Good morning. Good morning. Who wasn't here last night? Oh, everybody was. The same usual suspects. Great. So, first of all, I've got a few books here and I'll, after every, or before every one, I'll be putting out just some different books, things for you to look at. Welcome to Barham. You're in a retreat, but, by God, you'd better be back. So, this short book, A Fire of Mercy, it's by Erasmus Olivia Maricakis. He is now a monk of Spencer Trappist Monastery, Spencer, Massachusetts. And this is his first volume of at least three on commentary on Matthew's Gospel.

[01:07]

So, he takes the Greek, he makes his own translation, and he spends three, four, five, six, seven pages talking about those five words and then going on. So, if you're interested in something that will take you a while, this is good. Isaiah knows him personally and has recommended him, and I've been using these for years. They're really good. This one is a recommendation by Paula. Yeah, this particular one, he's written, I think, three of these or four, because, of course, I can't remember the other titles. One of them, I think, is River of Peace. This is Mountain of Silence. And it's written by Kyriakos Markidis, M-A-R-K-I-D-E-S, who's a Cypriot, who came to the States and became a sociologist, completely lost touch with his faith.

[02:11]

And then, in doing a sociological study, made contact with a monk from Mount Athos who had been shipped down to Cyprus when this guy was visiting Cyprus. So, they began having this dialogue that's by now gone on for years. And I don't know how much you know about Mount Athos, but it's the Eastern Orthodox monastic republic that's been there since about the 900s in the north of Greece and, you know, for centuries entirely cut off from the rest of the world. And so, they've preserved also a kind of desert spirituality, the same root that the Kamaldolese come from. What I love about his books is that, you know, he's... I'll just have to say this, he's not a great writer. His style bugs me to death, but he has a really... because he's doing this as a series of conversations with this elder, it's very understandable. And I think he really gets it.

[03:13]

He gets down awfully deep, you know, in terms of what has to take place in us as we move along this path. So, there you go. There's that one. Then, there's a book by Douglas Burton Christie. And we're going to be referring to this in the last two sessions. So, again, it's a little... The latter half of the book are the things that you would probably find most applicable. The first half, he makes his theoretical points, and you're welcome... I mean, you're free to read that, but if you want to get to the heart of the matter, it's the last half of the book. And we'll mention which chapter is on that. What's the next one? The Word in the Desert is the title. He's a good friend of mine and of the community. Then, we're reading this with our men in formation. This is by a Benedictine named Anselm Groom from Münster-Schwarzwald, German.

[04:13]

It's a wonderful little treatise on the wisdom of the desert tradition. The Maldives... The desert tradition plays a very important role. It's very well written. Pretty graspable. It's easy to grasp, but really has quite a bit to say. And then, the most recent book that I just picked up is by an author named Enzo Bianchi. He's associated with the Bose community in Rome. It is an ecumenical, urban monastic center. He's written a number of books. He has one on... I wonder if they'll have the title on Alexio, that is just really outstanding. And he doesn't list his other books. He must be a humble man. He doesn't even list a single other book of his, so that's pretty amazing.

[05:19]

This is a new book, but it's got these very short little chapters on essential things from the monastic tradition, like ascetia, the noonday devil, waiting for time to pass, patience, listening, Alexio, the spiritual life. So, lovely, and he just writes in a very expressive way. So if you could have all of these read before we get together. But you might want to just browse through some of these. They're all available on Amazon. We just can't keep everything that we recommended in the bookstore, otherwise it would end up being a library. But one other author, which I'll bring a book over,

[06:21]

his is Michael Casey, he's a Trappist monk from Australia, and his writings are really quite excellent. The interesting thing about him is he says over and over, I'm writing for monks, and yet so many people who have left this path read him. It's very readable, but his identity is really directed at monks. And a monk is someone with a monastic heart. So that extends it beyond just those who take monastic vows, most certainly. Alright, so I have a list of important things that I want to talk about, and I'll be saving that for our second meeting today, because I want to begin by reversing roles, and I'll be interviewing Paula. After that, what we're going to do is,

[07:24]

given the constraints of time, is to kind of divide you up into four or five groups, and with someone that we might consider, and they don't know that we've decided who the elders are. But we already have decided. And the idea being that the other people can begin by asking questions of the elder, and then some shared discussion, and then we'll have some feedback from that. And then we're going to finish up, we'll be watching the time rather carefully, and then we're going to finish up with, to show you how we'd like you to think about this, with Paula's reflections on her interview of me, and then my reflections on my interview of her. So it's going to be a compact morning here. Yeah, and we might take a longer into the next one. We don't know, but we'll try for it. Yeah, because we want to make sure you have time for yourselves here too,

