Animals recall the Kingdom of Heaven to come because they're so peaceful sometimes. They can go perfectly where they are, in a sense, in perfect contentment like children, whereas we're always restless and always worried. It takes us 20 years of meditation to get there. To get to that point. Not even that. Admire the cats, too. Because the cat is where it is. Last time we finished Conference 16 on friendship, and we thought it was worth spending some more time on that. So, on the subject. And actually we've got two principal subjects here, and one of them is friendship and what that is, what friendship is. It takes a little clarification. And the other one is anger. And connected with anger is the question of patience, being patient with one's brother. So we wanted to read some other things about that. In the Sayings of the Fathers, Book 16 on Patience.

[01:11]

Why, why? I'll read a couple of those sayings. Number nine. Abbot Pullman said, Whatever travail comes upon you shall be overcome by silence. Now, if we put that together with what Cassian has said in this conference, we find a flagrant contradiction. We talked about that last time. Silence is not the only remedy when you're talking about a relationship between two people. Silence does not solve everything. Even the Gospel tells us we have to go and be reconciled with our brother. And Cassian tells us about the kind of silence which is full of anger. Now, this is an illustration of the fact that you can't trust in just the words when you're talking about these things, but you have to ask what is underneath the word, what's meant by the word. What does the Father really mean? So Pullman's talking about, he's not talking about a relationship between two people,

[02:12]

he's talking about the monastic life in general. Even injustices that may be put upon you, and sufferings and afflictions and so on. But there may be a time when that silence is not enough. And Pullman himself proves it in a couple of places. There's a beautiful story, maybe we'll run into that one. Number 11. A man who saw a religious person, a monk, carrying a corpse on a bed said, Are you carrying dead men? Go and carry the living. That's really good. I didn't understand that for a long while, what he was talking about. What he means is, remember this is in the chapter on patience. What he means is you're wasting your time carrying dead people around, carrying bodies. He's not really reproaching the monk, but he's using this as an opportunity to teach a lesson. The work of a monk is to carry people, to carry living people, which means to bear his brothers. The work of a monk is to be patient.

[03:12]

How much patience? How long? How long? There's a limit. There's a limit to patience. With animals. The catchment doesn't say a word about cats. It's cold out there. And that's a good expression. Go and carry the living. Now, what does that do for us, mentally, psychologically, spiritually? It tells us that when we are oppressed by a brother, when somebody hurts us, when somebody has got our goat in some way, that that's exactly the way it should be, doesn't it? In other words, that that's our work, is to bear that. In a sense, that's our cross. In the sense of community life, one's cross is the relationship with one's brother. So, we always feel that something is out of joint, that something is wrong, and it shouldn't be that way when that happens, but that's what it's all about.

[04:17]

That's what's supposed to deepen our prayer and so on, and deepen our charity. If we just consider it in the light in which it hits us, as this fellow has done something terrible to me and I can't stand him, I never want to see him again. Well, we haven't done our work yet. Our work somehow is to get from that point to the point of charity. As Cashin talks about later on, he says, make your heart large enough so that that anger or whatever, that injustice can flow into it and just be drowned in that ocean of greatness of heart. Which is lovely to talk about, but very hard to do. Where do you begin, exactly? You begin, I guess, by looking at it. We'll talk about that later on. Begin by trying to see it objectively and to analyze it, in a sense, instead of just letting it sting as it is and turn into hatred. Like Maxima says, detach the passion from the image, which means detach the passion from the other person. Also, detach the passion from yourself. And then what have you got?

[05:18]

You've got the anger isolated out there somewhere. Then look at it. Various things you can do with it. Try to find its causes. And then bring it into your prayer in some way. But consider it to be your work, that's the thing. You see, that's your work. Which is much more important than making fruitcakes or anything else. Is to work through that passion. When you do that, you've really got something, if you can work through that passion. Of course, it takes years. But every time that we achieve a little victory. But you see, it's important for us to know what our work is, rather than to be putting our attention or energy into something else. And thinking that this is just kind of a distraction from our principal aim, which is to pray or something like that. But this is in the center of our work. But you say, to carry someone on your back, what does that mean exactly? It means to bear your brother with patience. It means to be patient. In other words, it means to find out ultimately, work your way through anger to charity.

[06:21]

If you think of Jesus, for instance, think of him carrying his cross. What was he carrying when he was carrying the cross? The cross is only a symbol, right? You can say he was carrying the sins of mankind, you can say he was carrying us. That Jesus was carrying man, was carrying the human race on his back when he was carrying the cross. Because you can read his whole work in terms of patience. You can say that the monk has to do the same thing. Which isn't to say that all of our life is on a horizontal level, but that's what the cenobitical life is about. If you read the Fathers about this, they'll talk about obedience and that kind of patience as being the work and the burden of the cenobitical life. Obedience being the vertical dimension and this patience with your brother being the horizontal dimension. Which makes it sound very grim, you know, but of course, if the work is accomplished, then there's a lot of joy that comes out of it, too. That's the thing. As a person gets through to the point of freedom,

[07:26]

from that narrowness of heart that Cashin is talking about to the wideness of heart that makes him able to be joyful even in the midst of being hurt and so on. And all of the friction that he might have on the outside. See, those sayings sometimes are worth worrying about when you don't understand them, until you get some kind of a thing out of it. And it may be that you would understand this one a different way from me, but that's what came to me after reading it a number of times. Go and carry the living. Our work is to bear one another. St. Paul talks about that, too. He says, bear one another's burdens. St. Benedict very much talks about it. The following one, in the same line. They said of a monk that the more bitterly anyone injured or assailed him, the more he was well disposed to them. For he said, people like this are a means to cure the faults of serious men. People who make them happy do their souls harm. How do you like that? For it is written, they that call thee blessed deceive thee.

[08:31]

That's in Isaiah, but you get similar words in the Gospel where Jesus says when men praise you and when they say all manner of nice things about you, look out because that's the way they did to the false prophets. But when they persecute you, that's just about right because that's what happened to the prophets before you. He says, people like this are a means to cure the faults of serious men. Now, who are the serious men? The serious men are the men who know what their work is, you see, in the light of the previous saying. And so they know that this is their work and they're serious about it. They're going to do it. They put their nose down to the grindstone, as it were. And so they work through this. And he says, to cure the faults, that's kind of deep in a way because it's not just a matter of learning the virtue of patience, but somehow your sins are being rubbed out when you do that. Your own faults are being cured by bearing the faults of others, which is a kind of symmetry, isn't it, in the scheme of salvation?

