The real contemplative takes the whole world in and shelters it, reveres it, and protects it with a body made of the steely substance of a justice that springs from love. To be contemplative it is necessary to reach out every day to the outcast other, just as does the God we breathe.
indness
Once a brother committed a sin in Scetis, and the elders assembled and sent for Abba Moses. He, however, did not want to go. Then the priest sent a message to him, saying: “Come, everybody is waiting for you.” So he finally got up to go. And he took a worn-out basket with holes, filled it with sand, and carried it along. The people who came to meet him said: “What is this?” Then the old man said: “My sins are running out behind me, yet I do not see them. And today I have come to judge the sins of someone else.” When they heard this, they said nothing to the brother and pardoned him.
THE DESERT MONASTICS ARE CLEAR: Self-righteousness is cruelty done in the name of justice. It is conceivable, of course, that we might find a self-righteous religious. It is feasible that we, like Abba Moses, could certainly find a self-righteous cleric. It is probable that I might very well find myself dealing with a self-righteous friend or neighbor or even family member. But it is not possible to find a self-righteous contemplative. Not a real contemplative.
Contemplation breaks us open to ourselves. The fruit of contemplation is self-knowledge, not self-justification. “The nearer we draw to God,” Abba Mateos said, “the more we see ourselves as sinners.” We see ourselves as we really are, and knowing ourselves we cannot condemn the other. We remember with a blush the public sin that made us mortal. We recognize with dismay the private sin that curls within us in fear of exposure. Then the whole world changes when we know ourselves. We gentle it. The fruit of self-knowledge is kindness. Broken ourselves, we bind tenderly the wounds of the other.
The most telling measure of the meaning of kindness in life is memories of unkindness in our own: scenes from a childhood marked by the cruelty of other children, recollections of disdain that scarred the heart, moments of scorn or rejection that leave a person feeling marginalized in the human community. In those moments of isolation we remember the impact of the fracturing of hope. We feel again the pain that comes with the assault on that sliver of dignity that refuses to die in us, however much the degradation of the moment. It is then that we come to understand that kindness, compassion, understanding, acceptance is the irrefutable mark of holiness because we ourselves have known—or perhaps have never known—the balm of kindness for which we so desperately thirsted in those situations. Kindness is an act of God that makes the dry dust of rejection digestible to the human psyche.
Cruelty is not the fruit of contemplation. Those who have touched the God who lives within themselves, with all their struggles, all their lack, see God everywhere and, most of all, in the helpless, fragile, pleading, frightened other. Contemplatives do not judge the heart of another by a scale on which they themselves could not be vindicated.
The pitfall of the religion of perfection is self-righteousness, that cancer of the soul that requires more of others than it demands of itself and so erodes its own fibre even more. It is an inner blindness that counts the sins of others but has no eye for itself. The self-righteous soul, the soul that preens on its own virtue, denies itself the self-knowledge that enables God to ignore what is lacking in us because our hearts are on the right way. It blocks the spirit of life from filling up the gaps within us that we ourselves are helpless to repair because the soul is not ready to receive.
Real contemplatives receive the other with the open arms of God because they have come to know that for all their emptiness God has received them.
To be a contemplative it is necessary to take in without reservation those whom the world casts out because it is they who show us most clearly the face of the waiting God.
ectio
The Art of Holy Reading
One day some disciples came to see Abba Anthony. In the midst of them was Abba Joseph. Wanting to test them, the old man suggested a text from the scriptures and, beginning with the youngest, he asked them what it meant. Each one gave his opinion as he was able. But to each one of them the old man said, “You have not understood it.” Last of all he said to Abba Joseph, “How would you explain this saying?” and Abba Joseph replied, “I do not know.” Then Abba Anthony said, “Indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: ‘I do not know.'”
CONTEMPLATION IS NOT A PRIVATE DEVOTION; it is a way of life. It changes the way we think. It shapes the way we live. It challenges the way we talk and where we go and what we do. We do not “contemplate” or “not contemplate.” We live the contemplative life.
At the same time, there is one tool of the contemplative life which, in a special way, stirs the mind to new depths. It stretches the soul to new lengths. It expands the vision beyond all others. In the Rule of Benedict more time is allotted to this practice, for instance, than to any other activity except formal prayer. Thoughtful, reflective reading—lectio—immersion in the lessons of scripture and what the Rule of Benedict calls “other holy books,” provides the background against which the entire rest of the life is lived. It is in lectio that the monastic mind comes to know itself.
The thoughtful reading of scripture does two things: it tells us what we bring to the Word of God, and it confronts us daily with what the word of God is bringing to us.
Monastic lectio is the practice of reading small passages daily—a page, a paragraph, a sentence—and then milking for meaning any word or phrase or situation that interests or provokes me there. Then the soul wrestling begins. The question becomes: Why does this word or passage mean something to me? Why is this word or situation bothering me? What does it mean to me, say to me? What feeling does it bring out in me? Lectio is a slow, reflective process that takes us down below the preoccupations of the moment, the distractions of the day to that place where the soul holds the residue of life.
