Last time we were reading a lot of things from Merton, which gives it the real crunch, the real nitty-gritty of stability, which is sticking with a commitment when the going gets tough, when all of the motivations and the good feeling drains out of it, and he really puts it across in four-stroke terms. This seems really to be what stability is—well, it's not the only thing that stability is about. Like all of these things, they have multiple facets to them. You can't say that the purpose of stability is just one thing. Stability is a quality of the Christian life, a quality of the monastic life, and it can't be pinned down to just one purpose. You find that when you start talking about these things, when you start talking about concrete realities, you can never pin them down to one purpose, as if they were machines made to do one thing, or to make one kind of article. They always have multiple aspects.

[01:01]

I'd like to read a little something from this, Consider Your Call, which is very good, by the way. We don't use it much, but it's an excellent treatise on all of these dimensions of monasticism. And he interprets stability largely, as does Saint Benedict, in terms of patience. Saint Benedict stands in the cenobitic tradition which reacted against the abuses associated with wandering monks, with the gyrobays, which Saint Benedict talks about in Chapter 1. He required that those who entered his monastery should commit themselves to persevere in obedience, even in times of difficulties and contradictions. In the rule, stability is discussed in terms of the monk's continual search for God, his residence within the monastery and community, and his perseverance in the monastic vocation. The monk should say nothing and hold fast to patience in his heart, enduring all without growing weary of giving up. The scripture says, He who endures to the end will be saved. Standing firm, or patient perseverance in obedience, is fundamental to what Saint Benedict

[02:05]

means by stability, for stability is the outward expression of perseverance. Then a little later on, Saint Benedict was above all concerned with a monk's stability in his search for God. The novice seeking admission in a monastery is to be examined to see if he's truly seeking God, have he told the difficulties and so on. In Chapter 58, and also in the prologue, Saint Benedict links perseverance with patience, which he interprets in its original sense of suffering. Patience in the Latin word, patio, means to suffer rather than to wait. We tend to think of patience as waiting, expectation, be patient. Stability involves both bearing from day to day the inevitable trials and disappointments which are part of human life and proffering from them. By persevering in obedience even to death, the monk responds to the words of Christ, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross to follow me.

[03:07]

Stability ensures that he will not evade the cross, particularly the cross of obedience. And then he quotes the end of the prologue, which we read before in this connection. Whenever we talk about these things, somebody mentioned this to me after the last class, whenever we talk about these things we seem, we're dissatisfied because either we talk about the bright side and we seem to have left out the essential dimension of difficulty of the cross and so on, or we talk about the dark side and the difficult side, like I did last time reading Martin, and we're feeling continually in ourselves, well, that's not the whole story, because there is the resurrection. But we don't even, we don't just feel that that's not the whole story, that the resurrection comes afterwards, but we feel somehow that we can't really talk about suffering just in terms of before and after. And when we talk about suffering only as suffering, we still haven't got the whole picture, even if we talk about the joy that's going to come afterwards, because somehow

[04:13]

the question of wisdom is to find the joy right in the suffering in some way. In other words, that's the secret, that's the key, that's the precious pearl, is not to be necessarily, you know, full of joy and suffering, but somehow never to let the two things get apart. And it's almost, in a sense, becoming a little indifferent to where we are in this respect of light or dark, happy or unhappy, pleasure or pain or whatever. Now, it sounds impossible, but there's something to that, that business about accepting the rain and the sunshine or whatever, and loving the good and the evil, in the Sermon on the Mount. Those who love Him, those who hate Him, that thing. If we think that we're never sort of treating the thing right, and we just talk about one of those sides and then the other, it's because somehow the two are supposed to be interwoven. In wisdom, somehow, the two are interwoven, so that one is never without the other, and

[05:17]

yet one is always victorious over the other, the light is always victorious over the dark. I don't know how to say that any more clearly, but there's something to that. There's something valid in that dissatisfaction with the way that we tend to talk about suffering. It's as if the word suffering can't be left by itself. It's as if you can't say it and leave it there. It's as if you can't say cross without saying resurrection and the same breath, or something like that. We're always dissatisfied when we hear that, and rightly so, because it falls short of the truth. As you see, it's hard to say that, it's hard to get into it. This business about the monk's perseverance in his community affecting the others too, we shouldn't just think of our own thing, of our own commitment, how it affects our own life and our own fulfillment, but also we've made a commitment to others, and our

[06:19]

departure is going to affect those others. And somehow the two things are united. It's not as if they're two separate sides of the deal, that is, I'm affected and my brothers are affected, but somehow that whole thing is interwoven, so that a person in a community is just like a piece of the body, you know. And he loses the vitality of the body and the body loses his presence, his vitality, and separation. And then he quotes a bunch of the Cistercians who are not of such immediate interest to us, but nevertheless they're good passages that he brings forward, and they're also applicable to us in general. He's got three texts from St. Bernard, covering these three cases of when it's just restlessness or you're moving to something less good, and obviously that can't be done, shouldn't be done. The second case is when you've got a good reason, really, to transfer, but it's not

