This morning we want to start in dead earnest on our study of the profession and the vows. The scope of the course is as indicated in Roberts, that is, his book covers the field that we're going to cover, since he's got the same five vows. First of all, he's got an introductory chapter on monastic profession, which we'll get into this morning, just considering profession in general. Now, we will have to go back to that, I think, again and again, to re-emphasize the unity of profession and to try to see once again what it means. So that'll be a theme that we'll continue to return to again and again, and then we'll come back to it after we finish the five vows in particular, and as we get into the final two chapters of Roberts. So first we talk about monastic profession, then about the five vows individually, conversion of manners, stability, chastity, poverty, and obedience, and then we'll say something about the implications, that is, the spirituality of the vows and of profession and its more

[01:09]

interior aspects. The time that we have for this class is about five months, from September through January of 81, since several people will be ready to make their simple commitment, their simple vows in February. Five months, 20 weeks, so we'll try to do, spend about three weeks on each of these vows, but that's adjustable depending on the different ones, because one may take a lot more time than another. So we just put that out as a preliminary scheme. Now about these books, in general, we shouldn't go marking up books, but I suggest that you mark this one up, and that you make it a personal copy, and underline the stuff that's important for you, and so on, because otherwise it's hard to get a hold of it. Some things need to be accented, so in this particular case, go ahead, you'll find that already in the first chapter, because you've got some key points that really need to be accented, and then a lot of other stuff that sort of fills in.

[02:11]

And it's a study in which we're particularly trying to get the accent in the right place, so we're trying to get the emphasis in the right place all the time. You've got a lot of matter, and then you may have one central point, and several other very important things, and so we want to get that kind of hierarchy of accents, of emphasis. Let's take a look at the preface of Roberts, to give us a little orientation. I'll be digressing from him, insofar as my own reading allows me to, but sometimes my own preparation won't be that extensive, so we'll have to depend on him. Now, in his preface, he starts out with a kind of far-reaching remark that Christian monasticism seems to be called a special meeting place for the different religious currents which ebb and flow in the world of our times, a meeting place and a fountain of new life. And behind that, he seems to have the notion, I think, of the meeting of East and West,

[03:17]

the meeting of Christianity and non-Christian spiritualities, for instance, which do find a kind of intersection, or should, in Christian monasticism. It's a natural meeting place for the universal, call it, drive to transcendence of mankind. Elsewhere, he talks about the monk that is in the heart of every man, and Christianity, you see, between revelation and man's sort of universal drive towards God, that's just written in it, that's in every man. And so, where you have those two words, Christian and monasticism, there should be a meeting place, inadequate, as our monasticism may seem very often, to provide this meeting place, but it should happen. He says it's particularly true of Benedictine and Cistercian communities, which represent the mainstream of Western monastic life. Well, they're certainly the biggest stream. When he says Benedictine and Cistercian, ordinarily, starting from outside, we'd say, well, Cistercian means Benedictine too, within the Benedictine family, but actually it's a separate stream,

[04:19]

still emanating from the role of Saint Benedict. So the purpose of his book is, and therefore, he says, there's a particular importance in understanding what you're doing when you make profession in one of these communities, got a kind of a worldwide importance, it's a universal thing, it's a matter of trying to find this point of intersection in a way. And if you find, in other words, the center point of your own life, really, the meaning of your own monastic life, he's suggesting, you find the center point of the world. That Merton would put it in those words, you know, if you find your own center, you're finding the center of the world, where all men come together, you know, it's another way of looking at it, particularly true in the monastic life. In fact, the monastic life, it sort of specializes in that, and so it doesn't specialize in anything else. So the reason for his book is to help people to prepare for this act of commitment, both the candidate and the community.

[05:22]

The origin, it started with a little pamphlet on the vows written by Thomas Merton in the 60s. We don't have that one. Maybe we do and we don't know it. I don't know what the title of it was. We don't have it in separate form anyway. It might be included in some book. I don't think it's part of the monastic journey. And he used it, and he entered Spencer in 53, and in 62 he went to Argentina, he went to Azul. So he probably used it already at Spencer and then continued at Azul, where he's probably been the novice pastor for a long while, if not the abbot, I don't know. He made another edition, the first edition in English in 1975, which we have a copy of. That's the one that we've had, that big sloppy looking green-covered mimeograph thing that we've had around for a long while, which is more primitive than this one.

[06:26]

This one he calls a definitive edition. It's finally been published. The other one is just a mimeograph for internal use. It says chapter 6, the one on stability, is the one that's most dependent on Thomas Martin's original notes. The other ones have been very much more modified, it seems. Now the bibliography contains two things. First of all, the things that he used in writing his books. Secondly, the books that have been suggested to him by other novice masters, by other formation people among the Trappists. So he hasn't read all of those things that you find in the bibliography. Some of them were just passed to him by other novice masters. The body of the work, chapters 2 through 6 on those five vows, he calls them the promises of profession. And in each of those chapters he's got a standard pattern. First of all, the clarification of the more exterior aspects and obligations, that is the more obvious things. Secondly, a word about possible infidelities, the negative, how you can fall short.

[07:32]

They used to talk a lot about sins against the vow, sin against the vow of poverty, of chastity, of obedience, of what you have to do in order really to sin against the vow. And they got into a whole detailed thing, which is terrible, because what you do, you focus on the minimum. You can very easily get a perverted moral theology by focusing on the law. And what you have to do just to keep from committing sin, that's terrible. It turns Christianity upside down. You get a Christianity which is the Christianity of just getting by. It's like how to pass the exam. It's the same psychology that a student gets when all he wants to do is get through the course and pass the exam. And so he doesn't develop any love at all for the subject. And you don't develop any love at all for the life or for the Lord, if that's the attitude. It's a totally other thing. We'll get back to that later. So he's not going to say a whole lot about that. Ends with some remarks on its interior and more purely spiritual dimension. And then he returns to that in the last two chapters.

[08:33]

Chapter 7 takes up again the theme of conversatio. So for Merton and also for Roberts, conversatio morum is the basic monastic vow. That's the one that's particularly monastic and that somehow sums up the whole monastic life. But it's a hard one to get a hold of because of all the confusion and the history of its interpretation. And we'll see that when we get to that. So I won't say any more about that now. We should get to it next time. The approach is inspired by that of Thomas Merton, but many other lines of thought have been introduced in an effort to obtain a more compact and coherent synthesis. Since I lack Merton's gift of expression, he says. He says he lacks Merton's gift of expression, but he doesn't say that he lacks the clarity of Merton's thoughts. So I suspect that he's confident about the structure of thought that he's evolved and that perhaps goes beyond that of Merton. Because there's been more thinking about these things since Merton's writing and since Merton's death, of course. It was 12 years ago. This book was, I think, finished probably in 77.

