Illuminated Life

by Joan Chittister

UNDERSTANDING—COMPASSION—is the foundation of a monastic lifestyle. Without it there is no hope at all for developing a community out of strangers. The Rule of Benedict is brimming with the concept: Monastics are not to bother the procurator of the monastery at undue times. People are not here simply to meet our demands. The doorkeeper is to welcome guests kindly at any hour, day or night. When people have needs we must do what we can to meet them. Monastics who need more than the rule allots are to be given it, no questions asked. The person is always more important than the rule. Meal servers are to be fed before the others so their work is no harder than necessary. No one exists for our satisfaction. Monastics who fail to live the life as they promised they would are to be counseled as well as corrected. All faults are forgivable; all life is a succession of stages. It is a Rule, in other words, that knows the limitations of the human condition—and honors them.

  Life is not perfect and people are not perfectible. Only understanding, only compassion—the ability to bear life with the rest of humanity, whatever burdens the bearing brings—perfects us. When that concept gets lost in the name of religion, gets forgotten in the name of goodness, religion has gone awry and virtue has lost its meaning. God is compassionate and gives us what we need. No one can possibly be truly contemplative, truly in touch with the God-Life , truly infused by the spirit of God, who does anything less for the sake of the other.

  Contemplation is the mirror through which we come to touch the greatness of God, yes, but contemplation is also the filter through which we discern the scope of our smallness and the potential of our greatness at the same time. The contemplative looks for perfection nowhere but in God. The contemplative understands brokenness. And, most of all, the contemplative realizes that it is precisely at the point of personal need that God comes to fill up the emptiness that is us.

  The contemplative knows that what we lack is our clear claim we have to the fullness of God. Not to know what we lack is to become Understanding our own gods, a more than sickly substitute for the real thing. When contemplation, that absorption in God that fills a person with the consciousness of the presence of God everywhere, in everyone, is real, we are consumed with love. There is no one for whom we do not care, no one who is beneath us. God, we know, is where we least of all expect God to be, waiting for us to realize that.

  Then, when we come to realize all of that, it becomes perfectly plain: There is no rule that means more than the person in front of us. There is no sin too great to be forgiven. There is no need that must not be reckoned with. There is no suffering I can rightly ignore. There is no struggle I can condemn. There is no pain I am not obliged to bear.

  God understands. And so, therefore, does the real contemplative.

  ision

  Abba Zacharias had a vision. He told his spiritual Father, Carion the ascetic, about it. Exasperated, Carion beat him and told him the vision came from demons. Zacharias went to Abba Poemen to tell him about it. Seeing his sincerity, Abba Poemen sent him on to a monk who was a mystic. This monk knew all about the vision before Zacharias even told him and said it was indeed from God. Then the mystic instructed him, “Now go back and submit yourself to your father.”

  THE DESERT MONASTICS ARE VERY CLEAR: Vision is one thing; visions are another. Visions are psychological phenomena that, in the end, may have nothing whatsoever to do with the way a person lives life or how a person develops. Some visions are surely spiritual gifts, but many of them are just as surely products of heightened emotional systems. Some of the most contemplative figures in history, for instance, never had a “vision.” Hildegard did not. Meister Eckhart did not. Teresa of Avila did not. They knew the presnce of God, but they never claimed to have had a single physical demonstration of it. Instead of visions, they had vision.

  Vision is not physical. It is a quality of the soul. People with vision hone in, laser-like, to the presence of God in life. They see the holy, bleeding, suffering, feuding world as God sees the world: as one and as sacred. In love with a loving God, they are impelled to love God's world as God does. They set out to love it as God loves it. They see God everywhere and in everything. They stretch beyond the demands of the personal, the chauvinistic, the nationalistic, the sectarian, even the doctrinal, to the will of God for the entire world. They are not trapped by the pitiful little agendas of color or gender or hierarchy or place. They live possessed by the will of God for the world and spend themselves for its coming. They do not slide into spiritual complacency or affect spiritual elitism. They work at the spiritual life, expecting no gifts from it and seeking no mystical signs to mark their spiritual growth. They simply do what must be done: They immerse themselves in the presence of God until everything becomes for them the presence of God.

  Contemplation is not the stuff of charlatans, telepathists, and magicians. Contemplation is about very basic, very real things. It is about seeing God in everyone, finding God everywhere, and responding to all of life as a message from God. Contemplation is not a road show of visions. It is not spiritual snake oil. It is not an exalted state of being. It is simply consciousness of the Ultimate in the immediate.

  Genuine spirituality is not spent escaping from life to live in a mental state of unconcern or otherworldliness. Contemplatives do not seek “visions.” They simply seek to know God, the God present in them and around them, in others and in everything, in Goodness and Truth, in universal love and universal peace. To contemplatives God is not a magic trick. God is the very breath they breathe.

  To be contemplatives, we must have the vision to do every day whatever must be done to make God present in this place, at this time, whatever the cost.

  ork

  One of the elders said: “I never wanted work which was useful to me but a loss to others. For I have this expectation, that what helps the other is fruitful for me.”

