And there's body, mind, and soul. So there's thoughts about your body, and that is food, sex, and things. And then there's bodies about your mind. Now, mind in antiquity was closer to the word hurt. It's more or less that juicy part inside yourself. It, you know, connects the tissue with the mental apparatus, its heart, its mind, but it doesn't necessarily mean mental.

[67:46]

So there are thoughts about the mind, and those are anger and dejection. Then there's thoughts about the soul, and those are assiduity, vainglory, and pride. So I'm going to put up that grid. We have seven more, not that food isn't our favorite topic. But is it going down pretty well? That didn't get saved, so you're the only one that knows about food. But I will take sex, that's always more interesting. Is it really apparent that the teaching about food is not about food? Does it make sense that it's a training?

[68:49]

Now, when you read it, there's a lot of sayings about food, but again, they're from observers. They don't know what the Ava was telling the monk to do. So you have to read a lot of Castron to get the sense of this, rather than just all the, you know, of people's observations. That's why you have to read, when you're studying this level, you have to read the sayings. There's almost 2,000 sayings of the Tattooed Energy Havasnamas. And then you have to read their lives. And then you have to read some versions. And then you have to read Keshen. I mean, it's an ensemble all together. That's what I think, anyway. OK, the second one is about sex. Sex happens to the monks and nuns when they're away from their environment, and it's a very disturbing experience to have left. family have left the possibility of sexual life with a partner, and then to have this enormous surge of sexual feelings that come through dreams, come through daydreams, come through conversations, come through even prayer.

[70:06]

So it's a very alarming thing. So there's many stories. Well, the teaching about sex Again, it didn't get published in the Airman's edition of Keshen. And thanks to James Kodangi, it did publish those four sections on sex. And now we only have those conferences published by Boniface Ramsey. We still do not have the Institute and the conferences in a modern text that I know of. So it's amazing. So you're wondering why you can't read this stuff. It's because it isn't out there. Not really. Even Klobuchar, I thought he was going to do a translation, and he didn't. He just did, you know, 300,000 footnotes and three chapters of his dissertation. or at least something similar, but it's excellent. But it still presumes you've read all of Cassius, you know, for that. But sex was even harder to find, you know. But thanks to Terence Cardone we have those teachings. Now, the first teaching is about confidence.

[71:09]

When one goes to the monastic way of life, they must be continent, which means no sex. Continent is a word that just means what it says. You refrain from any sexual activity. It is prohibited. It is a zero possibility. It's not like you're sort of. It's your continent, which means you do not engage in sexual stimulation. Now, continent also means masturbation. It means, you know, homosexuality. It means heterosexuality. It just means what it says. It's continent. So it's a way of doing your sex or not doing your sex. The second level, which is not in Gashen, but it helps me understand Gashen, is the word celibacy. Celibacy is a word that governs your choice about sex.

[72:14]

And that is your choice of being either married, or being gay, or being lesbian, or being single, or being a monk or a nun. And that's kind of different than just being single. Celibacy is a choice that governs your sexual activity. So, while you may happen to be confident while your husband is away, it doesn't mean that you're celibate. I mean, there is such a thing as celibate married people, but I got in trouble in the book putting that in. It seems to go past celibacy is a choice of lifelong refraining from sex. So, although I do think most married people are celibate, I must tell you that I came back four times before I would change it. And I did change it, because I wanted the book published. I used soul to seek with marriage also, because I thought the intent of it was there. And many people practice soul to seek while they're not having sex, and they need for it to be that way.

[73:21]

So it's an intention. But nevertheless, in confused matters. So then the third term is chastity. And chastity is your thoughts about your sex. And so if you are merely confident, you may entertain sexual thoughts, but you just don't act out. You may be celibate as a monk or a nun, you would have to refrain from any thoughts that would stimulate sexual arousal. Whereas if you were celibate as a married person, you would entertain sexual thoughts about your partner, but you would not entertain sexual thoughts about somebody else's partner. So you can see chastity is chaste thoughts. So everyone must be chaste according to their celibate choices or their lifelong choices. I hope that's not too confusing. But it makes a difference then what the spiritual practice is about sex. So for monks and nuns, confidence is a given.

[74:26]

And then we promise celibacy. So celibacy is a lifestyle choice. So then we could never bring from our formal way of life choices that return to our formal way of life. See what the teaching is? So when you go to town, you would just do your business and come back. You would not stay in town. You would not stay at a hotel. or you would not stay, you know, that's all the teachings about what are you doing in town? Do you take a companion? So syllabusy governs our choices that we do. Then chastity governs our thoughts about when we're doing our syllabusy or our married life. So you can see, if you have a spiritual director or a counselor or a therapist that says, you know, you have an affliction right now of chastity.