Then the hard and wrenching part begins. Now, I must find in myself what this word, this sentence, this situation is asking of me. Here, in this place, at this time. Now. What is this awareness demanding of me and what is obstructing me from doing it? The answers come from everywhere: All the old memories bubble up, all the present struggles take on a new edge. Clearly, there is an emptiness in me that is in need of filling. There is a vision that needs forming. There is a courage of soul that needs honing. What is it?
Suddenly, perhaps, or painfully slowly, I begin to see into myself. The gulf opens up between what I am and what I must be if divine life is ever to come to fullness in me. There is no more concealing it from myself, no more ignoring it. There is nowhere to go now but into the heart of God with arms up and hands open. Then we open ourselves to the work of divinity in us, to the One who binds all brokenness together, to the Life that simmers in our deadest, driest parts.
Day after day, year after year, the contemplative goes down into the scriptures, back through the holy wisdom of the ages, out into the Truth of the time and, in each moment, learns something new about the struggle within, about divinity, about life. Contemplatives, like Abba Joseph, never really “know” what anything “means.” They only come to know better and better in every sentence they read every day of their lives that divinity is at the depth of them calling them on.
To be a contemplative it is necessary to take time every day to fill myself with ideas that in the end lead my heart to the heart of the divine. Then, someday, somehow, the two hearts will beat in me as one.
etanoia
Call to Conversion
One day Abba Arsenius was asking an old Egyptian man for advice. There was someone who saw this and said to him: “Abba Arsenius, why is a person like you, who has such a great knowledge of Greek and Latin, asking a peasant like this about your thoughts?” And Abba Arsenius replied, “Indeed, I have learned the knowledge of Latin and Greek, yet I have not learned even the alphabet of this peasant.”
CHANGING THE WAY WE GO ABOUT
LIFE is not all that difficult. We all do it all the time. We diet because we want to change the way we look. We learn to ski or fish or bowl or play pinochle when we want to change the patterns of our lives. We move to the country when we want to change the clatter of our environment. We change jobs, states, houses, relationships, lifestyles over and over again as the years go by. But those are, in the main, very superficial changes. Real change is far deeper than that. It is changing the way we look at life that is the stuff of conversion.
Metanoia, conversion, is an ancient concept that is deeply embedded in the monastic worldview. Early seekers went to the desert to escape the spiritual aridity of the cities, to concentrate on the things of God. “Flight from the world”—separation from the systems and vitiated values that drove the world around them—became the mark of the true contemplative. To be a contemplative in a world bent on materialism and suffocated with itself, conversion was fundamental. But conversion to what? To deserts? Hardly. The goal was purity of heart, single-mindedness of search, focus of life. Over the years, with the coming of the Rule of Benedict and the formation of monastic communities, the answer became even more clear. Conversion was not geographical. The flight was not from any one kind of location to another. We do not need to leave where we are in order to become contemplative. Otherwise, the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Galilee surrounded by lepers and children and sick people and disciples and crowds of the curious and the committed was no contemplative either. Jesus the healer, the prophet, the preacher, the teacher, by that standard, was not engrafted into the mind of God. The thought appalls. No, surely contemplation is not a matter of place. “Flight from the world” is not about leaving any specific location. “Flight from the world” is about shedding one set of attitudes, one kind of consciousness for another. On the contrary, we simply have to be where we are with a different state of mind. We have to be in the office with the good of the whole world in mind. We have to be on the corporate board with the public at heart. We have to be in the home in a way that has more to do with development than with control. What Benedict wanted was conversion of heart.
But conversion to what?
The answer never changes. In every great religious tradition the concept is clear: To be contemplative we must become converted to the consciousness that makes us one with the universe, in tune with the cosmic voice of God. We must become aware of the sacred in every single element of life. We must bring beauty to birth in a poor and plastic world. We must restore the human community. We must grow in concert with the God who is within. We must be healers in a harsh society. We must become all those things that are the ground of contemplation, the fruits of contemplation, the end of contemplation.
The contemplative life is about becoming more contemplative all the time. It is about being in the world differently. What needs to be changed in us? Anything that makes us the sole center of ourselves. Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone, has to teach us. Anything that drowns out the voice of the Ultimate within must be damped.
To become a contemplative, a daily schedule of religious events and practices is not enough. We must begin to do life, to be with people, to accept circumstances, to bring good to evil in ways that speak of the presence of God in every moment.
ature
A philosopher asked Saint Anthony: “Father, how can you be enthusiastic when the comfort of books has been taken away from you?” And Anthony replied: “My book, O Philosopher, is the nature of created things, and whenever I want to read the word of God, it is right in front of me.”
WHERE IS GOD?” the catechism asked. “God is everywhere,” the catechism answered. The answer is often ignored, but the answer, if God is really God, is certainly true. God is the stuff of the universe. In everything created resides the energy, the life, the image, the nature of the creator.
