So we went through his thing and then, it seems as if there are two sides to this whole business. Well, you can always look at it any way you want to, but one way of looking at it is this, that we know very well, and the Lord tells us in the Gospel, you know, you have no father on earth. You have one father who is in heaven, you have one master, one teacher, who is the Christ, and they're all brothers. And so, we have an immediate contact with God and we have an immediate instruction from God. St. John talks about the anointing that we have within us that teaches us everything so that we don't need any teacher. And then, on the other side, we know that we, especially when we have a conversion, when we come to the monastery, we know we need somebody to help us. In fact, that's largely the reason why we come here, is because we know we can't do it by ourselves, we can't get there by ourselves. And if you read the beginning of chapter 7 of St. Benedict's Rule, you see this business about the person being tired of his own will, sort of, having followed this merry-go-round

[01:16]

of desire and of delusion for most of his life and wanting to get off it, wanting to do something else, wanting somebody else to help him. And then, we remember the whole of tradition, because when we say tradition, it already says it. But the tradition gives us this, the thing, what would you say, that the core of tradition is tradition itself, in a sense, okay? You say that the core of tradition is faith in tradition, is faith in handing something out. In other words, something can be communicated, something is passed on from one person to another. We have this thing in the beginning in the Gospel where the Word has to be preached, but then after the Word is preached, then maybe a person is autonomous. But there's something else there. The first dimension, the dimension of immediacy, is like the New Testament. And then we've got something older, something else, and it turns out to be very much like the Old Testament. So we're talking really about the coexistence of New Testament and Old Testament, in a sense.

[02:20]

We're in the New Testament. We are in the life of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is in our hearts. We have the freedom of the sons of God. And yet, as it were, we have to begin at the beginning of the road. And I think, I like to look at it that way, because I think that's what it is. It's living somehow the journey of the Old Testament in time, within the liberty of the New Testament. We're trying to realize, to put it in other words, that which we have been given. And it's a real puzzle. It's a real mystery as to why we needed it all, and then how it can work. And how these two things can coexist as you go along. How the immediacy of your contact with God, of your relationship with God, of your freedom for the power, can coexist with this need continually to follow a road towards freedom. I say it's a puzzle, but really it's something we've decided we're going to look at it that way, because in a way it's the most obvious thing in the world. I won't muse any more about that now, but I think it is.

[03:27]

Basically, scripturally, that's where we find it. It's living the already and living the not yet. It's living the conclusion, the point of arrival, which is already in the beginning, which is already in our baptism. And still having to follow the road step by step. And in a way, I think that we find that we do reproduce the history of the Jews. We reproduce the life of Jesus. We've heard a lot about the imitation of Christ in our spirituality, in our tradition. And that's what it's about. But the life of Christ in some way reproduces the life of the Jewish people. If you look at, for instance, Jesus forty days in the desert, it reproduces in some way all in one person the years of the Israelites in the desert. And so on. You can carry that pretty far, I think, that parallel. If you try to make an exact scheme of parallels, it falls apart, you can't do it.

[04:33]

And it all somehow comes into our own life. But the difficulty is that we find out that we're living it all simultaneously. We can't stretch it out exactly and make a map. A lot of people have tried to. It seems to me that the map that John of the Cross makes of the spiritual life comes pretty close to it. When he talks about those two nights, he talks about the night of the senses, which is a kind of conversion. And then he talks about the night of the spirit, which is like the exile. It's like the whole business of the destruction of the temple. It's as if the center of the person, after having been illuminated, having been made strong, so that the person has a new self, a new center. As if it's all taken away, as if it's all demolished. Just as the temple, just as Jerusalem was demolished, and the people were carried off into captivity. So there's a kind of parallel in the life of the individual. But as soon as you try to map it out, it fails. And why is that? Because if you could map your spiritual progress, it would defeat the progress itself.

[05:35]

If you could make a scheme that you could really objectify and put out on a sheet of paper in front of you, and say to yourself, I'm here, and next year I'm going to be there. Or, here I am, and now I know what to expect. It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Because why? Because we would be in control once again. Just as if we were driving a car down the highway. And so for some reason, that's impossible. And God has to be pretty clever to outwit our own attempts to map out and to control our spiritual progress. But he has a lot of resources. He finds all kinds of ways to let it have meaning so that it has a shape. There is a structure to it, but here we can't find the key. We can't find the key to understanding in a controlling, overall viewing way. The only key we have is to enter into it. The only key we have is ignorance. The only key we have is letting go, just as Jesus let go in some way. He let go, and he entered in.