  And Abba Theodore of Pherme said, “In these days many take their rest before God gives it to them.”

  IN THIS SOCIETY, work has become the way we make money, the way we enable ourselves to do what we would really prefer to do if we didn't need to work. No other approach to life, perhaps, explains so clearly what has really happened to the quality of the world around us than this. If there is anything that measures spiritual depth in a work-oriented society, it is surely the work we do, and why we do it or, conversely, the work we won't do and why we won't do it.

  Work is the contemplative's response to contemplative insight. In fact, it is everybody's answer to the profundity—or the shallowness—of their ideas about creation. To know the presence of God in all things has serious implications for the way a person lives the rest of life. What we know determines what we do. When I float in a sea of God, there is nothing not sacred. “Treat all things”—the buckets and the plants and the spades and the land—“as vessels of the altar,” the Rule of Benedict instructs. It is a profoundly contemplative statement.

  In the sacredness of the universe the contemplative sees the face of God. To do anything that defiles that face in the name of anything unworthy of the God who created it—profit, greed, leisure, progress, industry, “defense”—is blasphemy.

  One of the most demanding, but often overlooked, dimensions of the creation story is that when creation was finished, it wasn't really finished at all. Instead, God committed the rest of the process to us. What humans do on this earth either continues creation or obstructs it. It all depends on the way we look at life, the way we see our role in the ongoing creation of the world.

  Work is our contribution to creation. It relates us to the rest of the world. It fulfills our responsibility to the future. God left us a world intact, a world with enough for everyone. The contemplative question of the time is what kind of world we are leaving to those who come after us. The contemplative sets out to shape the world in the image of God. Order, cleanliness, care of the environment bring the Glory of God into the stuff of the moment, the character of the little piece of the planet for which we are responsible.

  The ideal
state, the contemplative knows, is not to avoid work. The first thing Genesis requires of Adam and Eve is that they “till the garden and keep it.” They are, then, commanded to work long before they sin. Work is not, in Judaeo-Christian tradition, punishment for sin. Work is the mark of the conscientiously human. We do not live to outgrow work. We live to work well, to work with purpose, to work with honesty and quality and artistry. The floors the contemplative mops have never been better mopped. The potatoes the contemplative grows do not damage the soil they grow in under the pretense of developing it. The machines a contemplative designs and builds are not created to destroy life but to make it more possible for everyone. The people the contemplative serves get all the care that God has given us.

  The contemplative is overcome by the notion of “tilling the garden and keeping it.” Work does not distract us from God. It brings the reign of God closer than it was before we came. Work doesn't take us away from God. It continues the work of God through us. Work is the priesthood of the human race. It turns the ordinary into the grandeur of God.

  To be a real contemplative and no shaman of the airy-fairy, I must work as if the preservation of the world depends on what I am doing in this small, otherwise insignificant space I call my life.

  enophilia

  The Love of Strangers

  Amma Sarah said: “If I pray to God that all people might be inspired because of me, I would find myself repentant at the door of every house. I would rather pray that my heart be pure toward them than that I changed something in theirs.”

  IT IS NOT WHAT OTHERS THINK OF US; it is what we think of others that singles the contemplative out in a crowd. Our role in life is not to convert others. It's not even to influence them. It certainly is not to impress them. Our goal in life is to convert ourselves from the pernicious agenda that is the self to an awareness of God's goodness present in the other. It is no idle prayer. The beauty of the open soul is not easy to come by in a world where the other—the alien, the foreigner, the stranger—threatens my sense of security and the pyramids of social control. After all, we know who's meant to be in charge, and we cannot allow outsiders to jeopardize a system built on the absolutes we have devised for ourselves.

  We learn at a very early age in this culture that the world is at our disposal. Most clearly of all, we learn that we are its norm. We know we are its pinnacle. We suffocate from national chauvinism. The messages are only insinuated, of course, but clear nevertheless: Other cultures are not nearly so “modern” or “progressive” or “developed”—meaning civilized—as we are. Other ethnic groups are not nearly so clever, so polished. Other races not nearly so human. There is a hierarchy of human achievement and, history shows, economics dictate, power insists, we are it.

  “We” and “they” are the hallmarks of an age awash in refugees, under siege from immigrants, and yet inseparably linked in a world in which there are no more natural boundaries. We have, indeed, one world now, but though intricately intertwined, painfully stratified. It is a world, a city, a neighborhood full of many of their kind and some of our kind. We, it is clear, have a natural right to everything we need to live in dignity and security. They are required to wait for such things or work harder to get them or, sometimes, to stand by and watch while we use up what they lack. In the midst of it all, in order to defend some of us from the rest of them, the world ends up dealing with struggles for jobs, conflict over food stamps, wars for water, wars for land, and, saddest of all, wars for ethnic cleansing.

  But the social problem is one thing. The spiritual problem is another. The reality is that those struggles, those wars are not elsewhere. Those wars take place in the human heart. We have become a world of insiders and outsiders when, in reality, there is no such thing as an outsider anymore. The whole city, the whole world lives in our living rooms. The whole city, the whole world is warring for my heart. Only the contemplative lives well in a world the security of which depends on the open heart.