[09:36]

He sent it up to the publisher. So he doesn't have to apologize for his thought, but only for his expression. And it's true. It's not a poetic work. And he skips some issues. The nature of authority in religious life, permanent commitments in general, disputed questions. In other words, he doesn't discuss them, but he has to take up an attitude on them. Because an attitude, a decision, a conclusion on these questions is presupposed by what he's saying. In other words, if you don't believe in permanent commitments, then his whole book has no meaning. But he's not going to go into that and discuss it. He's taken into account in his writing the recent works on the questions. He's read the stuff. He knows the literature, but he's not going to go into those questions. Okay. But he treats in detail those things that are particularly connected with monastic vows and which he feels are more positive.

[10:40]

Now, here's the premise for the whole book. This is important. It deserves an underlining or something. A union... The monk's life can only be understood by seeing it as a union of two different spiritual movements. And here he tries once again to range, to give you the whole global range, to talk about the whole of the planet as it were. And not just about the monk's life, not just about my life. Man's desire for community and his search for personal union with the eternal. So two things. The desire for community and the desire for God, to put it in Christian language. And so those are the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, once again. I've said this before a lot of times. Talking about the rule of St. Benedict, remember, we find the vertical beam and the horizontal beam. The vertical beam is represented by obedience and humility and prayer. The horizontal beam by fraternal charity and fraternal relations. And they're very striking. They stand out clearly in St. Benedict's rule.

[11:43]

But this is what you find in monasticism. And it's very important to go back and back to this point, you see. These are the two poles of the monastic life. Now look at our own congregation, the cenobitical life and the aramitical life. The cenobitical life emphasizes, witnesses more strongly to one pole of this, which is the desire for community. The aramitical life witnesses more strongly to the other pole, the vertical one, which is the search for union with God, you see, for the transcendent. As he says, for personal union with the eternal. So right inside our own congregation, we've got a pillar right into its structure. There's a very strong representation, manifestation of this same structure. And a lot of the fights and the tensions and everything that happened in monastic life were concerned with the tension between these two elements. That is when the tensions and the fights are honest ones. When they're dishonest ones, then there's something else going on. Then somebody is claiming to want one of these things and really is trying to bring in something else. It can happen to you. For instance, you can desire just an easier life and proclaim that under the name of

[12:51]

community. Or you can want just independence and withdrawal and a kind of comfortable isolation. And you can proclaim that under the flag of union with God, of solitude and so on. But this is the structure anyway. So he says, the fusion rather than the opposition. How often we've gotten the opposition, especially in the Kabbalah we've gotten the opposition between cenobitical and aramitical. But you've gotten something worse in some of the other congregations in a certain sense. That is, you get one element only and the other one completely locked off. So, take for example, here I'm not saying that we've got a superior setup. But what I mean is, the Cistercian and Benedictine life has very often tended to suppress the aramitical. And in doing that, it's tended to suppress the contemplative as well. You see, you get one manifestation in humility and obedience and so on. But the real contemplative dimension would tend to be suppressed.

[13:52]

And that's what Merton was complaining about so much among the Matrapas, that they had too much shut out the aramitical and therefore the contemplative. On the other hand, take the Koranites who have excluded the cenobitical life from their congregation and specialized in the aramitical. Now you can make that option, but then you've got really a narrow horizon. And you run certain dangers of ending up with a kind of unbalanced thing. Naturally, there's got to be an element of community in every monastic community, in every monastic structure. But it can really get down to below the survival level most, except for very exceptional individuals who can make it without any community. Now he says he's going to emphasize the contemplative element because he says that's more specifically characteristic of monastic life and orients the communal dimension. This is the theory of the Cistercian life, of the Trappist life. And even more so, of course, is the theory of the Camaldolese life, which says in the Constitution that the aramitical life,

[14:54]

the hermitage is a characteristic element of the congregation and gives its orientation also to the other communities that are not hermitages. That's what our tradition says and that's what our Constitution says. Contemplative life in its modern Western sense, a way of life totally ordered to the fullness of Christian prayer. So it's not in Cassian's sense. Cassian's sense of contemplative life is a phase of life, remember, the second phase of life, after the active life. And it's not a particular order, it's not a particular group of people who lead that type of life, who make profession out of that type of life, or anything like that. It's not a particular kind of juridical structure. He's talking of it in the Mormon sense. Now notice that he sums that vertical orientation up as a way of life totally ordered to the fullness of Christian prayer. So, he can call it prayer too, what he's talking about there.

[15:56]

Then he talks about the apostolic life, the apostolic group, which is not excluded, but he contends rather guaranteed. But it's in second place. The apostolate is strictly subordinated to the life of prayer in the kind of life that he's talking about. And of course, that's our life too. What he's saying holds for us. We may not agree with the way that he says it, but it's our orientation. And that should be true even in our cenobitical communities, per se, unless there's some reason why it can't be so. What? I mean, the apostolic should be subordinated to the contemplative. No, it means it should be in second place, not first place. If it begins to run the show, then it's gotten upside down, it's gotten out of hand. And of course, in the Trappist life, in the Cistercian life, the apostolic is on a very low level. I mean, it's regulated by visitations and just by the way they run the monasteries,

[17:01]

so it doesn't really get out of hand. Except for maybe a couple of monks who are on the margin of the community, but most of them are so strictly enclosed that there's not much danger in there. Most of them. So he says, other people besides Benedictines and Cistercians may be using the book. Then he talks about another sign of the monk hidden in every human heart. That's a good phrase. That's something to remember when you get to wondering about your vocation sometimes. Or when you think about other people and if we have any relationship to them, any meaning for them at all. That's the meaning. You see, there's a monk in everybody. There's a monk in everybody. And when you get to yearning after another kind of life, you get to wondering about your own call. Just reflect on that phrase a little. And you'll find that the deepest thing in you, probably if you've got the call, the deepest thing in you is that monk. And that monk is in everybody else. And a lot of people who come here are just yearning to discover their own element within themselves. They've got that hunger in their heart and they don't know what it is. And it can be the deepest thing in their life. And they're frustrated because they don't know how to find it.

[18:02]

They don't know how to get a hold of it or live according to it. And that's what we're up to. That's what this whole life is for. Now he talks about the more and less specifically monastic chapters. The ones on conversion of life, stability and spiritual methods are more specifically monastic. He puts an emphasis on a unified approach to the vows. This is very important because you get lost. Once you start trying to figure out, how do I relate spiritually to each of these commitments? And you forget that they're really just one commitment. A total commitment. That's what we'll be emphasizing throughout. And he equates it with that promise of conversion, that is conversatio morum, the first vow. And he says this is helpful for balancing other spiritualities. Because a lot of spiritualities that have come up since the monastic tradition, and even in the monastic tradition, there's been sort of a backwash into the monastic tradition.