[09:34]

Your faults are healed by bearing the faults of other men. And you see how sin and penance are so related in that sense. You could theorize, maybe this isn't true, but you could theorize and you could say, well, most of our asceticism, what is it? Our asceticism is only a training for the real asceticism, which is in bearing the living, which is in bearing the burden of sin as it is reflected onto us by other people mistreating us and so on. As Origen said that the monastic life was a preparation for martyrdom. There wasn't any monastic life as such, there wasn't that name. He said the ascetic life was a preparation for martyrdom, which is that, you see, in the most extreme case. Persecution, suffering and being put to death. As if two phases. The one phase of training and then the other phase of the real work. But that's an exaggeration. And that would suggest that the monastic life comes to an end at a certain point in the menu. But you see how those things are related.

[10:36]

The serious, the serious men. Those are the ones that have this insight into this thing and they also have enough resolution so that they go through with it. That's hard. Maximus the Confessor writes a lot like that. He says, when you get mistreated and so on, don't be indignant, don't be angry. He says, that's what you've got coming to you for your faults. As if he were to say, in the words of Hemingway, that you've got a death to die and you're going to do it tomorrow, you're going to do it some other day. I always remember there were a couple of... Hemingway wrote a book on war, during the Second World War, I guess, with some glorifications of war. He was a fool in that respect. But there were a couple of wonderful sayings in that book and one of them was, sayings for listening courage, and one of them was, well, you have to die, we have a death to repay to God and it may as well be today as any other day. That kind of total detachment,

[11:38]

which enables a person to give himself to something. Well, there's a little of that in this, too. The idea is that you have to die to yourself and the person who helps you to do it is helping you out rather than hurting you. It's nice in the mind, but when the situation comes up it's another thing to really hold on to that. Because your emotions will boil and steam and erupt against it. The thought of death Remember, that notion of... Remember, Cassian says somewhere, keep the notion of death, the thought of death in your mind. And that's another angle, that's another way in which the thought of death heals this particular thing of anger. Yes, Saint Benedict does. Not in that light, I don't think. Not in the light of anger. Patience. Now, Maximus the Confessor, I refer you often to his Centuries on Charity

[12:41]

because they're really a beautiful summary of the monastic life. In these terms, of course. Also, that ascetical book of his, the Libra Asceticus, which is in the same volume, in ancient Christian writers, in the same line, describing the work of Christ. Those sayings of his on charity, are they contained in another book? Yes, they're in two books in the library. One of them is ancient Christian writers. It's about... I don't remember what number it is. 19 or 20. The other one is Early Fathers from the Philokalia. You know, the first volume of those two volumes of extraction of Philokalia. The last thing in the first volume is the whole of his Centuries on Charity. All 400 of them, yes. So it's all there. It's a pretty good translation, I think. So there's only one book that has them all? No, both books have them all. Well, you have to look at both books to get...

[13:43]

No, no. I mean, all of them are in each of those two books. We've got several copies of that Philokalia one. We've only got one copy of the ancient Christian writers one. And book 17 on charity was very closely related to this. A few sayings. Abba Anthony also said, From our neighbor our life and death. If we do good to our neighbor, we do good to God. If we cause our neighbor to stumble, we sin against Christ. In the light of what Gashon said about not letting anger remain either in your brother's heart. Number six. Abba Agathos said, I never went to sleep intentionally while I kept a grudge against anyone, nor did I let anyone go away to sleep while he had a grievance against me. Very simple, but not so easy to do. I don't know why these things are so hard, why it's so difficult for us to deal with these emotions.

[14:44]

It's the real spiritual battle. And all of the fear that's in our nature, our instinctive fear and everything is involved in it. Is that why the asceticism has to be pretty radical? I mean, you know, compared to the normal way in people of the world or something, where we really go, it seems like a why so much and at the same time, because it's so negative, it's so rooted in us. That's the reason. Because in the world there are a couple of things you can say about that. One thing is in the world that largely people don't go that far. In other words, they're going to live life on a certain level, right? Largely on an exterior level. That's one way. That doesn't get all the way to the truth to say that. But most people stay there on the exterior level. And they don't want to get any deeper because it's too difficult and too painful. Besides, they're kind of extroverted anyway. The stream tends to carry them along that way. But the people who do really grow to spiritual depth in the world

[15:49]

have to go through the same thing. But they may not go through it in an ascetical way. You see, they go through it precisely in this way, in relationships with other people, and having to love people in spite of all of the suffering that's in it. Like Victor spoke once of that lady who had the drunken husband, I guess, that beat her and mistreated her, and she stuck with him. Well, that's the same thing. It's the same battle. As living in a community with somebody who treats you badly and who makes you suffer a great deal. It's the same thing. It's the same fight, and it purifies a person in the same way. Even though it's done in great simplicity by this woman, she doesn't know any of this theory and so on. And she doesn't have any pretensions of arriving at great spiritual heights or becoming a contemplative. But she has to fight the same battle. To try not to hate. It's very difficult to live close to another person and not to have resentments and things like that stored up. God is present in it because it's love.

[16:49]

How's that? God is present in it because it's love. Yeah. If it's love, that's bringing God into the relationship. To work from our instinctive resentment and anger and even hatred through to love means to draw God into the relationship, as it were, according to his word. He gives you the commandment. It's sort of the blueprint. You say, Well, here's the blueprint, but how can I make it unless you're in it? And so he comes into it to make it. But there's a lot of suffering involved in that. A lot of purification has to happen when it happens. I remember a woman who was a very good woman and was a married woman. She said to me, Why is it so difficult for us to live together without hating one another? And I think maybe it's because the devil is in it too. Maybe it's the devil that gives that particular twist to our feelings which turns just suffering into hatred, which turns it against another person,

[17:54]

in that way. I don't know. Maybe that's it. I make it sound very bad. Maybe I have a blacker heart than other people, but I find that to be very real. That anger has kind of a murderous quality about it. It's very overpowering when it takes position. People are very different. Some people explode and then they forget it and other people smolder, you know. And they're all burning inside all the time. I suppose it's better to have the first kind of temperament as far as just anger is concerned. They've got some great... A lot of these sayings and stories are cases, remarkable examples of patience. Like when Abhijan and these monks go out into the desert and one of the brothers is leading them