[08:29]

especially those who have not been here before. Okay, so when were you drawn to the monastic enterprise, and what did you think it was going to be like? Yeah, well I think I mentioned yesterday that I hadn't even been near religion for about 20 years, until shortly before my first visit here. And I think I, at first, saw this, like maybe a lot of us do our initial time here, as just this incredible island of peace, in the middle of a life that, for me, was really fraught with stresses, and I mean I'm talking serious ones, there were some terrible relationship problems going on, there was stresses at work, things weren't working out there. And I grew up with a mom who, in the 50s, they didn't really talk much about this, but she had a full-blown anxiety disorder, and that was the oldest of five.

[09:32]

So I grew up in an atmosphere where everything was always supercharged, and scuttling around to make things as calm as I could in the midst of that. So I saw it as, I have to say, an escape. An escape from things, and possibly a place of healing and peace. But I was very drawn to it in that regard. Okay. And what were some of the stumbling blocks, especially at the beginning? I think one of the things I learned, because of growing up the way I did, with this kind of intense but anxious mom who had very high aspirations for her kids, and I was number one of five, is that somehow I needed to earn love. And that's part of the classic path to the great. One of the great, the eight evil thoughts of vainglory. Needing to please through performance. And so I came really freighted with that to this life.

[10:35]

And of course, immediately, maybe in somewhat a similar way to you mentioned, you were used to being a high achiever too, is, you know, well, once I got here, I'm going to get myself organized, and I'm going to figure all this out. And it took a lot of years for that to slowly, for me to finally see that vainglory as my major block, and needing to somehow let go of it. One of the things that impressed me so much about, just in general, the monastic way, was this focus on anonymity. That for so many years, I didn't even know the names of the monks at all, and I still don't know most of their last names. It's just not a world where that's that important. Yeah, that's why we're just Bede and Paula here. Someone was commenting on that. Bede and Paula. Who helped bring you to some awareness about that? You know, I began seeing Father Isaiah years ago for spiritual direction,

[11:39]

and I think what I needed to do more than anything was lighten up about my deadly seriousness about my own importance in the world, and the big job I had to do. And he taught me to laugh about myself. In fact, he sent me, a few years ago, he sent me a little biography of St. Philip Neary, who's known as the laughing saint. And he's just always managed to diffuse, when I get rolling about something, through a kind of his own delight in life, which is something that really spills over to the whole community here. It's part of what's so attractive about the community. There's a sense of delight. He sent Father Robert, Father Bernard. And I began to really want that, but I knew to get it, I had to stop taking myself so seriously. And what's your own personal transfiguration been like in the monastic tradition?

[12:45]

Well, of course, the one that I longed for the most was a cessation of anxiety. Even though I didn't suffer like my mom did ever, I just grew up with a sort of anxious view of life, and how much work it took to keep everything going. I think oldest kids are sort of famous for that, and I married an oldest son of five sons, and so we together are quite the team. We think we have to keep the whole extended family going. Now all of our parents, all four of our parents are gone, so we can get into that mode. But I have noticed along the way that after years and years of praying, oh God, come to my assistance, oh Lord, make haste to help me with great sincerity, it's working. And there will be times where I find myself in a situation where, boy, in the past I would have been waved out or I wouldn't have been able to sleep or whatever, and I'm fine. And I think it's sort of like the moment you notice you weren't that bugged by that guy anymore.

[13:48]

In a community, it's like you see it in retrospect. You can't see it while it's happening to you, but then you realize, I've changed. And that's probably been the biggest. And with that came a major drop in the bingelery problem too, because I was no longer so worried about measuring up all the time. Excellent. What about memorable breakthroughs? With God. With God. Yeah. Well, I think maybe this is part and parcel of being a person who thinks you need to earn love through performance, but I was really scared of God. And I didn't know how afraid of God I was until a number of years into this life. And a longing for God and a longing to be embraced by Him. But when I actually tried to think about communicating with Him on my own, I don't know where that came from. Possibly from my Lutheran upbringing, there was such an emphasis on the utter magnificence of God.