[75:28]

You are going through a period where you are longing to be married. You are longing to have a child. You are longing to belong to someone and you are getting pretty uptight about it. Why don't you masturbate a little bit and that would reduce your anxiety and and would help even out your system, your physical system, because it's built up. And the answer is, that is the wrong direction, because you want all your thoughts towards God, and not towards yourself, nor towards others. Your thoughts towards God, and that's what celibacy is. It's a promise to bring all your thoughts, desires, and passions towards God. And if you shoot your deepest energy of sex and arousal towards others or towards yourself, that takes away that whole commitment, that whole direction towards God. And there's physiological consequences to that, there's emotional consequences to that, and there are

[76:34]

you're not going to move along the spiritual journey to elimination because you'll get stuck at this second renunciation of thoughts. Those thoughts will just reoccur even stronger next time because you're training your body to release it through that sexual experience. So that's why masturbation is to be taken very seriously to be trained out of. You know, get some help where it gets reduced, but move it out. And dreams, and this is Evagris, he talks about dreams being very healthy. And if you have dreams that you arouse, they're indicative of two or three things. One is you have not guarded your heart during the day. you have not watched your thoughts during the day, so that at night it comes up big time, or that you're not even aware of your thoughts. So you need to go back to cardinal heart and watchfulness of thoughts, so that as you see a thought or feel a thought that is stimulating, you reduce that thought with two ways.

[77:40]

This is a teaching on cardinal heart and watchfulness of thoughts. Two ways to reduce the thought. One is to lay a prayer around the thought. Lord Jesus Christ, I'm a loving God, have mercy on me, a sinner, or oh God, come to my assistance, Lord Jesus, mercy, all the thoughts, thoughts are things. Or the other thing is literally to just acknowledge the thoughts and consent for it to go away. So you either deal with the thoughts directly or you say a prayer. But if you think about the thought, you can just guarantee that it's going to go to the next level of desires and passions. So, sex is one of the best teachings because we all experience that also and it gets a hold of us. Now, another part of the teaching of the Vagrace is sex is more difficult than food and anger and some of the others because it is subliminal. It can get you before you know it. So we must be most empathetic with someone who comes to us with that affliction and be, because there with the grace of God go I, it could be us.

[78:43]

And we don't know, you know, how it's afflicting the other person until we've been through it ourselves. So there must be utmost compassion with someone who has even had an affair or masturbated or, you know, got hooked on the internet with porno or something that got the best of them for a while. We just must be compassionate. But on the other hand, we should not tolerate, we should not encourage it. We need to help that person. And there's two ways to help that person that's stored in the teaching. One way is to tell that person, come to communion. Stay in the community of us. Be with us. Don't isolate yourself. Stay in our group of other celibate people. In our group, our sexual energy is not high. We're not fantasizing all the time about sex. Believe it or not, if you go into a bar, or you go into places that are very sexually intense, what happens?

[79:49]

You know, a movie or whatever? Do you feel it more there or less? Do you feel when you're home, just have dinner with the nuns? No. You know, so which place are we supposed to be at? At home with the men, talking about the cereal, you know. You know, so I mean, it's just like, that energy, we have to be where that energy is. So we welcome people into our community. This is the synovium, where that energy is less, and that that energy gets sublimated in service. We have much energy, much sexual energy, to propagate ourselves, to create things beyond ourselves, and that's called mission and service, and love and compassion. That we can do. And that's what supplemented sexual energy does and does well. And you can do with less sleep and you can do with more force and with more focus and with more range and radius and depth. And that's marvelous what sexual energy does. And that's why lay people really don't want to be on this path with nuns and good celibates.

[80:55]

You know, we run circles around them and we know we do. I had a, well, we had that one. Okay. That was a bar watch when I was a little girl. So notice the teaching, it's stay in the group. Stay in the group. For yourself, when you're having sexual difficulty, stay in the group. And the worst thing you can do is go to that person that you're fantasizing about and say, you know, I'm thinking about you all the time. You should never go to that person that you're afflicted on because that'll just heighten the affliction. you know, so even if it's a spiritual director or whoever it is, it's no wonder there's a lot of married nun monks and nuns. So, okay, the second thing is exercise, and this comes from a diagnosis, you know, we're talking about a fetus born 3, 30 something, 3, 35. You should exercise, and he recommended, and it's stored in cash, and you take a day's journey away from the monastery, but come back that night.