[07:23]

an overwhelming reason, and still he says, well, you can do it, but it's better not to, even if there seems to be advantage, even if you seem to be moving to a better community. And the third case is where you're really in a wretched situation and you have the chance to move to a good situation, to a good community, and he says, you should do that. But, of course, one should not always be looking around and sort of taking out his thermometer and seeing how it is and so on, whether the grass is green on the other side, otherwise you'll never be at peace. This thing should not come up very often during a person's life, that's for sure, and maybe never. William of St. Thierry, now he's talking about the solitary life. This is in the Golden Letter, and did I bring it? I hope you've heard it. It's in the book. You've read about this, don't you? Oh, there it is. How'd you know?

[08:23]

This is in here on page 43 to 45. I'm just going to read a little bit of it, and if you're interested, you can read more of it. Now, what he's talking about is stability in the cell, and joining to the Carthusians, even though he, I don't know whether he was a Cistercian or a Benedictine, but I think he ended his days in a bigger Benedictine monastery. And this is about the animal man, the perfection of the animal man. It sounds horrible, but he's not talking about gorillas, he's talking about novices. Let's see, I'll try to find a punja passage for you. This is typical of the monastery. Now, all these good practices demand the cell as their workshop, and an enduring perseverance in it. Now, see, that's an echo of St. Benedict, but he's not talking about the monastery, he's talking about the cell as the workshop, because he's talking about solitarians, hermits.

[09:28]

In it, anyone who is on good terms with his poverty is rich. Whoever possesses goodwill is endowed with all that he needs to live well. And goodwill is not always to be trusted. It must be kept in check and under control, especially in a beginner. Let's see. Let the discipline of holy obedience govern goodwill, and let goodwill rule the body. Let it teach the body that it can stay in one place, endure the cell, and live in its own company. That was always a big trial for the Carthusians, just to stay there, just to stay in that place. And stability and solitary are locked together, you see, the two of them, at least for Carthusians. Because your stability is not reclusion, but it's very local, it's fixed in one place. I mean, you're solitary. Whereas for other people, you know, the desert world or something like that, let's say stay in the cell, but most of them probably have no mobility in the desert world. Not so for the Carthusians. And not so for the Carnavalists either, in general. The ones who lived in the structured hermitages, in particular, of course, the Lucruses.

[10:31]

That's the peak of this kind of thing. Well, it's also out of the wilderness. It seems like you're using it plentifully. You know, you don't have solitary occupation. That's another question. You know, it's a feeling that you get when you're in the wilderness. It keeps you together. Yeah, there's a companionship with nature, you know. There's a presence of God that it's easy to find in nature. But if you have to look at four worlds all the time, maybe it's not so easy. That's a bit of a difficult thing to understand, why they chose that enclosed form of solitude. But something to think about sometimes. Even the desert fathers, you know, they don't talk about nature. They don't talk about the marvels of nature, the beauty of nature, or anything else. They seem to have this sort of rude, ascetical view of solitude,

[11:36]

in which they're not interested in their surroundings. It startles us to see that. But there's nothing good about nature, as far as I know, in the sense of the fathers, for instance. And people like Cassian, they largely discourage attention to nature, too. That surprises us. We would have a different point of view, I think. My pre-present knowledge is that at least we know that the hermitage of Columbus was just a magnificent view Even though they don't talk about it, it's probably part of it. It can be, sometimes. I don't know about that. Somebody needs to write about that, and get the other point of view. I think that was Cheney's point of view, in his book. Which one? He had desiccated by the vocations of the old, so it seems that they did have a sense of beauty. That's St. Anthony, too, didn't he? He said nature was his book. When the philosophers came and said, where... Yeah, that's right, that's right. They said, where are your books? You don't have any books.

[12:38]

And Anthony said, nature is my book, and whenever I wish, I can read it. He sounded a little complacent about the whole thing, but I guess he had a right to do it. That usually comes out in the more legendary accounts, you know. But it's true that there... It's like the restoration of paradise. That's the notion there, OK? For the perfected man. Was the nature... The animals that are supposed to be wild become tame, and the persons are the same. It's back in paradise again, the recreation. The Carthusians have this... I don't know if I'm reading something... This sense of the tomb, where... Yes, yeah. The strict building enclosure is the tomb which you enter, and it is which you return to. And if you read Louf, you find a lot of that in Connexion and Solitude. That's hard for us to take. But I think people who have a particular vocation of that kind, they feel it.

