“Contemplative” is a bad word. When we talk about ourselves, monks, as contemplatives, we come face to face with the problem that we are not more than contemplatives. We are not prophets. We are failing in the prophetic aspect of our vocation. Why? Perhaps because we belong to a Christianity so deeply implicated in a society which has outlived its spiritual vitality and yet is groping for a new expression of life in crisis. Our monasteries are not fulfilling any kind of prophetic vocation in the modern world. ‘Whether we should be able to do that or not is another matter. The prophetic charism is a gift of God, not a duty of man.

But on the other hand, if the gift has not been given perhaps we who had the call have not prepared ourselves. It seems to me that contemplatives should be able to say to modern man something about God that answers the profoundly important and significant accusation of Marx against religion. Marx said religion inevitably leads to the alienation of man. It is not fulfillment but opium. Man in his worship of God divests himself of his own powers and of his own dignity and attributes these to an invisible and remote God and then begs God to grant them, give them back to him bit by bit, in retail packages. But that is not the case. We are learning more and more that the the denial of God is really the denial of man. Yet, on the other hand, the affirmation of God is the true affirmation of man. Barth somewhere said: “Merely to talk about man in a loud voice is not to talk about God.” Unless we really affirm God, we do not affirm man. Unless we affirm God as He who calls man into existence and to freedom and to love which is the fulfillment of that freedom—unless we affirm this God, we fail to affirm that without which man’s life has no meaning.

Monks ought to be able to reassure the modem world that in the struggle between thought and existence we are on the side of existence, not on the side of abstraction. But can we honestly affirm this? I don’t know.

A great deal of monastic life and “contemplative spirituality” is not necessarily abstract in a philosophical sense, but it is an artificial behavior in which thought, embodied in ritual forms, opposes itself to the concrete facts of existence. Do we make a fetish out of subjecting the realities of human existence to ritual forms and legalisms, to convince ourselves that in so doing we are leading spiritual and contemplative lives?

We monks should be able to reassure modern man that God is the source and the guarantee of our freedom and not simply a force standing over us to limit our freedom.

In the conflict between law and freedom, God is on the side of freedom. That is a scandalous statement! But it is the New Testament! How are we going to affirm to the modern world the scandal of the New Testament? It is here that we confront the seriousness of our prophetic as distinct from our contemplative calling.

Surely this is the “message” the monk should give the world. But to what extent can monks express this? We are, so it would seem, as committed to law as anybody. More than others! We multiply laws. We live a highly mediated existence in which at any moment rule and rite can substitute for authentic experience and encounter.

Our encounter with God should be, at the same time, the discovery of our own deepest freedom. If we never encounter Him, our freedom never fully develops. It develops only in the existential

encounter between the Christian and God, or between man and God—because not only Christians encounter God. Every man at some point in his life encounters God, and many who are not Christians have responded to God better than Christians. Our encounter with Him, our response to His Word is the drawing forth and calling out of our deepest freedom, our true identity.

Prayer

To properly understand prayer, we have to see in it this encounter of our freedom emerging from the depths of nothingness and undevelopment, at the call of God. Prayer is freedom and affirmation growing out of nothingness into love. Prayer is the flowering of our inmost freedom, in response to the Word of God. Prayer is not only dialogue with God: it is the communion of our freedom with His ultimate freedom, His infinite spirit. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit, and of the divine love. Prayer is the encounter of our freedom with the all-embracing charity which knows no limit and knows no obstacle. Prayer is an emergence into this area of infinite freedom. Prayer then is not an abject procedure although sometimes it may spring from our abjection.

Of course, we have to face the existential reality of our wretchedness, nothingness and abjection because it is there that our prayer begins. It is out of this nothingness that we are called into freedom. It is out of this darkness that we are called into light. Therefore, we need to recognize this as our true starting point. Otherwise our prayer is not authentic. But we are called out of this nothingness, darkness and alienation and frustration, into communion and intimacy with God, in His freedom. That is the meaning of prayer. Prayer therefore is not just simply a matter of thrusting ourselves down into a position of abjection, and grovelling in servile submission asking God for things which are already our own. That is the picture that Marx in his idea of religious alienation gives us. Prayer is not something that is meant to maintain us in servility and helplessness. We take stock  of our own wretchedness at the beginning of prayer in order to rise beyond it and above it to infinite freedom and infinite creative love in God.

Prayer infallibly does this if we believe it and if we understand its true dimensions. The great problem of prayer arises from the fact that if we take the alienated view we remain fixed in our own ego and we are no longer able to go out from ourselves into freedom. If we remain in our ego, clenched upon ourselves, trying to draw down to ourselves gifts which we then incorporate in our own limited selfish life, then prayer does remain servile. Servility has its root in self-serving. Servility, in a strange way, really, consists in trying to make God serve our own needs. We have to try to say to modem man something about the fact that authentic prayer enables us to emerge from our servility into freedom in Cod, because it no longer strives to manipulate him by superstitious “deals.”

Good Souls

Suppose, for a moment, that the term “contemplative” has a value and can be retained: in what sense are we contemplatives? In what sense are there real contemplatives in our monasteries? Obviously there are, especially among the older generation, a lot of people who have been and are authentic men of prayer. Yet so few, so very few seem really to be deeply contemplative. They are more what you would call “good souls.” They are worthy products of the religious system that has prevailed up to now, good regular people who have been faithful to their obligations. They have put their obligations before everything else and come to choir on time. They have been rewarded with satisfaction and peace. They have a kind of solid interior life going. Over the years they have acquired a certain experience and a deep love of God—no question about that. What they have apparently failed to develop is real depth of insight and a real fullness of life. Few have a real depth of spiritual consciousness and a real depth of interior experience. If they have, it is something that they are absolutely unable to articulate, something they are not even aware of. And of course, that is as it should be. But are they contemplatives? Or should they be?

You expect to find simple and deep people in the contemplative life. The true contemplative should not necessarily have much to say about his contemplative life. The business of articulating it can be a charism or it can be a delusion. But the fact remains that there is something to the articulation of this deep experience. One should be able to teach it to others, to make others understand what it is, and help them to attain it. That is the question that is raised by this message of contemplatives of the modem world. Do we have any depth of experience that we can communicate to the modem world in its own terms? Or should we just assume that the modem world is so far out that it does not deserve any message from us?

Is the contemplative merely there to create a sense of stability, devoutness, piety and peace? Is his the message of confidence that what has been is still going on and will continue to go on? He may indeed comfort you with such a message, but when he stops talking and when you start reflecting on all he has said, you realize that what has been is not going to go on. What has been has ended. We hope certainly that some of the qualities of that kind of interior life will continue. We would hate to lose the qualities of simplicity and devotion and piety and all that. But the message of our venerable and ancient system is not good enough. Its emphasis is almost always on something secondary. The emphasis is not on the deep realities of life. You may say our contemplative speaks of the cross and so forth—well, the cross is certainly not secondary. But it is too often seen from the point of view of the secondary. So much is taken for granted, so much is assumed. When the cross is spoken of in the context of what one might call milieu Catholicism (that is to say in which a Catholic milieu is taken for granted), then we assume that all the big things are taken care of by the milieu, and we are only responsible for minor details. The basic problems of life are taken for granted as having been solved years ago and nobody even raises them any more. In that context the cross, instead of being a deep mystery which shakes the very depths of man’s being in death and resurrection, becomes a matter of not blowing your top when somebody is late. The cross is a matter of being patient when you have to wait outside the abbot’s office.

The “contemplative life” is then reduced to little things like: learning to become a man of interior prayer by making good use of the moments when you just have to kick your heels waiting for something to happen—or for someone to provide something you need (and will maybe never get)—or for someone in authority to notice you are there and pat you on the head and say you are a good boy. The cross is emptied of all seriousness by this kind of fiddling around, even though from a certain point of view it’s not fiddling around. It can only appear serious within the context of a well-established, stable society, a Christian bourgeois society which is firmly built on its foundation which shall never be shaken. But that has ended. The foundations are thoroughly shaken. That kind of society no longer exists. We’re living in a world in revolution. The foundations of everything familiar are menaced, and if in the midst of this the mystery of the cross means practicing patience and offering it up and so forth when you’re sitting in front of a man’s office in order to get permission to do something that you ought to have sense enough to do for yourself, it becomes ludicrous in the eyes of the modern world. Therefore if the message of contemplatives to the modem world springs from something as trival as this—even though it may be using big words like cross, death, resurrection, prayer, contemplation, vision—it’s going to be ridiculous! It’s not going to touch anybody. They don’t want any part of it. If this is contemplation, then we might as well pick up our marbles and go home.

The Sacrifice of Security

Let us now face the question of how badly we need renewal and how little the renewal is really taking place. We don’t even know where to begin this renewal. It has to be our renewal, not just simply a renewal which introduces the active life into the cloister. We cannot seek the same kind of renewal as is sought in the active orders because we have a different job to do in the Church. True, we’re all going back to the gospel; but nowhere in the gospel are we told that the mystery of the cross and the mystery of the Resurrection and so forth are reduced to the little formalities to which we have reduced them. Nor is renewal simply a question of broadening out within the enclosure wall and just fitting a more liberal and more relaxed spirituality into the framework of offices and duties. Nor is it a matter of unending dialogue about those same offices and duties. Renewal means much more than that. You who are interested enough in this matter to be reading and I who am trying to develop these ideas are all involved together in a very crucial search for the realities of renewal. We are trying to see what demands are really going to be made on us. We want to estimate those demands properly and objectively. We want to be ready to pay the price—and the price here is not going to be just a matter of gritting our teeth and following orders that we instinctively realize to be beside the point!

It may be the price of sacrificing our security, sacrificing the psychological stability we have built on foundations that we do not dare to examine. We have to examine those foundations even though it will mean unrest, even though it will mean loss of peace, even though it will mean disturbance and anguish, even though it may mean the radical shaking of structures.

Certain structures need to be shaken, certain structures have to fall. We need not be revolutionaries within our institutions. Nowadays one sees too much of the neurotic rebel in the cloister, the neurotic who is interminably complaining about everything and has absolutely no intention of substituting anything positive for all this negation, the person who is always discontented and automatically throwing the blame for everything on somebody else—we don’t need that. But on the other hand we don’t want to go to the other extreme and just simply be ostriches, refusing to see that these institutions are in many respects outdated, and that perhaps renewal may mean the collapse of some institutional structures and starting over again with a whole new form.

