on this theme of the inner monk. I'd like to begin with a story from the desert tradition, and it's about one of the desert fathers, Abba Arsenius, and it concerns the theme of silence, which we ended our reflection last night talking about silence and solitude. And Abba Arsenius was very well known for his love of silence and solitude and his fidelity to the practice of this inner, this way of inner, deep inner listening. And, of course, as you probably have read or heard, that these desert Abbas and Ammas became rather well known because through this way to the heart, one can eventually gain

[01:07]

a certain wisdom and insight into, in some ways, mysterious way into everyone's heart, at least on one level. And, therefore, they would be wonderful guides for others and were filled with a great deal of wisdom. So, like so many other famous Abbas and Ammas, Abba Arsenius was plagued by this problem of notoriety, even though he certainly didn't do anything to develop it. And it happened that his disciples came clamoring to the door to his cell and letting him know that someone of imperial rank was coming to see him, perhaps a prince or someone certainly in the inner circles. And, of course, Arsenius did not want to break his silence. He kept a strict rule of silence as an important part of his monastic practice.

[02:11]

And his disciples begged him and told him how could he refuse not to speak with this very important person who was desperate, who really needed some spiritual guidance. And they prevailed and they prevailed and they hoped. And so eventually the person arrived and they brought him to him and he made him sit there and he never spoke a word. And finally, after quite a bit of time had elapsed, the official left very disappointed. Well, I don't know if he was more disappointed than the disciples who were simply mortified and embarrassed by the whole thing. Here their wise and famous Abba whom they were convinced would be able to impress this court official, doesn't even open his mouth to utter one word of wisdom. How embarrassing. And so they go up and they almost castigate Abba Arsenius for not having shared some word with this desperate fellow. And finally, Abba Arsenius did break his silence and saying, well, if he's not impressed

[03:14]

by my silence, he certainly wouldn't have been impressed by my words. What we have been saying since our first reflection is that the inner monk in all of us is that place of the heart, perhaps in some ways we could say that restless heart in all of us that seeks rest, repose, peace. A peace that comes from being one, whole, complete, and truly free. To find the inner monk, to get in touch with that inner monk, I must find my heart. I must return to my heart.

[04:14]

And I find and get to know my heart in a very special way, though not exclusively, but in a very special way through the scriptures. And what Benedict calls a listening life as he begins his rule. And so this is what we must now explore. Jesus, in our Sunday Gospel, tells the disciples and us, come away to a lonely place. And etomos in Greek. Come away and rest a while. And of course, in a deeper sense, we could say that lonely place, that empty place, is that place to rest is the hermitage of the heart. And the outer hermitage, like a place like this, is merely meant as a first stage

[05:22]

in order to find the inner hermitage. Or as some traditions would call it, the shrine at the center of the heart. Solitude and silence are essential for deep listening. This listening way into my heart. The hermitage represents the place of solitude, aloneness, and silence. And I think this is in part, this is at least part of the reason why our guest house here is booked six months in advance. Silence and solitude are rare and precious commodities in American society. It's interesting that while our guests are here, they become aware, gradually, of something.

[06:31]

Or of someone. Perhaps it's their heart. And it gives them an experience of spaciousness even greater than our magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean. Or the long coastline of Cape Lucia and the distant horizon. There is a spaciousness in the heart, which is the very spaciousness of God. But that silence and solitude are rare commodities, and why is that? It's not just the necessary and inevitable noises of the city, with its planes and sirens and cars and machinery and hustle and bustle. Or the family coming and going, each following their own busy schedule and act of life. It's more than that. What I would suggest is that our society fears solitude and silence.

[07:38]

It is afraid to stop the activity. The doing. For it believes to live is to do. Is to accomplish. Is to consume and acquire money. And things. And pleasure. And experiences. And yes, even people. To our society, a full life is one jam-packed with as many things and experiences as possible. Almost like our over-packed suitcases as we embark on a trip to Europe. Why we even approach religion this way. We are afraid to stop and slow down and listen within. For we fear what we might hear within.

[08:42]

And perhaps above all, we fear the silence and solitude that reminds us of death. It's interesting to note that Saint Benedict also says in his rule, keep death always before you. To truly enter into silence and solitude in order to listen one's way to one's heart, to the inner monk, I think requires us to face death. Death which represents that ultimate moment of silence and aloneness when all activity and experiences cease as we know them. There is something about being alone and silent that conjures up our fears of death. And so we run away every time the opportunity for solitude and silence presents itself.

[09:47]

As Ernest Becker in that classic book, The Denial of Death, makes so very clear, and I would certainly recommend your reading, of how many, many ways in our society we avoid death and are afraid of it. It is a well-known fact that people come on retreats and try to avoid death. They try to fill the time, the silence and the solitude, with doing and activity. All the letters they've been meaning to write and never had a chance to write, they decide they'll do that on the retreat to fill the time. Or all the books they've been meaning to get to. Or the phone calls. Or they may bring their work with them. Or visiting constantly with other retreatants. Or hanging around the bookstore far more than is necessary.