[19:03]

And these later spiritualities have tended to pick out one element and put your whole emphasis on that. Especially, I think, a lot of congregations and communities of sisters, you see, who got their spirituality sort of at second hand from a Jesuit or from somebody else. And from maybe some foundress who really had a charism, but she had one particular devotion or one particular accent. And so they put all the weight on that. And what happens is you really get out of balance. You lose the center of gravity of Christian life and the religious life. And you can bind people really into a straitjacket that way. By putting a particular devotion or some particular thing at the center of your life. Sometimes it comes out even in the names of the congregations of sisters. You have the Sisters of the Sacred Side, for instance. These Italian sisters. And at a certain point, you might have the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. That's okay. That's pretty well centralized.

[20:05]

But other things, particularly devotional things, have become the center of the whole religious life. And it's hard to get the balance back because they become such an emotional attachment, such a feeling of reverence for this thing. So the monastic tradition in this way, and realizing the unity of the profession, and how everything is really very simple. It's just a gift of self to God. It's like the cleanness and the balance of Cassian's First Conference when he says purity of heart is the thing. Purity of heart. Now, Roberts, when he gets going here, he's going to reinterpret that in terms of centering on Christ. The love of Christ. Nothing is to be preferred to the love of Christ, and that's it. And everything else is built on that. Everything else is just an explication of that. Okay, he's going to quote a lot of texts from the Second Vatican Council,

[21:09]

and he wants to justify that a bit here. It's not just to fill out his book. It's not just because they're authoritative texts and therefore he can sort of shelter behind them. But he says that these are particularly related to the gift of faith and the gift of love. And to the exercise of faith. But the way that he explains it doesn't seem to me to fully explain it. He's just got the feeling about the documents of Vatican II, I think, that they've got more weight and are more adequate to real faith, real Christian faith, in some way, than anything else he could bring in. He doesn't really explain more than that. He says that they're extraordinary expressions of the Church's universal teaching office. They speak directly to the light in us of the crucified and risen Christ, which we call faith. But I think the real reason is because he's just found that light in these Vatican II documents, and he knows that the moment of Vatican II in history and the life of the Church is a very significant moment. And therefore that that does shed the light that we need

[22:12]

for our time, for looking at the vows and monastic life and progression in our time. There was one particular passage that gave some encouragement to me. It was on the renewal of religious life and talking about the vows, people who are willing to make the vows. Hence, the more ardently they unite themselves to Christ through a self-surrender involving their entire lives, the more vigorous becomes the life of the Church and the more abundantly for apostolate bears fruit. So it's really encouraging us to make this heartfelt, total commitment to, in some way, give vigorous life, not only, I guess, maybe to our vocation, but also to the apostolate. That's right. In another place they talk about the hidden apostolic fruitfulness of the religious life of the monastic life. That's in Perfecta Caritatis, I think. Up above, he's been talking more about the direct apostolate of monks, I think,

[23:14]

and the fact that, for them, that has to take second place. And then there's another effect, besides the apostolate of the monks, that is, their preaching or whatever they do with people outside, there's this indirect, deep fertilizing of the Church's apostolate life. Like Saint Thérèse, she's the example, because she was made the patroness of the missions, right? But she never saw a mission. She lived her whole life in the contemplative economy. So, he believes that monastic life, more than any other life, must be built upon such faith. Sometimes it's hard to get the real weight and power of what a person is saying, but there's a lot of conviction and a lot of depth in his words, I think. This work of faith is the whole purpose of religious and monastic profession. Okay.

[24:15]

Any questions about that before we go on? That whole structure that he's talking about there, those two elements that are the... two movements that are the premise for his whole book, remember, they're reflected also in the double commandment of Christ, right? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. You shall love your brother as yourself. You've got them right there. And then, in Chapter 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, which we just began last week, the instruments of good works, remember, the first two are exactly those. So, Saint Benedict has got the center in the right place, too. It's the same as the Gospel. Excuse me, what was the Benedictine connection? Chapter 4, the first two instruments of good works. Okay, now, he's got his abbreviations facing the beginning of Chapter 1. Most of those abbreviations are the Council documents. Now, everybody should have a copy of those Council documents,

[25:18]

but probably you don't. How many people do have a copy? About half of you, I guess. So, we've got to get a few more copies. Thank you. The Vatican Council, too? Yeah. There are two editions. The first one is edited by Abbott and must have been put out before 1970. The second one, which is really better, is this one by Flannery, which came out in 1975, I believe. Is the red one the same as that one, or just the first one? Well, some of these are red and some are blue. So, you've got to look inside. The first one was red. The Abbott thing was red. It was a little thinner. This one has got additional documents besides the Vatican II documents. That's why it's better. If everybody doesn't have one, we'll have to get some more, because these things are important from every course we have. We'll refer to them just for your general use.

[26:19]

You should read almost all those documents, at least the major documents, the five or six major ones. The four constitutions and then the one on the religious one. So, these abbreviations, most of them are abbreviations, the first letters of the first two words in Latin of those various documents. After a while, you'll get so you know those by heart, at least the more important ones, the more important four or five. For instance, where you hear LG, as you will frequently, that's Lumen Gentium, that's the constitution on the church. PC is the decree on the religious life. So, that's a very important one for us. SC is the one on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. DV is the one on revelation, on Holy Scripture. GS is Gaudium et Spes, that's the church in the modern world, which is also very important, even though it doesn't refer directly to the monastic life probably once. But that's the one that shows the more or less new point of view of the church in Vatican II. That PH, we don't have it in this book.

[27:27]

It's not even in this newer edition. We'll have to find a copy somewhere. I'm sure we have it in the library. That's the one on sexual ethics. That will come up in the chapter on Chastity. Benite Seorsum, I don't know whether that's in here or not. We have a number of separate copies of that, and I'll have to put one or two on the shelf there for you. That was 69, it's probably in here. We haven't got it in the index. Maybe because it was too specialized. Then the Summa of St. Thomas. I don't know whether we'll put that on the shelf or not. When you want to look up a vow, or you want to look up poverty, chastity, and obedience, St. Thomas is a good reference to get the standard scholastic, or the best scholastic approach. And then we have to look at that in the light of the monastic tradition, and once again, Vatican II. But Vatican II itself depends a lot still on St. Thomas. When they talk about poverty, chastity, and obedience