They have perhaps been some unwise attempts at experimental foundations. In a few months they have proved to be pathetic: but that does not mean that we must not continue searching for new ways. On the other hand (now I really am rambling), we have to remember that there is an order in these things and that you do not sit down and start writing a new rule first thing of all. The writing of new rules should be the last thing of all. What one needs to do is to start a conversion and a new life oneself, in so far as one can. Thus, my new life and my contribution to a renewal in monasticism begin within myself and in my own daily life. My work for renewal takes place strictly in my own situation here, not as a struggle with the institution but in an effort to renew my life of prayer in a whole new context, with a whole new understanding of what the contemplative life means and demands. Creativity has to begin with me and I can’t sit here wasting time urging the monastic institution to become creative and prophetic. To begin with there is really not much change to be expected within the framework of the institution. It can change so much and no more. After that the structure won’t take any more change. So it is useless lamenting over the fact that it can’t be more creative. It’s useless lamenting over the fact that the best people continue to leave and it’s useless building hopes on illusory token changes which are after all a little petty. What each one of us has to do, what I have to do, is to buckle down and really start investigating new possibilities in our own lives; and if the new possibilities mean radical changes, all right. Maybe we need radical changes for which we may have to struggle and sweat some blood. Above all we must be more attentive to God’s way and God’s time, and give everything when it is really demanded.

We, the supposedly “contemplative” monks, need renewal as much as everybody else and we’ve got to do it ourselves. We have to find out for ourselves what we’re supposed to be doing. We cannot sit around waiting for somebody else to tell us. You who read this are yourselves studying possibilities of renewal.

Let me encourage you as a brother to forget about other people who are supposed to help you do it. Do it yourself with the help of the Holy Spirit. Find out what you are really looking for in the spiritual life. What did you really come to the cloister for? Why do you want to be a Carmelite, a Trappist, a contemplative? What are you seeking? Are you seeking security or are you seeking God? Are you seeking pleasant experiences or are you seeking the truth?

Are we seeking the truth that is to make us free? Are we seeking the truth of Christ? Are we responding to the Word of God which breaks through all structures of human life and institutions? These are the things which we have to ask ourselves. We can hardly expect others to answer these things for us!

The important thing for us is to clarify our aims and to rethink not only the accidentals but even the essentials of the contemplative life—in the sense of re-thinking our aims, our motives and ends. What do we come to the contemplative life for? Each of us may have a different answer. And let us not make the mistake of imagining ourselves re-thinking the life in order to re-legislate it. In other words let us not kid ourselves by talking now and living later. If our re-thinking is valid it is also a re-living. Don’t let’s get lost in words. Let’s live now. Let us not project ourselves too far ahead. Let us live in the present. Our re-thinking of the contemplative life is part of our present contemplation. Our new life will emerge from authenticity now. This is not merely an empty moment of transition. We are not in an interval of dynamic reconstruction in which we are simply going to put back together again a static life in which we will rest. Our rest is in the reconstruction itself. Transition is also fullness. We can have a certain personal fullness even when the changing institution is provisional, and we have to learn to be able to be contemplatives in the midst of the dynamic, in the midst of movement.

We can do this without being obsessed by the movement, without being too conscious of ourselves in movement. We can live happily in change, not worrying about change. Change is one of the big facts of all life. If we’re not able to be contemplatives in the midst of change, if we insist on being contemplatives in some completely stable situation which we imagine we are going to construct in the future, then we’re never going to be contemplatives.

So let’s move on in a quiet, confident way and be content. Let us not try to be too conscious of ourselves moving and not demand that everything be secure. Let us first live in Christ, fully open to his Spirit, unconcerned about institutional security, free from all care for ideal structures that will never be built, and content with the Dark Night of faith in which alone we are truly secure because truly free!

Contemplative Life

What do we think the contemplative life is? How do we conceive it? As a life of withdrawal, tranquillity, retirement, silence? Do we keep ourselves apart from action and change in order to learn techniques for entering into a kind of static present reality which is there and which we have to learn how to penetrate? Is contemplation an objective static “thing,” like a building, for which there is a key? Do you hunt for this key, find it, then unlock the door and enter? Well, that is a valid image from a certain point of view, but it isn’t the only image.

The contemplative life isn’t something objective that is “there” and to which, after fumbling around, you finally gain access. The contemplative life is a dimension of our subjective existence. Discovering the contemplative life is a new self-discovery. One might say it is the flowering of a deeper identity on an entirely different plane from a mere psychological discovery, a paradoxical new identity that is found only in loss of self. To find one’s self by losing one’s self: that is part of “contemplation.” Remember the Gospel, “He who would save his life must lose it.”

The contemplative experience originates from this totally new kind of awareness of the fact that we are most truly ourselves when we lose ourselves. We become ourselves when we find ourselves in Christ. Our contemplative vocation can become perverse and selfish if we are surreptitiously using tricks and bad faith. Bad faith for us consists in trying to play around with this concept of finding ourselves by losing ourselves. Bad faith wants to learn some trick way of losing ourselves so that we find ourselves and we come out on top in the end. This is one source of the self-deception and frustration that are so frequent in the contemplative life. Consequently, one of the basic rules is that it is always a gift of God. It is always something for which we must learn how to wait. But it is also something which we must learn to expect actively. The secret of the contemplative life is in this ability for active awareness, an active and expectant awareness where the activity is a deep personal response on a level which is, so to speak, beyond the faculties of the soul.

Contemplative prayer is a deep interior activity in the very roots of our being in response to God who has the initiative and yet draws us into certain very subtle forms of obedient initiative on our own side. This combination of initiative and expectant passivity is different in different people. So many things enter into it. In the renewal of the contemplative life we must not narrow down the possibilities for individual development as we have done in the past.

In the past, the contemplative life was proposed in a rather rigid formal sort of way. You entered the contemplative life by making a list of things which you were going to drop, so to speak. You took the world and all its possibilities and you just crossed everything off the list. You crossed off the joys of human love, you crossed off the joys of art, music, secular literature, enjoyment of beauties of nature, enjoyment of natural recreation, sports, swimming. All these things, you just discarded: and when you had crossed everything off the list then the one great thing was left, the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary!

I think we have to radically re-evaluate our whole view of this “one thing necessary.” The one thing necessary is not that which is left when everything is crossed off, but it is perhaps that which includes and embraces everything else, that which is arrived at when you’ve added up everything and gone far beyond. I don’t want to put it in a quantitative way however. Of course you understand, in reality the crossing-off process was supposed to be an elimination of a quantitative view, in order to get down to a strictly qualitative approach. You were supposed to end up, not with what was most but with what was best. I think we should aim for the most as well as the best but not the most and the best outside ourselves. The most and the best in ourselves. Here I think we need a great deal of subtlety and flexibility in recognizing the real vital possibilities of each individual in the contemplative life. Contemplative discipline is both hard and flexible. The contemplative life should be a life in which there is austerity. There has to be a real challenge. It’s got to be a tough life. This business of just softening up the contemplative life is foolish. In fact it means the end of all contemplation. But the contemplative life has to be tough in such a way that it’s also livable. The toughness of the contemplative life should not be that restricting toughness which arbitrarily rules out good possibilities. It should be a toughness that tones us up to meet new possibilities, the unexpected, that for which we have not been previously capable, for which we have not been previously ready.

In other words, the toughness of the contemplative life was to lift us above ourselves, above our capacities. A life of self-transcendence must be hard—hard and rewarding, not hard and frustrating.

This should give us some insight into the new way of asceticism, a rewarding hardness, a hardness that brings you out. The kind of hardness you get in football when you have to really play. So a re-evaluation of our aims in the contemplative life should, I think, take this new form of not simply assuming to begin with that we have crossed off all kinds of possibilities.

Art comes to mind here. By “art” I don’t mean fiddling around, please! There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. If this is wanted as a legitimate recreation, as a relaxation, or as occupational therapy, let’s be honest and call it occupational therapy.

Yet art in the contemplative life can really open up new capacities and new areas in the person of the contemplative. Everything depends on how it is used. The real key is guidance and direction and selectivity. The contemplative life is extremely selective. One of the things that has ruined the contemplative life has been the leveling process which has eliminated this selective quality, this capacity for creative personal judgment in special cases. The contemplative life has become a kind of assembly line on which everybody is put together according to one pattern. This is utterly deadly, and of course it kills selective judgment.

The lack of qualitative judgment, of taste, of personal discrimination, of openness to new possibilities, is bound up with one great defect—a failure of imagination. Our prayer itself is poor in imagination. The pragmatic and legalistic approach to the religious life in general, and to the contemplative life in particular, has resulted in a dreadful banality. Creativity has not been desired, imagination has been discouraged, and emphasis has been on submission of will, accepting the incomprehensible stupidity of a mechanical existence instead of thinking of a realistic way of improving things. But the solution is not in changing observances and practices, or in changing laws. The solution lies deeper, in the life of prayer. If what goes on inside our minds and hearts is banal, trivial, petty and unimaginative, we cannot be creative in our outer works. So much that is new and experimental is proving to be a frightful letdown because it is so second-rate, so superficial, so imitative. And so much of it is in the worst possible taste—as many of our old pieties were also in the worst taste.

The Imagination

Let us consider now whether the imagination has a place in the contemplative life. The imagination is one of the things we have tended to rule out of the contemplative life, largely in reaction against its formalized use in systematic meditation. Most of us, I suppose, ran into a period of revolt against the formalized use of the imagination in systematic “composition of place” and that sort of thing.

Here we must distinguish. I would say that a deliberate use of imagination in prayer might perhaps be a good thing for people who have weak imaginations, whose imagination has never been developed in any way at all. They might profitably be encouraged to exercise their imagination a little. But they must exercise it, not just follow a book written by someone whose imagination has gone dead.

I spoke a moment ago about ruling out everything in order to arrive at contemplation. Those of us who have read St. John of the Cross remember the chapters of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel where he strongly emphasizes the fact that anything that can be imagined or apprehended by the inner or outer senses has nothing to do with God. Whatever can be “seen” cannot be God. Therefore it is better to withdraw from imaginative activity in contemplative prayer, and of course that’s true.

