Monk?

January 26th was the feast of the founders of Citeaux, the first Cistercian Abbey, and the beginning of one of the great historical religious moments in Western civilization - and from such humble beginnings!

A heartfelt happy birthday to all Cistercians throughout the world. There is a beautiful reflection on the feast in a homily by Fr. Gerard of Genesee found here.

May their prayers for more vocations be answered. But more importantly lets pray for their journey into the depths of reality, their true call, that they may remain faithful to it. Amen

A quote from Aelred of Rievaulx, 12th Century Cistercian monk and abbot, that illuminates what we all encounter sooner or later, and by which, through grace and our free response, we are led to freedom:

See, dear Lord, how I have wandered the world and (have seen) those things which are in the world….In these I sought rest for my unhappy soul, but everywhere (I found) labor and lament, sorrow and affliction of spirit. You cried out, Lord; you cried out and called. You terrified me and shattered my deafness. You struck, you flogged, you conquered my hardheartedness. You sweetened, you flavored, you banished my bitterness. I heard you calling, but, alas, how late….Cistercian Fathers Series #17, pp. 133-34.

Those who seek will find, even if late, and some find their way to a monastery, the place where God best speaks to them, and where they best respond to his invitation.

I highly recommend John R. Sommerfeldt’s book, Aelred of Riveaux: pursuing perfect happiness (Newman Press, 2005), a wonderful reflection and application of Aelred’s vision of love.

Trappist monks in Choir

At the heart of the Christian life is a profound paradox, that true freedom is attained through the act, carried out over the span of a whole lifetime, of surrender. This idea is alien today in a culture that prizes the false concept of freedom as individual choice, over and above all other considerations. But the Christian seeks true freedom, found in love, acquired only through surrender to the Lordship of Christ.

So what of the monk? The monk is simply a Christian called to Christ’s freedom within the monastic way. For him this is where he will be most truly free. He sublimates his egoistic pursuits under the mantle of the Rule, the vows, and the particular practices of his monastery, and with them chips away at his resistances to complete surrender. But here there is a paradox, for as time passes he realizes his chipping away is futile, and he discovers, finally, his full dependence upon his loving Saviour. Freedom is not easily won. In fact it is a gift. Still, the struggle is necessary because only through it does the monk realize his utter dependence, the territory where freedom resides.

The very first word of the Rule attests to the centrality of surrender in the monk’s life: “Listen”. Let’s pray for all the monks and nuns living in monasteries throughout the world that they remain faithful to the call to surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, true model of surrender to the call to love. And let’s pray also that more young people hear the call to follow Him in the monastic way of liberation.

Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is the advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. Prologue, Rule of Saint Benedict

Trappist monk

The great monastic orders of the Christian West, the Benedictines and their relatives, the Cistercians, the Carthusians, the Camaldoese, exist down to our own day, even though the West cannot confidently anymore be considered Christian. But their numbers have decreased and for the most part are decreasing in a slow but steady manner. There is a great unknown involved in this development, one which sociologists, historians, and writers of every stripe have weighed in on, some saying it is the result of the upheavals of Vatican Council II, others the revolutionary changes within all of society from technological development to profound changes in social mores. I have no magic insight into the causes of this unsettling development, but I suspect it is reflective of all of the above. It seems, for whatever collective of causes, the traditional monastic orders are numerically in decline. The mean age of the orders members increases and the number of new members decreases.

If I do a Google search for monasticism I retrieve as many hits on the “new monasticism” as I do on the historical orders, such as the Cistercians and Benedictines. I take it the new monasticism is a movement of lay people, many married, who are attempting to live, with special focus on love of neighbor, especially the poor, the Gospel in community, often living together in the same house. It seems there is still an impulse to live a genuinely Christian life of sacrificial love, but within a different context than the cloister. I think this is wonderful; a sign the gospel is still lighting the flame of love and service within the hearts of men and women in our own time as it has throughout its history. And yet, I’m not so sure what the connection to monasticism is. Monastic life is something very particular, at least if I am to understand it historically, and is not really comprehensible if its definition is so broadened that any well meaning Christian community that lives communally can cal itself monastic, new or otherwise.

