The idea for these discussion questions that came from your seminar there, is that we can look at the world as it is, as a new world, as a contemporary world, as a new world, as Sure, why not me? They're helpful sometimes. I have. Okay, chapter one. This little chapter on a contemporary world, notice, it's really about change, isn't it? In other words, it's not about the way the world is so much as world, it's the way it is as a new world, as a contemporary world. Okay, so, obviously, the sense of flux or the sense of movement is so overpowering if that becomes the subject, practically. Whereas, a treatise on the world 400 years ago would have been different. It wouldn't have emphasized change so much as simply the secular and the world as opposed to the church or the world as opposed to the monastery and so on.

[01:17]

That's not what this is about. And the first thing, why talk about this, why have to consider this, or you might even say, why talk about the church before talking about monasticism? Well, but this question's a little different. It is that so many of the things that we face are common things. That is, the lines run not only inside the monastery but outside the monastery as well. So to talk about them in a container, to talk about them only locally, is not to be able to understand them. Because we tend to think of them as only theological or as, what would you say, as being able to be solved or resolved within the monastic consciousness, within the peculiarly, what would you call it, theologized monastic mind. And it isn't possible to do that. Which forces us to be open to that which is outside our own world, outside our own container.

[02:18]

What positive and negative forces are evident in the world today, it's so, you know, we're so in the middle of them all the time, it's hard to step back from and analyze them. But he does that, he separates out about three for each, three positives, three negatives. Desire for social justice and peace. Search for meaning in life. Technological advances open up spaces. Possibilities for constructive progress. You get the sense of the human person, if you boil it down a little bit, the human person acquires more consciousness and more freedom, in a way. The human person's world expands in some way, that a consciousness like a social injustice and so on becomes automatic, becomes part of our common consciousness. And in a sense, the ability of humanity to do something about conditions is much greater than it was before.

[03:27]

So, the counterweight of it is obvious. That is the massive kind of organized selfishness and the corporate forms of greed and exploitation and oppression and all of that. So as the good gets bigger, the evil gets bigger too, or gets more organized, or gets smarter, or whatever it does. I kind of felt that he's outdated as far as his critique of the modern world in the positive sense. I don't see people as really looking for the meaning of life anymore in the general sense that you see. You saw in the 60s or 70s, you don't see a sense of brotherhood or peace movement. You don't see social justice issues coming up anymore. And I just thought I was very curious how that's changed. Well, I'm not. I'm not sure. It depends where you look, I think, somehow. What's your feeling about it? Well, I say that because you have a lot of reasons for that. I think there was a reactionary movement to Vietnam, the push for sort of Western imperialism

[04:32]

in the East. In those days, yeah. The reaction against that, and then the issues brought up. But it didn't really stay. It really went down in the general sense. I think there was a breaking out at that point, okay? That was an explosion, a breaking out of what had been repressed or contained somewhere. I wouldn't say it was completely gone or not. I think it awakened the church to a lot of things that it would now sleep to. And probably it's still alive. Social justice issues try to stay alive in the church. There's peace movements and that sort of thing. But it's nowhere near where it used to be. In the 60s and 70s, it was really hot issues, and now it's just... It's not a tough wave. There's quite a number of other issues that are more important nowadays. You mean like prosperity and so on? Yeah. That's probably it. Survival would be another one. In those days, there was this polarization against communism, too, in those days. So there was... And to fight against that. Like the Vietnam, the whole... The whole social government exchange. ...had to fight against the anti-communist paradigm of the time.

[05:35]

You need only compare Time Magazine's review of the year to 20 years ago. Yeah. So he's making good comments, but I think he's also outdated. Although, you know, like the meditation movement, I think the search for meaning is something that doesn't stop. People are getting inspired. True. Yeah, true to an extent. I'm talking about the sociological factors at large. The less-concerned Muslims at large. Yeah, proportionately so. There are always people interested. Yeah, I've been researching from time to time. I'm trying to think of a recent example. Well, even the South African thing, you know, the collapse of Apartheid and things like that, okay? These movements keep coming up. There are lots of people who are still active in Central America, Latin America. It's not now against war or the Contras.

