A Path for the Wise

That picture of Mother Delores Hart in my last post drew an above average number of readers.  People love good old traditional nuns—I love good old traditional nuns, but then I believe that the monastic life in its various expressions—traditional and modern—is very much a hope for both the Church and the world in which we live. 

        Sister Joan Chittester, a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie PA, is a great example of the contemporary monastic.  I have never met Sister Joan though we have exchanged letters on a few occasions and she was a friend of a dear cousin of mine who died several years ago.  I have read a number of her books and find that while sometimes her ideas are challenging she can speak right to me.  One of my favorites is The Fire In These Ashes (Sheed and Ward, 1995).  In The Fire In These Ashes, Sister Joan says that the raison d’etre for monastic life is “to find God.”  You don’t become a monk or a nun for any other purpose than to find God. 

      I have always been a bit jealous of those who are called to the monastic life because at the end of the day, what is there except the search to find God?  I am a busy person.  I teach.  I run a library.  I give talks, retreats, renewal programs.  I am on committees.  I advise students with their research and papers.  I see people for spiritual direction.  I do a lot of things—but to what end?  Is life about keeping busy?  Or “putting bread and butter on the table?” I am a historian.  Do I really care about the Battle of Agincourt?  Am I supposed to think there is something worth caring about in the economic bubble of the twelfth century? Why should I bother with the Pirenne Thesis?  The fact of the matter is that history intrigues me not because some event a thousand years ago happened—things happening today have more import—but  because men and women in every age run around like ants on an anthill trying to find something? The question is: What are they looking for?  God?  No, of course not. At least not consciously.  But they are looking for meaning, for purpose.  And different people find different purpose in life.  For some it is love.  For some money. For  some power. For some freedom.  For some Beauty.  And does any of it last?  At the end of the day, does any of it matter?  No.  And so most just keeping running around in their busy circles.  But for those who wake up from their manic quest and realize how transient life is, the search then continues for that which is eternal. We want to set our eyes on some beacon that shines consistently drawing us on and through the pains and the sorrows, the transient joys and passing hopes of today.   Back in the third century people who realized how empty an unfocused life can be began going out into the deserts of Syria and Egypt.  They left their business and their families and their ambitions—and their religion—to live as solitaries, haunted by the realization that there has to be something more than money in the bank, love in their bed, a fancy house in which to live, and even moving ceremonies on Sunday mornings.  Perhaps the most startling thing is that they realized that a nice ceremony on Sunday morning wasn’t answering the call of their heart.  Here they were looking for God and they saw the emptiness of ritual and rite—the failure of religion to capture and hold the Divine Mystery.  Saint Antony Abbot is a prime example: he left his home and his pharmacy shop in Alexandria and shut himself up in an abandoned fort for over twenty years—never coming out, even for Sunday Mass.  

       Now I am not against Mass.  Far from it, I attend daily.  But Antony Abbot realized that the practice of religion was not enough.  There is something more, something beyond even the most fervent practice of religion.  Eighty some years ago Simone Weil wrote an essay in which she clearly distinguished the Love of God from the Love of Religion.  (Simone Weil, Waiting For God, trans. By Emma Craufurd, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.)  Religion is Religion—it isn’t God.  The Church is the Church—it isn’t God.  Religion or the Church can be the path to God and while it might advance you along the way, it ultimately will fall short of the destination. And often Religion or the Church are misused as paths that only circle back upon themselves.  Even the Sacraments will ultimately fall short.  The Uncreated can never be encapsulated in the created, the Creator in the creature.  This is why monks and nuns—real monks and nuns—have an affinity for agnostics.  They know how elusive God is.  God is always one step beyond us.  We arrive at the place where God was only to find that God has slipped away leaving a trace, a scent, some intangible sign that only makes us more ardent in our pursuit.  And at the same time we are pursuing him, ever more ardently, we begin to suspect that he is, in fact, pursuing us—luring us on ever deeper into  Mysterium—mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  And it is this that drives men and women into monasteries.  

        Sometimes in history the monasteries have taken on lives of their own—lives that distract the monk or the nun with the needs of administration, of building a church, of organizing the work, of feeding and clothing a community, of raising the money to do it all.  At the same time the formal prayers can easily replace the inner eros that impels the monk or nun on.  The need to practice the chant or shine the candleholders can seduce the heart away from its hunt and the monk or nun can forget the vision of their earnest years.  That is a tragic pitfall one hopes they can avoid. It is not unique to Christian monasticism—read the Dalai Lama and he will tell you the same about monks in his tradition who become lost in the superficial details and observances of their lives.   But monastic life is no place for religious people.  It is certainly no place for the pious.  Monastic life isn’t about the habit or the incense or even the chant.  All that is just icing on the cake—maybe even a seduction away from the heart of the life which is simply to seek God in his nakedness and in ours.