[14:48]

I love that. But He didn't seem approachable at all. And so it was a long time before I felt at ease praying sincerely from my heart to God and not making sure my words were properly respectful enough. And I realized this last spring, we live on our four acres, and we built a second house a few years ago. And our oldest daughter and son and two little grandchildren have been living there for four years. And I was secretly hoping they would always live there. That when I was 90, my kids would be right there, including my grandkids and great-grandkids. I wanted everybody there. Well, they had always told us, if we're ever able to buy a house, we're going to do it. So don't get too attached to us. And sure enough, they did. And they moved. And the weekend we helped them move, I came back to that empty house. And that house was one that they had grown up in, my daughter had grown up in. And I thought, I took myself up there to the empty house.

[15:54]

I had never seen it empty before in all the years we'd lived there. So it was both a grief for that and a grief for losing them. And I found myself sitting in the middle of the living room floor, staring straight up through the ceiling, out loud, like a psalmist. Just, God, I'm in trouble now. I need your help. Pounding on God's door in a way that I never would have dared to do in the past. And I realized, there's been a breakthrough. Somewhere along the line, it's become okay for me to even shake my fist at God if I need to. Did you realize it at the time that that was a shift, or it was later? No, it just sort of happened. It just happened. It happened very naturally. And then, after my yelling fest, then I cried for quite a long time. And then I went to every single room of the house, and I sat there for long enough to remember everything in the room. And then I consciously blessed it and asked God to bless the room. And then I was done.

[16:55]

And I was able to take up life again, and it's been okay. So I realized I had to be able to yell that at God. Right, right. Excellent. That's excellent. I think you did talk about the precipitating thing was the change in this experience of God as someone to be fearful of versus someone to have a relational experience. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be a way to describe it. So what was monasticism about for you originally, and what sort of shifts have taken place in the understanding of your own monastic heart? And I put it that way because we're talking about this in the context of the contemplative monastic tradition, which is one way and not the only way, but it's the one that we have our sense of experience with. And I really do believe there is this... People that come here into places like this where they feel at home,

[18:02]

where they feel like this is the place where some of their prayers, even as they come here for the first time, are going to be answered. That speaks to the wider presence of a monastic heart. Some writers these days talk about the new monasticism that seems to be springing up. Yeah. So in other words, how my ideas about monasticism have changed. That's right. Yeah, I think the original notion of this is this kind of idyllic island of peace. I know too much about you guys now. Yeah, that's not true. That's true. It's been much more humanized to me, and I think it's far easier for me to see now. Myself is on that same path, but in a whole different kind of context. I see it much more as maybe how you described it yesterday,

[19:08]

as a kind of daily moving along. Moving forward, sometimes in the same place for a long time, but then slowly things are happening underneath that we're not aware of, but it's staying with it. So yeah, probably less romanticized and less desperate view of it than when I first came. Advice to people, not just for those starting, though that will be some people here, but for those continuing. Take your time. I think there's, we're going to talk a little bit more about this, but I think there's a kind of tumultuous aspect to some of our lives when we come here and meet this and then have to go back. And so there's a longing for it to all be made. It's for us to get to the new heaven and the new earth right away. And it's knowing that it's just going to, it's the work of a lifetime. And so be at peace over that.

[20:09]

And don't expect, don't set yourself these kinds of goals and things that are not reachable in a quick amount of time. Most of it's very slow. So we're going to ask you to break down into some small groups with an identified elder. And just, so we're going to put the elder on the spot as someone who might be able to offer, you know, some answers to some of these questions. But another part of the discussion can be, what are the shared questions, you know? So though, because we've been, I've been asking the questions about her. Another way we could have done this is we could say, what are the questions that we're facing? And in fact, we will be talking about that this afternoon as well. I think we can turn that heat off. I think we're, it goes from being nothing to everything in here.

[21:11]

So, that's hot for us. So just to see what, we do want to watch the time. Okay, so we have about 20 minutes then within your small group to kind of talk together. And it's not, you know, some of you in the group are going to have more experience than others, so talk about that. But we all have questions, and we all have things to learn from each other. So we'll start with that, and then we'll be processing that with some additional information that we're bringing in as we meet again this afternoon for our two sessions. Yes, and use the questions that I passed out to you as your guideline for this group discussion. You know, kind of similarly, talk with each other like we have. And the way we chose these elders is that we were looking for people who last night had mentioned how many years they had been coming here. That doesn't mean that, it's kind of an honorary elder thing