On the other hand, imagination has an important part to play in our lives. We all know that when imagination is not constructively used, is not creatively used, it uses itself destructively. It works whether we want it to or not, and one of the places where we all run into imagination is in distractions. Because of the constant struggle with distractions we tend to take an excessively negative view of the imagination.

Some people cannot abide to have distractions. Their imagination works automatically, creating distractions, and then they hate themselves for it. Their whole life is reduced to a despairing struggle with distractions which, of course, makes distractions worse.

Distractions are produced by the imagination, and in many people distractions are worse because their imagination has nothing constructive, nothing creative to work on. For some people the great cross of distraction and imagination is the fact that imagination, when not constructively used, has a tendency to fix itself on what we call “impure” images. Now, perhaps I might mention in passing that this should just be ignored. To begin with, no image is impure. It is neither pure nor impure. There is nothing “wrong” or “dirty” about images. The wrong lies in a disordered affection of the will. A mere image is never impure, it’s neutral. The thought of a part of a body is not impure, it just is, that’s all.

I am speaking about imagination that doesn’t have any constructive outlet. It is important for us to find creative outlets and work for the imagination. Imagination has to be sublimated, not necessarily in prayer but certainly elsewhere. Where are some of the fields where we can find work for the imagination? Well, obviously the first thing that suggests itself is in reading the Bible. There is plenty in the Bible that appeals to the imagination, and the psalms are full of imagination. Anything poetic, anything literary, anything creative, in that sense, is full of imagination.

Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. The imagination is something which enables us to discover unique present meaning in a given moment of our life. Without imagination the contemplative life can be extremely dull and fruitless.

Remember also that imagination doesn’t just create fictions. These are real meanings that the imagination discovers, not just delusions. Yet of course they can be delusory and this is another problem. You see, with imagination you also need judgment. Imagination needs to be corrected with a certain intellectual estimate first of all on a prudential level, and then also even on an artistic level.

We have to consider the artistic truth of things that are brought together by imagination. This, in fact, is what is wrong very often with a crazy imagination. There can be a beauty in a deliberate grotesque and bizarre effect, but then one must be able to be conscious of this. But when imagination goes haywire in the contemplative life people get slightly nutty. They come to you with grotesque illusions, idiotic and often extremely complicated hang-ups—visions, voices, pseudo-prophecies, and take them very seriously in the wrong way. This is work of the imagination, and from a certain point of view you can regard it as creative in a nutty sort of way. But they are drawing wrong conclusions from it. They are rationalizing and verbalizing.

The contemplative life should not lead us just to suppress the imagination in order to get more pure messages from God. We must allow both for a contemplative prayer in which the imagination has little or no part, and for a creative, imaginative, genuinely poetic side in our life. Our imagination must be able to click and find correspondences, symbols and meanings. It should point up new meanings. It should create nuclei of meaning around which everything can collect significantly.

So when we talk about using the imagination in this particular way we imply a certain training or discipline of the imagination. This training should not be a matter of exterior compulsion, the domination of imagination by intellect and will. There are times of course when that is necessary. But the imagination should be allowed a certain freedom to browse around, find its own spontaneous material and work with that material. The intelligence and will should go along with it meanwhile—permissively, so to speak.

The training of the imagination implies a certain freedom and this freedom implies a certain capacity to choose and to find its own appropriate nourishment. Thus in the interior life there should be moments of relaxation, freedom and “browsing.” Perhaps the best way to do this is in the midst of nature, but also in literature. Perhaps also a certain amount of art is necessary, and music. Of course we have to remember our time is limited and first things have to come first. We can’t spend too much time just listening to music.

You also need a good garden, and you need access to the woods, or to the sea. Get out in those hills and really be in the midst of nature a little bit! That is not only legitimate, it is in a certain way necessary. Don’t take your cloister concept too materially. Of course now I may be running into all kinds of problems with constitutions. But the woods and nature should be part of your solitude, and if it’s not periodically part of your solitude I think the law should be changed.

Liberating the Imagination

The contemplative life should liberate and purify the imagination which passively absorbs all kinds of things without our realizing it; liberate and purify it from the influence of so much violence done by the bombardment of social images. There is a kind of contagion that affects the imagination unconsciously much more than we realize. It emanates from things like advertisements and from all the spurious fantasies that are thrown at us by our commercial society. These fantasies are deliberately intended to exercise a powerful effect on our conscious and subconscious minds. They are directed right at our instincts and appetites, and there is no question but that they exercise a real transforming power on our whole psychic structure. The contemplative life should liberate us from that kind of pressure, which is really a form of tyranny. It should subject our imagination passively to natural influences. There has been in the past a certain danger of unnatural influences and sick fantasies in the cloister itself. So often in cloistered life we have seen people simply imprisoned in an atmosphere of total ugliness, the pious ugliness of sick statuary and sentimental holy cards. There has been a great deal of house cleaning in various religious orders, and in the Church in general, in regard to bad art and bad influences on the imagination. In training the imagination we should work with the inexhaustible supply of images in the Bible, for example. Take a certain passage of the Bible and simply be fully conscious, completely aware of what is addressed to the imagination. See it and grasp it and experience it with the inner senses. Liturgy, too, is a favored means (at least ideally) for this education of all the senses and of the whole man.

Our imagination should be spontaneous but it should not always be completely unconscious or instinctive. Certainly a contemplative has to be liberated from a completely mechanical imagination. The imagination needs a certain critical reflection, a certain conscious awareness, a certain, let us say, conscious freedom of judgment in its exercise. The healthy imagination is one which can spontaneously move itself to what it likes better—consciously awarely, not self-consciously. The imagination moves in a state of conscious awareness but not in self-conscious examination of itself; not watching itself act but simply acting in full and joyous consciousness of the fact that it acts.

When reading the Bible your imagination should be distinctly aware of the images, the pictures presented to it. Besides taking account of these separate elements, it should also see how they are fused together in a symbolic unity, in what the Germans call a Gestalt, a form made by things converging in a new living unity. Train yourself to see those things when you are reading the Bible.

Don’t think that every time you read the Bible you must always be getting the loftiest possible theological sense! In the Bible, theology is embedded in material images and if you don’t see the images you don’t get the theological sense completely. The theological sense is not only an intellectual message addressed purely to the mind, a purely speculative meaning. There are meanings in the Bible which are communicated in concrete, living, material imagery, in material elements, fire, water, etc. One has to be sensible, sensitive, sensitized to the material qualities of these things in order to get the divine message.

Catholic Pessimism

The English Benedictine, Dom Sebastian Moore, in a book called Cod Is a New Language, frankly discusses what he calls “a Catholic neurosis.” He hits some nails pretty squarely on the head. He is talking (among other things) about life in Catholic institutions. He talks about how a layman teaching in a Catholic school may complain quite justly of the fact that he is dealt with in a very dishonest and devious sort of way by the religious who are running the school. They won’t meet things squarely. Instead of telling him directly and frankly about something, they try to get it to him through a lot of other people. Then, they think, there won’t be any argument!

That happens in monasteries, too. Superiors, not wanting to run into open conflict with subjects, don’t tell them directly what they want to tell them. They avoid confrontation and try to get it to the subject indirectly or by hints. You get rumors about what the superior thinks rather than hearing from him personally. And you are somehow expected to act on the rumor. An “obedience” based on this kind of thing is pretty equivocal! But that is not the point. The point that he brings up is of great value for contemplatives because it is one of the curses of our cloistered life.

Sebastian Moore talks about a kind of Catholic pessimism. It is related to the disgust and despair and discouragement we get in the contemplative life. This sense of frustration and hopelessness is due to the conditions of the life. This is something that we’ve really got to learn how to deal with. He says:

The effect of being continually exposed to the truth which is doing one no good is distressing to the soul. There can even result a kind of unbelief, an exhaustion of the spirit which is all the worse for being partly unconscious.

He relates this to the medieval concept of acedia, a kind of spiritual lassitude approaching despair. This is one of the curses of the contemplative life and we have not even begun to know how to deal with it. “The effect of being continually exposed to the truth which is doing one no good!”

Now let’s make a distinction here. Does he mean continually exposed to an ideal which is held up before us and which, we feel, is doing us no good? An occupational disease of contemplatives consists in this unconscious conviction that we are in the presence of wonderful spiritual values which aren’t reaching us. Somehow we are failing them, we are never quite measuring up.

One of the ways of reacting is to deny that this is happening at all or to get around it in some equivocal way—by verbalizing or rationalizing. The classic example of this is the old Latin choir and the classic “solution” is to make an act of pure intention. The will to mean it is equivalent to meaning it even though you do not understand. Thus it becomes a sacrifice of praise, the prayer of the Church, etc. There is of course some truth in this: but not enough truth to serve as a solid foundation for one’s whole contemplative life! Now, the key word here is alienation. To be alienated is to be a prisoner in something of which you cannot possibly take an active personal part. This accounts for the kind of choir neurosis that people get into. There is a deep resistance that gradually develops against a thing in which one is participating and yet not participating.

This is aggravated by an over-emphasis on the ideal and on the wonderful values that are present—that we are missing. The ideal is extolled and magnified until it gets to be so great, so superhuman, that we can’t participate in it. Besides, it is all presented in a completely abstract sort of way. We see with our mind that these values are there. We’re told that these values are there and we believe it. We’re constantly reproached for not measuring up, and we believe that too. We become obsessed by it. This is all done in an abstract sort of way so that you have to have a peculiar kind of intellect and a peculiar kind of will to be able to measure up to this inhuman challenge. You have to be able to believe in pure, disembodied, mathematical willpower (helped by an abstract kind of grace!) . Bence the sense of awful futility, of being confronted with something that we’re not measuring up to. Here is this immense truth and it is not getting through to us!

And yet, on the other hand, there is a great deal of this truth around that could get through to us. But we are not paying attention because we’ve not been trained to pay attention. We would even feel guilty for paying attention to it. We think it is not supernatural enough! Here again we neglect the imaginative content of some of the things that we live with all the time, the Bible for example. The imaginative and human appeal of the Bible and the liturgy is something that we completely bypass. We do not pay attention to it because we suppose that it is something inferior and we “want only the best.” So we bypass a value which we could participate in and could experience. Take the joy of singing in choir. Of course that gets knocked out of us because when we sing we are apt to ruin the whole choir! Still, that is what the choir is for. People should be able to enjoy the singing and enjoy what’s going on! But perhaps when they enjoy it, they make it intolerable for other people, so there is a problem. We have to face the fact; but we would be able to get to a lot of these values quite easily and quite simply if we would just be natural about them.