[06:39]

It's against oppression of workers and so on. It's not very visible, but that's what's going on. Still, I think, like a lot of guys are saying, after the Reagan years, especially in America, it turned much more into, I mean, they talk about it as the me generation. Yeah, oh yeah. You know, the whole yuppification. Everybody from the peace movements moved up to Sonoma County and got a good few wines and hot tubs and cocaine and switched over to comforts. That kind of wore out. That kind of urgency, a sense of urgency that is there. Not the same sharp edge and not the same youthfulness to it. But I also agree with you that there is, there does seem to be this kind of deeper, this meditation, that does seem to be a positive thing. A search for some kind of spirituality, even though it's often pretty vague at a new age. You don't have a massive wave of kids going east anymore.

[07:41]

No, that's true. There are always some, but... Now you get these catalogs for meditation. If you get $89, you can get a kid for meditation with beads and incense and probably a cushion. And a pillow. America wins. I think, gosh, it's tough. I think it's really, maybe in some ways, it's really compartmentalized in the country that there are pockets of people who are really caring and concerned and really more actively trying to figure out the meaning of life and having this actually reflected in the way they live. And then, some groups, even scary like some recent time in different colleges and stuff, not back in the 80s, but in the 90s,

[08:44]

seeing kids in these great years when they should be hopefully pursuing liberal arts or whatever, really getting, just having no focus on what they're going to do to make money for the rest of their lives. And so, it's a lot of different stuff. But one thing, I mean, there are some things that are more in this. There is definitely more of a shared consciousness, but how deep down the sharing and the consciousness go, I'm not quite sure about. Some things seem very good, like just shared ideas of human dignity or something like that. I mean, if those truly become parts of people, then that's something very important and deep right there. And if that can be shared in a, I don't mean superficial in a bad way, but in a topical way

[09:45]

as assumed, like the coinage of the day, then that's wonderful and that's some sort of real advancement for humanity. But at the same time, there are other types of consciousness, like consciousness of real depth or real thinking, real, I can't quite phrase it, but there are some things that can't be brought together in that topical, conscious type of a way. Yeah, that's true. Often substance seems to be turning into surface in some way. But, you know, things like capital punishment, a lot of things that went unnoticed and unprotested a hundred years ago and so on, are now almost, they're going to vanish because consciousness has awakened against them. A lot of things like that. So if we compare ourselves with the 60s, I think the freshness has gone out of it. On the other hand, if you look back a hundred years ago, the change I think is in the moments of consciousness. Of ordinary, consciousness of ordinary people.

[10:45]

Things that they took for granted and are no longer permissible. Environmental things too, you know, all kinds of stuff. And the other side, the fear of mass destruction, social and cultural disintegration, violence in the distance and so on, there's no... I can't look far to find that. Now we have fear of terrorism. Yeah. If you're not afraid of a supercar then you're afraid of some guy in the in the bus station. Wait till it happens. Wait till somebody takes a suitcase bomb into New York and sets it off. You know, it could start like a 1984 consciousness a kind of police state or something like that. That happens a couple of times. Okay, the church. And realistic optimism is the attitude of the church.

[11:48]

Okay, then he goes into these obvious characteristics of the secular scene today, and he's got five of them really. Four of them sort of move in the same direction. The fifth one is the counter-reaction. Is the contraction sort of against them. The first one is his complexity and fragmentation. He's got several species of that. What do you think of that Yeats poem Turning and turning the widening of the eye of the folk, and cannot hear the folk when things fall apart, the center cannot hold near anarchy as it was to come of the world. He had a sense of that. I thought that was just before World War II, but somebody corrected me. It was I think in the 20s. Okay. The second thing is materialism and the vacuum of meaning and the disillusionment. Just

[13:02]

the amount of knowledge that we've, not knowledge, but facts and stuff that we've acquired and accumulated is so immense that this sort of fragmentation that it becomes it has certain things because it's so immense it almost immediately invites people to leave a common ground of shared information and knowledge and reflection and understanding into special wings and corridors and subdivisions that take you away from the center simply because it's there and it's an area where more research or more growth can be done or something like that. More stuff can be found out. And it's the and this also

[14:04]

has its material implications too because you can also take this knowledge and just as growth happens in the material world as well, it's also inviting people more and more to specialize and it just, it puts what he says, little agreement and wisdom or little agreement and I think also little wisdom about how and what this machine of collecting more information it just sort of it makes us have to re-establish what our common ground is because it's no more going to be like an education in the humanities or something like that or an understanding of the King James Bible that at least everyone knows a book. It's going to be something completely different because even at college you're already specializing fundamentally yeah it may turn out to be football

[15:07]

the common ground or something like that as long as yeah the specialization is also a sucking out of depth into surface in the sense that metaphysics turns into physics the consideration of deep things gets sucked out somehow and becomes more surface than other departments of information, knowledge which are basically on the same level on the level of rational knowledge I always think of people who take up computer as their thing, as their profession, incredible because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything, does it? Beyond itself it's like, I don't know I don't have a comparison for it but it seems like you're turning yourself into a chip or something because there are no values related to it, it's purely a mechanical kind of fiction it's a conduit in some way so you can become part of the conduit but what's it between? what's it got to do with anything?