[10:54]

I remember once I was on duty in the bookstore and this person came in and came to the doorway in the little room where the monk on duty sits and looked at me with the most desperate, pleading look. I can't remember whether it was a man or a woman on their face, and said, can I help you? And the person said, can you just talk with me for a while? I can't stand it in my room anymore. So, it is very difficult. It's one thing to even get to the place of quiet, that geographical place of quiet and solitude, but to stick, to stay there is very difficult for us. It often happens too that we will ask to see a monk. And I've seen retreatants in one weekend talking to at least six or seven monks at different periods for probably a good 45 minutes to an hour.

[12:03]

I'm always struck by this and it kind of makes me chuckle as they go from one monk to the other and fill up the weekend time, rather than perhaps spending at least a good part of that time alone with God in silence. I would say that at least 50% of the noise and commotion and hustle and bustle in our cities and our home is related to this fear of death and the silence and solitude we associate with it. Silence and solitude therefore require a facing of our own death, our own mortality, the brevity of our life and its fragility. As scripture so often teaches us, especially in the wisdom books, that wisdom, part of wisdom anyway, is the realization of how passing life on this planet is,

[13:11]

how very, very brief it is. And with that in mind, one should focus one's energies on that which is most essential, that which is most important, that which has greatest meaning, and that which is most enduring, that perhaps which has eternity, the seeds of eternity, already within it. For moment by moment, truly our life hangs in the balance, hangs by a thread, with a tiger above us and below us. Silence and solitude start with the outer level, its most external dimensions, a place, a room, a house, a yard, a park, a car, a wilderness, a chapel. This is essential when we begin. We must find that geographical place

[14:14]

that can offer us a certain amount of silence and solitude. But this is only the beginning. It's the easiest, yet so difficult for Westerners. The greatest challenge, the most important challenge, is finding and entering into that inner silence and solitude within ourselves. And I suppose we have to take that gradually as a process. Fairly often it happens that retreatants come and they'll tell me, I'll see them in the bookstore, and they'll report to me the difficulty they had when they first came here. Staying very long. And how they had to slowly kind of build up a tolerance, if I might use that expression, for the silence and solitude.

[15:17]

And I'm sure it's more than that. I think it's also the lack of activity in the familiar surroundings in their life, familiar things they rely on to pass the time. And so some go from one hour to three hours to a whole day, and eventually they are able to handle a weekend here. For in our outer silence and solitude, once we can find that, the difficulty is we begin to hear voices within us. We begin to notice a tremendous amount of inner noise. Many words and voices, feelings and memories, worries, fears, confusion, uneasiness, desires, hungers, hurts, woundedness, feelings of boredom, and a sense of emptiness,

[16:19]

which to my mind is a very horrible feeling for Americans, because we are after the full life. We are that consumer society, and we consume anything and everything, because we maybe even have that slight awareness, that secret hunch, that we are quite empty inside. We not only deny death, the ultimate emptiness, if you will, but we deny the truth of the cross, which contains our truth. Emptiness, or to put it in another word, spaciousness, is somehow at the center of the mystery of God, and the mystery of being human. So Jesus warns the rich and the proud, so full of themselves and their things, and money, and reputation,

[17:24]

and social life, and power. He tells them that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. As we listen to our hearts in the silence and solitude, and its many urges, and desires, and fears, and hurts, we are easily frightened by the awesome hole within us, the emptiness within, covered over by all the commotion, distracting us from our emptiness, our poverty. For to be human is to be utterly poor and empty. I'd like to share with you an experience that I had a number of years ago that was a very powerful experience for me. And it happened at the Grand Canyon.

[18:26]

Very important place for me. Very spiritual place, I would add. And the first time I went to the Grand Canyon, of course I had heard about it, and read about it, and had seen some pictures, it was quite a momentous event. And I remember carefully walking up to the edge to look into the Grand Canyon, and really being awed and overcome by the experience. I remember my knees feeling even a bit weak as I attempted to look down and peer into this great cavern within the surface, on the surface of the earth, and the great depths within. And I sat there on a rock, a large boulder, just kind of pondering and contemplating

[19:28]

this vast, expansive mystery, as well as being aware of my feelings, and a bit surprised by them. And as I was sitting there, from deep within me, I heard this inner voice speaking to me. There was no one around me, it was very quiet, silence and solitude. And as I listened, this inner voice whispered to me, saying, this is your heart. This is your heart. And I remember kind of being surprised at, what is this? This is your heart. Your heart. Within you there is this big emptiness.