But we are told not to be natural. If you are taking a natural pleasure in something, it is not supernatural and that’s wrong. I think we should be able to take these natural pleasures and realize that they’re not opposed to the supernatural at all. They are a means of entering into contact with the real spiritual values which are given to us. We should not be afraid to make use of them. Then we might better face this situation of frustrating alienation in the religious life, this feeling that we’re constantly exposed to an immense truth which is not coming through and is not getting to us. We’re not responding to it on levels on which we could respond. We are attempting to respond on impossible levels. This is a highly destructive situation, and when a person lives under this day after day the whole thing gets to be incomparably sick. People saying over and over again what these great values are, etc., and nobody experiencing them at all. For you realize that the person who is giving you this enthusiastic pep talk doesn’t experience them either. Better just to smell a flower in the garden or something like that than to have an unauthentic experience of a much higher value. Better to honestly enjoy the sunshine or some light reading than to claim to be in contact with something that one is not in contact with at all.

So, therefore, I would say that it is very important in the contemplative life not to overemphasize the contemplation. If we constantly overemphasize those things to which access is inevitably quite rare, we overlook the ordinary authentic real experiences of everyday life as real things to enjoy, things to be happy about, things to praise God for. But the ordinary realities of everyday life, the faith and love with which we live our normal human lives, provide the foundation on which we build those higher things. If there is no foundation, then we have nothing at all! How can we relish the higher things of God if we cannot enjoy some simple little thing that comes along as a gift from Him! We should enjoy these things and then we will be able to go on to more rare experiences. Take the enjoyment of our daily bread. Bread is true, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe one of the troubles with modern life is that bread is no longer true bread. But around here, in this monastery, we have pretty good bread. Things that are good are good, and if one is responding to that goodness one is in contact with a truth from which one is getting something. The truth is doing us good. The truth of the sunshine, the truth of the rain, the truth of the fresh air, the truth of the wind in the trees, these are truths. And they are always accessible! Let us be exposed to these in such a way that they do us good because these are very accessible forms of truth, and if we allow ourselves to be benefited by the forms of truth that are really accessible to us instead of rejecting and disparaging and despising them as “merely natural” we will be in a better position to profit by higher forms of truth when they come our way.

Natural Problems

Another point raised by Sebastian Moore: sometimes our ordinary personal and human problems are treated in terms of the highest kind of ethical or religious crisis. Dom Sebastian points out that if all ordinary difficulties are always faced on the highest religious level as crucial problems, matters of life and death in the realm of faith and morals, we are never able to get to grips with them on our own personal level.

Suppose a person has difficulty coming to terms with some truth of faith. If this is immediately treated as a religious crisis of the highest order instead of as a personal and even psychological problem, it may be impossible to solve it. Perhaps it is not a problem at all on that religious level. It may not be a problem of sin, for example. If every problem that comes up is immediately treated in terms of sin and betrayal, our grasp of it may be totally unreal. Of course it may be a matter of sin. But let us not confuse a feeling of anxiety or insecurity with a sense of moral guilt. If we automatically assume that every little anxiety is the sign of a moral problem and then try to deal with it as a moral problem we may end up in the most awful confusion—and completely without reason. There is usually no need at all for the moral anguish we create over certain problems.

We ignore an important, psychological, natural element, which may really be the thing at issue in this particular case of this particular person. The solution of the problem may well not be in the confessional, not on a moral level, not on a religious level. It may not be a matter of faith and it may not involve one’s friendship with God at all. It is quite possibly a psychological, natural, emotional problem, something that could be more easily solved on a simple, human level. Some people just can’t stand to have their problems on this lower level—they prefer a full-scale crisis because it makes them feel more “Christian!”

The confessor very often does not realize this. Or he may grasp it intuitively, without knowing how to tell the penitent. We have a penitent who is bothered by this kind of problem which is not really a moral problem and yet is an acutely anguishing problem nevertheless. He or she goes to confession with the problem and the confessor realizes that this is neither a moral nor a religious problem. So he simply dismisses it. Then the person gets extremely worried about this because for him or for her it really is a problem. That is to say, it causes an experience of real insecurity and anxiety. Now, what the priest is saying is, not that this is no problem, but that it is nothing to worry about in confession. But he may brush it off as completely absurd, so that the penitent now feels guilty about having a problem. What he should really be saying is, “Look, this is not a religious problem, this is not a moral problem, and this is not a matter of sin. Your friendship with God is not involved here, and even though you may feel that it is, it isn’t. This has nothing to do with your friendship with God.” What we really need to learn is how to face and handle this sort of thing on a natural level. This is a natural problem, and we have to get in touch with the natural values in ourselves that are the resources with which to meet problems like this—for instance, the resources of growing up. Problems of this kind are often problems of maturity and problems of human experience. The real trouble with many religious is that authentic human experience is side-tracked or short-circuited in the convent. One is not allowed to be an ordinary human being because one is always supposed to be living on the superhuman level. One must always be on an intense level of religious crisis or about to lose one’s vocation or one’s faith. As a result, some people are driven in sheer desperation to “lose their vocation” and get it over with!

But we always have to remember that all problems are illusory without some basis of natural maturity and a natural human growth. It is very important to stress these natural values. We must constantly emphasize the importance of growing up. Needless to say, we must not go to the other extreme and make everything an intense psychological problem. There are real religious problems which are not just psychological problems but they may be more rare than we realize. Many religious are just not mature enough to have an authentic religious crisis!

To sum up, I would say that it is essential for us contemplatives to really hang on to the essentials of our vocation. We must face the fact that we are called to be contemplatives. If there is a real threat to our contemplative life, we must resist that threat. We must refuse to be involved in useless and foolish substitutes for the contemplative life. At the same time, we cannot possibly hang on to a dead formalistic set of pseudo-contemplative routines. The contemplative life has to be renewed and it has to be renewed from within. It has to be renewed by us with the help of the Holy Spirit. This is no time for fooling around, and it is no time for being unduly influenced by the slogans of people who don’t know our problems. It is possible that a great deal of the conflict that is going on in the Church today is marked by neurosis. Between the obsessive compulsive formalisms of some conservatives and the adolescent autistic thinking of some progressives! It’s for us to keep our sanity if we possibly can, and to keep a certain amount of lucidity and a genuine fidelity to Cod’s call. Let us keep alive especially the awareness of what is really authentic within our own experience, because we know, we have experienced in moments of prayer, in moments of truth and realization, what God really asks of us and what He really wishes to give us. Let us remain faithful to that truth and to that experience.

What Is Monastic?

Let us now try to clear the ground for a better approach to our problems as contemplatives. The main problem is of course the renewal of the contemplative life. Our first question concerns, precisely, the term “contemplative.” Should the term “contemplative religious” be used at all? There seems to be some protest about the term “monastic.” I find this in a letter which I am taking as my starting point. Reference is made to a sister who protested against the word “monastic.” The sister is quoted as saying: “I think that what I am objecting most to is the monasticism that has been imposed upon us and has become part of our structure.”

Since I do not know this sister and do not know exactly in what situation the statement was made, I cannot quite comment on it. This letter comes from a Franciscan milieu and the complaint against monasticism being “imposed” upon others, which is very common and in many cases a justified complaint today, usually arises in the active life and in priestly life, and even in lay life where a monastic form of spirituality has historically tended to prevail since the Middle Ages. As if sanctity for a lay person or for a secular priest consisted in living somewhat like a monk. I think perhaps it would be worth while to discuss a little what we mean by the monastic life and also, by implication, the contemplative life.

What is the best way to approach this whole question? ‘There is no point in just giving a definition of the essence of a monk and the essence of a contemplative and so forth. Let us rather approach it from a kind of phenomenological viewpoint. This is a more modern way of looking at it. Let us consider the different kinds of aspiration and vocation which draw people to the particular life that we are leading. What induces them to seek among us something that they particularly want? What brings them here to do, together with us, something that they particularly need to do? What is it that they feel will give their life its true meaning as their personal response to God’s call? In other words, let us consider the kind of thing people have traditionally wanted to do in a cloistered life, a life apart from the world, separated from the world.

In all religious life the postulant gets into a special relationship with civil society: a kind of relationship of opposition in some way or other with the rest of the world. This is central in all traditional forms of “dedicated life” but it’s most central in the so-called contemplative and cloistered orders. After all, when you talk about “cloistered life” you are defining a life (perhaps very unsatisfactorily) in terms of “separation from the world.” And of course, this whole idea of separation from the world is a big problem of our time. We have to be not only separated from the world but also open to it. Let us take for granted that when we talk about separation from the world we are not talking about a fanatical hatred of the world or anything like that.

The whole question of defining our precise relation to the world is another problem which will have to be treated somewhere else. But no matter how we look at it, when we talk about the kind of life that we have in fact embraced we are talking about a life which involves leaving the ordinary life that we knew before in order to do something else which we consider to be better because it is free from certain obstacles and hindrances. We have left our homes and families and civil life and our jobs (if we had them). We have left the university or wherever else we were. We have left our former kind of life and taken on the kind of life that we have now. Doubtless every single one of has at one time or other stopped to consider whether this was really worth while. Certainly one of the great problems in the religious life today is this question: Has it been worth while in terms of authenticity, reality, integrity, and so forth, for me to leave that other kind of life and embrace this kind of life? Is this really more real? Is this more authentic?

Very often you find people solving this question, or trying to solve it, by going from a more active kind of religious life to what we provisionally call a more contemplative life, a more cloistered and hidden kind of religious life. This assumes that one can create certain conditions which are “better” because the experience of generations has shown them to work in a certain way. We assume we can create this set of conditions and get into this new situation ourselves and thereby arrive at something very special to which we are called by God. And so in our cloistered life we try to set up conditions which make it easier and more effective to do something quite special. And what is this that we want to do? Why do we set up these conditions and do these things and what is it that we are after?

To begin with, I think that you can’t say that everybody in the cloister is simply trying to do the same thing. The monastic vocation really allows quite a lot of scope for individual differences; at least it should allow quite a lot of scope for the individual to follow a personal call, to follow something that he feels is especially relevant to him.

