Some Lenten Thoughts On the Church In the Present Millennium

Sorry, things have gotten away from this past week and I have neglected to post any entries.  I hope I can make it up over the next week or two—though the schedule gets incredibly busy at this time of year.  But it doesn’t stop the Krazies, so if they can find the time for all their manic ravings and bizarre pseudo-religiosity, I, in my little self-appointed hermitage, should be able to as well.  It is just that this time of year is so rich in the readings and prayers and liturgies of this season that it is hard to tear oneself away from Lent’s austere beauty and sit at the keyboard.  In the early morning, I just want to take my coffee and sit on the glassed-in verandah and watch the sun come up over the barren late-winter landscape and ponder how these inner and outer worlds coalesce into some sort of harmonious unity. 

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton and the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila.  They are two of my favorite spiritual writers.  They have a huge amount in common.  Both were very much down-to-earth sort of mystics—not the sort of flighty and vague romantics so favored by the sentimental and the pious.  Both had wicked senses of humor and were quick to turn a phrase that was both pithy and mirthful.  Both were deeply sensual and each, according to their particular genders, expressive of a highly sexualized spirituality.  But for me what is most important is that each, despite they themselves being monastics, were determined to open the arcane gateway of contemplative prayer to ordinary folk like you and like me. 

I wonder if it had not been for Merton—I read him before I ever read Teresa though I have over my career done a deeper study of Teresa than of Merton—I wonder if had it had not been for Merton would I ever have found the entry point of that Interior Castle of which Teresa speaks?  Had it not been for Merton, I am not sure that I would ever have realized the potential for prayer that went beyond the devotional.  I still enjoy the devotional, of course, much like I still like Jelly Beans; but I am glad that Merton and others showed me the darker and richer delights of still and silent prayer.

Some years back I was part of a group trying to arrange to bring Father William Menninger, like Merton a Cistercian (Trappist) monk, to our parish in Northern Virginia to give a workshop on contemplative prayer.  It was all set.  At the last minute, the pastor—who up to that time had been too busy to learn much about the program other than to insure that Father William was a priest in good standing and of “orthodox” Catholicity, cancelled the program.  “I didn’t realize it was about contemplative prayer,” he protested.  “That is something for monks and nuns, not for mere (his words) lay people like yourselves.  Why, if it isn’t part of our life as priests, would it ever be part of your lives as lay people?”  I had been reading Merton for over forty years at the time—and Teresa for about twenty-five—and I knew that all Christians are called to contemplative prayer.  It is not for “the elect.”  Indeed I have come to realize that all human persons are called to contemplative prayer as Saint Augustine pointed out in his famous lines:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A source, while far less credible than my beloved aforementioned Doctor Gratiae but still infinitely more insightful than any contemporary writer (including Merton), the Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote:   

“The devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest and public convictions and religious customs of all, summoning each one form the outset to a persona experience and a personal decision.

We live, in this country and throughout “the West,” in what has fast devolved into a post-Christian era.  The “Christian Culture” of Europe and Anglophone North America has been for the most part nothing more than an ever-thinning veneer since “The Enlightenment” and its Rosemary’s Baby, the French Revolution.  The days when one’s Christian worldview and consequent values could be widely shared with one’s family, neighbors, colleagues, and friends are gone.  This is not to say that there isn’t a sort of human goodness or moral framework to be found anymore, but it is at best the habitual remnants of an earlier era and more often a natural—and inconsistently fickle—sort of natural sense of decency or integrity.  One doesn’t need to be a Christian—or even a believer—for such natural sense of fairplay, but as I said it is often a very fickle system.  I have written in some previous posts about how the lack of philosophy in the curriculum required for a college education has led to the inability of so many in our society to make any sort of a moral judgment beyond the rule that “works for me” is good and “doesn’t work for me” is bad.   What Rahner is saying in the above quote is that if Christians are to find a moral compass in this “culture” of soulless modernity—or actually post-modernity—they must have some sort of direct experience of God.  The key word here is direct.  God’s presence can be mediated by sacred things, sacred people, sacred actions, sacred gatherings, sacred institutions.  We call these physical manifestations of the Divine “sacraments.”  (I am not speaking narrowly here of the Seven Sacraments as defined by the Fourth Lateran Council but of the entire realm of the sacramental: the visible channels or manifestations of invisible grace.)  Used correctly these sacraments/sacramentals are genuine channels of grace, but as Colm Luibheid points out in the preface to his John Cassian, Conferences (Paulist, 1985), the human heart longs for a direct and unmediated encounter with God.  Our hearts are restless until they rest in God—not in rituals and ceremonies (as helpful as they may be to some), not in icons and candles (as good as they too can be), nor even in the Bread which has become Christ’s Body and the Wine which has become Christ’s Blood—but all this only ignites a hunger for the Creator that transcends the created.  In no way does the Christian ever dispense with the mediated channels of grace—we are incarnate beings and we need the tangible, the edible, the visible, but we are also Spirit and as such we long for that which is beyond the creaturely.  