[20:33]

This deep wound. And I remember as I looked upon the canyon, it was like a deep wound in the skin of Mother Earth. This gigantic void and hole. And I remember it made me uncomfortable, and certainly hearing this voice made me even more uncomfortable to think that within me, there was this same reality. There was this gaping hole and this emptiness. This is your heart. And then the voice said, and this is the heart of all people. This is your poverty as a human being. You walk around all the time with this gaping hole within you.

[21:38]

This void, this emptiness. Well, after I sat with that for a while, a couple came over with a little child. And the little child, I noticed, had a toy pail and was filling it with rocks and sand and trying to toss it over the side. And I could hear, they were fairly close to me, the little child looked up to Mommy and Daddy saying, Look, Mommy and Daddy, I'm going to fill this hole. And the Mom and Dad started to laugh and looked up noticing that I could hear them and laughing at me, and I chuckled. And then turned back to my pondering on the wound, the hole of the Grand Canyon out there, but also inside of me. And after a little while, this voice from within me again said, This is what you and all people try to do

[22:39]

with the hole in your heart. And I was a bit confused. What do we try to do? And then I realized, referring to the little child, that we try to fill the emptiness within with toy pails of sand. In fact, that this is what we do most of the time. To return to one's heart is to face the emptiness within, is to face one's utter poverty, the void within. The great wound within us. This gaping hole. The nothingness that we are.

[23:42]

And if that isn't terrible enough, I don't know what is. And that's perhaps why we run away from who we really are. We run away from our inner life. We run away from our hearts. And we try fillers. At some level, we are aware that somehow we need to get filled. And the things in life that we grab at are like toy pails of sand. And as ridiculous as it was for this child to try to fill this hole with a little toy pail, which would take forever, so too would it be ridiculous for us to try to fill our hearts with the things of life. The addictions, the compulsions, the diversions. Even religion. We can approach religion and God as a filler.

[24:45]

Maybe it's a nicer pail, maybe it's a bit bigger pail with religious symbolism on the outside, but we basically want that to fill us. Anything but to have to face that emptiness. Well, after this awareness came to me, I decided to get up and it was a bit much to see my own sin, is that what I've been doing so much of my life and why there is this restlessness within me that I reach out to fill as I try to fill this hole. Of course, I did not know what else do you do with a hole but try to fill it. Well, I started to walk around the rim and I noticed this path leading down into the Grand Canyon. And

[25:48]

I started to go down the path and there were these warning signs. And the signs were warning me or warning anyone to be careful. Danger, turn back, make sure you have enough water, make sure you're not alone. The distance is far greater than you could ever imagine. And there were several of them and I began to stop and I noticed a fear in me like, God, this could be dangerous. And at that point, a group of, I don't know, they looked like young adults, late teens, early twenties came up and they were carrying someone and they had the most haggard look on their faces. They just thought I was contemplating going down and they warned me, don't do it, don't go by yourself. We underestimated how difficult it was and this gal fainted, etc., etc.

[26:51]

And I quickly turned around and went back up. And then once again, a little while later, I heard that voice from within me, deep within me say, this is your greatest fear. This is my greatest fear. Your greatest fear is to enter into your own emptiness. Your greatest fear is to go into your own woundedness, your own nothingness. This gaping hole within you to go into your heart. And yet, you must go down into that inner Grand Canyon of the heart. And so we don't have to

[27:56]

empty ourselves. That is not the task of journeying to the heart of finding the monk within. We are already empty. We are already poor people. It seems to me all we have to do is just remove the blinders and the curtains and to see and own and enter into our emptiness, our incompleteness. And this we must do every day. Every day we must begin the descent into our hearts all over again, which is a descent into the void, into our poverty, into the emptiness. And as you go down, you notice all these layers of sediment. There's a museum at the Grand Canyon

[29:00]

and I went there and they had this video explaining by studying all the layers of sediment how they could explore all that had happened over thousands and thousands of years in that one spot. And we too have layers of sediment within us. We have all the memories of our life, all the defenses and all the hurts and all the woundedness and all the incrustations of the years are all there and we must go through them in order to get to the bottom. But what is in the bottom is a raging river. The bottom of the Grand Canyon is this wonderful raging river of life. We must go into the emptiness

[30:06]

of our hearts and taste God there, deep within the wound. In our emptiness, woundedness, lies the stream of eternal life. In the desert within us is a garden and a fountain of refreshment. And this we must do each day. Each day we find the river and we drink. Each day is a dying and a rising and this is the Paschal Mystery. We must learn to embrace the completeness of God in our incompleteness. The refreshment of God in our desert and dryness and parchness. The garden of God in our wilderness. The security of God in our insecurity.

[31:06]

The ground of God in our free-falling. The arrival of God in our journey. And sin, and perhaps its most basic level, is this retreat from going in. And the attempt to fill it from the outside with the things of this world, even with religion. To attempt to try to fill it even with God. And so I'll end here and we'll pick up this reflection again tomorrow. Thank you.

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