To know the creator, it is only necessary to study creation. The source of life is Life. The obvious is almost too simple to be believed: All life contains the secrets of Life. “In this acorn,” the mystic Julian of Norwich said, “is everything there is.” Nature, all of it, is the mirror of the Ultimate, the resting place of the God of life, the presence of the power of God.
Western religious tradition, unfortunately, in its intent to present God as a personal God, has inadvertently reduced God to a figure isolated and separate from creation, so other than ourselves that there is nothing of God in us. Our notion of God is God the great Engineer of the universe, who created spirit and matter, spun them into space, and left one to vie with the other. Spirit, this tradition teaches, is the apotheosis of holiness; matter, on the other hand, is corruptible and corrupting. On the basis of this kind of thinking, nature is the illegitimate child of creation.
Nature, in a world that separates matter and spirit, exists only to be a kind of stage for human activity, a cornucopia of creature comforts, a wild world over which humanity was given “dominion” and through which God could finally be achieved only when matter was sloughed off. On such a strange scientific as well as spiritual foundation rests the justification for slavery, the rape of the earth, the wanton destruction of animals for “research,” the validation for plundering the rain forests, burning holes in the ozone layer, and turning oceans into cesspools. But the contemplative knows a sin against nature is a sin against life.
It's a pitiable, and extremely limited, posture, this notion that matter is evil and spirit is good and the two are definitively separate. It reduces the Godhead itself to a thing, a creator separate from the creation that emanates from the very life energy that is God. It ignores the unlimited promise of life. It ignores the message of God who calls to us everywhere. It fails to understand that all of nature can exist without humanity but that humanity, with all its “dominion,” cannot exist without the rest of nature. It ignores the oneness of life, the Oneness of God.
The contemplative knows better. The contemplative sees everywhere the One from whose life all life comes. All of life, the contemplative knows, reflects the face of God. To live with nature as an enemy is to fail life. To walk through nature as its dictator is to wrench the balance of life. To fail to see the voice of God in the balance of nature, the beauty of nature, the struggles of nature is to go through life blind of heart and deaf of soul.
To be a contemplative it is necessary to walk through nature softly, to be in tune with the rhythm of life, to learn from the cycles of time, to listen to the heartbeat of the universe, to love nature, to protect nature, and to discover in nature the presence and the power of God. To be a contemplative it is necessary to grow a plant, love an animal, walk in the rain, and profess our consciousness of God into a lifetime of pulsating seasons.
penness
It was said about a disciple that he endured seventy weeks of fasting, eating only once a week. He asked God about certain words in the Holy Scripture, but God did not answer. Finally, he said to himself: “Look, I have put in this much effort, but I haven't made any progress. So I will go to see my brother and ask him.”
When he had gone out, closed the door, and started off, an angel of God was sent to him and said: “Seventy weeks of fasting have not brought you near to God. But now that you are humble enough to go to your brother, I have been sent to you to reveal the meaning of the words.” Then the angel explained the meaning which the old man was seeking, and went away.
TO CLOSE OURSELVES OFF from the wisdom of the world around us in the name of God is a kind of spiritual arrogance exceeded by little else in the human lexicon of errors. It makes of life a kind of prison where, in the name of holiness, thought is chained and vision is condemned. It makes us our own gods. It is a sorry excuse for spirituality.
The sin of religion is to pronounce every other religion empty and unknowing, deficient and unblessed. It is to ignore the call of God to us through the life and
wisdom and spiritual vision of the other. The implications of that kind of closing out the multiple revelations of the mind of God are weighty: once we shut our hearts to the other, we have shut our hearts to God. It is a matter of great spiritual import, of deep spiritual summons. Openness to the presence of God, the Word of God in others, is of the essence of contemplation.
Learning to open the heart requires first that we open our lives. The home of whites that has never had a person of color at the supper table is a home that has missed an opportunity to grow. People of color who have never trusted a white have missed a chance to confirm the humanity of the human race. The man who has never worked with a woman as a peer, better yet as an executive, has deprived himself of the revelation of the other half of the world. The comfortable contemplative who has never served soup at a soup kitchen, or eaten lunch in the kitchen with the cook, or clerked in a thrift shop, or spent time in inner-city programs lives in an insulated bubble. The world they know cannot possibly give them the answers they seek. The adult who has never asked a child a question about life and really listened to the answer is doomed to go through life out of touch and essentially unlearned. “When someone comes to the gate,” the Rule of Benedict instructs, “say ‘Benedicite.'” Say, in other words, “Thanks be to God” that someone has come to add to our awareness of the world, to show us another way to think and be and live beyond our own small slice of the universe.
Openness is the door through which wisdom travels and contemplation begins. It is the pinnacle from which we learn that the world is much bigger, much broader than ourselves, that there is truth out there that is different from our own. The voice of God within us is not the only voice of God.
Illuminated Life Page 4