[28:28]

as being the great religious vows, the great religious commitments, that goes back to St. Thomas. That's the analysis of the scholastic theologians. And then they've got the Conferences of Cassian and the Rule of St. Benedict. And they refer once or twice to the Institutes, too, in the first chapter. He's got a pretty good bibliography here, and we'll have to dig out a lot of those books if we can put them on the shelter. Could you take a look through this first chapter and see what we have in the library? Some of them are there already, and others are not. I know we've got that Consider Your Call, and Vandenberg Why Monks, we've got that. I think about half of them are there already. And Fr. Abraham left a couple of these that I don't think we've had. Nobody, including myself, is going to have time to read all of those references,

[29:33]

so we'll have to try to get the choicest portions. Like Pfeiffer, now he had a big chunk as a reference for the first chapter there, but if you've got from about page 174 to 191, you've got the part that's most relevant. The rest could be picked up at another time. Pfeiffer is very preoccupied with giving a theological orientation in the monastic life, and he's just at the end of Vatican II. So he goes back and he takes the Bible and the liturgy and gives you a big introductory section on that at the beginning of his book, and then he tries to insert the monastic life into the Bible and the liturgy, you see, with varying success, I guess. It tends to make it a little heavy. It's heavy going, the first part of the book. But he's really good because he gives you almost everything you need to know. It's a question of getting the things that are more important and bringing them into relief. Okay, chapter one.

[30:36]

He talks about two stages here. When the postulant enters the community, it's already a public commitment to follow Christ. It certainly has that meaning for the person who comes in, even though it's not final and it's not irrevocable. And it also has that meaning for his family, for the people that he leaves behind, right? And for them, often that's the most significant break sometimes, when somebody comes to the monastery. And then the vows pronounced later make this commitment more explicit and intensify the personal encounter with the Saviour. Well, they make the public commitment more explicit. They really spell it out. They say exactly what he's committing himself to, and they make it final. When you get to the solemn vows, the permanent vows, they make it final, which of course entering the postulancy is not. And intensify the personal encounter with the Saviour. That's another matter which has to be pursued in another way in depth. It goes on inside the individual. The most ancient rite of profession, in the beginning of monasticism, expressed this interior and spiritual element by a change of clothing.

[31:55]

The external expression is simply taking the person's old clothes off and putting on new clothes. Now, the two elements that he's talking about that provide the title for this section are first of all the interior or spiritual element, and secondly the juridical element. Those are the two big elements. And oftentimes, in later times, the juridical element has often seemed to predominate and sort of tow along the spiritual element behind it, and the obligations of the vows. That's not the way it should be, because the interior spiritual element, that commitment, should sort of carry the vows behind it, or carry the obligations behind it as consequences, rather than being the cart before the horse, as we'll see later on. Now, this business about the change in clothing, let's spend a moment on that because it's kind of a rich thing. If you read that section in the Institutes of Cashin where he talks about the clothing of the monks, some of you read that before when you studied the book, One of the Institutes. It's kind of dull, but there's a richness behind it

[32:59]

which is not easily available to us. And there he gives you the symbolism of each of the items of clothing. If you read Piper, he sums it up in a couple of pages, and then Robert sums it up over here in even less space. Yeah, where he says, A belt signified chastity and mortification. A hooded cape symbolized the humility of his new state. He said it was children that wore these hoods, cowls. Piper says the monks in the Middle Ages were called the gens cuccolata, that means the hooded people, the hoods. A scapula served for manual labor. So each of these things symbolizes part of the sort of, what would you call it? Not the negative, but whatever you want to call it. The poverty or penance, the penitential dimension of the monk's life. Each of these things. The poverty, the work, the chastity and mortification.

[34:04]

And then it's said also that one of these garments, I forget which, symbolizes the monk's state as a soldier of Christ. But then there's another dimension, which is the positive. Remember the baptismal garment? The new white garment that was put on the person when he was baptized? Now that's the other dimension of this. You see, you've got not only the negative, or the penitential, but you've got the positive. So there's an ambiguity which introduces a kind of confusion into the symbolism of the monastic habit. Because largely, in the early monastic life, it seems to have been this ascetical dimension that was more important. But then you've got also the dimension of new life. And they call it the angelic garment at a certain point. And the white color of the Kamaldi's habit, as a matter of fact, is interpreted often in tradition in that sense. In the sense of an angelic life, or life of purity. And not purity in the sense of radiance, and not in the sense of penitence,

[35:06]

and not in the sense of abstinence. So you see, you've got those two dimensions. It's important not to lose that baptismal, the other side of that, and consider it just in a negative sense. As if the monk is just somebody who puts on rags and goes out into the desert as a scapegoat, or something like that. You can get kind of a dismal view of monastic life if you interpret that symbolism only in the negative sense, only in the ascetical sense. But that sense is important, very important. There's a good... Aside from those particular significances of the different parts of the habit, there's an important biblical symbolism of clothing itself. And for that I recommend, if you have time, this article on clothing, under the word clothing in the Dictionary of Biblical Theology. I'm just going to give you a couple of points. Because to me, the biblical significance of clothing itself is deeper and more important than those particular meanings for each of the garments. That one is symbolizing continence, and another is symbolizing humility, and so on. That doesn't have so much meaning for me.

[36:06]

I'm just going to give you a point or two from this, just the main points. The author, who is a French biblical scholar, presumably, I've never heard his name before. He says that there are two dimensions, besides just... There are two symbolic dimensions, really, in this matter of clothing in the Bible, which is very important. Because remember, as soon as Adam and Eve sinned, they know they're naked, right? And then they put the leaves on. And then they get ejected from the garden. They hide in the bushes because they were afraid, because they knew they were naked. And then God throws them out of the Garden of Paradise, and he gives them garments of skins, remember? To put on. And then you get this whole symbolism going throughout. In the Old Testament and the Prophets especially, the business of nakedness and shame and being clothed. The Prophets in Isaiah, where he says, the Lord has clothed me with a garment of splendor and so on.

[37:08]

The whole thing. The idea of nakedness and shame and poverty and being in the desert and an outcast, and the idea of being clothed with glory, being clothed with honor. There are two dimensions, he says. The sign of a definite order coming from the Creator. Clothing is a sign of order in some way. Whereas the creation by itself is, as it were, naked. But it is vested in a way, the creation. Nature itself. And then clothing puts some kind of order into this. It's hard to express that. There's a sense there. It's like the word that comes into creation. Now the creation itself has got a kind of clothing to it already. But man, when he comes into the creation, man is the only thing in creation that's naked. That needs to be clothed in that way. And that's a strange thing, isn't it? Something is missing from man so that he can even live in this place. The animals don't have to put clothing on.