[18:54]

and he loses the way and they don't want to show him up to make him feel bad by telling him, you've misled us. So Abhijan says, well, if we say anything to him he'll be grieved. Look, I'll pretend that I'm tired and say I can't walk and we'll lie here until daylight. And so they did so. They stayed there until daybreak so that they should not abuse the monk who had wrongly guided them. That sort of sensitivity, extraordinary sensitivity to the feelings of another. This expression, not to grieve another brother, that's great sensitivity. In other words, to hurt oneself rather than grieve the other. It's very, very hard to do. A real test of luck. There's a little lie there too, huh? Yes. We'll get into that in the next conference, number 17, where Keshen talks about the whole question of lies. It's surprising that a lot of the fathers don't have the same puritanical feeling about lying that we do. Abba Pullman said this,

[20:04]

There is nothing greater in love than that a man should lay down his life for his neighbor. Remember, that's Jesus in the Gospel. When a man hears a complaining word and struggles against himself and does not himself begin to complain, when a man bears an injury with patience and does not look for revenge, that is when a man lays down his life for his neighbor. Now, he's talking about a monastic interpretation of that saying of Jesus, right? Because ordinarily the monk isn't called upon to lay down his life in shedding his blood. That's a rarity, isn't it? I mean, not one person, maybe, in a million, is called on to do that, right? So how does that saying of Jesus apply to everybody? Since the Gospel, you know, is meant to be for our everyday lives. And how does it apply to the monk, who is not very often called upon to be a martyr? So Pullman makes that kind of exegesis and I think he's right. He's in a direct line, you see, and in a very practical way, which happens to us all the time. In other words, to overcome oneself

[21:09]

and one's own instinct, one's own inner impulse, in order for the good of a brother, even a brother against whom one is moved, whom one does not like at that moment, against whom one is angry, that is to lay down one's life for one's neighbor. He's saying that your life is what's most alive in you at that moment. It's your heart at that moment and if your heart is angry, to lay down your life is to lay down that anger, right? Because you are that at the moment, from a certain point of view. As far as your feeling is concerned. There's one about the monk who was making baskets and he had them all finished and he was putting the handles on them and then another monk nearby says, I don't have any handles, what am I going to do? So he took off the handles he had put on his own baskets and took them to the nearby monk saying, I don't need these, take them and put them on your baskets. Another lie, by the way. And he allowed the brother to finish his baskets, but left his own unfinished. Which is a symbolic playing out, as it were,

[22:11]

of this business of preferring brother to self. Preferring a brother's needs to your own needs. Or laying down your life for your brother. Doesn't that come to, when people ask us, do we need their help? We might need their help, but we say, no, don't bother. The white lie there. Sometimes, however, it's good for the other person to be able to give us help, you see. Whereas this case, it's a case of one person really suffering deprivation. It's either you or me. This is the case, it's you or me. There are many cases like that, isn't there? They don't happen to us that often. One of us is going to lose out, so I'll lose out rather than letting you lose out. That's the situation here. The other situation, it may be good for the other person to make that sacrifice if he's making it to the Lord, you see. The theory of Brother Anthony and Father Menard that if I ask you for money to build my seminary,

[23:14]

I'm doing you a favour by relieving you of that unnecessary wealth that you have in order to serve God and gain grace by that. So you should be grateful now. Give it to me. I think Father Pedro used to have a line like that too. I've never had the brass to approach anybody like that. So, it's kind of complicated because there can be different motives, different effects when a person offers to help you. Yours often, when somebody offers to help me and I say, No, thanks, it's because, a couple of reasons. We don't want to be bothered with another person's fooling around in what we're doing. Or, we'd rather be self-sufficient and not be put in the position of having to thank anybody or owing anybody anything. Too often it's that way, you see. They say it's harder for us to accept help than to give it often because to accept it we have to be humble.

[24:15]

And often a person will offer to give you help because he wants a little bit to be in a superior position, the position of a person who's giving help. Or because he needs to be needed, as they say, that sort of thing. It's very complex. It's a forest of different human impulses and so on. Sometimes, very often, even if we don't absolutely need the help, it's good just to say thank you and to accept it. In that way, you're putting yourself aside, in a sense, to accept the help because you'd rather not have it. It's an annoyance to you, you know. But he wants to give it. It happens a lot. Here's a good saying. Number 19. An old man was asked, How is it that some struggle away at their religious life but do not receive grace like the old fathers? Now, this is a question that can be asked every day in a religious life. I mean, we ask it. Why doesn't the monastic life seem to be full of life and fervor and enthusiasm the way it was in the days of the desert

[25:18]

or St. Bernard or St. Romeo? And the old man said, Because then charity ruled, and each one drew his neighbor upward. Now charity is growing cold, and each of us draws his neighbor downward, and so we do not deserve grace. That's beautiful. He's saying, Well, it hardly needs to be interpreted, you know. What does he mean by drawing one another downward? It could mean many things, in many ways. But he's saying that there's a lack of drawing one another upward as we should. Now, how do we draw one another upward? Well, it might partly be by exhortation. But largely, I think, it's the matter of that intensity of relationship, that intensity of union, of love, of friendship, whatever you want to call it, you see, which somehow draws God into the relationship. And it's just good to meditate on that, meditate on that saying around our own life, I mean, our own experience, in the light of that saying. How we draw one another upward

[26:20]

and how we draw one another downward. We draw one another downward in very subtle ways, simply by not helping the other. We draw one another downward just by standing back from the other very often and not caring, you know. Which isn't to say that we should always be in a big mush of sentimental intimacy and all that, you know. But that there should be concern and there should be always sort of this beating, that kind of circulation of the blood almost, of trying to raise upwards, trying to edify, trying to move forward, that sort of thing. And always sort of to have our brother's spiritual good in mind, not in too, you know, dictatorial a way. There's a whole lot in that saying, right? I haven't really pointed to much of it. Remember, that was the saying of Jesus that in the last days charity will grow cold, will grow cold on the earth. And when the Son of Man would come, will he find faith on the earth? Now, drawing one's neighbor downward