       And this is why we need to hear more of the monastic voices in the Church.  They have a wisdom that speaks beyond the superciliousness of the pious and directly to the dark night of the seeker.   As Elizabeth Barret Brownking wrote 

      Earth’s crammed with heaven

      And every common bush aflame with God

      And only he who sees takes off his shoes

      The rest sit round it

      And pluck blackberries

A lot of people are plucking blackberries—we need people in the Church today who can point and shout: “Fire!” For what a fire it is for those with eyes to see. 

A Good Captain for Our Team

Mother Delores Hart, a nun of Regina Laudis Abbey

and former movie star--her years in monastic life

have only increased her love for life--a good witness

of what religous faith is really about

Well I said yesterday that if the Church is to evangelize we need for it to put its best foot forward and you can bet that best foot isn’t attached to a bishop’s leg.  Frankly we need the bishops to step to the background and let others—preferably laity—come to the fore and represent the Church in the world not only because the hierarchy—as a whole—have lost credibility both for their mishandling of the sex abuse crisis but even more for the pompous arrogance with which they speak and demand to be listened to in a world that is far more sophisticated and complex than they are prepared to deal with.  We have Catholic voices that do carry weight and who credibly represent the Catholic voice.  (I will not say “represent the Church” because right now the hierarchy holds the cards as to who does and does not represent “The Church,” but whether their various excellencies and eminences like it or not  “their Church” is more narrow than “the Church” and my point about putting the best foot forward is precisely that “their Church” lacks the verve and élan to make the Gospel come alive in our contemporary world.  Like Peter stepping out of the boat, they have to overcome their fear and choose to trust that the waves won’t prevail, putting their faith in Christ’s promise rather than their own hollow power. 
       As I said in my last posting, you want something to believe in—look to a L’Arche community.  Look at a Franciscan bread-line or a Missionaries of Charity shelter for people with HIV/AIDS.  Have you seen the Jesuit-sponsored Christo Rey academies that prepare poor children for scholarships to first-rate Catholic High Schools that will be springboards to education and out of poverty?  Have you met any of the Little Sisters of the Poor and see how well they take care of the indigent aged?  And there’s more.  Go to Gethsemane Abbey, or Our Lady of the Genesee, or the nuns at Wrentham and see the Cistercian dedication to prayer and work—ora et labora.  Do you know the Carmelite nuns at Baltimore, or Cleveland, or Alhambra—great women giving their lives in compassionate prayer for and with people in every sort of need.  And then there is Catholic Relief Services and the outstanding work they do in Haiti, in Cambodia, in Guatemala and dozens of other countries around the world.  Here in this country look at the services run by Catholic Charities—pregnancy centers, immigrant centers, job-training centers, food pantries, women’s shelters and much more.  Have you ever visited a Catholic Worker House?  Up in Buffalo New York there is a wonderful group of people running Saint Luke’s Mission of Mercy.  In Alexandria Virginia we have Christ House.  You want an intelligent discussion of the issues from a Catholic perspective—you are more likely to find it in America or Commonweal than you are in a letter read from the pulpit.  Actually, at this point, the hierarchy has become little more than a millstone around the neck of American Catholicism—not because they are bishops but because of the sort of men who are most usually chosen for bishops.  We need bishops—but we need bright men who are holy, who are humble, and who look and look attentively to the needs, the struggles, and the experience of their flocks rather than to the monsignoral desk jockeys who run the Vatican and hand out advancements  based on institutional loyalty rather than the wisdom and compassion of a Shepherd’s heart.  
        There is a lot of attention these past few days about Delores Hart, a woman who gave up a promising career in Hollywood to become an enclosed Benedictinve Nun at Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut.   I am not going to spend a lot of time on Mother Delores—you can google her.  But a friend of mine sent me the attached link to an interview with her and I was impressed.  Here is a woman who turned away from the glamor and glitz to search for God.  When she speaks she has a lot to say.  It isn’t harsh and condemnatory.  It is frank and honest and yet so positive towards life and love and this world in which we live.   I am not a fan of the Huffington post, but check out the video in this article.  Here is someone that can speak for the Church so much better than whoever it is that writes those letters we keep getting read to us on Sunday mornings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/oscars-2012-mother-dolores-hart-elvis_n_1279731.html