[38:09]

But man does. So it's as if he needs something else. And it's a little bit related to the coming of the Word into creation and the coming of the Spirit into creation. Because ultimately what man has to be clothed with is God's glory, which is very much like the Spirit, the dimension of the Spirit. Likewise, a symbol recalling the promise of a glory lost in paradise. So here's that whole drama of being in paradise, not needing clothing at first, because they're clothed with grace, they're clothed with God's glory. Then sin and nakedness. And it's a very mysterious place there where they sin and all of a sudden they realize they're naked, but it's as if they were naked before and didn't know it. That grace was a kind of ignorance. It's as if their eyes were shielded by the hand of God's grace or something like that. In paradise, forbidden knowledge opened the eyes of Adam and Eve and they knew they were naked. It's Genesis chapter 3.

[39:11]

Until that moment they had felt themselves in harmony with the divine atmosphere by a kind of grace which clothed them like a garment. Henceforth, not the kind of grace which clothed them like a garment. And that's what we're moving back towards, you see, is to be clothed once again. Remember the wedding garment also in the parable of Jesus. The fellow is thrown out of the wedding banquet because he doesn't have a garment on. Really? Gee, how do you make sense out of that? Maybe like a return to paradise. Well, if you say... Apostle means sent away. Now, they were sent away naked, in a sense. God clothed them, but to be sent away from the garden. Because the first sending away, in a sense, was the sending away of Adam and Eve out of the garden. Apostle means... Apostello in Greek means to send out, send away. But that's strange, isn't it? Sometimes there are words like that in Hebrew and probably in Syriac. They're just coincidences,

[40:12]

and sometimes there's an interconnection between the two meanings. Ephraim uses it in the sense of stripping down, stripping naked, and diving into the water in baptism. Oh, I see. Because when Jesus sends out the apostles, of course, to preach, he strips them down to the minimum, because they're still clothed. And those two meanings must probably go further back than in the Testament. Henceforth, not their sex, but their entire body is signed with want before God's presence. A grass skirt no longer suffices to cover it. The sinners hide among the trees of the garden because their shame arises in the presence of the Divine Majesty. I was afraid because I'm naked. Now they no longer have a sign justifying a familiarity of approach to God. I don't know whether Parasee or another word that we've got in Martin's name now. For they have lost the sense of belonging to the Lord. They are perpetually surprised by their nakedness, like a mirror which does not reflect God's image.

[41:14]

They've lost the likeness. There's still the image in them, but there's a disfigured image, and there's something wrong with them, there's something wrong with this nakedness. The fact that there's something wrong with man is manifested already by this, or at least by the shame that he feels. God, however, does not dismiss the sinners without clothing them in skin tonics. A covering that does not suppress their nakedness but is more a sign of their permanent call to the dignity they lost. Clothing will now indicate duality, the affirmation of fallen man's dignity and the possibility of once more clothing himself with the lost glory. So the fact that we wear clothing puts us in that middle state between the glory that has been lost and the ultimate state, where we would have been re-clothed in God's glory. And meanwhile, the glory is inside of us in some way, it's in our hearts. When St. Paul says, Put on Christ, he means an interior thing, really, and then he means behaving that way. And this goes right into the book of Revelation, of course.

[42:19]

The victorious have washed their robes and whitened them, and have let it around. And the bride is adorned herself for marriage. What has this got to do with the monastic life, then? The fact of the change of clothing signifies a change in state, a new state, all right? And usually the monks conceived it in terms of humility, in terms of asceticism, and putting off the display of the world, and putting on these poor garments. The monk was supposed to be able to leave his clothes out for three days and nobody would pick them up. That was the forgiveness of the desert clothes. And then also there's this significance of a commitment to a new life. But usually what you see in the monastic garment is the negative or penitential or ascetical aspect. Now that clothing has something to do also with the desert. Because consider that the desert is like nature in nakedness, not clothed with the fertility and the glory of God's life-giving spirit, as it were.

[43:27]

So the desert and this kind of destitution of the monastic habit go together in some way. And the prophets and John the Baptist, when they were out in the desert, remember they were clothed with a goat skin or something like that. Elijah, he wore an animal skin. And that takes you back to Genesis 2. You're thrown out of paradise, as it were, into the world. Then you voluntarily take yourself out of the comforts of the world and sort of the false paradise of the world and put yourself back into the desert. And you symbolize that by putting on those garments of exile, which are the simple garments of the monk. And they started out with that malotes, you know, with the goat skin or whatever it was. Somebody had a question? No. Oh, I'm going. Yeah. What about natives? We don't seem to have any problem with that. No. Yeah. I don't know. There's a kind of innocence. Yeah. Most people in the world wear some kind of clothing, don't they? At least a little bit.

[44:28]

It seems like a lot of natives do, but the only reason they wear any is when they're working. Huh? Yeah, I guess a lot of the aborigines, for instance. How about in Australia? The aborigines didn't wear any clothing at all. I guess that's true in some places in Africa. I don't know how to put that into it. I don't think that you can say that they're in kind of an original state of purity, innocence, and virtue. It's not exactly that. There's kind of a mixture of innocence and ignorance there, I think, as not being fully conscious of their state. And I don't know what else. Civilization always seems to bring with it clothing. Like the coming of the word. The connection of that with civilization, with culture and so on, seems to bring with it just a natural instinct to clothe oneself. Weren't there also monks that used to run around? Yeah. One of the Desert Fathers talks about them.

[45:30]

I think it's Macarius. Somebody says, what's a monk? And he says, well, I don't know. I'm not a monk, but I've seen monks. And then he talks about these two monks that he saw completely naked on an island somewhere, who were living, I guess, off the grass or the fields or something like that, and had no roof over their heads or anything. And he was pointing that out as being real monasticism, you see, rather than the sort of kid stuff you're used to. And you see all Mount Athos and its brotherhood, it's kind of, you know. The Boscoy. I don't know if there are any now. And I don't know whether they're clothed or not. There's a gospel of Thomas. Someone said, I just read this, which wasn't Mount Athos, that there's a saying that says, if you can't let them go, run naked for the Lord. Run naked for the Lord. A lot of Assyrians went to that kind of training,

[46:32]

along with their other extraordinary things. They had those species of monasticism. Special kinds of monks. Because, in general, you have a distinctive vesture for the monks, I guess, in India and also in Buddhism. Very simple. Sacramental. I was wondering also, when Jesus took off his clothes to wash their feet, does that tie in there in any way? Yes, it certainly does. That means, I think it's like he's taking off his dignity completely. And when he does that, he's symbolizing his whole life, okay? And especially his passion of that. Because St. Paul says... Is it the same in all of the accounts of that? Yeah, that's what I've got, too.

