Illuminated Life

by Joan Chittister

  Beauty takes us beyond the visible to the height of consciousness, past the ordinary to the mystical, away from the expedient to the endlessly true. Beauty sustains the human heart in the midst of pain and despair. Whatever the dullness of a world stupefied by the mediocre, in the end beauty is able, by penetrating our own souls, to penetrate the ugliness of a world awash in the cheap, the tawdry, the imitative, the excessive, and the cruel. To have seen a bit of the Beauty out of which beauty comes is a deeply spiritual experience. It shouts to us always, “More. There is yet more.”

  Beauty is not a matter of having enough money to buy anything in sight. It is a matter of having enough taste to recognize quality, depth, truth, harmony when we see it. “Beauty is truth and truth beauty / That's all we know and all we need to know,” the poet John Keats wrote. A thing is beautiful, in other words, when it really is what it purports to be. There are cures, of course, for a deprivation of spirit. We could take down the billboards that turn the landscape into a junkyard of old ideas. We could clear away the clash of colors and things that saturate space and make seeing into the soul of a thing impossible. We could refuse to allow people to turn marble statues into plastic replicas. We could study the order, the harmony, the proportion of a flower. We could strain our eyes to look for what is beneath the obvious in the wrinkles of age, the misshapened knuckles of a worker's hands, the meaning in every moment, the ultimate in every possibility, the essence of every encounter. Or we could simply own one soul-shattering piece of art ourselves, put it up in a solitary place over and against the commonplace which normally surrounds us. We could let it seep into the center of the self until we find that we can never be satisfied again, anesthetized again, by the visual platitudes of the world in which we live.

  What we do not nourish within ourselves cannot exist in the world around us because we are its microcosm. We cannot moan the loss of quality in our world and not ourselves seed the beautiful in our wake. We cannot decry the loss of the spiritual and continue ourselves to function only on the level of the vulgar. We cannot hope for fullness of life without nurturing fullness of soul. We must seek beauty, study beauty, surround ourselves with beauty. To revivify the soul of the world, we ourselves must become beauty. Where we are must be more beautiful because we have been there than it was before our coming.

  To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give it away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

  ommunity

  Cassian taught this: Abba John, abbot of a large monastery, went to Abba Paesius who had been living for forty years far off in the desert. As John was very fond of Paesius and could therefore speak freely with him, he said to him, “What good have you done by living here in retreat for so long, and not being easily disturbed by anyone?” Paesius replied, “Since I have lived in solitude, the sun has never seen me eating.” Abba John said back to him, “As for me, since I have been living with others, it has never seen me angry.”

  SOLITUDE, a sometimes romanticized and often exaggerated element of the contemplative life, has its own struggles, of course. But, the desert monastics imply, when we choose solitude as the kiln for our souls, the temptation can be to gauge spiritual development by a lesser standard than the Gospel describes. When a person lives alone, the ancients knew, it can be very beguiling to confuse practice with holiness. If the measuring stick of spirituality is simply rigid physical asceticism and fidelity to the rules, the fasts, the routines, then spiritual ripening is simply a matter of some kind of spiritual arithmetic. We count up what we've done, what we've “given up,” what we've avoided and count ourselves holy. The problem, these great masters of the spiritual life knew, is that such a measure is a partial one. To claim full human development, total spiritual maturity, outside the realm of the human community is to claim the impossible.

  The real contemplative does not have to withdraw from life to find God. The real contemplative hears the voice of God in the voice of the other, sees the face of God in the face of the other, knows the will of God in the person of the other, serves the heart of God by addressing the wounds, answering the call of the other. “The most valiant monastics,” the Rule of Benedict insists, “are those who live in community…. Let permission to live alone be seldom given.” St. Basil, an early leader of Eastern Monasticism, asks pointedly, “Whose feet shall the hermit wash?” The implications are clear. It is human community that tests the spiritual grist of the human being.

  Community, Abba John teaches, calls us to the kind of relationships that walk us through minefields of personal selfishness, that confront us with moments of personal responsibility, that raise us to the level of personal heroics, and lead us to the rigor of personal compassion day after day after day. It is when we see in the needs of others what we are meant to give away that we become truly empty of ourselves. It is in the challenges of the times that we come to speak the Spirit. It is when we find ourselves dealing with the downright intransigence of the other that we understand our own sin. It is when we recognize in the world around us the call of God to us that our response to the human race becomes the measuring stick of the quality of our souls.

  When anger rages in us unabated and unresolved, we obliterate the other in our hearts. When months go by and we never even speak to our neighbors, never seek them out, never stir ourselves out of our hermitages to admit their existence, we deny creation. When advice is something we resist and questions are something we avoid in life, God has no voice by which to call us.