[06:36]

He entered into the darkness. It's the same thing that we have to do. And so we're never going to understand it. We can only understand it in a kind of unstructured way. And that's why the Old Testament is the way that it is. It's like a heap of stuff. It's like a heap of materials. That's why the Bible is the way it is. It doesn't want us to be able to pull the hard and fast structure out of it, because then the process would be... Then it wouldn't call for faith. We'd just put ourselves on the rails and we'd be on our way, by your taking it down. Okay. So this coexistence of the immediacy and the journey. I like that expression of Fr. Benedetto, of the Camino of faith, the journey of faith, the work of faith. It's really what it is. But we walk with the whole thing inside of us. It's like the disciples on the Hotel Mouse. We walk along, and say we're meditating the Word,

[07:40]

and we've got the whole thing inside of us. We've got the fire inside of us, we've got the light inside of us, the power, the spirit. The Trinity is inside of us, Jesus is inside of us, and we're walking along in the darkness, which makes it pretty exciting. Is there anything... We'll finish up this subject for sure today, and so far as we can, we can go on next time. Is there anything else you wanted to bring up before? I was going to go back and follow some more from Desai, talking about his business of consultation with spiritual fathers. So, remember he's been talking about the key question, is the question of discernment. And we start out not having discernment, so we have to try to find somebody who has.

[08:41]

And he locates that as traditionally in the hermits. You can't find them in the telephone directory, they're not inside. What I mean to say is that they're kind of rare. And nowadays everybody's looking for a spiritual director. And despite the training they had, despite the special attention given to them, on the one side there's a kind of loss of confidence in spiritual direction, and on the other side there's a great quest for them. Okay, this business of discernment and how it's acquired. And the matter of going to a spiritual father, according to Desai and according to Kashin, in the tradition, is in order to learn discernment, and discernment is learned by humility, and humility is manifested by the manifestation of thoughts, so it's kind of a circular process.

[09:44]

True discretion, says Kashin, is only secured by true humility, and of this humility the first proof is given by reserving everything, not only what you do, but also what you think, for the scrutiny of the elders, so as not to trust at all in your own judgment, but to acquiesce in their decisions in all matters. And to acknowledge what ought to be considered good or bad by their traditions. And so, you're familiar with that, those of you who are studying Kashin, remember in that second conference on discernment, the whole business is about manifesting the thoughts. As a matter of fact, the fathers teach that to confide in oneself, and to think that one is capable of discerning better than others, what is good for him, is the most fundamental obstacle in the way of his spiritual life. And then he goes on and quotes Dorotheus in that famous principle that we've heard, where every fall comes from following one's own guidance. And then he gets into that other business, which we recall about the dispositions for seeking help, that we can go with a disposition that frustrates the process entirely,

[10:54]

and so that we get is what we bring, in a sense, what we take with us is what we're going to get back. Sometimes that's what we want. It's almost as if, if we want what we bring with us, that's exactly what we're going to get. It's going to be like we were calling out over the canyon and getting an echo back of the will that's in our own hearts. But if we go to listen, instead of to sort of get our own will back, then we can get something. Even if the spiritual director is not all that insightful, or causal, or all that... If we have recourse to the counsel of our spiritual father with a truly humble and confident heart, and then a total detachment from our own judgment... And of course that's hard, you know, it's asking too much. The language is extreme, but we can have something like that. People can want that. The biggest thing, really, is not to have all these beautiful virtues, but it's to want them. And to want them with as much sincerity as possible, so that we're not faking them, so that there's not a basic flaw of hypocrisy

[11:55]

between the word, the concept, and where we are in our hearts. With a truly humble, confident heart, and a total detachment from our own judgment, God will certainly not allow us to go astray for following his advice, in spite of all the inevitable human deficiencies. And we sure know that. On the contrary, if we consult our spiritual father with a secret attachment to our own ideas, and with a hidden desire to have them approved, well, you know, you can... Everybody, you can't go... You can't help that. That's going to be in us. Of course we've got our own desires, and we can't go with a total detachment. I just as soon do this as that. If we do, there's something wrong, if we're totally indifferent on that emotional level. But if we're indifferent on a deeper level, so that really, in our will, even if it's going to be painful, we're open to the possibility of going either way. Well, that's all that we can ask for ourselves. That indifference has to be understood on the right level, in an abstraction from our own judgment, because you can't pretend not to have a mind