This eros for God has always been in the human soul.  It doesn’t come with baptism or with some sort of mid-life conversion or being “born again.”  As Saint Augustine points out, we are created with this hunger for God.  It is us; it is who we are.  It has always been there, though not all have let an awareness of the hunger surface.  It was there for the psalmist when he wrote “Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is longing for you, my God.”  It was there for Jesus when he said: Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.”  It was there for Saint Augustine when he wrote the line I quoted earlier.  Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Bernard, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhardt, Saint John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, and countless mystics in between wrote or spoke of it.  It drove the desert fathers out to lives in the barren wilderness.  It provided John Cassian with the major theme of his conferences.  It populated Mount Athos and Subiaco.  Ignatius experienced it in the cave of Manressa.  Teresa of Avila was obsessed with it.  Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote to her sister Guite about it.  And to come back full circle, it is the core of all of Merton’s writings. 

And it is shaping the Church for its third millennium.  I am somewhat racing a deadline as this evening we have Taizé prayer in our parish.  People still come out for Stations of the Cross and Benediction on Friday evenings, but more and more are coming for the monastic quiet of this simple contemplative prayer around the Cross.  When we have a speaker on contemplative prayer we fill the parish center; when we have a speaker about the Catechism of the Catholic Church a dozen donuts will do.  When I sit in church during the day and see people come in, one less and less sees rosaries come out or prayerbooks opened, but people just sitting silently in God’s presence for 20, 30, even 40 minutes and more.

We need to find ways to encourage people to deeper prayer.  Merton’s books are still to be found in bookshops and on Amazon.  I think the biggest challenge, however, is to convince our priests that there is more to prayer than them parading around in a cope and carrying a monstrance or mumbling away in Latin jingo as they versus apsidem and mistakenly call it versus Deum.  Rahner has not only spoken truly that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or cease to be anything at all, but also that we, as the Church itself, will either be contemplative or cease to be.  

Roots of Liturgical Reform: Maria Laach and Odo Casel 2



Monastic Liturgy at St. Joseph's Abbey,

Spencer  MA

 My last entry mentioned Dom Odo Casel of Maria Laach Abbey and his scholarly work to reintroduce the idea of Mysterium into Catholic sacramental theology. I had mentioned that the western obsession with the human person as an embodied intellect has so overemphasized the dogmatic aspects of religion as to strip the human person of the capacity for the mystical encounter with God.  This is one of the reasons that mysticism, indeed spirituality, is all but dead in the Western Church—Catholic and Protestant.  In its place there is a sort of pallid piety that is no more than a combination of doctrinal assent and moral rigidity.   But I don’t want to overstate the insipidness of western liturgy—pre and post Vatican II—completely.  While my experience in most parishes is that Sunday worship is shallow and lacking an appreciation for the sacred and that the pre-conciliar liturgy, the so-called “Extraordinary Form,” is the exaltation of form over substance, an empty show of an effete and effeminate fussiness, I do find worshipping in a monastic community that the (new) liturgy, when done well, has both a measured pace and solemn gravity that facilitate its being a genuinely prayerful and prayerfilled experience.  While I am sure that this is not true of the liturgy of all religious communities, I would commend especially the Cistercians (Trappists) for letting the liturgy be of what the Fathers of the Church wrote and Dom Odo was trying to express by his use of the concept of Mysterium. 