[13:42]

There's this Abbas Silvanos, I think, among the Desert Fathers. He went out and he put his hood over his face, and they asked him, why? You can't even see where you're going. He said, why should I look at this feudal son? In other words, he has some kind of experience inside of himself that made him totally unconcerned with what was around him, even if it be beautiful. It's difficult for us to judge those things. And on the other hand, you've got St. John of the Cross, who is sort of the most absolute of ascetics, and takes his novices out in the countryside, so that the nature somehow will stimulate the presence of God. It may be partly the literature, you know, that just the way that they wrote, and the way that they filtered those sayings when they passed them down to us, it seems so harsh in that respect. There's some knowledge of their vocations and everything, and probably correct them. Often you talk, but when you hear about,

[14:44]

like in the Middle Ages, also the Commandolese, when you hear them talking about solitude, you hear them talking about a terrible solitude. Or something like that. You know, like the location of Font d'Avalano, which is a beautiful place, is described as a terrible solitude. And it was partly a sense that they had for human companionship, I think, too, that made it spread its beauty. Okay, Father. It's impossible for a man faithfully to fix his soul upon one thing who has not first perseveringly attached his body to one place. To try to escape ill health of the soul by moving from place to place is like flying from one's own shadow. Such a man, as he flies from himself, carries himself with him. He changes his place, but not his soul. He finds himself the same everywhere he is. Except that the constant movement itself

[15:45]

makes him worse. Just as a sick man is harmed by jolting and is carried about, and so he is unknown. The image that always comes back is a tree that's planted and has to sink its roots. And that leads us into deep waters, because when we think about that tree image with respect to man, what are we saying, actually? What are we saying about man? In some way, he interacts with his context. We don't think about that so much, but in some way, man has to be planted into God and he has to be planted into the world. And how do we understand that? As Christians, because we're supposed to be pilgrims and strangers as Christians. None of us were planted into the church. We're planted in a community. We have to be planted into a human context in some way. And in order to do that stably, we require some kind of a physical context. In other words, a place where the same people can stay together. It's that kind of thing. We'll run into that a little more later.

[16:45]

This idea of you staying in one place in an external way in order to make this interior pilgrimage to say, however, as Robert says, stability and pilgrimage thus have the same ascetic purpose. Well, it's true in a very general kind of way, in the end, but that can be a stretching paradox. Gary Covigne has this, on page 109, this image of the soul on the sea. A genuine monastic vocation is not necessarily connected with great initial fervor. That may be a comprehensive problem. You've got different shapes of the spiritual life for different people, and some people begin with an enormous explosion of mysticism or something, and then they can actually taper off and lose their vocation at a certain point. And other people may start very laboriously and just be hanging on by the skin of their teeth,

[17:54]

but gradually they consolidate and get stronger and stronger. He says that they should seek God and I think he just uses the word fervent because he was fervent. And that's true. One thing... Let's think about this for a minute. One thing is a lot of consolation and joy, and another thing is what you call fervor or resolution of will or desire or something like that. A person can be very earnest and in a sense fervent, even though God is not giving him a lot of consolations. Another person can just be flooded with consolations, with joyful emotions,

[18:55]

and even with contemplative graces. If a person doesn't have a pretty strong inner glow or something like that... Glow, I don't mean pleasure necessarily, even joy in a sense, but if he doesn't have a pretty strong inner motivation when he comes to the monastery, the prognosis, the expectation is pretty poor. In other words, he has to bring something with him, that's for sure. It has to be there even if it hasn't emerged very strongly yet and even if he hasn't had a lot of contemplative graces. Sometimes you get people who have had a lot of grace from God who have really been, what do you call it, showered with special graces by God and it renders them almost unable to live the ordinary monastic life.

[19:57]

And they get so identified with their past experience, with what they've had before when God was so close to them that they can't accept anything less than that, anything less satisfactory, so that, you know, they can't live the monastic life because they're stuck on that experience that they've had. It happens sometimes. Okay. Doctrinal Reflections. He gets this image of the tree and he gives several biblical sources for that. The seed, the tree, the plant. Starting with Psalm number 1, remember? That the just man is like a tree that's planted by flowing waters. And then the image of Jesus of the seed and the soul. We've been through that kind of thing before. But they're good at meditating. They get you past, they get you beyond where you can go with concepts and ideas sometimes, those images. And they make you see how all of God's creation fits together in some way.