[12:55]

and not to have feelings. Patrick? About this inequality, or the destruction of our self-worth, that is, we need to put away the argument. Yeah. So, we still are going to have to have our own self-worth. Oh, plenty of it, yeah. So, if we allow obedience to come in, is it balanced out? Yeah, obedience is supposed to help us out of this, precisely. In fact, the reason for obedience, from one point of view, is to give us an anchor, a pivot, let's say, outside of ourselves, from which we can orient ourselves, so that we won't orient ourselves with our own self-worth. Now, when he talks about this, it's as if he's demanding from the outside a kind of perfection. But you can't demand that perfection from the outside. You can't demand perfect disposition from a disciple. But the thing is that his resolution to obey,

[13:56]

to open himself and to obey, is stronger than his self-worth, than his preference for this or that way. In other words, he said, I'm going to tell him, and I'm going to do whatever he says. And he may feel very strongly that he wants to do one thing or another, but the fact is that his resolution to obey is stronger than that. And his openness, both his openness and his obedience, is stronger than that. So, it'll work out. But he can't have that perfect indifference, otherwise he'd already be there, you know. Otherwise he could give his spiritual father a place. But if we go with this hidden desire to have our thing approved, he will infallibly become cautious, for because he wishes to respect our liberty and our own mapped-out itinerary, he is liable to give us an answer corresponding to what we're ready to accept, but which will bring us neither joy nor security. Okay, that's real. That's very true. That is, just because there can be a kind of magical idea about spiritual direction, if you go to the spiritual father, you go to him, you go to him, you say, you get his permission,

[14:58]

you twist his arm and get his permission to do something, and then you expect to go away, that's God's will, because I got him to say so. That doesn't work. Just because you get permission to do something, just because something is under obedience in a formal sense, doesn't mean it's God's will, not at all. And it doesn't mean that we're going to have peace in our hearts. It can be just a kind of ratification of our going around in our own little circle of self-will, or just continuing in our own way. Now, I suppose you can say it shouldn't be that way. The spiritual father should be firmer, and they should speak like the prophet, according to God, not according to man. But they're human, too. And you find even the desert fathers doing that. The spiritual masters even do that kind of thing. They give somebody a word according to what he's ready for, what he's willing to do. It surprises us what they do. I think we could go probably more deeply into that and find a discernment, and find when they do that and when they don't, and to what extent, because they have to give the person a clue

[15:59]

that he's not really doing the best thing, if they don't approve of what he's done. We'd have to look into how they do that. You can't just pat him on the back and say, Oh, you've done that, that's great. You will infallibly become cautious, and, in other words, he won't say. He'll see that the person, he isn't going to be able to make the switch. He isn't going to be able, really, to do what he says. Or, if he does it, it's going to strain the relationship so much that it will no longer be the relationship it should be. In other words, he's going to lose the person, in a sense, if he does that. And so he becomes cautious. In order to, somewhere else... He uses that image of the fish, the fisherman and the fish. He doesn't pull him in, you know, or just haul him into the boat right away, because the line will break.

[17:00]

He has to let the fish play on the line. It's an image we may not approve of, but he's talking about that with respect to God, and the next discourse on religion, and so on. And the image applies here also. Or, because he wishes to respect our liberty and our own mapped-out itinerary, he's liable to give us an answer corresponding to what we're ready to accept, but which will bring us neither joy nor security. I repeat it, because it's so true. Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't go, we shouldn't have any initiative, we shouldn't have any projects or any desires at all. We can't just wait passively for him to tell us what we're supposed to do, and give us a push, you know, on the timeframe. Excuse me, I just... I guess you're just saying that the spiritual father and the mother give counsel to the brother, as they're able together, as the brother's able in some spiritual posture. So, could it happen that

[18:02]

two different brothers would come to the father with objectively the same thing? But the spiritual father would give different answers to each brother. Now, the brothers may see a different brother setting in the community, approaching a certain thing in a different manner than they were given counsel to, but we as brothers in Christ have to act in faith and trust that he's doing what he can with the Lord and with the spiritual father. So, I mean, is that a balance, that type of situation? Yeah, that happens. In fact, you find stories about that even in the Desert Fathers, okay? You find the story of the two brothers that come to the same spiritual father, and he gives one of them a real heavy thing, you know, he says, you go out and you eat every other day or something like that, and come back in a year. And the other one, he gives hardly anything heavy at all, hardly anything penitential at all. And I forget who it is, but somebody questions him, he says, why did you do that? He says, one of these fellows is a real worker, you know, and he wants the Word of God. And the other one,

[19:03]

no, I can't really ask him to do that much. But it's as if physically and every other way they have the same ability, but it's just that there's not the same willingness. So it's very true. Maybe that's not quite as clear. That's not as clear as the question where they come and they present the same thing to him. They present the same situation, they say, what should I do? And you'll know that one is able to respond to it in a different way from the other one, so they'll tell him two different things. And the way he says it may sound like an absolute, so they go back and it's like they're getting two whole different principles there. He may say it without explaining that it's relative to that person at all. And that happens. Several of those are the same to the Father. And then he goes on, of course, to our theism, but remember that if you go to a little child and ask him, if you're really sincere, God will speak through him.