[16:10]

yeah to make a career of that, to make a life of that but that's only a symbol of the whole thing it's interesting you mentioned even the King James Bible this conference I was in in Chicago in September they were lamenting this idea of we're talking about enculturation that there isn't a common culture in which to enculture it and one of the things they mentioned is for example there's not a common translation of the Bible that everybody reads there's not even a common sacral language you mean in the States, American culture he was talking about American England and Scotland Geoffrey Ray White yeah there's a great richness in it at the same time there is an opportunity probably for finding something common on a very deep level, I mean the contemplative thing offers that Christian faith offers it too

[17:13]

on every other level okay, concentration on material things it's strange that there's a positive and a negative to this it's as if in the history of the world you start out with God and you end up with the world you start out with theological things in the old mythical cultures there was always a supernatural there was always the divine permeating we seem to move from that into an accent on the world on matter alone and on the divine only in so far as it's inside who was that French philosopher who said there are three stages one is mythology and the second one is philosophy and the third one is science and that's when you're really that's when you're really getting in touch with reality and you think of physical science basically

[18:14]

positive science the idea of something like Marxism an actual world view based on inter-realism let me check a dark project where science physical science would just develop into a what is it called something like terrible towers of of learning or something the fragmentation becomes greater and greater as you specialize more and more in scientific fields and stuff like that and just I'm not representing the real world there's again that as you get more specialized and grow taller you're again

[19:15]

departing from the center there's a strange power in the scientific thing isn't there too because as it specializes it also generalizes and sometimes penetrates like the breaking open of the atomic nucleus there's a strange quantum leap there and penetration into a new order of physical reality so something you feel something momentous happening the new physics and psychology have dumped out the spirituality like you came over the specialization is one it's like the sharp point of the pencil but at the other end the thing is generalizing and simplifying and coming back to a unitive view that's why Wilbur can write about the relationship between the new physics and eastern mysticism and asian mysticism and Wilbur and Capra and then all the others that follow but it tends to remain always on the

[20:17]

same level of what we call epistemology that is it's always the brain that's operating from one end to the other for the whole thing and then relativism all these studies the kind of root of truth the unitary root of truth seems to be pulled out you lose touch with any kind of absolute truth absolute reality I always think of the French critics in that respect the quintessence of that kind of thing deconstructing even everything until they've deconstructed deconstruction and each of these things has another side I don't want to say a silver lining but each of these things has underneath it I think there's a current of history flowing, the Holy Spirit acting in history

[21:18]

in which each of these things is a reflection also an obverse of something but for instance that materialism underneath that there's a kind of dynamism of incarnation happening so that human life becomes valued in a way it's never been valued before so that the divine really is found inside the human person instead of outside and above the human person and this relativism also is a kind of clearing of the ground a kind of bulldozing of the ground so that the single absolute truth can emerge itself or can be realized it's almost like a Zen operation happening I mean the relationship between deconstruction and Buddhism that there is they're always ambivalent these things you can always take them in a destructive way or you can find something something greater opportunity even the one of

[22:20]

the breakdown of tradition the breakdown of mediation so that you have to be in immediate contact with the reality the breakdown of tradition can offer you an opportunity of getting to a point where the truth comes out of yourself where the truth emerges once again and verifies itself where the truth simply is and what is declares itself what is valid, what is real in tradition isn't going to die in the end it can't be destroyed it's like you cut the grass and it comes up again or you cut a tree and green shoots start coming up from the stalk but underneath this whole historical process there has to be a positive dynamism and if Christianity can find that it itself is identical in some way with a positive dynamism then I think it's got the right approach to history rather than