[82:05]

So get a good exercise, and get back in time for communion in the morning. So, so, but disengage yourself from the routine just enough to get that your physical body reroute all the energies in your body because they're stuck. They're stuck in the lower regions or someplace. In the Tibetan tradition, I watched them do these enormous amount of prostrations. Those monks prostrate or this into sometimes 300 before prayer, they have to do 300 prostrations, which is very similar to 300 pushups. And that's the idea of getting that whole body engaged physically, so that when you meditate and pray, your sexual energies aren't stuck. And there's a lot more to those teachings than that. But I think for beginners, I think we should know, stay in the Sanonim, in the community, and also keep a regular diet of exercise that is very healthy. Then lose the whole body. Because remember, sex is an affliction of the body.

[83:07]

So what's wrong with your body? It's not you, it's just your body. And certain times of the month, it's harder for women. I don't know about men. But you go in cycles. Now, there's a little bit more to sex but I'm going to deviate here a minute and talk about Well, there's two things. One is I'm going to talk about the word affliction. Affliction is a technical term in antiquity, and it means a thought that gets stuck. It's an illness of the thought. It's something that coalesces, and then it comes to your consciousness, and it must be dealt with or it will create illness, physical, spiritual, emotional illness. So these afflictions that you have, have to be managed, have to be cared for. I know the psychological world today doesn't like the word managed, but I think those of us in the monastic life, we need to take these afflictions of food, these affliction of sex, affliction of things, and just say, well, you just grow out of it.

[84:15]

Well, you could grow into a worse form of it. So it's got to be, take these teachings and train before, train yourself too, get somebody that knows these teachings, work on them. This is the effort. Now, those that say, well this sounds like legionism, you know, this effort, and that old debate of the effort, no effort. Well, this is a response to grace, it seems to me. We have been given a vocation, but it just doesn't happen. We cooperate with the impulse of grace, the Holy Spirit. So this is the right effort. This is the work, the ascetical work we must do. And I don't think renunciation is optional for any Christian or any believer, anybody serious about the spiritual journey. We must renounce. And this renunciation is a effort, full of effort every day. Now in this sex effort, if we are some of it, then we must, there's two dangerous times. And one is before you fall asleep and when you wake up.

[85:19]

That's when you're most vulnerable. That's when you're vulnerable. You're kind of weakening and tired from the day, you're waking up and you're facing all your, you know, it's those little, those little moments, those thresholds that we cross over. And that's the concept and the idea behind vigils. Vigils is a time, either at night or in the morning or both, to be very vigilant over your thoughts, to get your prayer without ceasing, to commend your whole body and your soul and your mind to God. And to never sleep with someone else. See, the point is, you're vigilant of yourself. You can't do it if you're going to be sleeping with somebody else. It doesn't work. That's why most monks have a cell for yourself. It's a very individual thing to do. And even if you have to share a cell with another, you create this individual space with silence. So we create silence before we sleep and when we wake so that we can attend our minds to this purity of heart, this purity of mind.

[86:25]

We want to make sure that were not taken by surprise, by the allurements, by loneliness, by this longing for someone else in our life. So you see, rituals are extremely important. And also, food comes in here. The kind of food that you eat can also excite you, or too much food. In antiquity, they talked about too much water. Again, you know, they were using other physiologies. But the second thing besides vigils that is extremely pertinent to this conversation is total radical honesty in our thoughts, nakedness before God with our thoughts. Know your thoughts and disclose them to God. And the recommendation about sexual thoughts in Cajun is to practice exageresis, which means to lay your thoughts on another. Go to the Abbot and dash them as Christ as you would a stone.

[87:30]

So you would just put those thoughts out there saying, I'm going crazy, I'm afflicted with these thoughts day and night. You know, I'm just really in a loop. Can you help me? Because thoughts become a loop and you start saying, well, you know, I could just masturbate a little or I could just be in love with him a little or I could just go out with him three times, not four times. Or you remember when teenagers used to say, we won't go all the way. Do you remember those days? They don't even talk about that today. But there's illusions. There's self-deceit. And then you start saying, well, I'm not even going to think about it. I'm just going to kind of grow up and test my maturity and I'm a woman and all that. We can't play any games like that. We have to manifest our thoughts entirely to God. That's a chaste person. And then to get out of an affliction, see why this is a teaching on affliction. Affliction is reoccurring thoughts that grip us, that somehow we lose control.