What are the elements that particularize monastic life, and those who live within its framework? One key attribute of the monk and nun has always been celibacy, the consecration of one’s entire being to God, including within this term, virginity (the avoidance of sexual relations), continence (the habit of mind of living chastely), and chastity (the moral virtue of purity). A life without celibacy just hasn’t ever been considered to be monastic, as the Latin root of the word monk , monachus, meaning one who lives alone, indicates. Interestingly, St. Benedict never mentions the promise of chastity in the monks vows, because it was considered so self-evidently a requirement to live a life of total dedication to God alone.

I’ll have future posts about some of the other essential elements of monastic life as it has been practiced throughout Christian history. But I return to my original question as to why so few people are entering the monastic orders today. Thomas Merton thought it had a lot to do with the interior life of modern man, which he felt suffers from a profound identity crisis, and one which the orders were ill equipped to handle. The result was many good vocations floundered and eventually left the monasteries. Maybe so, but the orders have made deep and principled changes, the result very much of a response to Vatican II and the needs of modern man. But the problem is not so much that large numbers of good vocations are leaving the monasteries, it’s that they aren’t ever coming at all.

So my question remains the same, and is one I only have sketchy ideas about why it has become so serious. The irony is that todays monasteries (and here again I am speaking about that which I know, namely the Cistercian monasteries) are living a monastic life that has gone through a prolonged self-examination with the result being that those men and women living in Cistercian monasteries today have been given the opportunity to live a true, honest, genuine form of monastic life, truly challenging and fully capable of providing the place to discover one’s true identity before God.

If others have ideas, please share them here. Does God still call men and women to monastic life today? If yes, why are so few responding? If no, why would this be? Are we just going through an historical anomaly, which will change with more people in the future once again responding to the call? Lots of questions, few answers.

Peace, and Happy New Year to all!

Classes are over!!! and I’ve survived. My Independent Project thesis continues until May and I’ll be taking two more classes beginning in January, but for now there is a much welcomed break.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a virtue that has gone out of favor, if I can put it that way. Are virtues ever “in favor”, such that they are eagerly embraced? Be that as it may, my thoughts have been about the virtue of humility, and the place it holds in the monastic architecture of the “good life”.

Humility has never been much in favor, and is an idea very much misunderstood, I think. The image of the monk bent and submissive is a common one and one that is instinctively rejected today as the negation of personality and an unhealthy loss of individuality. This image of the monk reinforces the negative stereotype of the institutionalized, passive, indeed humiliated person subject to the whims of whatever authority commands his obedience. Such an understanding of humility, which, it must be admitted, had its adherents in some times and places, is rightfully rejected.

But such an understanding of humility is not humility at all, and it is hard to imagine how it ever gained any intellectual currency. Humility, as Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk of Tarawara Abbey in Australia has written, is etymologically of the same root as earth, humus, and connotes, among other things, a going down to the essential substance of reality, to the place out of which all things grow. It is being in consonance with the truth, beyond which no good thing can come, for to be removed from truth is to be in the dark, subject to the whims of one’s own desiring, unconnected from the source of reality.

To be in touch with the source requires a clarity of sight that comes only through an acceptance of my limitations. By being open to the truth that has its origin outside my own self, means, by definition, admitting that I am in need, that I don’t have all the answers, that I am vulnerable, and prone to self delusion at best and often self destruction. Sadly, many destroy their lives in a state of complete unreality, out of touch with any sense the paths they walk are leading them into a land of forgetfulness so complete that truth seems strange and the twisted seems self-evidently normal. All we have to do is turn on the television and see the parade of naked kings, endlessly, one after another.

Monks have been practicing the art of humility for centuries, and there are some very powerful documents from monastic literature that can help us all, monk and non-monk, to “remember” where we come from and of our ontological dependence. The first of these, of course, is The Rule of Saint Benedict, but there are many others, such as John Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes, which Benedict relied upon, as well as the traditions of the desert fathers and mothers, whom Cassian had studied and learned from, as well as St. Bernard’s writings and many others. In our own time Michael Casey himself has written an excellent book on the subject, A Guide to Living the Truth: Saint Benedict’s teaching on Humility, which I recommend enthusiastically.

How is this related to Christmas? Well, if Jesus is who the Church claims him to be, namely the only Son of God, Logos of all creation, the source from which all things come, then I can imagine there has been no humility more deserving of the name than his birth as a human being to a poor Semite couple in the backwaters of Galilee. We have a friend and a teacher in him.

Merry Christmas!

Well, it’s crunch time with my classes at the Landscape Institute, so there’ll be a bit of a pause here for’Monk?’ blog. Wish me well; be back in a week or so.