[47:32]

It seems to me there are two accounts of that. One's in St. John and the other... You get mysterious things like that, I guess. You don't know what to make of it. Because, you know, it's different. You're recording this and you're... You're encompassing the meaning. You're presenting it. That's right. And for St. Peter, it's like what he says after he climbs up on the beach. And Jesus asks him three times if he loves him. He says, finally, he says, Lord, you know. You know everything. You know. It's as if he stripped himself of any pretense or of any self... You know, he's unclothed with any kind of self-image or any claim. He says, you know, Lord. It's as if he's naked before Jesus. There are probably other meanings in that, too. I wouldn't venture to say too much about that. One of the fathers interprets, when Jesus is entering to Jerusalem, when they lay down the garments

[48:33]

for him to cross over the enterprise, as the church laying down, you know, the people giving their lives, their bodies, you know, as a sacrifice, you know, for the world and all this. So they interpret the garments as bodies and lives. Oh, I see. Yeah, I've never seen that before. They kind of make a road of themselves for him. And so we come to other natures. There's a lot in this business of calling. Pfeiffer talks about that symbolism in some detail, page 175, 176, 177. He says about the same thing that Robert says, but with greater length. Clothing is a symbol recalling the promise of a glory lost in paradise. This whole theme of God's glory is very important. We find ourselves coming back to it

[49:35]

from one angle after another. That's what you're really after is God's glory. You can't have it without God. I mean, that's the promise. That's what the search is about. That's what Jesus brings. And it's symbolized by this clothing thing. And so we take off sort of the false glory of the clothing you would choose in the world that would give you a good appearance in the world. And you put on this humble clothing, like you go into the desert because you want the water to spring up out of the desert coming from God, not from you. You don't take your... The desert and this poverty of monastic dress are very similar in this sense. And you want the glory to come from God. And so you renounce the glory that you might have yourself. You might bring with you from the world. That sort of thing. But the glory in the end is not just glory, but it's everything. It's everything. It's life too. And it comes across in the Bible in that term, glory. But it's everything. And it's also the likeness of God.

[50:37]

It's the similitude in addition to the image that we have in us. We shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is, which is in Genesis. It means we'll be clothed, and wedded. So you've got this terrific paradox in the monastic life that what you're really after is glory. And you do it precisely by renouncing glory, precisely by this humility. It's very easy. There's so much tension at that point. It's very easy to get lopsided and to have the whole thing keel over in some way. A great tension at that point between the search for glory in the right way, in the way that Jesus is inviting us to search for Him, and a kind of sick humility, and a kind of vain glorious motivation in the monastic life. It's very delicate. We have to keep reorienting ourselves and correcting ourselves, according to the Gospel. What it means interiorly

[51:51]

is our own self-image, right? It's the self-image that I have of myself that gives me a comfortable feedback that makes me feel like I'm somebody. Largely by being better than somebody else. It's the false self, in other words. Yes. We tend to keep up the game longer than we would... Okay. So much for clothing. About the biblical foundations of monastic profession. This is a bit of a digression, but Roberts zips through this in very little time, you see, whereas Peiffer spends about 100 pages on it. So, what foundations do you find, what do you find if you look in the Bible,

[52:52]

the Old Testament and the New Testament, for the notion of monastic profession, for this commitment that we make? I just want to point out a couple of them, and then you'd have to look into them yourself. You can just sort of store them away and maybe come back to them later on. One of them is the notion of covenant, all right? If you read some biblical theologians, it's either Bonrad or Eichrodt, one of these contemporary biblical theologians, who says that the core of the Old Testament is the theme of covenant, the covenant between God and man. Now, the covenant that comes out most clearly is the one at Mount Sinai, remember, where God gives the law, and Moses receives it, and the people swear themselves to abide by the law, and Moses kills a cow and sprinkles half of the blood upon, whatever, the Ark of the Covenant, half of the blood upon the people. That's the covenant. There's a covenant with Noah, there's another covenant with David, and then Jesus talks about the New Covenant, remember? Jeremiah already talks about it, it's going to come.

[53:54]

So the New Covenant is the covenant made by the death and resurrection of Jesus, and it constitutes the Church, really. And what is a covenant? It's a bond between two. It's a bond between God and man. Now, that's what you're doing when you make your monastic profession, isn't it? You're making a bond between yourself and God. So, it's important to ground these things in their biblical foundations. The notion of covenant is very deep, you can do a lot of studying on that and not get to the bottom of it. You can go right to the Old Testament with that idea. There was a covenant with Noah, remember, when God put the rainbow in the sky, and that is thought of as being a covenant with the whole of nature. You see, the whole of the world, even outside of the Jewish people. Natural covenant. And there's another one with Moses, and this is sort of the covenant of the Old Testament. That makes the Jewish people, that makes them a people, that makes them God's people, and they sort of make this contract with the Lord. And then there's the other one with David,

[54:55]

which is specific to his house, and becomes a messianic thing between David, or the Davidic king, or the Messiah, and God. And then there's the New Covenant. And how do you insert yourself into the New Covenant? By baptism, right? So that's the New Testament element that inserts itself and inserts you into the Covenant, the New Covenant. St. Paul says you're baptized into the death of Christ so that you can rise again with Him to a new life. Now, that's the covenant as far as we're concerned. And it puts us into the body of Christ, and it gives us the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God inside ourselves. The covenant is really a union there. And the other analogy is with marriage. Because the model in human life of a relationship between two people is the relationship between man and woman, between husband and wife. And you find that pretty much in the Old Testament, in the center of the Old Testament. Remember Hosea, and then Jeremiah,

[55:56]

and there's some of it in Isaiah and in the other prophets. But Hosea, of course, is the one where you find the most of it in the smallest space, because it's a short book. And that seems to be maybe the first one that brings out that imagery so strongly. Of Israel as being the bride of Yahweh, of man as being the bride of God. And then the Song of Songs is sort of the height of it in the Old Testament. And immediately in the New Testament it's picked up by John the Baptist who says, I'm the friend of the bridegroom, remember, the bride is not mine but it belongs to him, and by Jesus himself. Not because he refers to himself as the bridegroom, he doesn't, but when he uses the parables of the wedding feast continually. Remember? One time after another. So he's referring to himself sort of obliquely as the bridegroom, showing himself as the bridegroom and then hiding himself, just like in the Song of Songs. And the bride is everybody. The bride is the church, but it's each one of us. Okay, now, monasticism

[56:58]

and monastic profession builds itself right upon this, and it's simply a further commitment to that. Now, the fact that monasticism is an alternative to marriage, that you can't have both, means that they have this relationship one with the other, and that monasticism approaches that covenant business from another angle, which excludes that kind of relationship with a woman, or with a man in the case of a religious woman, but which is analogous to it. See, it goes beyond it as the profession, the consecration of virgins says, that you forsake the sacrament, the sacramental union, which is an image of this union between man and God, for the real thing. That's a pretty bold statement, but that's in the ritual world. Now, this is all biblical stuff, you see. This all comes out of the scriptures. And it's important to make this relationship because it enriches your lexio, and it also gives you a more solid understanding