[20:57]

That one thing is a parable of another thing. That the plants and the trees and the seeds are parables of man, parables of the kingdom. And then the parable of the vine in John 15. And the notion that he's trying to get there is that notion of abiding, of dwelling, which implies a kind of stability. Now the stability that he's talking about there is stability in Christ, stability in the word of Jesus. He says, abide in me. And he says elsewhere, abide in my word. But he interprets that ultimately as being stability in the commandment of love. The whole purpose of the vow of stability is to attain this stability in love, that is stability in living the word of God. This is the kingdom of Christ, the meaning of monastics for the monastic community. And then the fact that the monk is a person who somehow tries to get the outside together with the inside. That is, he finds an external style of life or creates one which is supposed to express the internal grace that he has. And that's why this interior stability, this dwelling in the word, dwelling in the commandment of love,

[21:58]

for him means usually dwelling in one community of brothers, dwelling among one group of men, in which he has stable relationships. Fidelity and its importance in Scripture. There's a central axis in the Scriptures. The people who started writing theologies of the Old Testament would come up sometimes, often, with the covenant as a central notion in the Old Testament. The covenant between God and man is a thing that gives meaning to the Old Testament, that pulls it all together, the backbone of the Old Testament in a sense. And what that implies, of course, is fidelity. This fidelity, the relationship, the dialogue between two, and the fidelity on both sides. And it's a story of, usually interpreted also by the prophets, it's a story of God's fidelity and man's infidelity,

[22:59]

which sounds pretty unfair. That's the way it works. And that is a kind of pattern for our own life. The same importance of fidelity. Okay, the business... Now, he gets into a quibble here about person and community, which may seem a little... a little unnecessary. Some modern writers have abused the relation between the heavenly Jerusalem and the religious community by finding almost all the meaning of the religious vows in their communal aspect. The vows would be, in the first place, means to establish the perfect Christian community, and only secondarily means to sanctify the person involved. So he says, well, the sanctification of the individual is a more important thing, and it's that that is the common good that holds the people together in a community. Stability is not primarily

[24:04]

for the perfecting of the community in the sense of making it more orderly and stable. It's certainly not. But rather in order to root the monk in the search for God and in the fulfillment of the plan of the Father. Okay. Then he quotes Gaudium and Spes. The social order in its progressive development must at every moment be subordinate to the good of the human person. So he seems to have proved his point that the person is more important to the community. But hold on, because you can't really put one above the other. And of course, that's what he would say at the end, is you can't put one above the other. But maybe he hasn't quite brought out that mystery of relationship between the two, between person and community, such that the more deeply you experience community, the more you're sanctified in your person. It's not a tug of war between a social structure which is external to yourself and makes these demands on you, and your own fulfillment, your own realization. Insofar as you discover the reality of community,

[25:05]

you discover your own person. Your own person which is only discovered in self-transcendence. Teilhard, you know, Teilhard de Chardin, he talks about, he puts this very well, I think, that the mystery of the person and the mystery of community is such that insofar as one develops, the other develops. They don't pull in opposite directions, they move parallel and reinforce one another. And if you think about it, it makes some sense because we only grow, really, insofar as we learn to relate with other people. It's hard for us to think of two things without putting them in tension, wanting to put one above the other and wanting to, wanting them to work against one another. But actually, these two reinforce one another. When they're on a sufficiently deep level, if they're on a shallow level, then they pull against one another. If we realize, if we think of our human fulfillment on too shallow a level, then it's going to be hostile to community. It's going to be hostile to the common good. If we think of the common good

[26:06]

of community on too shallow a level as being just obligation, just our duties, or just kind of superficial relationships with our brothers, then, of course, that's going to be depersonalizing, too. But there is a deeper level on which the two are one. And once again, this is the mystery of the Trinity, remember, in which we find the one and the other, the one and the many, the singularity, uniqueness, oneness and plurality somehow fused in the third. And what is the third? The third is always the Holy Spirit and so on. So it's the reflection of the Trinity in this mystery of communion, which is the Church and which is the monastic community, which actually carries within it the fulfillment of the person. And this whole business that we were talking about before, you know, if we see the monastic life in terms of freedom, well, what are we going to do with something like stability? But we find in the end that this freedom is only real when it's freedom in communion,

[27:06]

when it's freedom in relationship. And our freedom is freedom within the climate of personhood. Now, that doesn't just mean my personhood, because my personhood doesn't exist aside from, call it the magnetic fields or whatever, of other personhoods. In other words, somehow our salvation and the expansion of our freedom into God is expansion into a personal field. Think of it as expansion into the Spirit or expansion to the Father, whichever you prefer, or even into Christ. But it's into an increasingly personal field. And the community is where that happens. It happens among a community of human beings that we move and grow and are freed into this field of personhood, which is God Himself, our participation in God. Is there a sense of that in terms of what Jesus says when he says that a grain of corn is to fall into the ground and die? Is that a field that is going to fall into the ground? I wasn't thinking

[28:07]

of a field in terms of a piece of earth. I was thinking in terms of a magnetic field. But that's not kind of making the jump there. Yeah. There's a sense of that. When the seed falls into the ground, what does it mean? You can say that the seed of your individualism falls into the ground of community. And there it rediscovers itself filling the ground of community or sort of coexisting, fused in its being with the ground of community so that the two are not outside of one another but one is the other. Then it gains within itself all of the fullness of the ground itself and the community itself. And that's the hundredfold that Jesus is talking about. He who gives up brother and sister and so on will have a hundredfold in this life. And that's the ground as it were of community which is the sacrament, the symbol, the sign, the material incarnate representation of and container of that ground which is God which is the Father Himself. Always think of