  There are few things in life more threatening to the person whose religion is parochialism than the alien and few things more revelatory to the contemplative than the stranger. The contemplative sees in the other what is lacking in the self. It is in the stranger that God's new word comes most clearly to light for those who behold behind appearances the refraction of the divine mystery in a mundane world.

  The stranger, to the contemplative, is the angel of Tobias, the visitor to the tent of Abraham and Sarah, the sound of “Hail, Mary” in the garden calling us to a life we do not know and cannot predict. It is the stranger who disarms all our preconceptions about life and penetrates all our stereotypes about the world. It is the stranger whomakes the supernatural natural. It is the stranger who tests all our good intentions.

  To be a contemplative we must open our hearts and our doors to the stranger in whom lives the Word that is calling to our bound aried hearts to become wider than denominationalism alone can ever make us. To be a contemplative we must live in peace. We must speak peace everywhere to everyone. We must speak good about everyone we do not know and yet do know to be just as full of God as we are, if not more so.

  earning

  Abba Nilus said: “Do not want things to turn out as they seem best to you but as God pleases. Then you will be free of confusion and thankful in your prayer.”

  WHO IS THERE who hasn't, at some time or other, wanted life to be different than it is? Who of us has not wanted it ourselves? We get tired of what we're doing or where we are. We look for better days somewhere else. We want to do something different but, down deep, we don't really know what it is. All we know is that we yearn for what we do not have. We feel the confusion. We lack the gratitude for life of which the desert monastics speak. We chafe and groan through life. And so we miss it. Life ends and we have not lived it. We yearn for the more we cannot see.

  Contemplation is also yearning. But the contemplative knows that no matter where we go—and go we must if the call is clear—we will still, in the end, be yearning for what cannot be seen. Yearning is, in fact, a sign of the spiritual life. Those who do not yearn for God do not know God. But yearning for God requires that we allow the Life within us that is the energy of the universe to connect us to Life everywhere, in every one, at all times, always.

  Contemplation is the magnet of the soul. It draws us out of ourselves and more deeply into ourselves at the same time. It is always restless, always at peace. What is here is everything and what is here is never enough. The contemplative yearns always for the Light that suffuses all of life but is yet only a glimmer here of the total Mystery in which we are immersed.

  Contemplation is the giving over of the self to oneness with the One who is the life of the entire universe, the One of which everything is part, but nothing is all. It is joy and pain at the crossroads. It is Awareness writ large and daily life full to the brim. It is God everywhere and nowhere. The implications astound us: To be contemplative means to live in the presence of God and the absence of God at the same time.

  The life of the contemplative is spent nurturing the presence of the Ultimate and hungering after the absence of the Ultimate always. To the contemplative, Life is only the beginning of awareness. Death is only the birth canal to new life, the process by which we are expelled out of the womb of the world into the womb of God, out of life lived in darkness into Life lived in light.

  The contemplative enjoys—and the contemplative yearns. Life is everything and life is empty. Life is meant to be lived to the full.

  The only question for the restless soul is: For what do we yearn? If we yearn only for more of ourselves, we will never be satisfied because in our smallness we are not enough for ourselves. If we yearn for God, we will not be satisfied either but we will at least know that we have what we are alive to discover: the Glory of God in me.

  To be a contemplative it is necessary to say every day what the ancients of every tradition have been telling us over and over again for eons, “God is in me and I am of God and so I and every
thing are one. Alleluia.”

  eal

  Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba Joseph, as far as I am able I say my little office, I keep my little fasts, I pray my little prayers, I meditate a little, I live in peace, and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then Abba Joseph, stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten torches of flame and he said to him, “Why not be turned completely into fire?”

  W HO CAN SEE GOD AND LIVE?” the ancients asked. It's an important question. While we look for marks of our spiritual progress, the measure may well be in the question: Who can see God and live the same dull, directionless, complacent way they lived before God became the presence in life that makes all other presence relative? God is not in the whirlwind, the prophet Ezekiel says. Indeed not, the contemplative knows. Rather, God is the whirlwind. God is the energy that drives us, the torch that leads us, the life that beckons us, the Spirit within that carries us on—past every doubt, beyond every failure, despite every difficulty. To that Energy there is no acceptable, no possible, response but energy. Those who have no flame in their hearts for justice, no unrelenting understanding of the other, no consciousness of responsibility for the reign of God, no awareness of a prodding, nagging call to stretch themselves beyond themselves, no raging commitment to human community, no vision of beauty, and no endurance for the dailiness of it all may indeed be seeking God, but make no mistake, God is still only an idea to them—precious as it may be—but not a Reality.

  Contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It brings us not only face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. The presence of God is a demanding thing. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within. We become new people and, in the doing, see everything around us newly, too. We become connected to everything, to everyone. We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of peoples, the suffering of friends, the burdens of enemies, the raping of the earth, the hunger of the starving, the dreams of every laughing child. Awareness focuses our hearts. Zeal consumes us.