[27:22]

also obviously can be in things that we say. Things that we say which are negative instead of positive. The least little negative trend that's given to a conversation and so on, and pretty soon the conversation is a negative conversation, it's a strange phenomenon. The big difference between, and just becoming critical about things and becoming critical about people doesn't matter much who it is or what it is that we're criticizing, but pretty soon the tone of the thing is negative and pretty soon we're getting a satisfaction out of the negativity of the conversation. It's a weird thing the way it happens. We get some kind of yield, some kind of self-satisfaction out of criticizing other things and other people. Here's a good one. Farmer had a quarrel. Number 22. Two old men lived together for many years without a quarrel. You may have heard this before. One said to the other,

[28:23]

Let us have one quarrel with each other, as is the way of men. Before we die, let's have one fight because we haven't had that experience and everybody else has. And the other answered, I do not know how a quarrel happens. And the first said, Look, I put a tile between us, a brick, I put a brick between us and I say, That's mine. Then you say, No, it's mine. That's how you begin a quarrel. So they put a brick between them and one of them said, That's mine. And the other said, No, it's mine. And he answered, Yes, it's yours. Take it away. And they went away, unable to argue with each other. That goes along, you know, with the helping the thieves to carry away the stuff on theirself. It's the same psychology. About anger.

[29:30]

Now, I found there's a whole section of the Institutes on Anger, and that's Book Eight of the Institutes. So here I was looking for a lot of other references, you know, and I overlooked that and I didn't catch it. So perhaps now is not the time to study that in detail. But I'd like to refer you to it and just give the final gist of it. Book Eight of the Spirit of Anger, which, now remember, these are identified with demons here in Kashinology. And the spirit of anger is something that comes into you. The demon is almost identified with the passion, behind the passion. It begins on page 257, goes to page 263. And the gist of it simply is that it's never justified to be angry with your brother. It comes down to that. That the only justified anger is anger against your own passions,

[30:30]

or against the devil, or whatever you want to call it then. He says, Whatever source of anger you have, it has the same bad effect. From almost every cause, the emotion of wrath boils over and blinds the eyes of the soul. Blinds the eyes of the soul. That's good. In other words, it cuts a person off from truth. And bringing the deadly beam of a worse disease over the keenness of our sight presents us from seeing the Son of Righteousness, Christ. It doesn't make any difference what you put over your eyes, he says. Whether it's righteous or unrighteous, that's good. Righteous in quotation marks. Because you blind yourself anyway. And then most of the rest of it is just sort of commentary on an explanation of it. What is the sun which should not go down on your wrath? Here's another good sort of allegorical interpretation in chapter 10 here.

[31:32]

Let not the sun go down upon your anger. So he says, The sun is the mind, it's the noose or reason, which is called the sun because it looks over all the thoughts and discernings of the heart. It should not be put out by the sun of anger, lest when it goes down, the shadows of disturbance together with the devil or author fill all the feelings of our hearts. And overwhelmed by the shadows of wrath is in a murky night we know not what we ought to do. So he set aside the adjectives there. What he's saying is that, first of all, he said that anger clouds the sun of righteousness, right? Anger clouds the mind. And then he says, Let not the sun go down upon your anger. Let not your discernment, your reason. But he means, when he talks about the noose and when he talks about the mind, there he's talking about something very deep. He's talking about the discretion, discernment. He's really talking about the heart in the end, the light of the heart, as it were, which is the deepest light in you. He says, Let that not be put out by anger,

[32:36]

but let that overcome the anger. That's what it means. But he doesn't say, Don't wait. He does say, Don't wait until sundown, but instantly, when he applies it in this way. So that's not a bad interpretation. And then he talks a lot about that business of being angry still and being silent, and hypocrisy and so on, and the need for reconciliation, the need for open reconciliation. And then he talks about the people who go into solitude before they've overcome the passion of anger. It's a good section. Fairly rich in content. Here's the last chapter.

[33:37]

Wherefore, the athlete of Christ who strives lawfully ought thoroughly to root out the feeling of wrath. It's as if he's saying that the thing itself is wrong, no matter what the cause for it, which is not necessarily to say that it's a... You don't have to say that it's a sin to say that, you only need to say that it's in your way, that it's keeping you from love and from contemplation, keeping you from the goal. You don't have to say it's a big sin. It may be in certain cases. And it will be a sure remedy for this disease if in the first place we make up our mind that we ought never to be angry at all, whether for good or bad reasons, as we know that we shall at once lose the light of discernment and the security of good counsel. That's that sun of righteousness he was talking about, let not the sun go down. And our very uprightness and the temperate character of righteousness. If the main light of our heart has been darkened by its shadows, you see. So he's identifying that with contemplation and with charity and with purity of heart just as back in the first conference, you see. Or ahead of the first conference

[34:39]

because we're in the institutes here. Next, that the purity of our soul will presently be clouded and that it cannot possibly be made a temple for the Holy Ghost while the spirit of anger resides in us. Lastly, that we should consider that we ought never to pray nor pour out our prayer to God while we are angry. And then finally, he puts before you the thought of death. It's the same, very much the same doctrine. The next book here is a book on dejection or despondency or depression. In the fourth chapter, he says, sometimes this depression comes from the fault of previous anger. We were talking about that anger, which is allowed to smolder and not expressed, turns into self-hatred and depression. Okay. Also, in Evagrius, Evagrius writes a lot about the passion of anger. He was sort of the first one to analyze it

[35:41]

the way he does among the early Christians. And in his Practicos, if you look in Fr. John Yud's index to this book under anger, you'll find all the references. I'll just give a couple of them. The most fierce passion is anger. This is Practicos, number 11. In fact, it is defined as a boiling and stirring up of wrath against anyone who is given injury or is thought to have done so. It constantly irritates the soul and above all, at the time of prayer, it seizes the mind and flashes the picture of the offensive person before one's eyes. Then there comes a time when it persists longer, is transformed into indignation, stirs up alarming experiences by night, frightening dreams and so on. This is succeeded by a general debility of the body, malnutrition with its attendant pallor and the illusion of being attacked by poisonous wild beasts. And his big principle