[20:04]

If you go to a prophet with a lack of sincerity in your heart then you get the wrong answer. He follows to our theism pretty thoroughly. Then he gets on to the subject of self-will. First thing he does is to quote to our theism once again. In other words, we're cutting out self-will, which is sort of at the root of this business. Because what is it? We're finding these two things continually. We're finding discernment and self-will, discernment and self-will. It's as if the key is discernment, discernment is the key to getting around self-will, and self-will is the obstacle to discernment. It's another one of these circles. But the thing that clouds our understanding is our self-will. And the reason why we go to somebody else to ask him is precisely to get around that. And then finally to get in a position where we can guide ourselves. And yet always with a ton of trick. Okay. I'm not going to read you what he says about that self-will business. It's curious, it's curious

[21:06]

that the first bit of self-will here is curiosity. I remember seeing Bernard and where he did the steps of pride and the twelve steps of pride and whatever it is. And the first one is curiosity. And the first checking of self-will here for Dorotheus is, a thought comes to mind, go a bit closer and get a look and see what that is. Somebody's up, walking. And the answer is, no, I will not go and investigate. Rejection of curiosity, as it were, is a step in restraining self-will, and he's got a whole bunch of evidence. Therefore, it is a question of refusing to gratify out of love for Christ, whose will alone has some value for us. And then he urges impulses and longings which all day long invite us to seek our self-satisfaction. Because, channeled across, it is necessary to curb all desire or pleasure which is not met for the honor and glory of God. That's a difficult one, because if you try to carry that out literally, you'll either freeze your spontaneity in your heart completely, or you get into a very artificial way of acting. You know, it's because everything

[22:08]

has to have a label on it, this is for the honor and glory of God. And so it mustn't be understood in two, it's different either way. A lot of these things also are, they're counsels of perfection, which we can only grow back on, somewhat, on an earlier stage of the road. And then he talks about obedience and its connection with his prism of self-realization, which we constantly raise. And he quotes Parsonopheus, a letter of Parsonopheus. The domain of self-will denial extends far beyond that of obedience. The latter is, however, one of the principal means of practicing this self-denial. And he quotes Parsonopheus. This is a letter, so it's not in paraphrase. He who is a true disciple of Christ no longer enjoys the slightest liberty of doing on his own anything whatsoever. He who wishes to become a monk must absolutely have no self-will in anything whatsoever. This is what Christ teaches us when he says, I came into the world not to do my will. For if one wishes to do this

[23:11]

and abstain from that, he either poses as one endowed with more discernment than the one who commands, or he has become the plaguing of the demons. You have, therefore, to obey in all things, even if you think to man it seems to imply a sin for you. And then, he's got, talking about himself. Because the abbot who gives you, the abbot, actually, who gives you orders for self-care and for all responsibility, since he will have to render an account on every hill. Then he's got this business about consultation. In case the thing is too large for you to open it. The same as St. Benedict says when he was sixteen. This absoluteness, it's the language that gets in our way. Having absolutely no self-will in anything whatsoever. And what did Christ mean when he said, I came into the world not to know my own will. His own will was in the Father's will. The will that's being talked about is a will that's separated from the will of God. You've got to clearly distinguish your will and your own will and your self-will. And self-will, which is really not neutral

[24:12]

but pulling against something. In other words, it's pulling out of communion. It's pulling out of obedience. It's pulling out of, away from the will of God. It's an assertion of my own will independently and in opposition, at a certain point, to the will of God. Therefore, it's a decision. It's a preference of my own will. It's a preference for self. That's what he's talking about. Because otherwise, we get into this idea that you can't have any will. And nothing, you can't take joy in anything at all. You can't do anything naturally. And that's destructive. It's the preference of our own will. In St. Vinod's language, it would be preferring something to the love of Christ. It's a matter of preference, not a matter of having no will. In the light of this, how do we proceed to let certain processes that seem and represent the modern world be inevitable, almost, when it requires the maturity of the adolescent who separates

[25:13]

himself from his family and the his beloved depends on their parents, goes through a very awful poverty, from two and fourteen to twenty-five and seven, until he can meet again his parents with a certain indifference that perhaps you have never seen. And that forces you every day to think what's happening in life of the members of the church. You have to go through some period of doubt, feeling, but now this is what it is. And then come back after a certain amount of time. Ideally, one would think, okay, this is not, it should not be a case of outright separation, but that's the feeling that it is in most cases. This is the patristic