Historically, in the beginning of the monastic life, you find people called to a kind of special individual union with God which they are supposed to find out about and work out for themselves after an initial period of training. The earliest model for the monastic life is that of the ascetics and virgins who lived apart from their fellow citizens in the towns of the Roman Empire, or outside the towns. These more experienced ascetics would follow their own manner of life, praying and denying themselves, and following a hidden quiet way of prayer and worship. They would receive young people who thought they were called to the same kind of thing, give them a rudimentary and individual training, and then turn them loose to carry on for themselves.

Monastic communities came only later. And these early monastic vocations were people who felt that they had an individual call to a particular kind of life. They would go off in the desert to live in a cave or somewhere, or they would take to the road and live as pilgrims and beggars.

The Franciscan way came into the Middle Ages as a salutary revolt against the highly institutionalized monastic system. St. Francis made possible once again an open-ended kind of existence in which there wasn’t very much predetermined for you. You were pretty free to do this or that or anything. You could be a pilgrim, you could be a hermit, and you could be a pilgrim for a while and a hennit for a while and then a scholar for a while. Then you could go to the Muslims in North Africa and get yourself martyred if you had the grace! And so forth.

The Franciscan ideal could really be regarded as a return to the authentic freedom of early monasticism. I would venture as a kind of personal guess as this point that actually the ideal of St. Francis was more purely monastic in the true original primitive sense than the life lived by the big Benedictine and Cistercian communities of the thirteenth century where everything was so highly organized behind walls.

A Life of Charismatic Freedom

One of the essential elements of the monastic life is a kind of charismatic freedom. This seems to me to be right at the heart of this monastic vocation; and this creates a problem, of course, precisely because the monastic life as we have it is so highly organized. To what extent does this organized and disciplined and systematic life enable a person to attain a certain level of freedom interiorly in order to do what God has called him to do? To say “a life of charismatic freedom” is to speak of a life in which a person is free from certain routine cares and responsibilities and claims and demands which are regarded as less fruitful, as somewhat deadening. The monastic charism seeks to be free from these in order to be more constantly awake, alert, alive, sensitive to areas of experience which are not easily opened up in the midst of the routines which we shall call “worldly routines.” On the other hand, of course, we must not develop a sort of magic idea of the contemplative life and say that when a person puts on a certain kind of habit and goes into a certain kind of cloister and lives a certain kind of rule automatically a deep inner kind of contemplative life follows. This is not necessarily so and the problem of substituting cloister routines for worldly routines can really be an evasion and a falsification of this call to authentic inner freedom. But the point is that the contemplative or monastic life is supposed to liberate a man or a woman from certain routines which are fruitless for them, although perhaps fruitful for other people, in order to let them do something else that they feel they are called to do.

I suppose here we had better say something about freedom. Here we realize that we are in trouble! We cannot possibly take these big words for granted. They call for a great deal of study, a great deal of reflection from all of us collectively and individually. It is definitely not enough to pick up some of the echoes and resonances and emotional implications of a word like freedom as it is bandied around in the religious life. These are loaded words, and they are being used in a way that can be very fruitful and very helpful, but can also be very destructive.

Freedom is also a fighting word, and we have to reflect on the reasons why. Freedom is a fighting word in the religious life today, just as it is in civil life, simply because it has been denied people so consistently and with so many fradulent excuses. Religious have been abused in this matter like everyone else. Authority has not always been honest in its exercise. “Obedience” has been used to justify almost anything. The time has come to rectify that abuse. But as I say, we have to consider and study what freedom means, especially for us in the contemplative life.

Asceticism

Freedom for what? Obviously the traditional idea, although this has to be examined too, still holds. Traditionally in the monastic life, in the contemplative life and in the ascetic life as a whole, there’s a question of asceticism. It is understood that the freedom we seek is a freedom which is purchased at the price of renouncing another kind of freedom. The freedom that we are talking about in the contemplative life and in the monastic life is the freedom which is bought by the renunciation of license or the simple capacity to follow any legitimate desire in any legitimate direction. Besides renouncing illegitimate freedom we also give up a certain lawful autonomy. So that we come face to face right away with the fact that the freedom we look for is bound up with restrictions. Of course, if we’re going to consider contemplative freedom intelligently we must go back to the real sources in the New Testament and especially in St. Paul and St. John. I am not going to do that here. The freedom we seek in the contemplative life is to be understood in the light of St. John’s statement that the truth shall make you free and St. Paul’s statement that we have the freedom of the children of God and the freedom of the Spirit. It is also the freedom which is not under the law. Monastic freedom does not place its hope in the fulfillment of legal routine observances. Therefore it is very important indeed to understand the contemplative life or the monastic life or whatever form of life you want to call it in such a way that it does not become a life dominated by law or a life defined by the hope of salvation through good works. We have to take into account the fact that Luther was a religious. They speak of him as a “monk.” He was not a monk—the Augustinians are not monks. But Luther was a religious reacting against a decadent religious system and returning to St. Paul. Luther wanted to “return to sources.”

‘Whether we agree with Luther or not is another matter, but Luther is historically important for the religious life of the Catholic Church and for our monastic renewal. Obviously the reforms of the Council of Trent were aimed against Luther. But now we clearly understand also that one of the main points of Vatican II has been an implicit recognition that we are now beyond the Council of Trent. The need for the defensive measures taken at Trent no longer exists. We are in a totally different situation. Without abandoning the historic continuity which links us with the medieval past through Trent, we have to remember that the defensive attitude taken by Trent cannot be what governs and guides us in our religious renewal today.

To return to my point: in the contemplative and monastic life we have sought out a certain kind of solitude and separation from the world for the sake of freedom.

Martha and Mary

One of the ways in which the freedom of the contemplative life is expressed is perhaps not very popular today. Still, let us consider this example. We find it in the gospel of Martha and Mary. Martha working to provide the meal which our Lord is to eat and Mary sitting at the feet of the Lord listening to what he has to say. Martha complains that Mary does not help her, and Jesus defends Mary, saying: “Martha, you are solicitous, you are disturbed with many things! Mary has chosen the best part and it shall not be taken from her.”

Traditionally this has been explained by the fathers of the Church, in a way that we all well know, to justify a certain renunciation of good, productive, healthy social activity in order simply to listen to the words of Christ, to be silent and listen to God. Of course this really doesn’t solve any problems, yet the use of this text as a justification of the contemplative life does rest on a solid psychological basis, on a basis of real experience which can be verified in the lives of those who have tried to put it into practice and know what it means.

When someone has an authentic call to the contemplative life or to the monastic life, that call can be understood in terms of this gospel text and experienced in the way that is suggested by it. Our vocation can be understood as the resolution of a conflict which is expressed in this story, a conflict in ourselves. Now the important thing is that the conflict is in ourselves rather than projected outward into institutions. It is one thing to experience in our own lives the difference between the action of Martha and the listening of Mary—but quite another to “prove” that Trappists are “better” than Dominicans!

The fact that this conflict between Martha and Mary became an institutional matter in the thirteenth century does not concern us here, it simply obscures the issue. Ever since that time, there has been a great deal of argument about the respective value of active orders and contemplative orders. This is no longer to the point. Where the conflict resolves itself is in our own hearts as individual persons or small groups, called to this particular life of quiet, of freedom to listen to the Word of God in our hearts. We experience in ourselves a new and special kind of truth when we imitate Mary. We who have this particular call recognize that when we are agitated by all kinds of external concerns which do not touch us deeply at all we are less authentic, less real, less ourselves, less what we are supposed to be. We feel less faithful to the will of God than when we remain simply in an attitude of freedom and attentiveness to His word, His love and His will. This gospel text illustrates our experience that we are summoned by the Holy Spirit to make an act of preference. We are called to prefer the apparent uselessness, the apparent unproductiveness, the apparent inactivity of simply sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to him. We are called to prefer this over an apparently more productive, more active, more busy life. We quietly affirm that there is something more important than “getting things done.”

Together with this is another implied assumption: that this preference goes against the ideas of the majority of our fellow human beings at any given moment and especially today in the twentieth century. Our act of preference for “quiet” is at the same time an implicit protest and defiance, a protest against and a defiance of the counter opinion of those who are absolutely convinced that our life is useless and who reproach us for it.

Here we find another piece in the jigsaw puzzle that we are putting together. A very important piece is this element of preferring to be at the feet of Jesus and to listen to him in secret, even though we can’t fully explain it to other people. Other people are not going to understand it. Other good people are not going to understand it, other Christians and other Catholics. We realize all this and we make our choice anyhow. In this contemplative life of ours, in our monastic existence, we are going against the stream.

The Discipline of Listening

This puts us in a very uncomfortable position. We realize that if we get excited about those who criticize us and devote too much effort to answering them, we become solicitous and which we are called to cultivate as a special kind of discipline. This brings us to another point in this Martha-Mary picture that we are considering. It is an obscure realization which is never emphasized enough. Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. This discipline of listening and of attention is a very high form of ascetic discipline, a rather difficult one to maintain. In fact, there are lots of people who do not have the strength nor the grace to maintain this kind of discipline for very long. Doubtless when a person is clearly not able to do this, maybe he shouldn’t try. Our asceticism will consist in discovering to what extent each one of us can simply remain quiet in passive attention to God, and to what extent we do need some activity, some work that does not completely interfere with this but which relaxes us and takes us away from mere concentration. We all need a certain amount of activity which enables us to participate healthily in the life of our community. We need work that keeps us in tune physically and psychologically so that we are able to listen fruitfully instead of just going stale and turning off completely. There is such a thing as over-doing interior prayer and over-doing concentration and over-doing recollection. This can be harmful. It only deadens our capacity to listen and to attend to God.

This we all know. But let us emphasize the fact that our attention to Jesus alone, our listening to his word, our attitude of interior conviction is something we come to experience as the highest value in our life. Contemplatives are people who experience this. This is in itself a most effective discipline and a most purifying form of ascetic training and formation. In this tranquil, empty, peaceful solitude a person receives quietly, hid-denly and secretly from God a great deal of benefit, simply by listening and quiet attention.

In this connection let me refer to a passage by St. John of the Cross. Speaking of solitude and the benefits of solitude on the soul, and the tranquil listening to God which he calls the “tranquillity of solitude in which the soul is moved and guided to find things by the spirit of God,” he says that in this solitude, in this listening, in this tranquil attention to God, God acts directly upon the one who prays, doing it by Himself, communicating Himself to the soul, without other means, without passing through angels, men, images or forms. He adds that in this solitude, God and the beloved are together in great intimacy.