[29:08]

the ground somehow as representing the Father. So freedom comes in as really our nation first of all and freedom itself if you are free. Exactly. The elbow only bends one way as the Buddhist say so beautifully. And so you find out which way your elbow bends after you've broken it a number of times and then you use it that way. And that way happens to be in community. I think bending the elbow means something else in our culture than it does as another form of community. Okay. But that's really something to think about that business of the person and community. The person and community the fact that insofar as you discover your person now this is getting beneath that shallow self the ego because the ego is the one with the shell around it that's impermeable to others.

[30:10]

And it's Martin's thing between the false self and the true self or at least the shallow self the individualistic self and that deep self which is not distinct from anybody else. Distinct and yet not distinct. It's the mystery of eternity once again. And that's the beauty and the joy of the whole thing. The freedom to move sort of out of oneself and back into oneself which in its hard form is the cross, right? When Jesus moves out of himself by laying down his life that's the hard form that's the dark form but what's the light form? The light form is the experience of love. When one is free one's very freedom is to pass beyond one's own boundaries and then back into one's own boundaries and all of this guaranteed somehow by that life that comes from the Father which enables us to do this without fear without the fear of death because one has been given a life which is beyond death which is coming from beyond death coming from the Father. So it's this being liberated from fear that enables the thing to happen.

[31:11]

Fear of death and corresponding with fear of one another fear of being hurt by one another crushed by one another overwhelmed by one another and therefore exposed to one another and hurt and so on and the whole thing. But for that we've got to get healed from the hurts that we already have because they're the things that that trigger that healing. But it's community that does that. It's community that gives the healing because it reassures us that we can come out of that clamshell and not be killed not be swallowed up. We may call this is on 114 in the middle we may call the vow of stability the commitment to paternal love. Now that's good. The commitment to paternal it's very important to realize this because if we just see it in the in the vertical or God and me dimension we're not really getting it.

[32:13]

Because at that point you can say well I can do this anyway you know. I can live this this monastic life anyway. If it doesn't work out well enough here I'll just take off and I'll do it somewhere else. But what prevents that what stands in the way of that? The fact that your commitment is a commitment to a group of men also to a bond of love to a field or a climate of love to I don't know to a house put it in that in that sense a kind of family thing. Is that true? I think it is true. In the same way that we're joined to the church you know when we get baptized we're not just joined to God but we somehow are related to God through and in our relation to the church not only through and in our relation to the church but not without it. And the monastic community is a further realization of that in a very concrete way and with a concrete scope a sort of more narrowly defined way path but it's the same thing

[33:14]

reproduced so that the monastery becomes a local church and so does the hermitage I mean that's the choice that's been made in this community is to try to realize that value of community and not just go for the God and Athem not just the vertical way not just the purely solitary way but this also because without this it hardly seems worthwhile nowadays unless you have both of those values unless you have the value of all of the contemplative value of union with God along with that other value of communion with other men it hardly seems worthwhile. I was thinking about what you said when you were saying to us that life is not really true it's not like there's beautiful places that you can have a life that's great living and peaceful well you could say there's another there's a better community on the other side of the border say that we're

[34:14]

a comparable community yeah that's another factor that you're bringing up say there were another community just as good as far as that's concerned over the hill a little better a little better but suppose that I've been here for ten years and suppose that I've built relationships bonds with these people who are living here you see what I mean? I can't just move and find the same thing or something better over there because that would be ripping myself out of the body which is my body in some way it would be ripping myself out of the sacrament which God has given me for me to live in it's a whole different point of view and that if we read Father the Jesuit of Father Hoy we'll find him putting the value of stability ultimately in communion which is communion with God but it's also communion with other people he's talking about commitment in general now what's

[35:16]

this in terms of Saint Benedict in the language of Saint Benedict it's that love of Christ which is the direct love of Christ the love between you and Christ but it's also the love which comes from Christ which is centered in Christ but which is realized among the brothers okay it's that whole thing which is very difficult to pin down but which is that climate of the upper room as it were that atmosphere of Christness of the spirit of Christ the tenderness of Christ the love of Christ which is supposed to fill the whole thing which is supposed to fill the body and that's the thing that makes all these comparisons you know I can do it better over there it makes them all irrelevant they don't mean anything at that point and without that thing somehow it's just one's own trip and I don't think in the end it's really worthwhile from a Christian point of view so you need these two things together and if you have a bunch of people who realize that you've really got