[23:20]

just thinking of itself as drowning in a kind of whirlpool or hurricane if there's one one thing happening in the way that he presents these four things what would you call it? if there's one, because I think there is I think there's a four features of one deeper movement of a single thing you could describe it as a kind of loss of meaning he brings it out in one or another place explicitly I guess there was a and maybe in the grand sweep of time in the past and the future maybe this would be seen as as a short-lived phase

[24:26]

tough to know maybe see certain types of contractions but I saw it as a almost a centrifugal acceleration away from the center society moving outward and also with that if there's the same massive stuff in the center and then it's spun and moves outward it's also going to be more individualized because the matter just breaks up and spreads more so both more away from the center greater velocity and more individualized so it's a very kind of centrifugal image that we have there it's like Hisman spinning out David Vollmer, a physicist, has the idea of the implicate order and the explicate order and it's like we move into from an implicate order in which deep things remain unexpressed monasticism is about that there are deep, deep things which can't be articulated in language but they're carried along by

[25:27]

tradition. This is truly a tribal society to a time when everything has to become explicate, everything has to become unfolded, visible, and everything has to turn into surface and the computer thing like the internet is like the end point, symbolic end point of that process. Everything is out there, but it's all on the same level in some way and you can't find anymore opening into depth, maybe you can, certain web pages but from the implicate and the profound and the nascent also the idea of like the child who contains everything, or like the bud which hasn't opened yet, or like the virginal state, you know and then the state in which everything is unfolded everything is out, all the cards are on the table now that's very significant for monasticism because I think monasticism is totally about that implicate order practically speaking, that's where it's hardest so what happens when everything is explicate? You could say that

[26:28]

at that point monasticism has a special role of witnessing to the implicate witnessing to that which hasn't unfolded yet, witnessing to that which is still the root in the ground, or the seed in the ground or whatever people can use tragic images like Christ in the tomb, or something like that or Holy Saturday but there's also a more serene way of thinking of it you were asking about the one thing he's had in common that the sense you get from him it's his sense of the ground in a new way a breakdown, a fragmentation there's a sense that the ground is giving way that you're moving into a void in some way I think we can get a lot of images for it kind of orbit around this

[27:28]

move into a void it's like a deficit of wisdom from every one of these angles the wisdom is disappearing, especially the wisdom which was not yet spoken the wisdom which was implicate which was carried about in the body or in the faith if there could be some some school or way of learning I think of some name like the art of flexibility between the implicate and the explicate how to move both between real depth and interiority and integration to very specialized functions uses of knowledge pursuits and stuff like that

[28:28]

I guess that's one of the things with life that everybody has to figure out more or less but how to develop that flexibility between habits and between fast motion between stillness and fast motion between really being centered and withdrawn and deep and interior and living in the mystery versus spitting out important but special singular instances of action or of work or just of life or whatever mostly what we do probably is simply do both not that we know so well how to navigate between the two or negotiate between the two we know how to be quiet we know how to be interior and then we have to respond to those multiple things and so we kind of move back between the two and then let them let them negotiate

[29:28]

between themselves how can we do that but one of them is much more articulate than the other one but against this against what he's talking about here monasticism really emerges as a counter-pull to the fragmentation, to the materialism to the relativism and what's the other one the breakdown of tradition now they're like they're like critical asset which washes monasticism but it should stand out as a kind of rock you could call it the rock of the implicate or something like that from which the green growth can once again come but it has to be awful careful that it's the real rock and not another form that is the root and not just another branch another expression also in terms of wisdom

[30:29]

monasticism is a wisdom vocational wisdom tradition then its role becomes sharply outlined against this background of dissolution and evacuation of wisdom and so on and yet with all of that one can't hate the world, can't hate the forward movement of history because at its core in some way it's divine it's quite a challenge not just to be the rock but also to understand the dynamism to have a grasp actually of that deep movement in the world and in history which is producing all of this so to be able to foster its positive orientation to cherish and nurture its positive development at the same time being aware and confronting its negative development and so much of what he's talking about here is the negative ...