The solitude wherein the soul lives before time was the desire to be without all the blessings of the world for the sake of love.

Now, that is a good definition, or a good indication of something of that choice that I was speaking of—a desire, an active desire to forgo the benefits, privileges, blessings, advantages which are characteristic of a worldly life or an active life. Characteristic, incidentally, of a good worldly life. We do not deny the goodness of all these things but we renounce their goodness for something else which we see to be better for us, but which does not appear at all to anybody else.

Even at the very beginning of a contemplative life, when a person has received this call from God, he does realize obscurely that for him the supreme value of life is going to consist in a surrender directly to God, in the hope and confidence and belief that God will act directly upon him without the intermediary of ordinary active human ideas or agencies. Of course it may be normal and may be fruitful and sanctifying for most people to reach God through the medium of married love and by bringing up children in an active life, and many may find God better in an active apostolic life fully mixed up with the things of time and of the world. This may be a perfectly normal and perhaps in some respects a better way. Certainly it is a way that the rest of the human race appreciates more. Nevertheless, there is for us this mysterious call to a life of direct communion with and dependence upon and guidance by and formation by and purification by God in silence, in prayer, in solitude, in detachment, in freedom.

It is here that we have to seek the real meaning of freedom in the contemplative life. We renounce other forms of freedom in order to have this kind of freedom. Therefore it becomes necessary to accept restrictions, restraints, self-denial, sacrifice and so forth, as we have always heard and always known. But it is much deeper than we have always heard. Restriction and sacrifice have to be accepted in order that this inner freedom may grow. Therefore in the contemplative life, in the monastic life, there is necessarily an element of renouncing advantages, renouncing even certain fruitful activities which sanctify people in other vocations, in order to find our expansion and development and rest and peace in a totally different dimension. For a great deal of the time this solitude and listening are painful, difficult, full of hardship and very demanding. The contemplative life is especially demanding because we are alone and unable to explain ourselves to other people. Admittedly this is very hazardous. So many people are not able to handle this isolation, as we know from experience. They crack up! Perhaps we can say that in our life there are many people who do have an authentic appreciation of what this might be for them and yet they are not able to attain to it. We must not blame them. We must not say that it is their fault. We must not say that they have not been generous enough. It is just a fact that few people are able to live in this solitary “desert” for a lifetime. Those of us who recognize ourselves really called to this should be very happy—much more happy than we usually are about it. We should be very grateful to God that He called us to this life and that He has called us to this particular kind of peace in this particular kind of fulfillment, which in so many respects is an unfulfillment and which is almost scandalous to people of our time, so intent upon human fulfillment. Yet even they, when they come in contact with people who have lived in a solitary or clositered life, recognize that there is a special kind of happiness in this life.

Contemplative and Mystic

Let us finally consider the question of using the word “contemplative” for all this. This word, contemplative, is another one that calls for a great deal of reflection and study on our part. There are many problems. First of all, the term “contemplative” is ambiguous. In the debates that were carried on rather hotly in the nineteen-twenties between the Jesuits and the Dominicans in France about the mystical life, mystical graces and contemplative life, the term “contemplative” tended to be used as it had been used for several centuries before with overtones of mysticism. Indeed, very often you find that the word “contemplative” is a safer, vaguer, broader and more discreet word for “mystic.” Mystic seems to be a more scary word than contemplative. People hesitate to use it. Also mystic tends to suggest women with stigmata and people having visions, or people who have manifestly attained to mystical union in an extraordinary way. As I understand it from having read a lot of the literature on the subject, the word “contemplative” has been rather widely used as a discreet term for persons enjoying a certain low grade of mystical grace which has nothing to do with visions and has nothing to do with anything very special, but corresponds to a kind of quiet, unitive and passive absorption in God. This is definitely a special grace of God which is much more widespread than is usually realized. It is really accessible to lots of people. Doubtless many who receive it cannot stay with it for very long but nevertheless it is a sort of borderline mystical state.

Now, this use of “contemplation” can be very misleading because if you say we are a “contemplative order,” we are a “contemplative community,” this is a “contemplative cloister,” are you intimating that everybody in the cloister is a mystic of this particular kind? Or that everybody in the cloister should be a mystic of this particular kind? The answer is obviously “No!” Nor is anyone asserting that contemplatives in this sense are found only in cloisters. They are found rather widely outside cloisters. There are plenty of housewives with noisy children and all kinds of duties who are leading a contemplative life in this sense. And there are plenty of people teaching in universities or engaged in intellectual life in one form or other who are or can be contemplatives in this sense without very much difficulty.

It is not even necessarily true that life in a contemplative cloister is more propitious to this unitive way of prayer than any other kind of life. It should be, it’s designed for that. We have to admit this when we speak of Carmelite cloisters. Obviously St. Teresa meant Carmel to be a place where this kind of contemplative prayer, quasi-mystical prayer, near-mystical prayer, should be not unusual. But nevertheless, we all know from experience that there are lots of people in monasteries and cloisters who do not respond to this kind of thing at all, who are mystified by it or scared by it or upset by it or disturbed by it, and who nevertheless can do very well indeed in a life of service, charity and devotion. This brings us to the important point that the essential of our life is not precisely or chiefly that it disposes us for contemplation in the sense that I have just described but that it produces a community in which the Spirit can speak to us all in different ways. The longing for a real evangelical community life is certainly as strong today, above all in the young people who are coming to religious life.

Christian Community

There’s nothing wrong whatever in dropping the use of this word “contemplation” completely if we want to look at the whole thing from a different point of view and use a different lan-guage—the language of the last chapters of St. John’s Gospel, for example. Here the mystical theology, so to speak, of the New Testament is fully exposed in the context of the Last Supper; that is to say, in the ideal, perfect expression of Christian community. And so suppose that the term “contemplation” is unsatisfactory—suppose there are lots of people who are mystified and put off when we express the idea of union with God and direct communion with him in the language of “contemplation.” If this insistence on “contemplation” becomes scandalous and difficult for them let us re-formulate it in terms of the New Testament. Let us think of it in terms of knowing Jesus, being one of his disciples, being a member of the loving community which is called together in his merciful love, called to share his body and his blood together around the table of the Eucharistic banquet, called to realize in our love for one another and in our love for Jesus his presence in us. Let us consider the fourteenth chapter of St. John, for example, as an expression of the experience of Jesus present to us in our communal life, in the quiet of that cenacle which we have chosen and which is our cloister.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house. If there were not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me. So that where I am, you may be too. You know the way and the place where I am going. Thomas said, Lord, we do not know where you are going so how can we know the way. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment, you know him and have seen him.

Our life in our cloistered community is a life in which we should have access to many mansions. Let us always remember that. That should be a kind of magna carta of the monastic life. “There are many mansions in my Father’s house.” Here is a place where we are gathered together, called out of the world in the sense that the disciples were called there to the cenacle with Jesus. Like the disciples we are waiting for him to come and bring us to the place that he has prepared for us. This is the language of the New Testament. This may appeal more to some than the language of “contemplation” but it comes basically down to the same thing, the same experience, Mary’s love and total trust in the Lord who promises to manifest His glory to us and in us through the Church.

In this life of waiting and of trusting, of attending entirely to Jesus’ will for us and to his love for us living in simplicity with the brothers and the sisters, in the breaking of bread and in mutual love, we learn gradually to experience a new dimension of our Christian life. We come to see not only that we are going somewhere but that we have already arrived, and that Jesus is both the way and the truth and the life. He is the beginning and the end; to live in him is to be not only on the way but at the end, to have arrived.

Our life in Christ is all-sufficient. What we have been calling the “contemplative life” is a life of awareness that one thing is necessary, that Jesus is alone necessary and that to live for him and in him is all-sufficient. To live in him pacifies everything. To live in him takes care of everything. To live in him answers all questions even though we don’t quite understand or hear the answers.

So when Philip says to him, as we do, “Show us the Father,” Jesus replies (and this is our life), “To have seen me is to have seen the Father, so how can you say, let us see the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me? It is the Father living in me who is doing this work.”

This we have to believe in our own life. If we are living in Christ, we are, so to speak, face to face with the Father but we do not know it and we cannot see Him. We have to be content to be face to face with Him in a way that we cannot understand or see. But we must realize that Jesus working in us is carrying out the Father’s work and manifesting the Father to us. “It is to the glory of my Father that you should bear much fruit and then you will be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remained in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you. A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friend. I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father. You did not choose me. No, I chose you and I commissioned you to go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last; and then the Father will give you anything that you ask him in my name. What I command you is to love one another.”

Built into all this passage of St. John is the basic idea that if we live by Christ’s love in the Christian community, we will experience, obscurely, in some way, what it means that Christ is sent to us from the Father and dwells in us by His Spirit, fulfilling in us the will of the Father, so that what we experience in our communal Christian life is what it means to be united to God in Christ and to be children of God in His Spirit.

We have now considered two aspects of our life, one the more personal solitary one, and the other more communal one. We have emphasized the fact that these are two aspects of the same thing. We do not need to know which one of these is right because they are both right. What we really have to discover for ourselves and for our communities is how to reach the right kind of combination of these two elements so that each one of us will be able to live fully the kind of vocation to which he or she has been called.

Active Service

The word “contemplative” is used both juridically and mystically, and this creates confusion. The term “contemplative life” has become a kind of juridical term synonymous with “cloistered life” and yet it also has mystical overtones. Now, you cannot really have such a thing as a contemplative institution. Contemplation simply cannot be institutionalized. In fact you can create a cloistered life with certain laws and regulations, and inside this cloistered life there may be some people who are really called to be contemplatives in the sense of mystics of a very simple kind. There may be other people, perhaps the majority, whose whole life is centered on a kind of simple active service and worship within the cloister, without a thought of mystical prayer. And this is a very special, very real kind of vocation. It emphatically does not want to become involved in active outside external concerns, and does want simply to lead a quiet, well-ordered life in the cloister, centered principally on liturgical worship, on manual work, simply service, and communal life and fraternal charity.