[36:16]

something where there is that communion both in the common purpose but also that love among themselves between themselves that's the gift that the bonus that's given to you in a monastic communion yeah that's the expression of it but you could call it a commitment to friendship okay yeah yeah you could call it that but it's got a real deep level which is beyond even our feelings you know just like in married life there's a commitment which is deeper than the feelings of the realization of friendship at any particular moment there's a deeper reality there which holds the two people together so that a new love can spring up even after years of relative dryness something like that there's a gift which is there underneath like a sacrament there's a gift which is there underneath which may or may not come to the surface but whether it does or not it's there

[37:18]

ready to be tapped and it's given to you also look around consider the community now there'll be people in the community whom you really consider your friends okay but consider that it's really got to be concrete it's really got to be individual in order to be meaningful because the kind of general

[38:18]

sense of commitment or love for man doesn't mean anything unless it proves itself and in an individual relationship in a concrete relationship okay because it can be just romantic you know it can be just an idealistic thing unless it really is factual with between me and these particular people here and this particular person now if this thing is there it justifies itself if this reality of fraternal communion of fraternal love is there then a person doesn't want anything a person doesn't want any other kind of life it somehow verifies his vocation and verifies his belonging to this group of men at the same time it's a reality that we need to believe in even when we don't feel it and if we really believe in it we'll feel it we'll find it sooner

[39:18]

or later the thing will come to the surface because the gift is there the person has the vocation the gift is there there's a Reese has got something on that page i thought it was pretty good at a time when inherited structures are changing the real ground of stability becomes clearer it is a belonging to the people who make up one's own community it's not a belonging to the structure and it's not really a dedication to a particular place because well what's the difference from the point of view of the place where there's the same set up the same structure no it's a commitment to the people and in that sense it's analogous to marriage we find that analogy of marriage and monastic life religious life cropping up frequently in various ways genuine

[40:19]

belonging demands continual conversion of heart for the sake of trust the real enemy of stability is not moving about but personal alienation and especially the alienation which is not a passing pain but a rigid habit to be fixed in a personal hardness or to make it difficult for others to escape from such an attitude is not stability it's the

[41:42]

ambiguity of solitude which may be true solitude in love or maybe the other kind of solitude which is just withdrawal isolation with a good deal of dislike hatred and negativity and that's no good at all somehow community is supposed to work through that so that solitude may be filled with the other the spirit but it's an interplay between solitude and community by which we do it it's not that we're thrown into community all the time but the life is a mixture of community and solitude so that moving back and forth from prayer from interiority from your own relationship with God by yourself and your relationship with your brothers sort of one diffuses into the other one diffuses into the other you begin to be able to find to find God when you're with your brothers in them and around them among yourselves and so on it becomes woven in with the other the two

[42:56]

so solitude yeah it has to be it has to be if it's not then it's no good at all okay it's not on the external level no not on the external level a greater openness of heart okay because when you get deeper into

[44:49]

communion it's not that we step aside from the question but we're going contrary so it becomes pretty clear at that point if you read somebody like climacus when he talks about the signs of true solitude you'll see it all the anger and irritableness and resentment and the other things that come out when solitude is going on they're not always that obvious and a person's own self-hatred you see because he knows he's being unfaithful to the spirit and so there's all this tension within himself i don't remember now he was in a monastery i don't know the proportion between his community life and solitude but i do know that he spent a long time on solitude he's one of those examples where you see the phases of life pretty distinctly and then there's the return at the end and just this flower that begins to receive many many people sort

[45:50]

of a classic pattern like the same attitude solitude and then re-emergence in a very deep communion such is the meaning of centipede instability and then he quotes that beautiful chapter of the rule 72 i memorized that once a long while ago i'm not sorry nothing is more but the one on good zeal versus bitter zeal and that's related to what we're talking about there's a good solitude there's a bitter solitude just like there's a good zeal and there's a bitter zeal because there's a good spirit and there's a bitter spirit and the good spirit is a

[46:50]

spirit of communion whether you're alone or whether you're with other people and the bitter spirit is the spirit of withdrawal of dislike of isolation and of self selfness self for self you know self for self which refuses to transcend itself and necessarily has to turn mean in one way or another so that that spirit of bitter zeal by the way is a spirit of separation in other words it's the spirit of judgment which goes along with the wrong kind of solitude the spirit of zeal means fire zeal means means heat means energy means zeal and jealousy come from the same word and the bitter zeal is the spirit of judgment it's a pharisaic spirit a condemnatory spirit a spirit which finds its own identity by putting the other

[47:50]

person down by separating itself from the other person a spirit which finds its own identity its own sense of being of confidence and of selfhood by distinction from the other and superiority to the other rather than by communion with the other therefore which is incapable of love and when it seems to be expressing love it's really expressing something else by your solitude for instance if you make a retreat for a week and you find yourself afterwards with compunction with gratitude with the spirit of humility and sort of just being grateful to be a brother of your brother something like that well your solitude is definitely good if you find yourself very tense nervous impatient with yourself judgmental