[22:15]

because it's people that have been very steeped in this particular Kamaldolese tradition, if that makes sense. So don't be offended if you didn't get on the elder list. All right, so who have we chosen? Well, I think we, Mia, you're for sure, you've been coming here forever. Janet, you're an elder, and Wendy, and Catherine. Does that sound good? So what we want to do right now is for Paula to talk about some of her reflections as she heard me talk, and then I'm going to offer some of mine as I heard her talk. And then I encourage you to think about some of these things in the meantime. Yes. And you need to tell them when you have this insight so they can... I will. I will. They will be very impressed. But mainly we're doing this with each other to give you a little model,

[23:18]

maybe, for what we hope you will do when you head on back to your own cells for a while, to think about what you just heard in your group. And the desert was a very oral place. Everything was, the word was very important and it was spoken, and part of the practice was learning how to listen and to incorporate and then to do. And so that's what I would be curious, you know, both of us would love to hear back from you in turn. And we probably won't have time to hear from every single person, but we could make this part of a discussion when we come back. So I'll just say, at 2.45 this morning, I was sleeping very soundly and suddenly I was wide awake, you know, and I thought, what woke me up? And I realized I had a thought. And the thought had to do with what I heard from Bede. You know, it surprised me that it would strike me that hard in the night, and so I tried to forget it and go back to sleep, but I couldn't. So I finally gave up and put on some tea and turned the light on

[24:20]

and sat and wrote it. So I'm just going to read it to you. This is what came. I'd asked Bede what drew him to the monastic life. He seemed to say that it came very naturally after years of being educated by the Dominican sisters who recognized that he had a vocation or even able to help him identify that not only was it a monastic vocation, but it was a contemplative one. If you recall, I said, how did you know that? You know, somebody had helped him identify it. The second thing Bede said was that monastic life for him was much a matter of keeping to the daily schedule, the daily round of liturgy and prayer and the duties involved in keeping the hermitage running. Nothing dramatic, in other words. When I asked about any memorable breakthroughs in his relationship with God, he said very firmly, no, as though he has thought about this issue a lot and wants to disabuse both postulants and oblates and novices of any romantic notions about mystical breakthroughs.

[25:21]

Finally, he said he could not do it, live this life, without his brothers, without the community, that on his own he would fail. And he kind of backed off from that word fail, and then he said it again, fail. They could not sustain the life. The revelation I had after listening to him was this. All these years, I've secretly wondered if the whole notion of being an oblate, a sort of monk in the world, as Christine Balter's painter calls it, isn't merely romantic slush. How can I, outside the monastery and free to live an entirely undisciplined life if I so choose, and sometimes do choose, presume to call myself in any way a monastic? At times, especially when life has once again unraveled the minimal daily practice I do manage to keep, it feels presumptuous to speak of a monastic path at all. The only thing that is saving me at these times is coming to the hermitage for recalibration, or getting on the backpack trail, or at the very least getting a whole day at home without any deadlines to meet

[26:26]

so that I can walk, pray, read, meditate, and garden in peaceful silence and recover myself. What I realized after Bede spoke is that monastic life here at the Brunnerian, wait a minute, sorry, at the hermitage really is a kind of Brunnerian container. You who've heard Father Bruno speak about the monastery as container that needs to somehow be transcended will know what I'm talking about. It prioritizes prayer, meditation, and liturgical worship within easy walking distance of one's self, and in a stunning, peaceful, and mostly silent setting. All the work behind the scenes to keep this place going must somehow fit into this container, and the community keeps one accountable. You can't slip too far off the path without somebody noticing and offering a hand. There's a regular access to spiritual direction and confession. All is ordered toward maximum time for prayer, study, meditation, and liturgical worship.

[27:27]

Of course, that's the tradition of 1700 years by now, and this has been a highly developed way of life that's intended to maximize our potential for focus. Life outside the monastery is thus necessarily more dramatic for anyone who finds the contemplative path. First, you often don't even know what it is, and I think that's what really struck me is how many omelettes, including me, had to flounder along for a number of years with these strange urges, not knowing even how to identify it. The furthest thing in the world from me would have been, in my life, for someone to point me toward a monastic path. That makes for a lot of confusion. Then you must work and live in an environment that is either neutral in its stance toward the spiritual path or actively hostile, and I was in one of those in the academic world, very, very unfriendly toward any kind of serious religious belief. To find and maintain silence is a constant chore.