What we have to do at this present point in our study is to realize that when the law talks of the contemplative life it is really thinking of this second class of people, interested more in active service in the cloister than in simple contemplative prayer. Now, it would be a great mistake to oppose these two to each other, because in fact a person who is called to be a contemplative in the cloister is going to be greatly helped toward that end by living the simple life of service we have been talking about. Also those who live a life of cloistered service and liturgical prayer, with a certain amount of meditation with reading, will come very close to a kind of simple contemplative peace in their hearts which, however, they will experience in a slightly different way. It may be a sense of peace from having done their duty—the peace that comes from living an ordered life, a quiet indus‑ trious life of devotion and consecration. Perhaps this simple and active, dutiful and devout peace is what most cloistered religious seek.

The opposition between the two kinds of approach can be exaggerated, and cause an unfortunate split in the community. To some extent this is due, I think, to the fact that the active service people lack imagination. They seem to feel that we who have emphasized solitude and contemplation are somehow running them down. There is a kind of “chip on the shoulder” attitude on the part of the active service types—they resent the claims of the more contemplative members of the community, as if on the one hand we claim superiority, and on the other are trying to get out of work. So we notice a kind of defensive attitude on the part of some in our monasteries, who are good people and work hard. They get a lot of satisfaction out of work, which is fine; but they feel that the “Marys” are shirking their responsibility and are not realistic. They seem to think the “contemplatives” are deceiving themselves and just sitting around twiddling their thumbs in a state of quietism and inertia. There has been a certain amount of tension between the two groups on this account.

And so contemplation, even in the so-called contemplative monasteries, tends always to be in disrepute. Even so-called contemplatives can look upon contemplation as something unrealistic, as if the real point of monastic life were only active cloistered service. Perhaps it is—I’m not coming to any conclusions on this now. I am just sorting out the different manifestations of these two tendencies. Many so-called contemplatives are simply called to a kind of cloistered service, and it is therefore unfortunate that the life should be officially called contemplative, because the use of the term is ambiguous for these people and causes a lot of doubt and confusion. In practice they solve it by saying that liturgy is contemplation, and he who is zealous about going to choir on time is a “true contemplative.”

Attentiveness to God

I am now talking more particularly to those vJho really seek a deeper experience of God, a deeper expansion of the religious consciousness, a deeper understanding and knowledge of the things of God through love. A moment ago we described two approaches to the life of Mary, the life of sitting at the feet of Christ. The life of Mary can be seen as a life of solitary listening, solitary attentiveness, interior purification, interior disposability, openness, readiness to be spoken to, an interior sensitivity, an interior awareness, all of which we cultivate in prayer. A person called to this kind of contemplation will quite spontaneously seek more time to be alone, quiet, simply listening to God.

Of course where people go wrong is that they fail to realize that this simple prayer can go on even though one may be at work. This state of attention to God certainly can coexist with a simple kind of action, and the fact that one is not aware of attending to God is perhaps better. It is not necessarily the best and most healthy thing for a person to be sitting quietly, intensely aware of himself as passive. It is better for a person to be somewhat active and not to be aware that anything special is going on, provided that there is no absorption in anything else.

Take the activity of sweeping the floor or washing dishes or chopping wood or cutting grass or something like that. These activities are not distracting. We do not become absorbed in them and it is quite possible to engage in them without any sense that we are praying or that we are doing anything other than simply doing what we do in such a way that we remain quietly close to God. Now, the point I am trying to get to is this: what this attentiveness to God really means is not just a particular psychological state or a peculiar kind of recollection, but it is part and parcel of the experience of love in everyday life. Consequently love is the thing that really creates unity in the apparent division between the Marthas and the Malys of

the cloister. It also creates unity in ourselves--and unites us with reality. Maybe the Marthas obscurely realize that when they are giving their bodies and their senses something neutral to do they are at peace and somehow or another united with God, without realizing it or experiencing anything special. They may find that when they sit down and do nothing and simply try to attend to God in a recollected state they become tense and confused, too aware of themselves. The other people, the contemplatives and the Marys, so to speak, are able to do this and enjoy listening to God and they think perhaps they are better off that way. In actual fact, what happens is that the Marys also enter into great dryness and do not necessarily enjoy or get much sweetness out of this attentiveness to God. But they have to go on with it anyway because they cannot help themselves.

They are called and drawn to this in such a way that they realize that the greatest benefit in their life is going to come from this simple peaceful attentiveness to God even though it is arid and quiet and dry. And they too will learn, as I said, to combine it with simple tasks and manual work. It is also a good thing to be involved in some work that takes your mind off prayer completely, that rests the mind and gives it a change. The mind is not rested by falling into complete inactivity but by varying its activity. This variety is important.

The essential thing in our life is this fact that it be centered on love as sufficient unto itself. Love alone is enough, regardless of whether it produces anything. It is better for love not to be especially oriented to results, to a work to be done, a class to be taught, people to be taken care of in the hospital, or anything like that. In the active life love is channeled into something that gets results. In the so-called contemplative life love is sufficient unto itself. It does of course work, it does do things, but in our life the emphasis is on love above everything else, on faith above everything else. Especially on faith above works! The characteristic of our life is that it makes us realize more deeply how much we depend directly on God by faith, how much we depend directly on the mercy of God, how much we depend upon receiving everything directly from him and

not through the mediation of our own activity. While we continue to act, we act in such a way that this consciousness of dependence on God is greater, more continual, more all-embracing and more satisfactory than it is in the active life. It is in this that we find our peace. It is in this that we find our whole meaning for existence. What is called the contemplative life is really a life arranged in such a way that a person can more easily and more simply and more naturally live in an awareness of direct dependence on God—almost with the sense of realizing consciously, at every moment, how much we depend on Him; and receive from Him directly everything that comes to us as a pure gift; and experience, taste in our hearts, the love of God in this gift, the delicacy and the personal attention of God to us in His merciful love, which St. Thérèse de Lisieux brought out so beautifully.

This is of course true to some extent of all religious life. But in other forms of religious life the emphasis tends to be outgoing, centered on what we are doing and on the results we are getting and on the relationships we are setting up with other people; whereas in our life, the so-called contemplative life, the emphasis is on our direct relationship to God and our experience with that relationship, that experience of spiritual childhood, sonship in the spirit. ‘We cultivate a sense of direct dependence on God and look to God in order to receive all from Him at every moment.

And this life takes two forms, as I say. Some see it more in terms of a simple service in the cloister, liturgical prayer, and active work around the house. Others see it more in terms of solitary meditation and direct listening. But the contrast between these two should not be exaggerated; they’re really doing pretty much the same thing and they should feel that they are sisters to one another like Martha and Mary. For the medieval writers always ended up by saying that Martha and Mary complete each other and that no community would be a full monastic community if there were not Marthas and Marys together. They are both needed, and the real community is a synthesis of these two aspects of the one monastic life.

Deviations

At this point it might be well to pause and consider the fact that in both these approaches to the hidden life of prayer, the cloistered life, there can be and often are, as we know by experience, deviations and wrong directions. Many people misunderstand both these ways of approaching our life with God, the way of cloistered service and the way of solitary meditative absorption and prayer and listening. Now, the problem is in each case to insure a genuine, living, healthy occupation with God which is based on faith, on real living faith and also on common sense. We must cultivate a realistic and healthy view of human life. It is easy to live inhumanly in a cloister, to cultivate a sort of fanatical and compulsive addiction to the practices of cloistered life. Instead of living our lives in a healthy, productive, normal, humble, quiet, matter-of-fact sort of way, on a basis of deep faith, one may get tense and overpreoccupied, over-anxious, almost superstitious and fanatical about the things that he or she is doing. The more active people whose life is centered on cloistered service tend to develop a kind of scrupulosity, a kind of obsession with doing everything the right way—they become obsessed with the idea that there is only one right way to do it and that’s the way it’s going to be done by everybody! They are obsessed with what they are doing and in seeing that it is recognized as right by others. In other words, they develop an excessive preoccupation with themselves.

The same thing happens in a different way with the person who tends to prefer a silent, solitary, meditative approach. By way of brief and shorthand identification, I would say that what we are concerned with is people who become unconsciously centered on themselves rather than on God. We find that they develop a kind of cult of themselves, a cult of their own works, their own personality and their own activities. They are engrossed in their own prayers and their own feelings and their own experiences, instead of the cult of God. They’re not worshipping God, really. They become, as it were, hypnotized by themselves. And they can do this sometimes with the best will in the world. They can rationalize all this very cleverly as service of God and it can become really a complicated business, this sort of fanatical involvement in oneself, justified by rationalization in which everything is theoretically ordered to God.

So there are people who are intensely involved in themselves, all tied up in themselves, and rather unpleasant to live with because of this. They take it out in various subtle ways on other people. They justify all this by appealing to God, to faith and to religion. Sometimes passive meditating people are extremely aware of every little thing that disturbs them, and become extremely critical of anything that interferes with their absorption in the experience of sweetness that they are having. This is, generally speaking, a sign that there is something wrong somewhere, that the contemplative thing isn’t quite as authentic as it appears to be. It is more centered on one’s own self than it is on God.

In all cases, we have to remember the basic importance of a good, common-sense, realistic, human view of life; and where this common-sense, human realism is not found it must be cultivated. If it cannot be cultivated, then there is something definitely wrong with that person’s vocation. But of course there will always be people who have been to some extent wounded, twisted, and injured by the inhumanity of an abstract kind of life. They will be semi-neurotics, who nevertheless get along in the cloister. They can remain in the cloister. They can be lived with and helped. They can even be of real positive value to the community in spite of their shortcomings. I suppose we could say that in a certain way we are all slightly nuts. We are all a little bit crazy and we all have to get along with one another in spite of our little eccentricities and quirks of character. There is evidently a little bit of the neurotic in almost everybody today. This has to be understood and accepted. Anyway the great thing is to maintain a healthy atmosphere.

The basic requirement of the contemplative and cloistered life today is this: before all else, before we indulge in asceticism or I go on to quiet contemplative absorption in God, we must recognize the need to maintain a healthy human atmosphere and a normal human relationship to one another and to reality in our communities.

This, of course, goes without saying, but it cannot be overemphasized; it’s so easily forgotten. People become so tied up in abstract ascetic or contemplative projects, things that they think they ought to do, that they forget the basic reality of living as human beings first of all. We have to be, first of all, healthy, mature, honest, objective, humble men and women before we can go on to be ascetics and mystics and contemplatives. This must never be forgotten and it has to be continually returned to because it is the foundation on which all the rest is built.