Your ‘Monk?’ blogger,

Tim,

For the first time in its history, the Carthusian Order, founded in 1084 by St. Bruno, has allowed a filmaker inside the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the legendary Carthusian Order located in the French Alps. This site has information on the film, which contains a trailer and photos. The film contains few words and the only music is the monks plaintive chant. Be sure to watch the trailer - amazing! The title of the film is Into Great Silence.
The cloisters of The Grande Chartreuse

The monk lives by the Word. He breathes it in from his rising - Lord, open my lips and I shall proclaim your praise - until his resting - Now, Master, let your servant go in peace. Your Word has been fulfilled.

They gather together in Church seven times every day to recite, hear, chant, and meditate upon the Word of God in the Scripture they live by, and that tells their story as a believing community. In a very real sense the monk becomes the Word en-fleshed, so fully is he plunged into its mediating sign. As he walks the cloister the Word echoes all around him, so drenched in it has the very building become.

Every week at the Abbey of the Genesee in Western New York there is a band of brothers whom together chant the entire 150 psalms, and when it’s over begin again. Some brothers there have been doing this every day for over fifty years. This is an immersion that is difficult to comprehend, and one that transforms a psych, the intellect, one’s very being so completely that a new creation is born: the new man, the pilgrim following the sound of the Word wherever it leads. He is a man of God.

That is not to say one should expect angels at the Abbey of the Genesee or at any monastery. They are flesh and blood just like the rest of us, and have their own problems collectively and personally, some of which they’ll carry all the way to the end, as St. Paul reminds us we’ll all do(2 Cor 12:7). Still, there is a powerful presence felt at the Abbey, especially felt when the monks file in silently one by one in preparation for prayer. It is the Word which is felt, carried in the flesh and blood heart of each of the brothers as they enter the Church… carried in love.

What is a monk?
A monk is someone who everyday asks:
What is a monk?

Dom Andre Louf
Cistercian monk and abbot

There was a program on television last night and it got me thinking. It was about runaway kids living on the streets of Portland, Oregon, some of them living this way for a number of years. Portland has become a magnet for the kids because the city has taken a soft approach with them and also because a cheap heroin is available. Many of the kids spend their time panhandling for the ten dollars it takes to get a hit of the drug, but of course the cycle never ends, and once they satisfy their craving, they’re scrambling to get enough money for the next hit. Most of them are good kids, but terribly, terribly lost.

The thing that struck me was how destructive their response is to a need that is good and liberating, the need for authenticity. One of the girls, eighteen and pregnant, was criticizing society and all the so-called “normal” people who go off to work every day and raise families, pigenholing everyone living this way as phony. At the bottom of her criticism there is some truth to be sure; there are many such people living on a superficial level, chasing after money and possessions and avoiding the deeper realities of life. What is sad is the self-destructive reaction to the inauthenticity the kids see all too clearly around them. Sticking a needle in your arm only deadens the reality, and in the end makes them very much like the people they abhor.

It made me think of the monastic response throughout history to this very same question of authenticity. Men and women seeking to live honestly and genuinely, and pursuing the truth wherever it took them, have fled not to the mean streets, not to drugs, not to self-destructive isolation from others, but rather to the desert (garden!) of truth , of self-giving, of identification with all humanity in solitude and silence. The monastic life, when truly lived, has opened up to countless thousands throughout history the truth that I am not different than you, but that we all are engaged in the same search for the truth, brothers and sisters in the seeking. The tragedy of the kids on streets all over our country is that in many cases what compels them is good, but their choices are self-defeating.

I have a good friend, who one day way back now in the early 70s was found lying on the sidewalk somewhere in Manhattan, dying of a drug overdose. He was rushed to the hospital where they saved his life. Not long after, while recovering, he had a vision of God’s love for him, which changed him forever. Henceforth, he only wanted to seek God and knew a monastery was the best place to do his seeking. Well, he didn’t become a monk, formally, but he’s been living as a lay worker at a Trappist monastery for over twenty-five years now. He lives his own form of monastic life, supported by the prayers and witness of the monks.

There is no difference between what drove my friend first to drugs and ultimately to God’s love, and what drives the kids today on the streets of Portland. God rescued him because he sought the truth. May God have pity on these kids and may they find their way to the really Real, God’s love for each of them personally.