[48:51]

of others or very superior about the sort of spiritual quality of your retreat and so on well that's sort of science in other words but that doesn't mean that the whole of your solitude is negative it only means that that particular dose wasn't really the right prescription maybe it was too much maybe it was done in the wrong way something like that but one sort of gets a feel for it as it goes on year after year yes oh yeah in fact that's the in a sense that's the central sign that's the other side the other side of communion something you know it's the inside of it sort of the reality is that is that defenselessness that openness which expresses itself closer in love it's the other side of love so you're saying that there could be cycles in that and sometimes the solitude will be positive and sometimes

[49:51]

negative no not really that wasn't what I meant but that or you can have a passing disturbance of some kind also that can make it less fruitful for you it can be a difficult time you can have a time of dryness also when you're naturally a little bit early so you shouldn't judge necessarily that your solitude is bad negative in that case excuse me it's not quite as simple as I describe it that's kind of a that's a first principle and a rough indicator that there are lots of things that would make you modify your vision I don't think it's that there are cycles now cycles in a sense of period when solitude is positive period when solitude is negative period there are phases there'll be a time in your life when you need more solitude just to find yourself maybe due to external circumstances maybe due to your own life process and times when you need more community now theoretically there's a kind of evolution towards more

[50:51]

solitude but we have to be very flexible about that because people's life patterns are so different and maybe that person needs a lot of solitude for a while just to sort of find himself and then not so much for a while for quite a long while and then it's called the real deep solitude period later that's right and often there are more factors involved than just a person's own spiritual development but the classic pattern sort of is that there's a like a period of initial solitude and then a kind of emergence for a while and a flowering into a community life and then later on quite a bit later on there'll be a real call to the deep life of solitude the first

[51:51]

breaking off from the world solitude is involved there and that sort of incorporation in the community there may be a real call to a permanent life there and classic patterns there are many variations well I think that the difficulty with that is that it's trying to make a theory out of only a little data okay that is they've got some cases among saint laurent and his followers but it tends to get generalized and made into a theory a pattern for all the commodities which I think is risky especially since you can apply it in so many ways you can apply it in different kinds of apostrophes we talked about that before it's pretty dangerous to

[52:54]

generalize generalize too much it's a question of discernment in the individual case and certain things that certainly are a pattern which is the need for community to get in touch with God's spirit in the first years of the monastic life and then what may happen afterwards is unpredictable the person could go in either direction outward or inward towards more activity okay he's got a he's got a long section here on I hope that you're reading all of Robert's because we're not covering it all we're not repeating it all we're not discussing it all but there's a lot of good points there that we need to look

[53:55]

critically at ourselves and not just at the ones who leave and ask ourselves how much of it was our responsibility it was our fault that kind of thing and also not to need to justify ourselves by judging somebody else also in that case but a long section on the love of the order and this is important and it's complicated for us by the various tensions in our own order in our own congregation the way that we tend to talk about we Americans and them Italians it's complicated and there's a danger of our not developing sufficient love for the order especially since we haven't been focusing much on our Comalthe's tradition nor on our Comalthe's texts and so on so at least realize the need for this and that each of you will sooner or later have to give some attention to that now in the old days too much attention would be given to it in the

[55:01]

sense that the whole monastic life would be seen as being the peak of it would be the Comalthe's life of course and the most interesting most important things were the things that were particularly and exclusively ours so the Comalthe's hermitage would be the absolute you know the garden of paradise and the peak of the church and well that's Boulogne but it's too much of an exaggeration the other extreme however is not to give any attention to our own tradition not to cultivate any warmth or affection for our own house really our own family and we're closer to our own that's right now we don't have that old chauvinistic and narrow patriotic spirit which would have to condemn every other religious order you know in order to build up our own unfortunately there was a lot of that you know 30 years ago 20 years ago it especially happens when you have too many religious crowded together so it's a

[56:02]

thing that happens in Europe quite a bit the Jesuits all tell jokes about the Dominicans and the Dominicans tell jokes about the Franciscans and the Comalthe's tell jokes about all of them but we don't have much of that in the states because people don't really know all those kinds of religions so we I haven't been very responsible about giving you this kind of material but I have to develop a taste for it you know a taste for a long tradition it seems like in Europe it's been there for a thousand and the monastery's been there for a thousand years you know so that's right I think the thing that's going to that's going to attach us