  The contemplative sees the Creator in the gleam of the created. God, we come to realize, is indeed everywhere. The goodness we see in the other gives us a glimpse of the face of God. What we learn from the other we learn about ourselves. The honor with which we regard the other unmasks our own theology of creation. The way we react to the needs of the other tells us something about our own needs. The attention we give to another exposes our real sense of the breadth of the universe and stretches it beyond ourselves. We see in others the kind of commitment it takes to go on believing when our own belief falters. We look to others for the kind of vision that expands our own beyond the daily. We depend on others for the kind of wisdom that exceeds mere answers. We hold on to others to find the kind of love that makes life rich with meaning, certain proof of the everlasting love of a God for whom there is no word.

  Clearly, in the serious contemplation of our place in the human community lies the quality of our contemplation. To be a real contemplative we must every day take others into the narrow little confines of our lives—and listen to their call to us to be about something greater than ourselves.

  ailiness

  Abba Poemen said about Abba Pior that every single day he made a fresh beginning.

  ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT, but most seasoning, elements of life is simply the fine art of getting up every morning, of doing what must be done if for no other reason than that it is our responsibility to do it. To face the elements of the day and keep on going takes a peculiar kind of courage. It is in dailiness that we prove our mettle. And it is not easy.

  The easy thing is to run away from life. Anyone can do it, and everyone at one time or another wants to. Living through the sterile and the fruitless cycles of life earns no medals, carries no honor. The temptation is to put down the hard parts, to disappear from the heat of the day, to escape from the dullness of the daily, from its pressures and its dry, barren routines when life looks so much more exciting, so much more rewarding, somewhere else.

  Few, in the end, ever go, of course. But simply staying where we are because there is nowhere else to go is not the answer. What makes the difference is to stay where we need to be with a sense that dailiness is the real stuff of contemplation. Then the staying becomes more than bearable; it becomes possible.

  Regularity has been a mark of the spiritual life in every century, in every trad
ition. The Rule of Benedict is built on an ordo of prayer, work, and reading that forms the backbone of every day of the monastic life. Why? Because the spiritual life is meant to be dull? No, because the spiritual life is meant to be constant, meant to be centered. The dailiness of spiritual practices, the practices of daily life, focus the heart and concentrate the mind. Incessant agitation, unending variety, constant novelty, a torrent of gadgetry, a life filled with the strange and the unfamiliar irritate the soul and fragment the inner vision.

  Dailiness, routine, sameness frees the heart to traffic in more important matters. The desert monastics wove baskets every day of their lives to earn alms for the poor—and, when the baskets went unsold, unbraided them and began again. The purpose was to occupy the body and free the mind. Mindless work—mowing the lawn, sweeping the sidewalk, washing the windows—is not a burden when the mind is full and the heart like a laser beam finds its way to God. We wait for retreats, services, grand gatherings to take us to God, and God is with us all the while. We are just too preoccupied, too disassociated to notice. We run from place to place and thing to thing, we skirt from idea to idea and do not recognize God in the humdrum of the day to day. We give our souls no rest and find them dying from spiritual starvation when we need them most.

  Dailiness frees us for the things of God. The important thing is to prepare the mind by prayer and reading, to make the routine parts of life periods of reflection, so that God can be present in mechanical moments in conscious ways. Every day the contemplative makes a new beginning, tries again to plumb the meaning of life, disappears again into the heart of God so present in the world around us if we only realize it. To be a contemplative there must be time for God. The routine parts of life, the dull parts of every day—the commute, the cleaning, the cooking, the waiting times—are gifts of space. Then, while the world goes on around us, the thoughts of God take hold within us. Then we are ready for the chaos that comes with variety, with gadgets, with change, with the whirl of a world in motion.

  To be a contemplative we must remember to begin again, day after day, to turn dailiness into time with God.

  nlightenment

  Amma Syncletica said: “In the beginning, there is struggle and a lot of work for those who come near to God. But after that, there is indescribable joy. It is just like building a fire: at first it's smoky and your eyes water, but later you get the desired result. Thus we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with tears and effort.”

  THE IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER in the spiritual life is that religion is a means, not an end. When we stop at the level of the rules and the laws, the doctrines and the dogmas—good guides as these may be—and call those things the spiritual life, we have stopped far short of the meaning of life, the call of the divine, the fullness of the self.

  Enlightenment is the ability to see beyond all the things we make God to find God. We make religion God and so fail to see godliness where religion is not, though goodness is clear and constant in the simplest of people, the remotest of places. We make national honor God and fail to see the presence of God in other nations, particularly non-Christian nations. We make personal security God and fail to see God in the bleak and barren dimensions of life. We make our own human color the color of God and fail to see God in the one who comes in different guise. We give God gender and miss the spirit of God everywhere in everyone. We separate spirit and matter as if they were two different things, though we know now from quantum physics that matter is simply fields of force made dense by the spirit of Energy. We are one with the Universe, in other words. We are not separate from it or different from it. We are not above it. We are in it, all of us and everything, swimming in an energy that is God. To be enlightened is to see behind the forms to the God who holds them in being.