[36:42]

is that anger gets in the way of prayer. And if you have anger in your heart, you can't pray. This comes out more in the chapters on prayer than it does in the practicals, I suppose. In the practicals, he talks about how you get rid of anger. Turbid anger is calmed by the singing of psalms, by patience and almsgiving. But Gashin says something else is needed, because he's talking about the solitary remedies here, but Gashin says you've got to be reconciled to your brother. Let not the sun go down upon our anger, lest by night the demons come upon us to strike fear in our souls and render our spirits more cowardly for the fight on the morrow. For images of a frightful kind usually arise from anger's

[37:42]

disturbing influence, dreams. Indeed, there is nothing more disposed to render the spirit inclined to desertion than trouble and irascibility. There's a footnote by John E. Edgerton who remembers as a psychiatrist. Was the keen awareness of Agrius had of the evil consequences of anger in all its varied forms, that is, the consequences of resentment, hatred and, when inverted, sadness and depression, based solely on his experiences with man and knowledge of himself? Or was he also impressed with the place of anger in classical Greek literature and especially in Homer? Anger that is far sweeter than trickling honey grows in men's hearts like smoke, is quoting Homer. About this business of anger, there's a lot of contemporary discussion of anger and assertiveness and so on. The essential principle

[38:44]

nowadays is that anger and these emotions need, first of all, to be allowed to surface, they need to be recognized and then often people say, in some way they need to be expressed. It doesn't mean that they have to be acted out by punching somebody but they have to have some outlet, some outlet. And you find very different versions of this from people who recommend quite an aggressiveness to people who tell you how to turn the anger into assertiveness, which is not aggressiveness but is a kind of activity which uses that energy, to people who tell you how to work out the anger in communication that is with the other person, which is a hard thing to do, it takes a lot of courage. This Powell, I don't know if you know many of these books. John Powell is a Jesuit. He's written about four or five books about this size.

[39:45]

This is one of the first ones, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am. And in it he collects a lot of contemporary psychology from different sides. And in this he talks about dealing with emotions very largely. And I'll quote you just a couple of things as a resume of his doctrine. Here he's saying that the secret of personal growth is communication. So this of course, this kind of theory, completely horizontal theory, has to be integrated into the monastic life. It's one element which has to be integrated, because he leaves out the vertical dimension almost entirely. The dimension of prayer, the ascetical dimension, the dimension that Cassian is talking about, you see. He talks about the horizontal dimension, which Cassian talks about as reconciliation with your brother, which he talks about as

[40:46]

communication. But involved in this is also the recognition of the emotion yourself. And a lot of our problems are because we don't recognize the feeling that we have in ourselves for what it is. And we press it, we push it down. So, he's got certain rules for what he calls gut-level communication. You may or may not like that expression. Words, rules. I always like things with numbers on them, and he's got these numbers. One, emotions are not moral, that is good or bad. No, that's number two. Here's number one. Rule one. Gut-level communication, translated into civil terms, is emotional openness and honesty, must never imply a judgment of the other. That is, one has to learn to express his emotions. You don't say that you're a bum, but you say,

[41:47]

I feel angry, something like that, you see. It doesn't imply judgment on the other, either in paying yourself for as you express it to the other. Second, emotions are not moral, that is good or bad. Emotions in themselves are not good or evil. It's only when you give yourself to them, right, when you act them out, when you accept them, when you allow them to fructify in you, that they carry on that moral quality. Emotions are natural, the way they spring up. Three, feelings must be integrated with the intellect and will, which means that you can't repress them, you have to bring them into the light, you have to bring them into the light of that sun of righteousness that Keshen is talking about. Keshen is talking about the intellect and the will, which are illuminated by grace, whereas Powell is not explicitly talking about that. So, you've got to recognize what's in you, and then you've got to freely decide what you're going to do with that emotion, whether to act it out, whether to suppress it, whether to communicate it to the other person, or whether to talk about it with another friend, maybe,

[42:47]

or with a confessor or somebody, in order to get it off your mind. Rule four, in gut-level communication, emotions must be reported. Now, this is the hardest part of all. It means you've got... you're supposed to communicate the emotion to the other person's concern. If you're angry at somebody, you should tell him, only it's very delicate the way that you tell him. I'm not giving this as gospel, but only as a kind of representative point of view, which really adds something to the picture which Cashin is giving us, you see, in dealing with our emotions. Rule five, with rare exceptions, emotions must be reported at the time that they're being experienced, not later on after you feel flaccid. And that's hard too. It takes a lot of courage to do this sort of thing. And I think he's kind of an extremist on it. I don't think it's always as prudent as he would seem to suggest. He's not reckoning enough

[43:47]

I think, on that other dimension. I think the trick is to know when it is good. The trick, because you can do it, but how and when? If the other person at that moment is too sensitive, you can just touch off something hopeless, you know. You both get yourselves into a state out of control. Because the other person didn't know it and he's going to say, oh, that's how he thinks about it. Yeah. And then he starts thinking about it and he gets mad. And he hasn't read the book. So here we've got some rules. I've found some more numbers. The healthy reaction and the unhealthy reaction. He's got an example here. And this is a situation of an argument, okay, where you're getting angry. You're having a discussion with a member of your family or a friend. There are several differences of opinion and very gradually voices and blood pressures

[44:48]

rise. You are beginning to feel the stress of strong feelings. What should you do? Okay, here's the sequence. The healthy reaction. First, be aware of your emotions. Turn your mind briefly away from the argument and pay direct attention to your emotional reaction. Ask yourself, what am I feeling? Is it embarrassment because his arguments sound better? Is it fear? Is it superiority? And so on. Unhealthy. Ignore your emotional reaction. Just push it down and don't recognize it. Pretend that you're not feeling it. Just try to sort of force your way through and keep your eye on the argument in spite of it. Secondly, healthy. Admit your emotion. Unhealthy. Keep denying your emotions. The healthy reaction. Turn your full awareness towards the emotion. Take a good look so you can identify it. Estimate, too, how strong it is. It is anger and pretty high voltage, too. Number three, investigate your emotion. The healthy reaction. If you

[45:48]

really want to find out a lot about yourself, ask your anger how it got there and where it came from. Trace the origin of your emotion. You may not be able to uncover the whole family tree of your present emotion, but you may just get a glimpse of an inferiority complex to which you have never admitted. Whereas the unhealthy reaction is just to keep fighting, that is, keep focused on the argument and how you're going to win. Number four, the healthy reaction. Report your emotion. Just the facts, no interpretations or judgments. For instance, let's cool this down for a minute. I'm getting too worked up and I'm starting to say things I don't really mean. It's very important not to accuse or judge in this report. Do not tell him that it is his fault that you got so angry. It really isn't his fault. It's something in you. Don't blame him even to yourself. That's not easy either. So this takes a real kind of inner strength to be able to do this sort of thing. Number five, integrate your emotion.