Penance

Now let us take up another very important aspect of the contemplative life. In so far as it is a life of freedom it has to be a life of penance. This may sound contradictory to those who only take a superficial view of freedom, but when we realize the true depth of the Christian idea of freedom we realize that it is essentially bound up with penance. What our life is supposed to do for us is to guarantee us a certain freedom of spirit. The true freedom of spirit that St. Paul and St. John speak of is the truth that makes us free. The monastic life seeks to provide a certain kind of truth by a really authentic penance. One of the things necessary today in the renewal of our religious life and our contemplative life is the renewal of the spirit of penance. But it has to be a renewal, not a return to a concept of strictness which has prevailed for the last two or three hundred years. True penance is more than legalistic strictness, a fanatical, obsessive and compulsive sort of strictness about keeping small and rather arbitrary rules, just for their own sake. Let us face the fact right away, that this unsatisfactory concept of penance, while it had a value at a certain time, is much too limited and much too rigid. It has to a great extent lost all meaning to people in our time, whether for better or for worse. I won’t go into the discussion of whether this shows that the people of our time are better or worse than people of other times. But the fact remains, that the kind of penitential discipline presupposed by a series of formal and rigid little observances has ceased to have any meaning to modem people.

A person who had bought this concept of life felt that in doing all these things he was being a real “penitent” and “denying himself.” And yet they were comparatively easy to do. It was to some extent simply an act, playing a penitential role. Of course it was not all that easy. Some of the penitential things were really a hardship. For example, the old rules about clothing when you had to sleep in all your habit even in the hottest nights of summer. There was all the paraphernalia of the old habit with the rather complicated and heavy underwear we used to have. You really were hot in that dormitory cell, sleeping in all those clothes! You knew that it was summer! That was a trying and exacting and difficult thing to do and it required a lot of resolution and a lot of prayer! It meant a certain amount of anguish—the business of having prickly heat all summer long with no relief possible from it. You just couldn’t get away from prickly heat because you just never stopped sweating and there was no way to be dry for more than ten seconds. You just never dried out.

Well, without going on with this, you can see that this refinement of discipline in matters of petty regulations is no longer adequate as a Christian idea of penance even though it may be difficult, even though it may be demanding. This is not the right approach. Experience has taught us that this simply no longer really works. We still have in our communities many excellent people who have been formed by this kind of practice and we admire these people very much; but we also have people who have been broken and twisted and distorted by this kind of practice. We instinctively feel that they did not come to the cloister just to be deformed in this particular kind of way, and therefore this dehumanizing concept of penance is insufficient It does not come near the demand of the New Testament idea of penance. The distinction is this: the old idea of penance that I’ve been talking about is a limited one, very demanding within a small area but not really going very deep. It is external, and, in a certain sense, it’s easier—it’s kind of an evasion of the real penance of giving up ourselves. Is it real self-sacrifice or is it only will-training? It may be purifying up to a point but it leaves intact the inmost ego, and a person can be really strict in this kind of penance and remain very proud and harsh and extremely uncharitable. A cruel, aggressive and vindictive kind of person can flourish on this kind of penance. Real penance is aimed at the deep root of pride and the deep root of uncharitableness. Real penance aims at that vindictiveness and that persecuting mentality which so many of these strict people developed in the past.

But we must not go to the other extreme. That we now in the monastic life or the cloistered life or the contemplative life are simply throwing away all these practices and living in a kind of freedom of spirit without any real discipline is fatal. There is no hope of any good coming out of this. It will only destroy monasticism. The freedom that we are looking for must never be considered a kind of mere spontaneous following of natural tendencies, innocent natural feelings, and so forth. This idea of mere personal fulfillment, a more or less natural fulfillment of spontaneous good instincts and desires, is not good enough. If there is real charity present, if you have real honest‑to-goodness community relationships in which there is real love, certainly this will do an enormous amount—but you can’t have this without real self-denial, and the problem is, of course, to what extent real love is found in these relationships which are sought for and pointed to as the solution. To what extent are they really love, and to what extent are they mere gregariousness, vapid togetherness? We cannot be content with a superficial chumminess and euphoria, the kind of cheerfulness which depends on having a good time. We have been at this kind of thing for a couple of years and I think we are beginning to see the insufficiency of a community life in which there is a great deal of chumminess and a certain amount of openness and also a lot of confusion. Community means more than people proppingeach other up in a desperate kind of way. It means more than interminable talking and interminable wandering around looking for something that brings joy. This is not going to do the trick.

Basically there is only one Christian freedom, which is the freedom of the cross. It is the freedom that comes for one who has completely given himself with Christ on the cross, has risen with Christ and has his freedom—not simply in ordinary human spontaneity but in the spontaneity of the Spirit of God, who is given to us in exchange for our own spirit when and if we die on the cross with Christ. The pattern of the monastic life is a real death and resurrection, and for us especially there is this element of a real death to the world, to the ordinary life that we would otherwise be living as Christians or as active apostles. Whatever we call our life, cloistered or contemplative or monastic, it does imply a real break and therefore a real liberation, by a kind of death, from the claims and demands of a highly distracted and confused life in the world; although this, of course, may have a few Christian dimensions of its own. It might even be more Christian than our life. In certain circumstances it might be, but the fact remains that in response to the call of God we have made this real break and sought this real liberation from the whole network of needs, servitudes and demands which secular life imposes on people. There is no real freedom in our life without this death and resurrection—without this clean break.

Our freedom is by no means simply a removal of obstacles which permits us to fulfill our best natural aspirations. That has to be perfectly clear. We do not come to the cloister simply to become artists or to become musicians or to make friends with other people. We do not come to the cloister for the expansion of a merely human existence, because that can be done much better somewhere else. The real expansion of human existence in that kind of dimension is to be sought in married life. We do not come to the cloister to find the same kind of fulfillment and expansion of our human character and personality as we would find in marriage or in a creative secular existence, a professional career in the world. We come here for a specific and precise aim, which is a special kind of transformation in Christ and a special kind of transformation in the Spirit. The root of our penance is not at all just the embracing of ascetical routine. We come here for transformation, to be transformed not by simple convent discipline or by monastic ascetic practices. We come here to be transformed by the Spirit. We do not bring to the cloister or to the solitude of the monastery or the woods simply our own personality and our own aspirations plus a set of ascetic tools that we’re going to work with to make ourselves more perfect. The idea that one remains essentially oneself and in command of oneself, and simply uses ascetic techniques to become more perfect, is essentially misleading. It leads to a wrong concept of penance, which is really no penance at all. It is mere willful rigidity without any transformation.

We come to the cloister to surrender ourselves to Christ and to his Spirit in a kind of death, in order to live again in a life which he gives us. The freedom that we seek in the cloister is the freedom to be open to the new life which comes from Christ, the freedom to follow his Spirit. We seek a virginal freedom to follow the bridegroom wherever he goes, to be attentive to his every inspiration and to listen to the personal message that he has for us. This can come to us from no other source except from him speaking in our hearts. The institution of a certain kind of strict cloistered and solitary life is aimed precisely to protect this inner atmosphere of silence, listening and freedom in which Christ can do in us the work he wishes to do.

The root of our penance is faith. The root of our life of metanoia is a real faith in Christ, a real faith in our vocation, a real faith in the transforming power of the cross, a faith in God’s promises, a faith that if we give up ourselves and our ambitions, even our spiritual ambitions, if we deliver ourselves utterly and totally into the hands of Christ and to his love, we will indeed be transformed in his time, in his way, by his Spirit. Not in our time, not in our way, and not by our own spirit.

We do not come here to be transformed by our own will and our own spirit. We come here to make this complete surrender in faith. Whether we go by the old way or by the new way, this faith is radically and urgently and critically the most important thing. This is what we have to cultivate and this is what we have, above all, to pray for.

Prayer for Faith

So I would say, the root of renewal for our life implies renewal in the spheres of prayer and of penance. We do not yet know exactly in what this renewal will consist. These are the things that we have to discover collectively and individually by a real cooperative search under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But the root of it all for all of us is prayer for faith. We must pray to the Lord at every moment to increase our faith because the root of renewal is faith. In proportion as we grow in faith, we keep closer and closer to him who has called us. In proportion as our faith develops it gives us the vision ‘by which we can see our errors, and we can see the wrong road, instinctively. By our faith we will come to a closer union with Christ, a deeper dependence on him so that he will be able to guide us through the difficulties, the obstacles, the confusions and the errors that we are likely to meet in this way of renewal. So prayer for faith is absolutely the most fundamental thing and we must not forget how great is the power of God to give us what we need and in the most surprising ways. For example, I just had a letter from a person who claimed that she had been an atheist for quite some time. She is a young married woman, evidently baptized a Catholic in childhood and brought up perhaps as a Catholic. She could see no logical reason for the existence of God. People had been trying to prove to her the existence of God and it made no impression on her whatever. All this had no meaning whatever to her and  she simply could not believe in God. Until all of a sudden one day, instead of arguing with her, some priest said, “Look, God wants your heart, not your mind: God loves you!” All of a sudden this whole thing collapsed and there broke through into her heart the sense of who God really is and what He really meant to her. She saw how desperately she needed this God who loved her, who was calling her to accept His love and to love Him in return. The whole reality of the thing just simply burst through, whereas arguments about the existence of God and intellectual discussion of God and so forth had meant nothing. So it is with us. We get so involved in all these intellectual and abstract discussions that we forget the basic—this call of God’s love to us, urging us to love Him in return and to open our hearts to Him and to give Him our hearts so that He may fill them with love and faith. So let us then do this. Let us pray for faith, let us pray for an increase of faith and give ourselves, totally, completely, and with perfect confidence to the God who loves us and calls us to His love.

In closing, let me quote a sentence from Clement of Alexandria which I just happened to turn up in some notes here. Comparing the Christian to Ulysses on his ship as he travelled in his journey homeward, he speaks of how Ulysses escaped the lure of the sirens by being tied to the mast of his vessel. This has traditionally been a kind of image of the soul resisting the allurements of what does not really concern it. Clement of Alexandria compares the Christian to Ulysses bound to the mast. It is a good image of our life and its restrictions. He says:

Bound to the wood of a cross, thou art free from all danger of destruction. God’s Logos will steer thy ship and the Holy Pneuma or the Holy Spirit will give thee a safe return to heaven’s harbor.

So let us consider our own lives in the light of this image, and, trusting God, remain bound to the wood of the cross; so that dying with Christ and rising with him we may be brought to union with him forever in heaven by his Holy Spirit.

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