[57:02]

to our tradition is not the particular history if we were living in Italy for instance we would go over to the next town and we'd see a Comalthe's church that was built in 1200 and go over to the next town and see another one that's been there for 500 years and so on all that history you're just soaked in history especially in certain areas of Italy where there's such a rich Comalthe's tradition it's not at all the same over here what is it we can develop a kind of historical and what do you call it touristic and also romantic interest in those times and so on reading about them and imagining pictures but what's really going to awaken for us the love of our tradition I think it's the experience ourselves of the same thing that was in the Saint Mario that we were just talking about that sense of communion in the same experience of God that shared vision in the words of Joe

[58:03]

Grove that shared vision in some way that shared experience that common sense of common vocation the experience of it not just the idea of it but the experience of it which we find to be also common not only to us you and I us who are here but also common to us and to those first phenomena in other words that's the reawakening of that same fire of the vocation you see a thousand years later on and that's what makes us love the order it's not the external history you know or the glories of the order in another time with all of the legend and literature so that's the proof of our vocation too if we have that vocation that thing really in other words it works for us in that sense not just works in the sense of machinery but works in the sense that the interior spirit the interior flame is really transmitted and fortunately the thing has

[59:04]

this beauty of the balance of the two of the two sides the two values and the way that the spark jumps between the two of them between the community pole and the solitary it's a magnificent thing it's better balanced potentially at least you see than a lot of other monasticism in the west and that thing is reproduced on one side is the question of openness and contemplative life okay the contemplative core of monasticism yet openness to various kinds of activity and so on but on the in our own ambit on a smaller scale it's experienced in the relationship between your own solitary life your own life of interior prayer and a relationship with your brothers which is what we were just talking about what is

[60:04]

love of the order full acceptance of this human institution and the gift of oneself to it as it is does not imply maintaining cost would have made the same idealistic enthusiasm that we had as novices in other words we don't have to cultivate a kind of glowing image of the community and of the order we can let it fall apart be happy to see that image fall apart as long as we stick with it and another image which is genuine lies out of it maybe no image but just the experience the reality but that image that we start with is going to fall apart it's a dream it's a bubble and it's a holy bubble and it's a useful one because it brings us here but it has to disappear sooner or later and give place to the reality and there are two difficulties in this one is a false idealism and the other is a lack of vocation false idealism which he expresses right after which is

[61:04]

lack of realism is insisting on seeing things differently from what they are not refusing to accept the community as it is Vanier is good on this in his book community and growth Merton has this magnificent passage which I think I have read to you before along with his love of the earth he had a good deal of healthy hatred that's not a good expression I may have read this thing to you before it's number 72 in this Merton Jacob book about the monastery as a spiritual powerhouse you know how it makes fun of it when you enter a monastery you are no longer a factor in the world if you think of the people outside thinking of you you are messing up your monastic vocation people writing in

[62:07]

saying pray for us we depend only on you people asking please do a prayer crusade for me that's kind of awkward from another point they expect you to knock your head against the wall for their urgency it's a little unrealistic but the other side of it is that it tends to put the monks on a real pedestal yeah well they're holy people so their holy knees you see as soon as they hit the floor things spring open in heaven for the monks it is not a good thing because it gives them the impression that he's really somebody that he's more somebody than those outside in the world he's much more somebody he's beginning to enjoy himself if you're going to be somebody you might as well go outside and be somebody

[63:07]

outside where it doesn't count in a monastery being somebody doesn't count he's really beginning to anybody who is a somebody in a monastery to the extent that he is a somebody is a nobody you got that a monk does not want to be a self that is a source of power that can move we are not movers or movers and shakers and then he quotes Alan Watts about the difference between a purpose and meaning and this is good life without purpose is not necessarily life without meaning a purpose is justified by something beyond itself but meaning is its own justification so the monastic life is its own justification and it doesn't have to reflect itself back to itself it doesn't have to mirror itself it just should be in total transparency total unselfconsciousness thus the inner life of God and its creative reflection is not purposeful like the greatest achievement of human

[64:07]

art it's meaningful insofar as man has not realized union with God he has purpose but no meaning and we Americans understand purpose a lot better than we understand meaning but insofar as he's realized it he has meaning but no purpose see purpose is for something else and you've got to be careful of the language because that can be exaggerated too but if the world is depending on monastic orders to carry the torch of culture through a new dark age it's due for a disappointment a monk is a person to whom people pay no attention if a monk is outside the monastery in such a way that everyone is paying attention to it right away there's a contradiction the meaning of monastic life is that a monk gets no more attention outside than a dog or bum on the street and who got more attention in a monastic world than a dog or bum on the so that's part of his part of his

[65:08]

his strong feeling that comes from that he's fighting his own self image problem that's enough for today i guess we can finish this next time then i'd like to talk about a bit about this question various ways of thinking of stability we may have seemed to stretch this out a bit but remember that when we're talking about and then the question about breaking commitment and when it's reasonable to do that just a couple of principles about that which we'll get from father who is can anyone say forever okay that's enough um for just the fucking case i want to go to this bed you i don't

[65:53]

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