[46:48]

That's the healthy reaction. Having listened to your emotion and having questioned it and reported it, now let your mind judge what is the right thing to do and let your will carry out the judgment. Say, for example, let's start again. I think I've been too defensive to listen to you. I'd like to try again. Or would you mind if we dropped the subject? I'm afraid I'm getting too touchy to discuss anything. Okay, now I've just given you a little sliver of what he has to say there. But you sort of get the idea. I haven't given you the reasons he gives why that kind of communication is so important. But you see that a lot of what he says there is implicit maybe in what Cashin says about not leaving your anger in silence, burying it under the ... exactly thinking of it that way. He's probably saying, well, you should go to your brother and say, look, I'm sorry that I offended you. I'm sorry about this whole thing, even if it's not your fault, something like that. Whereas this is a deliberate

[47:49]

attempt to express emotion. There's a principle, a presupposition under that, isn't there, that it's healthy to express emotion to communicate it, that it's necessary to do that. I don't know if Cashin would say that. I don't think Cashin would say that, as a matter of fact. He'd say, no, you've got to keep that emotion inside. What you should do is not necessarily dissimulate it, lie about it, but you've got to overcome it with charity, something like that. But he's saying you've got to express it. And that's the contemporary point of view. Some people put it a lot more strongly. It'll tell you how to win the argument, or how to hold your own and forget about the other fellow. Whereas Powell has Christianized it somewhat. But that's to be reckoned with when we talk about these emotional things, about these relationships, that sort of thing. Now, I've been very unfair to it because I just wanted to take

[48:52]

a look at it for a moment. Some other time maybe we can talk about it more. I don't pretend to be an expert on it. Also, I've had no practical experience in that kind of thing. You see, the encounter group is typically where you work that sort of thing out. And there are all kinds of encounter groups, from the sensitivity group where it can be pretty violent to something which may be quite in a religious context. Have any of you had any experience with any of those things? Just a little bit. With some friends. If you've got a prior commitment to working work at that sort of thing. I imagine it can work out pretty well. If everybody's agreed, well, we're here for this now. We're going to do this. It's another thing where the other person has not made a commitment to it, and you just decide, well, I'm going to operate on this principle now. Brother William, he was telling me the other

[49:52]

day, he said, we have a thing we do in our community. Once in a while we'll have a conversation and we'll deliberately ask at various points in the conversation, where is that coming from? What you said or what I said, what is the motivation for that? What's the feeling behind that? Let's identify it. And they do that, the three of them. That's the sort of exercise you can do based on a prior commitment. A very useful thing it can be. And one reason why it's useful, a couple reasons, is you stand aside from your own feeling at that point. You don't identify yourself with your feeling, you see, but you stand by and you detach yourself from the feeling and you attach yourself to your brother so that you can look at it together, right? So that does something, doesn't it? It's possible that that would help to arrive at a union

[50:53]

and a deeper plane between you and your brother, stepping completely beyond that feeling that's there. Possible. I don't know if it works that way. But in a small group it could be a good way to operate. Interesting to try it. Only the trouble with those things is you get to a point where you can't say everything that's in your heart. You can't admit to every feeling that's in your heart. Unless you're very close to that group, unless you know the people very well and you're very much committed to the group, or unless you're not committed to them at all. For instance, if you go to Esalen for a weekend and you come from Detroit or something like that, you can be as frank as you want to because you'll never see those people again, right? I mean, you probably wouldn't be bashful about saying anything that was inside of you as long as they didn't know you and you were never going to... There's no relationship. Or if you're so deep into the relationship that

[51:53]

you have that confidence in everybody that you can say everything that you feel and not be afraid of offending them or alienating them or disgusting them or whatever, you in between where most of our life is, is very difficult to be that frank. There's probably something that has to be worked in gradually. With experience you have to find how far you can go. But then you always arrive at the question, well, now, we're assuming here that the real light, the real theater of operation is between my brother and me, but isn't it between myself and God? You've got two completely different theories there, you see. Now, do they overlap or do they contradict one another? I'm inclined to think that they overlap, but that you have to find the relationship between the two sort of by prudent experiment and by discernment. So you see what the fruits are of both of those things. And our way is primarily

[52:53]

the vertical way, of course, traditionally. Excuse me. Working these things out by prayer and, as the father says, as Gautam said, by patience, you know, by working within your own heart to work it out. Bringing it into the light, but working it out in the light of God and between you and God and your own heart. And then, when necessary, being reconciled to your brother. But that forum of the horizontal sphere with your brother is not the principle one as it is with all of these. It depends also very much on how you're living. If you're living close to one another, as you are down here, especially when people are in a tight centripetal setting, the horizontal thing is going to be much more significant than when somebody is living alone, right? And has less relationship with his brother. That's obvious. Right.

[53:55]

On the question of friendship, I'd like to read just a little from C.S. Lewis. This book, The Four Loves of Deception and Friendship. His idea of friendship... He distinguishes friendship from the other three kinds of love, and those kinds are, first of all, likings and loves for the subhuman. He's got more than... And then... That's a very mild sort of thing. Then affection, which is between people who simply, just like old shoes, sort of, they're just close to one another until they gradually develop a sort of harmony. Nothing... It doesn't need to be very deep. And there's friendship. And there's eros, which is romantic love, which has

[55:03]

a sexual element in it also. And then finally there's charity, or agape. Now, how does friendship fit in between these others? The four real kinds of love are affection and friendship, eros and charity. He starts out by saying that friendship is not much appreciated in our day. In fact, people don't think about it much at all. And the reason he says it is because it's, in a way, the least natural form of love. It has not such strong natural forces behind it. Another answer is that that takes a little explanation. Remember, he's distinguishing it from eros. He's distinguishing it from romantic love, which has any sexual element in it at all. So almost by definition he's calling it a love which is not based simply on natural attraction. And I think that his idea of

