Monk?

I’ve been tinkering with the design of the blog and wonder what folks think. If you’ve got a moment leave a comment and let me know if you like this theme or the previous theme. This one is the WP-Andreas01 1.3 by Andreas Viklund. I’ve changed the header image, applying a tweaked image from the Abbey of the Genesee web site, which depicts the monks in procession during their yearly blessing of the fields. I used Photoshop for the edit.

Since we recently celebrated St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s feast day, here is a thought from the great Cisterciain abbot for your meditation:

Gladness and Thanksgiving

My advise to you my friends, is to turn aside occasionally from troubled and anxious pondering on the paths you may be treading, and to travel on smoother ways where the gifts of God are quietly savored. So that the thoughts of Him may give breathing space to you whose consciences are worried. I should like you to experience for yourselves the truth of the words: Make the Lord your joy and He will give you what your heart desires. Sorrow for sin is necessary, but it should not be endless in preoccupation. You must dwell also on the glad remembrance of God’s loving kindness, otherwise sadness will harden the heart and lead it more deeply into despair.

You must fix your attention on the ways of “God, see how He mitigates the bitterness of the heart that is crushed, how He wins back the timid soul from the abyss of despair, how He consoles the grief-stricken and strengthens the wavering with the sweet caress of His faithful love.

His loving mercy is greater than all iniquity. Think of the Lord with goodness, seek Him in simplicity of heart. You will all the more easily achieve this if you let your minds dwell frequently on the memory of God’s bountifulness.

Love without measure: extracts from the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Introduced and arranged by Paul Diemer. Cistercian Publications, 1990.

If our post-modern minds can account for the flowery 12 Century language, what we read here is a beautiful meditation on the love and generosity of God for His creation, humanity. There is nothing here of that sometimes excessive Christian tendency to a sense of guilt that not surprisingly repels the non-Christian. God is greater than our sad and tragic self-hatefulness, which, often, even the greatest Christian saints suffered from.

Bernard’s monastic life allowed him to dwell frequently on the memory of God’s bountifulness thus simplifying his vision of life, allowing him to be forgiven time and time again by his Lord. He suggests that we all take time to turn aside occasionally from troubled and anxious pondering on the paths you may be treading, and to travel on smoother ways where the gifts of God are quietly savored.

One of the great monastic gifts to the world is the practice of hospitality, which takes the form of offering retreat houses for those who want to get away and reassess life, a place to listen to the still small voice within. The Abbey of the Genesee and other Cistercian monasteries throughout the world can be contacted to make a reservation for such a retreat. Give it a chance, you may be surprised at the results. God bless.

What is this ‘conversion of life’, in latin conversatio morum, mentioned in the monk’s formula of profession (see June 18, below), which Br. Isaac just committed himself to for the rest of his life? The meaning of the phrase can be intuited from the words themselves, this is obvious. On it’s face it means what it says, to turn from one way of living to another way of living. But what does that mean?

‘Conversion of life’ is a twofold act of turning from sin and towards Christ. But isn’t this what every Christian does through his Baptism and the working out of its implications in his life? Yes, absolutely! There is no difference fundamentally between what the Christian takes on as his goal in life and what the monk does in his life.

Monastic life is a particularly radical response, you could say countercultural; it aims at the root of life, at its heart, its core. Br. Isaac and all the monks at Genesee and throughout the world who, responding to a personal call, vow this ‘conversion of life’, promise to follow Christ in this particular place, with these brothers, under obedience to this abbot and his successors, using all the means the monastic life provides for his journey.

Isaac and all his monastic brothers and sisters freely choose to live at the margins of society, bypassing its legitimate joys and pleasures for the sake of the Kingdom. the monk’s profession is a public act, a seal and a testimony, that for him there is nothing he prefers to the love of God and to the Kingdom He promises. On this he stakes his whole life.

There is so much more to say about ‘conversion of life’, but I’m going to let St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian saint, have the last word.

Our way of life is rejection by men. It is humility, voluntary poverty, obedience, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit. Our way of life is subjection to a teacher, to an abbot, to a rule, to discipline. Our way of life is to apply oneself to silence, to practice fasting, vigils, prayer, manual work, and above all to hold on to the more excellent way which is charity, advancing in all these observances from day to day persevering in them until the last day.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 142.

Monk Reading

I’m a librarian, my professional life is grounded in the importance of literature and learning. There is no denying how critical ‘book learning’, to use a time-worn phrase, is, and the negative impact its neglect has on a life, and a society; poverty, crime, and the loss of hope are its legacy.

And the importance of study to the life of prayer and contemplation has gone hand-in-hand with the establishment and development of the monastic life in the West, a truth reflected in the very structure of the monk’s day, with its scheduled time set aside for sacred reading, and the centrality of libraries throughout its history. As the European monastic adage has it, “A monastery without a library is like a fort without an armory”. This focus continues down to our own day. Without grounding in a knowledge base man swims in a sea of subjectivity and ignorance, as true for the monk as for the rest of us.

Still, knowledge for its own sake has never been the goal of the monastic life, rather the tradition understands the destructive power such an ethos can have personally and communally. The great Benedictine scholar, monk Jean Leclercq, catalogs this wonderfully in his landmark book The love of learning and the desire for God: a study of monastic culture, where he contrasts the literary work of the emerging university scholastics with that of monastic writers such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

And what distinguished the monastic intellectual from his scholastic counterpart? In a word: experience, for the goal of the monk is not the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, but the Source of that knowledge, the contact with which humbles, and dissociates his self from the products of his experience, his meager attempt to express the ineffable. As Leclerq states it: “There is no spiritual literature without spiritual experience: it is the experience which gives rise to the literature, not the reverse.” (p. 264) And what underlies the monk’s experience of God is the whole edifice of monastic culture and the virtues it cultivates in him, especially the virtue of humility.

St. Bernard in self-deprecation expresses the monastic approach beautifully:

And now someone may perhaps ask me what it is like to enjoy the Word. And I shall answer him: “Seek out, rather, someone who has had the experience and ask him. For if it had been given to me, even to such as me, to have that experience, do you think that I could express the inexpressible?”… Oh you who are anxious to learn what it is to enjoy the Word, prepare not your ear but your soul; for it is grace that teaches it and not language. The secret remains hidden from the wise and the cautious, and is revealed to the little ones.
(St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Patrologia Latina, Super Cantica, 85.14)

And the monastic way has been and continues to be a place where one learns to “prepare your soul”.