[57:58]

of your monastic commitment. It does both of those things. It relates your life better, too, to the scriptures level. And it helps you to understand the Old Testament, too, in its symbolic level, where first of all it symbolizes Christ and the Church, and then it symbolizes you and Christ, and me and Christ. And then finally, remember the anagogical level, where the heavenly Jerusalem comes down from heaven like a blind adorned poor husband. That's the Church, with all of us somehow inside of it. And that union, that final union, whereby the Church doesn't have any lamp anymore, but God is its light. And the lamp is its light. Remember that article of Clement that was in Cistercian studies on the monastic life and the Holy Spirit, where he says there are two orders in the Church,

[59:00]

and one is the order of the Word, which becomes a sacramental order, and the other is the order of the Spirit, which becomes a charismatic order. And he puts monasticism in that order of the Spirit. So on one side you've got the sacrament of baptism, and the priesthood, and marriage. And on the other side you've got the charismatic level of the Spirit, not the Word, not the sacrament, but the Spirit. And that's monasticism. And so you can get some understanding of monasticism from looking at the other side, and then, sort of, interpreting monasticism as a reflection, as an analogy of that other side, which is sacramental, and which is more visible, because it's the Word, whereas the monastic is interior, and it's very hard to understand it from outside of itself. The only way to really understand it is by the experience of it somehow, and then by comparing it with the other one, which is sort of reflected in the Word. So the Word interprets the Spirit, and the Spirit interprets the Word. That's the way it goes. But it gets us back to the Trinitarian foundation, the Trinitarian truth, which after all is the basis of everything we're talking about. And the other relation to that Trinitarian truth

[60:03]

is the fact that, what's the original covenant between the Father and the Son? What's the original covenant? And that's the one, also, which runs right through sacred history, right into the fact that the Church is the body of Christ, and the priesthood of Christ is the Son, sort of wearing the Church, but the Church is His body, relating to the Father. So that same covenant comes down and becomes incarnate, and becomes the life of the Church itself. So those things kind of run through the Scriptures and run right into monasticism. I'm sort of wondering why a profession wasn't considered a sacrament, especially since, maybe in the sense you can see, it was instituted by Christ, but it seems to be wrong, problematic, certain things like that. A lot of people have asked that question, and it's something we really need to ponder over. You may never get an answer that satisfies you completely,

[61:05]

but one answer is Clement's answer, that you have the sacramental order, which follows in the line of the Word, and therefore, in that line, follow marriage, and holy orders, and the Eucharist, and the other sacraments, but marriage and holy order is especially significant here. Whereas the other line, the line of the Spirit, is not signified in the same way. It's essentially interior. Didn't in the early days they connect the monasticism profession with the sacrament of baptism? Yes, especially that Syrian connection. I haven't listened to those tapes of Professor Winkler, but I imagine that connection comes out very strongly. That's very confusing. So they didn't want to... Okay, to connect it with baptism doesn't mean it's another baptism. Often they express themselves carelessly, like the fathers and the monastic writers talk about a second baptism, but what they really mean is you're living your baptism for the first time, or you commit yourself to the baptism that you received a long while ago, but you didn't really keep it. If you were baptized as a baby, maybe you didn't even realize it.

[62:07]

Now, some people talk about that kind of thing in relation to the charismatic, in relation to the experience of the Holy Spirit, which is the baptism in the Spirit, right? And the monks talk about it with respect to monastic profession. Somebody else will talk about it with respect to the gift of the tears, the gift of tears. Simeon the New Theologian, I think, he talks about the gift of tears of compunction as being a second baptism, a baptism in the Holy Spirit, and he unites all those ideas, really, which is more important than the first baptism, he says. Now, that's crazy, but that's what he says. But it's the experience of the first baptism, and so monasticism is a commitment to the first baptism. You see, you've got these two orders, the one order of the sacrament and the other order of the commitment and the experience and so on, in a special way. Now, I don't know whether I'm completely satisfied with that explanation as to why monasticism is not a sacrament, but I've never heard of it. If we take that explanation, it goes pretty far,

[63:08]

because then it says you've got a lot of working out to do of your monastic vocation in that interior line, you see. You've really got to develop that in order to know what you're up to, because it's not going to be spelled out for you in words. It has to be an interior realization that really challenges you to discover that, to experience that, because it's not given to you at the outset. Whereas the sacramental thing is. Well, yeah, but this is jumping the gun a little bit. He was talking about the vow of continence, he calls it. And he says that once that vow is taken, it can never be revoked, not even the Church can revoke it, or dispense a person from it. And that just, in his view, is so irrevocable, it seems almost like a mark of sacrament. That's a different thing. He was talking about consecration. But he must mean that also the religious vows, poverty, chastity and obedience, the vow of continence,

[64:08]

and the vow of chastity. But it's not a sacrament. I just leave you that to puzzle over, because I haven't got any better answer than that one. In fact, it's more a mystery than an answer. Why it's not a sacrament. What is this other order which it must belong to? Because here I think we can trust tradition. Tradition gives you these facts, that here are the sacraments and here is monasticism, and neither in the Western nor the Eastern Church is monasticism interpreted as a sacrament. So we've got that fact. And then we have to try to understand it from there. So we start with a mystery, with a paradox. What happens to the monk who is living the life of the Spirit? What happens to the order of the sacrament? Does he transcend it? Does he become a sacrament? He should become a sacrament in a sense, but we've got to be careful that we don't move too easily with that language. But he should become a living sacrament.

[65:09]

He should become a manifestation of what baptism is. And therefore in his body he should become a revelation of the grace of Christ. But I'm not sure that that helps us with our question. Baptism is a sacrament. Yes, yes. So then the monastic practice is to bring forth a baptism. So then that's the sacrament of monasticism. That is, you're right, that is the sacrament of monasticism. So if we say monasticism or monastic profession is a second baptism, we mean this, that now I'm going to take my baptism seriously, and therefore I make this public manifestation of the fact. So monasticism is the duty of all Christians, especially monasticism, to bring forth the Holy Spirit. Yes.

[66:10]

Yeah, that's right. Now I'll bet that that Syriac tradition gives you more light than anything else on this. I'll bet those tapes help a lot on this. Because this whole business of the water of baptism and then the desert, the arid desert, for one thing. The monk receives the sacrament of baptism, the exterior water of baptism, but what really counts there is the interior water of the Holy Spirit. He goes out into the aridity of the desert, as it were, in order to let this interior water of the Spirit come up and fill him, in order that the baptism may permeate him, may flow through him entirely, as it were, until the water of the Spirit comes to the surface, as it were, and the fertility in which he becomes a sacrament at that point, this return to paradise that theme is. But somehow it's the working out of baptism and the realization of the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so it's the interiority of the thing, the invisibility of the thing, that makes it differ from the sacraments, where you always have an external reality.