[56:03]

friendship is a rather English idea of friendship. It's kind of rarefied. It's kind of platonic, you might say, in a sense. I don't know if that's accurate. It's the friendship of two people who share a common interest, okay? That's his definition of friendship. Two people who are interested in the same thing. He says another reason why it's not much appreciated nowadays is because few people experience it. The possibility of going through life without the experience is rooted in that fact which separates friendship so sharply from both the other loves. Friendship is, in a sense, not at all derogatory to it, the least natural of loves, the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves. There is nothing throaty about it, nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between individuals. The moment two men are friends, they have, in some degree, drawn apart together from the herd. The species,

[57:07]

biologically considered, has no need of it because it doesn't reproduce the species. The pack or herd, the community, may even dislike and distrust it. There is always a strong distrust of individual friendships. In particular friendships, they were called in the religious life, in the religious community. And they were often suspected of having a basis either of homosexuality, something like that, or of murmuring, or of discontent and kind of rebellion against the structure, against the superiors of the community, that sort of thing. And partly just this element. The leaders of the community very often do. Headmasters and headmistresses and heads of religious communities, colonels and ship's captains, can feel uneasy when close and strong friendships arise between little knots of their subjects. Okay, I'm just going to read you a few snippets of this also. Is he saying that

[58:11]

one shouldn't have that kind of friendship? No. No, he's not saying that. What he's going to say in the end is that friendship is very double-edged. That is that you can share a common interest, which is either good or which is evil, okay? So you can be drawn together into friendship in either a positive or negative way, which I think is true. everything depends on the common interest, on the bond. So he's being a little critical there about the community and so on, and about authority, and that it is suspicious always of friendship. Maybe it shouldn't be. It's implicit there. Friendship. Now, companionship or clubbableness is the matrix of friendship. It's a much, it's a weaker relationship. Friendship arises out of mere companionship

[59:15]

when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till the moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure or burden. The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, what, you two? I thought I was the only one. You get the idea there. There's an interest which somebody has, there's a solitary interest, and then somebody, he finds out that somebody else shares it, you know, and so a certain type of music or literature or whatever. Or potentially also, you see, a spiritual interest, and that's where it becomes interesting for us, this theory of his about friendship. Suppose two people share precisely their spiritual quest, their spiritual goal. Now that's what Cashin is talking about when he's talking about friendship, isn't it? He says that's the basis. He talks about it in terms of equal purpose and equal virtue, right? Having the same goal in life, the same basic interest which is monastic perfection, which is the kingdom of God, which is Christ, which is contemplation also. And being more or less

[60:17]

at the same level in it, which we weren't too sure of when we read it. Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. They would be glad to reduce it. The first two would be glad to find a third. I'm not sure that's always true. If the element of a shared interest is very great, it will tend to be true, though, rather than the directly interpersonal element. And it won't be an exclusive friendship. Now, the kind of friendship that is negative in a religious community tends to be the exclusive friendship, negative from the point of view of charity, where if a third person comes you don't want to keep them outside because some of it is kind of jealousy in the friendship. In our own time,

[61:18]

friendship arises in the same way. For us, of course, the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions, but one or two or three who share something more will be our friends. And this kind of love, as Emerson said, do you love me, means do you see the same truth? Or at least, do you care about the same truth? The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our friend. He need not agree with us about the answer. It's okay. I think he's kind of narrowly defining friendship there, but it's a useful definition because it brings clarity to the question. He says that friendship is like companionship, it's kind of a concentration of companionship. The companionship was between people

[62:19]

who were doing something together, hunting, studying, painting, or what you will. The friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined. Still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry. Still collaborating, but in some work the world does not or not yet take account of. Still traveling companions, but on a different kind of journey. And here we feel a very great closeness to the spiritual life, you see, to the monastic life, possibly to a monastic community. Hence we picture lovers face to face, but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead, they look ahead towards the goal, the interest that they have. That is why those pathetic people who simply want friends can never make any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Where the truthful answer to the question, do you see the same truth, would be, I see nothing and I don't care about the truth, I only want a friend. No friendship can arise. Though affection, of course, may arise. There would be nothing

[63:20]

for the friendship to be about. And friendship must be about something even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing. Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers. It so happens that that comes very close to the heart of the meeting of a monastic community, I think. And that the people are drawn together precisely by their common goal. And so, they don't sit there looking at one another, but they sort of are drawn into the intense movement towards that common goal, which becomes a common thing. And the more intent they are on that goal, the closer they're drawn together. That's what Cashin says, right? Where he says, the strength of the friendship depends on the purpose and the virtue, which means the speed or the energy with which they're moving towards that goal. That's what holds them together. Which may sound very mathematical, but it's really in terms, in terms of love, in terms of the ultimate reality. Some of the things

[64:21]

that he says about friendship don't hold up so well for a monastic community, however. One of them is the fact that friendship, he says, is a completely free thing. That is, you can't be constrained in any way to be friends with anybody. Some of you take it voluntarily. Well, that's not true in a monastic community, is it? Because you join a community and then others join it after you and you don't choose all of those people, right? It's not a completely spontaneous thing. It is up to a point when you say, well, I want to be a member of this group. Yes, after that. So that's something that cuts across the theory. Of course, we do not want to know our friend's affairs at all. Friendship, like Eros, is uninquisitive, unlike affection, I guess. You become a man's

[65:22]

friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these unconcerning things, matters of fact, to do with the real question, that is, do you see the same truth? In a circle of true friends, each man is simply what he is, stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two pence about anyone else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course, you will get to know about most of these in the end, but casually. They will come out bit by bit to furnish an illustration or an analogy to serve as pegs for an anecdote, never for their own sake. This is the kingliness of friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, free from our context. This love essentially ignores not only our physical bodies, but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past, and connections. That's interesting, interesting to debate because is it true or is it not? It strikes

[66:22]

a lot of resonance with monastic community where precisely we're not encouraged to talk a lot about the things, especially in the old days, to talk about the things that we were or had or were connected with before we came into the monastery. St. Benedict says, don't talk about the things outside of the world. But can we carry that completely to its... Because what it seems to do, does it not, is to abstract from the whole person and take off a piece of him and just associate with that. Right? In other words, I abstract from the total existence of this person and I simply remove the section which is interested in the same thing I'm interested in, stamp collecting or rare books or whatever it is and I deal with that. Well, that's a pretty rarified and dehumanized kind of relationship, isn't it? However, in the spiritual life it may begin to have some meaning because remember that we're talking about the person's deeper being when we're talking about the spiritual life, when we're talking about the monastic or contemplative life.