[31:31]

and he talks about the strong right-wing reaction enforcement of traditional values by discipline, law and order of course there's a place for that but people absolutize it and then get paranoid about it they panic and things rigidify it so we've seen it in the church, we see it in the world, we see it in monasticism of course in our community you don't see much of that now but we had a lot of it before and a lot of it is simply the human response to a bewildering velocity and magnitude of change it's the natural contraction when you're threatened by something overwhelming ... and it sounds there as if

[32:31]

discipline, law and order are all negatives or desperation measures but of course there's a place for all of them but if they're dominant if they're the final criteria then we're really poor you certainly see it on the political scene the strong right-wing reaction also has what we call political and economic, not only obviously political but also economic implications doesn't it that is, it goes along with the desire to hang on to what one has very often and often more on the side of the people who have just

[33:41]

especially in communities as such I just think that different things together, in some way these things seem bigger than life but all bottoms have to sort of grapple with them so even though the size of these historical changes might be bigger than individual people yet individual lives still have to work with them to come to some sort of way of life in the midst of all these changes like communities and stuff Kathleen Norris, one of her books, she just says that one of the things that monasteries really offer people in the world is just a glimpse of community where people might not still have fights but still live together and even to see in these times when things are changing

[34:47]

orders are being changed and all that stuff that the new community and the way of Christian community is also going to have to cope with these changes that it's going to be, you know it might not be an ideally formed thing but it's going to be but if it holds together it will therefore be a form that somehow works in the midst of all these changes and that might be helpful to some people or to Robert saying something about more democracy and that somehow this is in the spirit of the times and I don't know how, in some ways we can see that here I don't know if we'd be able to yet come up with a recognizable charter or constitution for it at this point but somehow it seems more pervasive and that it's just somehow being dealt with or lived with

[35:48]

sorry I'm kind of vague there but it just seems just seems in the midst of a lack of the regulations like the law in the sense of Torah and the lack of a well-defined set of ways to live we're now replacing that with a new set a new Torah, a new set of ways to live it's almost like intentionally living community by the seat of the pants in a certain way does that make any sense? Yeah, we tend to replace form with a kind of space in an atmosphere, a space in the climate, an invisible kind of bond something in a sense it's moving from childhood to adulthood people having to be adult human beings and much of religious life in the past that hasn't been true I think if you look at some contemplative women's communities now, wow

[36:51]

nobody grows up except maybe the Atheists yeah and he's got a section here on developing countries and so on and he goes back to the question of why we need to know about these things I think we have to kind of chew on them all the time since we never really understand them fully but to be open to the reality of them and trying to find trying to find the meaning of them as a continual effort an informed awareness of these factors is essential for any renewal in the church whether in monasteries or elsewhere, otherwise we're in great danger of updating the church on the basis of a narrow superficial understanding of what the signs of the times demand, and that's very true

[37:52]

you know you can have all kinds of reforms where you just go back to a pre-existing code or something like that, or try to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube, or try to get things back into order in the regular observance and typically monastic reforms have been of that kind and then once in a while you'll have a real renewal I think like this Cistercian renewal that Romuald was talking about the other day was a genuine renewal so was Romuald's renewal where somehow you get back to the core of the thing and generate regenerate it from its root and then there's life but often reforms where you just kind of whip things back into order get people back into line have a more limited fruitfulness the time of the Counter-Reformation of course there was renewal but there was an awful lot of that kind of reform of imposing a container in some way getting things back into order there's a place for that

[38:54]

true Vatican II is unique as far as I know though in the way that it works in that it is not just a reform as a Council it's dramatically different from the Council of Trent isn't it because it opens with the Council of Trent closed and it's a renewal in which the Church really opens itself and takes a new attitude towards everything outside itself I suppose we'll get to that in the next chapter the Church really opens to the world to the other religions, to the other Christian denominations to the modern world to human activity, to human creativity all of those things in a new way part of it is just undoing the cramp of the Counter-Reformation but part of it goes deeper than that too because it's a new attitude it's like the Church itself emerges from a deltative state of childhood to adulthood where you can see that progression happening

[39:56]

and then having to deal with people as adults, which is so extremely difficult for a number of the key people besides Ronald, in changing the attitude, just describing it forming that concept of openness to the Christian denominations to other forms of religion and so on you mean around the time of Vatican II? Catholic plus now what was the process? well, I was a bambino, I was a baby in those days practically speaking even though I was over there because we were in Mount Sir Robin and I was over there at the time of the Council he was vocalized to Ron he's one but he's just one but he stands out because of his intelligence because of the voluminous writing and articulation that he did because he says it so well was it John Paul? who? John XXIII

[40:57]