[67:13]

In marriage, what is the external reality? It's probably the union of the bride and groom. It seems almost the same as, say, martyrdom. I couldn't really work out how he was killed. I couldn't say that's why it's a sacrament. It's just kind of instilled as baptism. It's exactly as baptism, isn't it? And martyrdom and monasticism are related very much in tradition. They talk about the baptism of blood, of course, that happens in martyrdom, even when you didn't have the baptism of water. Somebody dies for Christ, but he hasn't been baptized. It's considered that he's automatically baptized. I don't remember that one. But there's another

[68:18]

good thing about this the fact that monasticism is not a sacrament. Of course, consider if we want monasticism to be a universal thing, and this is a liberating notion, if you say there's a monk in the heart of every man and that every Christian lives a monastic life somewhere in himself, that part of his life can be a monastic life even if he's married, then it's better not to say that monasticism is a sacrament like holy orders or like marriage which separates certain people off. If you say monasticism is just the realization of baptism, it's very liberating in that sense. You don't make yourself another compartment, another specialization, another sector of the Christian people. Like even holy orders doesn't have a special function. No, you're just living a Christian life. And so everybody can do this. And so it immediately relates you to everybody else. And instead of relating to them say from above like the priest tends to do by preaching to them or teaching them or ruling them or whatever he does, now you relate to them heart to heart in a way because the monk in you

[69:18]

relates to the monk in them. Only somehow you specialize in this thing but you specialize in it exactly by not specializing by not being in a particular category. It can be a proud thing too but it shouldn't be because the ideal is one thing and then where we are is another thing. I think this is why Grieg was so well-known among the Christians. They were French. They were the Communist Party. It made him question himself as to what does it mean to be a monk again and say well maybe there are more monks than we are. A little bit implicit in what he was saying. He liked that kind of challenge. Didn't he say a little bit afterwards that the guy was inferring that there were real monks? That's right. It was kind of an attack

[70:21]

in the sense that you have to be a revolutionary in this world. You have to fight the forces of oppression or something that was implied in order to be a real monk today. The people who retire from the struggle are not the real monks. He was saying too that the Nazi Party had to become to some degree another form of society in a more comfortable structure. Especially in the disseminating of the scenes that are taking place. In one of his last talks he really identified strongly and marginally those people that somehow struck out on unchartered grounds in a sense. Which is what a monk should be doing and trying to find something that is reproducible and has an implication for himself and for society. Yeah, exactly. Merton talked continually about this

[71:22]

kind of social adaptation which happens in monasticism and once you get comfortably settled into another social structure with a nice personal identity once again which comes from the society and an external self you might as well be back in the world. He's saying maybe a bit exaggerated. But he insists that the monk is a person who is called to go beyond that and strike out really into the solitude of not having an identity from his surroundings. Not having an identity from the respect the esteem of other people. In other words to be naked in the sense of not having a social foundation for his own identity and go out into the desert in that way. An adventurer in that sense. But you've got to remember he's got this paper on final integration of monastic what does he call it? Monastic therapy. It's in Contemplation in the World of Action where he's drawing from this Persian psychiatrist Eraste and he says there are two levels actually of formation and one level of formation as I remember it is the social formation which gives you and you've got to go through that in other words

[72:22]

you have to live in society you have to live in community and be given an identity form your personality form your ego whatever you want to talk about it even form a false self but be careful with that word false because it's not entirely false. And then you go beyond that and you strike out on your own and most people never do that you see? Most people are fortunate if they get as far as integrating themselves into that social environment that social context then they find themselves in the normal way of speaking okay? And this is where psychiatry is going to take you too is adapting that way to society and you function okay you know? But the monk is the one according to Merton who is called to go beyond that and some people talk about going into a kind of insanity almost some of them really do go beyond that and break through into the unknown to be an explorer in that sense sometimes it's just literature but there's a lot of truth in that monasticism easily becomes just a duplicate world sort of which is a little higher a little more a little better a little cleaner a little more Christian

[73:23]

but the monk and Merton continually insists on this it's called to go beyond that beyond any social context into solitude where he relates to God alone and rediscovers mankind and the world inside himself with God now you've got to balance that with the whole theology the whole spirituality of community which of course we do and no doubt not everybody is called to go into that that world you can sit there and say okay you come you die for one identity God which is not necessary then you take on another identity that's right of a monk that's right and then at a certain time once you're a monk you have to die to that and that's good as long as you admit that that phase is necessary for almost everybody of getting the monastic identity and Merton did that himself you can trace it in his writing as he's acquiring the identity of a monk in his early years at Gethsemane and then he gets the itch to go beyond that and especially with Merton who was a public figure at the same time

[74:24]

and that's why he's so bitter against this false self and the social identity because he saw himself as being a phony public image he writes about that really sarcastically sometimes the fellow who gave up beer you know as if that was the greatest thing he could do in the world so he says I like beer and I drink it whenever I get my hands on it but he hated that thing because he thought it was risking threatening to crush his real self you see and so he did everything he could to puncture that and to move beyond especially in his later years and hence the movement into the hermitage too away from any kind of esteem but he was too communicative a person to go entirely into solitude he always had to be writing or talking or in dialogue it seems paradoxical because he while he talks about that margin the value of that marginal going beyond he also talks about monasticism being a witness to the ordinary that's right that's right

[75:24]

I don't know how you get the two together but it's partly in the interpretation of the words extraordinary singular unusual and so on versus ordinary and it's partly probably something that was never reconciled in his own mind okay yeah I'm glad you brought that up you can turn to that another time because he says the monastic life is supposed to portray not the extraordinary but how a man should be how a man should live and so on if you carry that far enough it may carry you through the extraordinary and back again that is through that solitude and back again but that's carrying it so far that it becomes hardly practical at all if you have to get into that real state of perfection or whatever you want to call it on the other side of the desert in order to show that ordinariness it's something to think about later on you know the contemplation talks very much very well about the true self also

[76:25]

the true self is supposed to be found that's right that's right now remember that that thought is evolving in Merton though and it's never really definitive it's never final another thing about this is that Merton would say that the hermit is a man who lives an ordinary life ok in an external way and that the extraordinary or this adventure is interior alright the adventure and the the way that he really departs from the social context is more interior than exterior because in going off into solitude exteriorly he's going to live as an ordinary man a very simple life without any in fact without any excitement on the external level at all so that extraordinary and that whole journey there that whole inner trip is is interior and invisible it seems let's come back to that another time glory be to the father

[77:26]

and to the son and to the holy spirit the Lord is in the beginning and it is now and ever shall be world without end Amen

[77:35]

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