[67:22]

It's not just a section of his personality, it's the whole deeper self of the person, right? Now, for that deeper self these things of background and family and age and experience are a little bit irrelevant, right? So, there's more sense to it in the monastic life, in the contemplative life and yet for me it's still not completely convincing because he's abstracting friendship here and isolating it a little bit too much, I think. He's being too analytical but in being too analytical he's being extremely helpful because he helps us to see it, you know, clearly. But then we have to let it merge back into the totality of the person and into the totality of the relationship which, if it's really interested in the person is also going to be interested in the human person. I mean, the person also that we see, you know. Well, where did you get that hole in your head, you know? How did... Various things. I mean, the person, you're interested in the concrete person also. Not only in his, say, in his true self which somehow magically you see beneath

[68:23]

all of the rubbish on the surface, you know. So, there's a lot of truth to that in the monastic life. Ask Brother Angelus. That's one thing he always objected to was any curiosity about everybody's background. Yeah, he mentioned that. Every once in a while he slips into baseball language. He used to be a pitcher in high school. Yeah. But if you get to know about, you know, you come closer somehow if you know about the guy's background and all. Sure, sure. You see, we need these human helps and he's abstracting from them almost totally. And in the old theory of the monastic life you're abstracted from them totally too. I mean, you don't care where a person comes from and his family, but you do care. You care about him in his totality. And you don't just care about the common interest but you care about him too, you know, as a total person. So, I think his definition of friendship is too narrow but it helps us to see it clearly. Because you can take his definition and reintegrate it with what you know. Especially about

[69:25]

how the Lord brought the person about, you know. That is the most interesting. Okay, now, he's not talking about the spiritual path so that's another thing. So spiritual friendship is going to add other dimensions, isn't it? Hence, if you will not misunderstand me, says the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself. For God did not need to create. It has no survival value. Rather, it's one of those things which give value to survival. Well, that's beautiful. I don't know if it's a hundred percent true but it's beautiful. And yet we see in a community, if we're going to define monastic community as friendship then we have to say, well, at a certain point we've got a duty to be friends with people. At which point it separates itself from the kind of friendship

[70:25]

that he's talking about, precisely. And you can't say if you talk about friendship as involving a certain affection, that's another difficulty because affection doesn't come about because you want it to come about because you decide that it's going to be there, does it? It's something that precedes you more or less. You like a person because you like him and you don't know why very often. It's not something you give reasons for. And it's not something you do on purpose even though your decision may be very much connected with it. It is prior to the decision in a way. Prior to the decision of friendship, in other words. So it's not all as deliberate and intentional as he may put it. Now, here, no doubt we're mixing it up with these other levels of love like eros and affection or whatever. But that beautiful freedom of friendship, that's something he's got there. And then he goes on and he talks about all the negative possibilities of friendship. I don't need to go into that.

[71:26]

So he's not just He's talking about the positive possibilities of friendship. He does talk about sort of the accidental qualities of friendship. In reality, a few years' difference in friendship being free of all the certain accidental things... We think we have chosen our peers, our friends, but in reality But in reality, a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, so on. The accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting, any of these chances might have kept us apart. But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, can truly say to every group of Christian friends, you have not chosen one another, but I have

[72:29]

chosen you for one another. Now, this is especially true in a community, because we believe that the community is a result of the Holy Spirit, giving people a particular vocation, so. Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men. By friendship, God opens our eyes to them, so a kind of epiphany of, what, of the image of God, really, in man. They are like all beauties derived from him, and then in a good friendship, increased by him through the friendship itself, so that it is his instrument for creating as well as for revealing. So, some good things to say, I guess we won't be able to spend any more time on that subject. I don't know if there are any things you wanted to discuss about it.

[73:29]

There's an article by a certain Giovanni Tabacco called Privilege of Amoris on Friendship and Fraternal Affection Among the Early Canaubes. It's a good article, but unfortunately it's in Italian, it's never been translated. And the friendship was quite intense among St. Ronaldo and his first disciples, the first generation of Canaubes, surprisingly so. The amount of affection, too, you know, the amount of emotion. It's difficult for us to empathize with it, because we come from a different age. You know, what sort of bothers me is when, let's say you're in the community especially, and when you just, you see someone and something comes over you that's pretty overpowering, where you just don't have much like for that person. Yes. How do you deal with that? There's no way that you can overpower that feeling, I don't think.

[74:32]

It may be with you for years, and so that's a real test of charity. In a sense, you can say that friendship, in the way in which Lewis is talking about, can't be there, right? Or probably won't be there, because friendship, it seems to involve a certain affection, a certain feeling. Although, there are so many things, so many ways of working at that. One of them is obviously to work at developing a common interest, something like that. To find something in a person that you can relate to, I suppose that's the secret, just on a natural level. Maybe he has one thing in common with you that you can relate with, so find that. Another way of looking at it is find something in him which you admire, you see, which is the same thing on a deeper level, because it means you relate to it subconsciously in some way. Ways like that. And really the basis is what? The basis is faith, in that case. The basis is faith that, on a deeper level, he is likable, worthy of love, and I can learn

[75:38]

to love him. You have to believe that, otherwise you won't be able to do anything with him. And sometimes it's very hard, because it involves all those obstacles we were talking about before, all of the hidden subconscious things in ourselves, fear and everything else. Because often when we really don't like a person, when we enthusiastically don't like a person, there's something pretty strong in us, down deeper, that's causing it. Okay, so next time we can go on with number 17. Number 17 is about making promises that may not seem quite so relevant to the monastic life. He doesn't talk there explicitly about monastic profession, which is surprising, but I guess it's because they didn't really have that kind of... They didn't understand it that way in those days. And then we'll close this series of conferences, and then we'll go back afterwards to the one on chastity, if I can make a resume out of it.

[76:37]

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