  Enlightenment sees, too, beyond the shapes and icons that intend to personalize God to the God that is too personal, too encompassing, to be any one shape or form or name. Enlightenment takes us beyond our parochialisms to the presence of God everywhere, in everyone, in the universe.

  To be enlightened is to be in touch with the God within and around us more than it is to be engulfed in any single way, any one manifestation, any specific denominational or nationalistic construct, however good and well-intentioned it may be.

  It is a practice in many monasteries to turn and bow to the sister walking in procession with you after bowing to the altar as you enter chapel for prayer. The meaning of such a monastic custom is clear: God is as much in the world around us, as much in one another, as on that altar or in that chapel. God is the stuff of our lives, the breath of our very souls, calling us always to a heightened understanding of Life in all its forms.

  To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not “coming.” Heaven is here. We have simply not been able to realize that yet because, like King Arthur and his search for the Holy Grail, we look in all the wrong places, worship all the wrong idols, get fixated on all the wrong notions of God. We are always on our way to somewhere else when this place, the place in which I stand, wherever it is, is the place of my procession into God, the site of my union with the Life that gives life.

  To be contemplative I must put down my notions of separateness from God and let God speak to me through everything that seeps through the universe into the pores of my minuscule little life. Then I will find myself, as Abbess Syncletica promises, at the flash point of the divine fire.

  aith

  Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion, said: When we were walking along the sea one day, I was thirsty, so I said to Abba Bessarion, “Abba, I am very thirsty.” Then the old man prayed and said to me, “Then drink from the sea.” And the water was sweet when I drank it. So I poured it into a flask so that I would not be thirsty later. Seeing this, the old man asked me, “Why are you doing that?” And I answered, “So that I won't be thirsty later on.” Then the old man said, “God is here and God is everywhere.”

  FAITH IS THE GATE, the goal, and the bedrock of the contemplative life. Faith is not denominational. It is confidence in a God we cannot see but know without doubt exists—if for no other reason than that we feel the power of life within us and know our smallness at the same time. Immersed in the awareness of God everywhere, overwhelmed by the effort of living in a consciousness punctuated by death, the contemplative has faith in the process of life.

  Contemplative faith is not based on magic or belief in a Great Puppeteer. The contemplative knows simply that the God who gave life sustains it, makes it possible, and has provided everything we need to negotiate it with deep meaning and endless consequence. The contemplative knows what it is to live in the womb of God. The contemplative, the Rule of Benedict says, “prays always,” is always in touch with God in whose Life we live.

  Faith is beyond denominational purity, more than religious devotion, more than saintly rigor. Faith rests in the arms of God, trusts today and accepts tomorrow because faith knows that whatever the day, God is in it. Where there is possibility without certainty, faith assures. Where there is uncertainty without surety, faith sustains. Where there is confidence that life has purpose even when it does not have clarity, faith is its foundation. Faith lives in the mystery that is God and thrives on life.

  Faith is not belief in an afterlife based on today's moral litmus test. To the contemplative “bad” and “good” make no matter. Each has the capacity to become the other. Out of bad much good has come. It is often sin that unmasks us to ourselves and opens the way for growth. Mature virtue is tried virtue, not virtue unassailed. Great good, on the other hand, whatever its effects, has so often deteriorated into arrogance, into a righteousness that vitiates its own rightness. But both of them, both bad and good, lived in the light of God, blanch, are reduced to size in the face of the Life that transcends them.

  Life is not a game we win, and God is not a trophy we merit. No matter how “good” we are, we are not good enough for God. On the other hand, no matter how “bad” we are, we can never be outside of God.
We can only hope in each instance to come to such a consciousness of God that no lesser gods can capture our attention and no trifling, self-centered gods can keep us from the fullness of awareness that is the fullness of Life. It is the project of life, this coming to Wholeness, this experience of Purpose beyond all purposes, this identification with everything that is.

  Life, the contemplative knows, is a process. It is not that all the elements of life, mundane as they may be, do not matter. On the contrary, to the contemplative everything matters. Everything speaks of God, and God is both in and beyond everything.

  Having the faith to take life one piece at a time—to live it in the knowledge that there is something of God in this for me now, here, at this moment—is of the essence of happiness. It is not that God is a black box full of tests and trials and treats. It is that life is a step on the way to a God who goes the way with us. However far, however perilous.

  The thought of life on a small planet whirling in space is a recipe for despair. It is the source of human anxiety, this thought of having been cut adrift alone and without meaning. To the person of faith, it is this very mystery that pushes us to the edge of our souls where life is the beginning, not the end, and presses us down into the center of our souls where God, the energy of space, waits for us smiling.

  To the contemplative, faith is not about having lights turn green before we get to the stop light at the corner or even about having cancerous tumors disappear on command. Faith is about knowing that life is the tabernacle of a living God made small by our meager icons of Being. To the contemplative, it is clear that the many forms of life all reveal in some measure the Life that is their Ground. The life to come, the contemplative knows from having lived this one, will be good.