[28:30]

There's no quiet walk to church, but instead, driving through morning traffic in the clamor of city life. If there is to be any kind of daily schedule for Lectio and prayer, it must be fit in around a job, family obligations, and all the requirements of maintaining a self-supporting life in the modern world. So no wonder people come here and fall on their knees at Thanksgiving. No wonder they suffer a lot of turmoil as they make their way along this subtle, mysterious path while living outside the monastic container. What I've been failing to see until now is that an omelette is not some kind of pretender, a monastic wannabe, but really is following the same path as the monks, the contemplative path is the same for everyone, but thanks to the additional obstacles, the highs and lows on the Adelaide path are much more pronounced, at least it's been my experience with my fellow Adelaides, that there's a lot more seeking and trying out on one's own, more trial and error and self-doubt, much less oversight and counseling and teaching.

[29:35]

This is a really helpful insight for me, though ultimately every one of us, monks and Adelaides alike, must transcend circumstance and find our way to God, despite whatever is happening around us. It's clear that the monastery protects and nourishes the person on the contemplative path in a way that the Adelaide in the world can only partially replicate, if at all. It seems to me that the great danger for the monk is probably then boredom and acedia, as the path wears on day after day, but for the Adelaide, it's more likely to be frustration, self-dramatizing and despair, thanks to the differing circumstances in which we're trying to do this. So that's what kept me up until I wrote it all down. I'm happy to report I went back to sleep after this. So I haven't awakened at two in the morning yet, with a chance to have it processed. As I listened to her story and reflected on the story I've heard

[30:44]

from many other people that come here, I really am in awe of the real efforts that people are really doing to bring to some realization these deep monastic and contemplative impulses that are at the heart of people's experience. In a way, how wrenching it is for many people in some of these settings to move from one way of living and being. So there are some real differences in how things came to be for me versus how things came to be for her. Very different. But they're both aspects of the same sort of movement towards this greater monastic contemplative life. A thought as I've listened to this is that I have a series of questions

[31:49]

that I often like to pose to people. I think they're sort of defining questions in our own lives. Who am I? is the first question, but it's by no means the last. The question that follows from that is, whose am I? So if, in fact, we are, as human beings and children of God, relationship-seeking from the very beginning, which I believe we are. My training is in the psychoanalytic model, which started with Freud. He was into drives, and I believe in drives and sex and aggression. But a later analytic movement talks more of this relational component, that we are relationship-seeking from birth. And I think the ultimate relationship is with God. And we're not just... So who am I? Whose am I? And then a third question is, well, then who am I for?

[32:50]

Because it has to be for something. It can't just be for myself. So I know at the very beginning the idea, well, I'll be a monk, this will be good for me and my soul and my salvation. This is my new career, my occupation. But really what's become clearer is that in some ways I've had a pretty darn good... I mean, we all suffer, so I don't want to say that I haven't, or that I haven't been betrayed, or all of the things that all human beings face. But it feels like I'm... So I'm here in a certain way to be present and available for those who come here. That's how I'm starting to understand why I'm even here in the first place. This isn't just for my own personal salvation. But I think the hermitage itself... Where are we going in this new century?

[33:54]

And I think it's to be a place for people like you. So who am I for? Well, I would say I'm here for you. I think this monastery is here for you. And the people who are thinking of joining us have to understand that it's for themselves, but it's also for the people that come here. As monks, we can go other places and live the monastic life, but there's something about God's presence here that we're called to open and to bring more people here. I'm always amazed at the complexity and the various stumbling blocks that people experience, but that in spite of this, this getting up and continuing to move again. So there's this real synergistic component about how we... What am I here for?

[34:55]

Who am I here for? So I hope that comes across from the monks, for those of you who have had longer experience, that we are here for you in so many ways. I reflect long and hard about how difficult it is for you folks with the sort of lives that you're trying to lead. It's hard enough for me to do it here, and I've got 1,700 years of tradition guiding me here. Anything else you wanted to add to that as we watch our time? Oh, it's 9.51. We should say. Right, so I have this little corner here, themes, words, phrases, questions, and some little dashes. So between now and 2 o'clock, especially if those who are leading the group could just put down a word or a phrase that will capture some of the things that happened in your small groups,

[35:59]

and that will lead us for some further discussion. We'll want to tie that in with the ideas and things that we want to talk about as well. Okay, Eucharist is at 11.30, and lunch is brought down to the kitchen. And you should be sure to pick that up before 1 o'clock, because then they race down and pull it away. In typically ordered monastic fashion. Exactly. All right, and then we'll see you at Mass, and otherwise at 2. Exactly. and otherwise at 2.

[36:32]

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