John XXIII called it, it was a shocker I was surprised when he called the Council he said he was doing it to let in fresh air and ornamental but then even the form of the Council changed because in the first meeting I think a lot of the bishops I think they overturned the way the Council was set up by whatever commission it was and his commission who had it all on track so they couldn't get off the tracks so they tore up the tracks they jumped the scheme of the bishops so it was not quite a mutiny but it was a marvelous but John XXIII opened his face he simply had the courage and the trust in the Holy Spirit to say okay, let's go it didn't come out of nowhere there was already a firm idealism it was repressed biblical studies certainly flip-flopped biblical studies had been contained it was a reign of terror before

[41:59]

yeah, they were killing everything well there was something happening in the 40s with Antoinette de Vinay of Dante's Spirituria that began to open the thing to Catholic critical historical study of things but there were a whole bunch of theologians who had been sort of squeezed into this container and trying to burst so it was happening across the board yeah, I think across the board there was a liturgical movement very strong in France and Germany they were just like jets lined up waiting for the signal to go the liturgical people were some of the boldest I think unfortunately well they were bold also because what they do comes out in the community whereas the biblical patristic scholars kind of keep it contained but this becomes right in the center stage liturgical get a biblical patristic or liturgical ecumenical I was thinking of Yves Congar with the New Theology this huge influence on Gaudium and also John Kirby

[43:01]

and Murray their writing wasn't really written they were writing I'm sure Cone had some influence although it was of course reactionary but I think Sturt yeah, he was a characterist also wasn't he at the council? I'm not sure who's that? Hans Cone he kind of played his ad boy role afterwards Skilbeck was already yeah and people liked Ian Danielou some of them were thoroughly under the umbrella of orthodox some of them were at the edge and getting silenced or you know dissimilar they don't all come to mind Yves Congar was silenced and sent to England where he didn't speak the language so he spent four years there in English I figured they'd keep him busy for a while he went to China

[44:02]

he wanted to be in China but he didn't want to stay there indirectly certainly he wasn't at the council did he help take up the China maps? well he's under suspicion for having swallowed part of a hoax if not is that Peking Man or who is it? I think it is the Peking Man now he'd become the Beijing Man plus the cow bones or the gorilla bones or something I don't think so so there's a little shadow at that point so it's a big story it's hard for us to pull it together because in their whole ranks of writers and biblical studies and patristic studies and so on kind of pushing the envelope at that point there's a vast amount of water behind the dam okay

[45:03]

Dagogini is another one what would you call it he's not a rebel he's not a revolutionary but his investigations into the beginnings of the liturgy and so on have a lot to do with it and putting focus on the Christ mystery once again instead of the complex structures of liturgy before that wasn't his right upon the liturgy going into the meetings the only of the pre-baptic pre-council pre-council agendas for the different committees that resembled itself after the whole process was over his writings on liturgical reform were pretty much done and I think everything else got completely changed but most of his stuff was so good that it was pretty much inculcated yeah because the theological dimensions it's written before the council right?

[46:05]

I think it was 58 isn't it? I think so, something like that we didn't have it in English for quite a while at least not the whole thing and it's thoroughly Thomistic in its approach it always starts out that way anyway the implications are revolutionary sorry one more thing I can't resist taking especially in what we're reading in chapter 2 about the mystery of the church somewhere Thomas might be summa contra gentilis but he talks about Thomas the great not only holy holy man but also one of the greatest minds that's ever lived and both of those together but he said of course Thomism after him is kind of a bad shadow but he was although there were good things too

[47:05]

he talks in one of his writings I think it's summa contra gentilis about how he's talking about salvation and the scope of the church and then he says something he actually mentions the name here but what if there is a holy man by the Ganges river who's never heard the saving name of Christ and I think his answer is something like well we'll leave this to God's discretion or I'm kind of putting words in his mouth something like this we'll leave this to God but it's hard to think that he would not be afforded the opportunity of salvation so it's said in a very in some ways stifled language but it's very a lot of it's here too he's saying that maybe the church isn't the only instrument of salvation and so he has a very deep understanding of the whole commonality of the human family so he talks actually about a holy man by the Ganges I think he mentions the name, the word Ganges that's crazy so some news must have

[48:11]

drifted that there were there were such people at that time probably got a few minutes left okay some monks discovered these things after entering the monastery and others knew about them lived in them before or were aware of them what can a monastery a monastic community offer to this kind of world and he boils it down to a genuine community life and experience of God, those are like the two dimensions you know the vertical and the horizontal in a way the two witnesses you can even say baptismal and eucharistic to the monastery this is on page 16 the final page of the text and the change meet for whether one or whether one branches from the other it's like asking the life decision to go to the place where you find the Father and the Holy Spirit together