[88:31]

So to get out of an affliction, you have to take the next step to manifest them to somebody else. And it should be somebody a little higher than yourself that's been through it. And that person will give you a word of salvation. See, this is the origin of those 2,000 epitome agents. How do you say that word? Find out. Apopticians. How's that? Apopticians. All right, there's 2,000 of them about, give or take, the translations you read. And so the monk who would have an affliction would go to Marita in the desert of St. Walburga in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and say, Marita, I can't take this anymore. I'm in this culture, and I work with all these people that are really sexually active and even promiscuous. Can you help me through this? And so Marita would sit down and give me a word. And that's the word for TV's output. about the gyms and those are the sayings but the whole conversation we don't hear and the word is just the right word to attack that place inside me that's locked they're like colons she'll just know the right thing like say you're okay but you must guard your heart must watch your thoughts she'll just really penetrate and give you the not only penetrate with the right advice but somehow

[89:57]

give you the through the holy spirit the grace to do it i know you can do it and i will pray with you you know that will not be so a year from now and you know and say vigil say this song three times before you go to bed well you know that's the origin of this so the the alma the alma practiced um the uh the discernment, to know what thought you had and can read your heart and unlock that heart from the affliction, that's the role of the alma mater. The disciple is not doing the discernment. The disciple practices humility. So when people come to us, we need to practice humility. And believe me, before 5 o'clock, I want to get to the heart of the matter, because this teaching is all stored in chapter 7 of Benedict on those 12 steps of humility, and I'll put these together. So help me get that far. So you see, then, the Agnus and Agnus practiced discernment, the disciple practiced humility, and in that, the afflictions were released.

[91:05]

And then they had these practices that they continued, like guard of the heart, watchfulness of thoughts, vigils, prayer without ceasing, maxa divina, the synodium, the fasting. So you see, that's where the monastic practices come in. And if you had a steady diet of these monastic practices, which again would take a workshop in and of itself, these afflictions wouldn't have their grip, because the monastic practices are the tools to get out of those afflictions, or to prevent those afflictions, or to manage those afflictions. I'm going to stop there. Isn't this great stuff? So listen to the affliction of the person next to you. We need to move you along, but we do have six more thoughts But you can see some patterns emerging, can't you? That these thoughts are a way into spiritual direction. This is the original spiritual direction, was skillful means to help people through these thoughts.

[92:10]

And also this is a form of prayer. You can do this in yourself between you and God. Who would help you more than God? I mean, this is examination of consciousness. You know, these are my thoughts, Lord, can you help me, you know? And that's also why you and I sit and listen to those psalms and have those psalms wash over us day after day after day. And they also attend to all these afflictions and thoughts. And if we lay our thoughts along with the psalmist, they are washed away. in a very ancient way through the Samadhi. So, well, let's move along unless there's a major question. Any major question? Anybody want to disclose their thoughts? No? Okay. The third thought of the body is anger. And this thought of anger is a... No, no, sorry, things. Things, angers of the mind. things is an insidious, cancerous blight, because one thing begets another thing.

[93:13]

Actually, things are very much like thoughts. You don't have a thing in and of itself. There's a thing, and then you have to place the thing someplace, then you have to use the thing, then you have to, you know, care for the thing, and then you've got to repair the thing, and then you've got to give away the thing. And then you got to get another thing because of that thing. And somebody else sees that thing. So it's insidious. It's got a life of its own. So the teaching, and I'm going to shorten this one, not because it's not important, because if indeed you're afflicted, and we get all the way to the end, what Keshin says, if you want to start back on the spiritual life, and you find yourself totally immersed in your former way of life, the best starting place is things. Clean out your things. Because it's something you can sort outside of yourself, and do some direct creases. The discernment means to sort. Sort is towards God, towards self, towards others, or towards evil.

[94:16]

So you sort out your things. Does this thing bring me toward God? Is this thing just toward myself? Does this lead me towards service and others? Does it lead me towards evil? So sorting things is the place to start. So when you have somebody totally afflicted, go up and help them clean out their room, you know? or clean out their house or change their space. It's a wonderful thing. The other big teaching about things, there's lots. The heavenly teaching on things is the idea of going to the monastery and getting all your things from the abbot. Because it's a right order of things. There is no such thing as possessing things. Because things can possess you. If you have things uncritically, they'll possess you. So if you start watching your thoughts of things, you need to surrender them to the attic, to the community. You must live without things.

[95:19]

That's when you renounce things. And then you get the things back, only what you need.

[95:25]

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