[26:22]

doctrine, okay? And we've gotten beyond the patristic times. And history has moved. That thing of Panikkar, that's one of the lines that he follows. This is typical monastic spirituality, which makes obedience an absolute, and does not countenance a breaking away of that kind. And in the modern world we find that in some way we've moved outside of that to a point where for human development itself we have to become more autonomous than is possible in this kind of spirituality, in this kind of structure. So what's the answer to that? One answer is to say, well, the adolescent, therefore, has to reach that point of autonomy and identity before he comes to the monastery. I remember Merton wrote like that in contemplation of the law of action. The monastery is not the place to resolve the identity crisis. It has to be done before you enter. But practically that's impossible. Because many people don't get through that crisis until they're in midlife or something like that. So the monasteries are full of people who really haven't solved that crisis. And especially since

[27:24]

in former days the monastery would become a refuge for people who weren't facing that crisis. Okay? We've got a real thing in an existing monastic community to deal with that problem. The other thing is though that gradually I think our understanding of this whole business has to change so that that process itself can be undergone within the monastery. And I imagine that in these in this monastic tradition there was room for that. Because those people a lot of them had the same problem of that and somehow this kind of obedience was able to make space for people to go through a kind of rebellion thing and then return to go through a kind of insurance thing. I'm sure it was in the discretion of the fathers themselves. Somehow the individual fathers were able to have wisdom enough sometimes to let that happen. Because it's happened I think in former times too. But now we've got something else. This whole business of atheism is on which you spoke about. The whole history of the West from the time of the Protestant Reformation is a whole new phase

[28:26]

which is in a sense beyond this and confronts us with an enormous problem in a way. There isn't any simple answer to any of that. Except that monasticism has to in a way find a way to be open enough to expose people to the same maturing process by the world or by the movement of history or by whatever you want to call it that the people in the world can't undergo. How can that be said? How can that be expressed? We have to understand that second phase of human life. We have to understand the phase of alienation and return. The phase of doubt. We're talking about the breaking of the ego. That business of the collapse of the religious self the religious person in a sense. We have to make room for that. And it's as if

[29:27]

this tradition doesn't explicitly make room for that but actually often allowed it to happen I think. Today it looks like a different ballgame because we've got an atheistic world and so on. We've got that possibility out there. But I think the same spiritual challenge and process is sometimes undergone within this context but without understanding it in that way. And without the possibility without the ideological possibility of atheism or something like that that much rejection in the theological realm that the emotional process and the disintegration of the self I'm sure sometimes has to happen in that way. I'm making it up in a complicated way. There's a way in which it was already being done here but without being understood in the way that we talk about it today. And there's a way in which it was not being permitted I think also. I'm probably waiting for you to concentrate on that. I was concentrating forward very much you see. That's right. In the same way that Herodotus is a saint

[30:27]

in that the theology is all about the lack. That's right. That's right. I think a lot of it had to happen internally within the fixed structure of faith and so on instead of going outside in a sense of the fixed structure of faith the way a person does today. And yet also I think that the modern situation has falsified our thing of it. For instance if we think we have to go the path of Kierkegaard into that precise kind of anxiety and so on I think that's a mistake because I think that in some way is stepping away from the center of faith into a kind of cold zone you know because it is very distant from the power of the center of the faith. We don't have to do that. That's an error of the modern world I think. And Merton follows him along that path a bit to he follows Kierkegaard out into that cold place and loses the center of power of the faith at a certain point I think. When he talks about you know

[31:27]

some of the things that he gets into when he talks about that dread business a little of that and then a great deal of genuine insight into it at the same time in his own experience. It's a hard thing to talk about because there's so much history. Our situation is very different from theirs at that time and yet on another level it's the same you know it's the same death and resurrection and the same crumbling of the self and reconstituting it. But this is worth thinking about because we really need to try to understand this. But when John of the Cross talks about that second purification that what would you call it that shattering of the religious self itself he's talking about it and he's writing for the modern time as it were even though it's still completely within the context of faith but he goes further than these

[32:27]

people do at least on the level of explicit theorizing and writing about it. They don't make that distinction very often of the first phase of this purification and that second phase. I'm

[33:33]

not going go the details of that I'm details of purification that second phase of that purification and to the extent that you just make the life on the basis of structure and rule and tradition in an external sense you stay in that first phase of life. Remember that essay where he talks about the first phase of the ascetic life which is of

[71:22]

the ascetic Okay? I give to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning and is now and ever shall be. Amen. Amen.

[71:37]

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