[49:12]

in a sense to get deep enough into itself so that it understands not only non-duality but also historical movement and dynamism and creativity and growth and the same thing is true of the church but so often we seem to be getting stuck in that space in between, we get stuck with the word between the Father and the Spirit and we never get to the point of the other two monasticism in some way is inclined to the side of the Father, the side of the Source the side of the One but it's problem now is to be able to also relate to and understand the dynamism the movement, the Spirit which is inside history too

[50:13]

I haven't mentioned Teilhard before because he's in some way beyond that one of the few people who's written, Christians who's written in that tone is Teilhard and understands somehow the movement of history and evolution as being Christ-centric, the movement itself as being Christ-centric he doesn't develop the theology so much he takes it from the head but see monasticism traditionally, I'm reading Panikkar reading Panikkar that thing about the center, you're going back to the unmoving, you're going back to the as Joseph was saying yesterday in the Kolatsha, the uncarved clock you know the beginning but now monasticism is confronted by the dramatic emergence of change, the dramatic emergence of the principle of

[51:16]

the Spirit in history and how does it relate to that typically like often monastic founders have almost generated history I think, you know like Antony or somebody they seem to go away from it and then something new comes out of there creative energy comes out of there or the Cistercians, Romulus talked about how they revolutionized agriculture it's only one way or the Benedictines who kept alive the seeds for the Renaissance and so on afterwards but they do it by going back to the root it seems but somehow there's an understanding which can relate to both of those movements and it's as if we're challenged to find that a movement backward to the source and to the center away from the world, a movement outward a creative movement outward, it generates

[52:17]

a new creation I don't want to preach on that okay we've got this chapter about the history of the church I was thinking about the different approaches to monasticism that are suggested in what we've been doing here one is the the Asian monastic tradition because remember he mentioned the universal phenomenon of monasticism in the introduction and then the church approach so there's that universal one which basically sends us always east, it always draws us to Asia because that's where his traditional monasticity developed. Then there's the contemporary world which we've had in this chapter we just did and then there's the mystery of the church which we get in the next chapter but coming to you through immediately, what do you call it, mediated by Vatican II the Vatican II consciousness and awareness of the church and the Vatican II language of the church so those are like three three different angles

[53:18]

on this matter of monasticism that we're getting it occurred to me that the book on monasticism which most thoroughly reflects Vatican II is this Pfeiffer's monastic spirituality so I went over and grabbed it this morning because he starts out this book was published in 1966 okay, that's the final year of the council and he starts out by talking about the function of religious life in the church and then he talks about monastic life as a form of religious life as it were even though he knocks that at a certain point, he rebels against it and says well no, it's not just another species of religious life, but he's defining monasticism as it were, or coming towards it from that point of view church, religious life, monastic life which I think is a very deadening approach, the way he does it

[54:19]

I think he kills a lot of his readers in the first chapter before he starts talking about monasticism at all because it's like an extrinsic way that's the danger of being influenced by something like, even something like Vatican II as important as it is if you start to think about monasticism from that point of view only you can, you sort of lose the savour, you lose the taste of monasticism in itself when you're talking in kind of generalities you get too theological in a sense you don't have any taste of what it's really about because you're coming from outside it but it's a very interesting book for that reason I remember, I guess I came back here after we came back from Italy, we were reading at Kaplan every evening I guess we were reading that book, we were reading Pfeiffer I can remember sitting there and somebody was reading from up there we didn't have any heater in here in those days, we didn't have any carpet in those days it was really something, lots of chapters

[55:23]

and things like that, we kind of tortured such because you were coalished you had a long reading like that at Kaplan? yeah, we had a good chunk you know, each evening scripture too? I think we we would have prayed Kaplan together it must have been we had psalms what kind of floor did you have? wood, there's concrete under here painted red with a big crack running down the middle you could stare at that crack really? red, it was painted it was painted tomato red maybe exaggerated because of the intensity of the experience with metal chairs I hope I don't know what a chair is but it was pre-remodeled four doesn't mean ugly hmm? well it didn't we went for ugly

[56:24]

ok, maybe we should put it here this time pick it up next time as it was at the beginning it's just very shoddy oh, damn it

[56:43]

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