I asked one of the monks at an abbey to which I occasionally go for Mass what approach to the liturgy he employs to make the Mass as prayerful as it is when he presides.  I was surprised to learn that he had studied the Zen tea ceremony for several years, learning to carry out this ritual that is simultaneously both minimalistic and extremely complex.  He told me—“if the Zen Master can put so much effort into an effortless making of a cup of tea for his guest (note the paradox of effortless effort), I learned how much effort I must make to present Christ to you in bread and wine.  And as the Zen Master and all the ritual calls the guest’s attention not to himself or to the ritual itself, but only to the tea, so I must celebrate the Mysteries (not in the same precise sense Dom Odo’s use of the word) so as to call attention not to myself or to the ritual, but only to Christ who comes to have tea, or in this case his supper, with us.”

The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh makes a similar point in his book Living Buddah, Living Christ (Riverhead Trade, 2007—10^th anniversary edition).  Thich Nhat Hanh speaks specifically of the Eucharist and gives an amazing testimony to the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but he marvels how many Christians approach the Sacrament without “mindfulness.”  I know exactly what he is speaking of.  I see priest after priest going mechanically through the ritual with all the passion of a tired housewife ironing shirts.  And I don’t mean this as a slap at the “New Mass,” I remember it well from my days as an altar boy long before Vatican II.  And indeed, if there is an insipidness in the western liturgy—old and new—it is probably not in the rite itself but rather in the lack of spiritual depth in those leading the celebration.

It was against this perfunctory and robotic approach to the Mass that Casel tried to resurrect the idea of Mysterium, the Divine inbreaking into our liturgy when our poor efforts at worship are washed out in the splendid light of God’s Revealing himself to us; that sacred moment when the emphasis shifts from our offering God worship to his shining forth grace into our being.

In any event, Maria Laach became a great workshop for liturgy in the first half of the 20^th century as all sorts of “experiments” were tried from restoring the ancient Holy Week ceremonies (thirty and more years before Pius XII authorized the changes for the whole Church) to laying the groundwork for the “new” Mass that Paul VI would mandate for the entire Roman Rite of the Church in 1970.  Most of these experiments were “illegal” of course—but they weren’t make-it-up-as-you-go-along experiments but rather the implementation of changes determined by sound historical scholarship.  And while I am not always happy (personally) with the ways that the current Liturgy is carried out, I am grateful to have shed the bonds of spiritual slavery represented in the rigid (rigid as in rigor mortis) pre-conciliar rites.  I have no desire to go back to those Fleshpots of pre-Vatican II slavery in the Egypt of the Tridentine Church.    

Unfortunately, there is a shadow side to the Maria Laach experience as it was a gathering place for many of the right-wing Catholics who wanted to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy after the Kaisers abdication following the German defeat in World War I.  As a restored monarchy became less and less a possibility, these Catholic right-wingers evolved from their mere hatred for the Weimar Republic into a core of support for Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party.  Most distressing in this connection with the Nazi regime, Maria Laach became associated with anti-Semitic publications during the Hitler years. It was the connections with these pro-Hitler conservative Catholics that preserved the Abbey from being confiscated—the only Abbey in the Rhineland not confiscated—during the Nazi regime.  On the other hand, the Abbey provided refuge to Konrad Adenauer for a year when he was in trouble with Hitler’s Reich.   An interesting subject to explore would be the role of the Catholic Right in bringing Hitler to power.   Hmmm, might it have relevance for us today?  Fortnight for Freedom?—what is the real political philosophy of Archbishop Lori and friends?  No, I’m sure I am wrong, couldn’t be. Hmmm. 

Holy Week V

And where would be more perfect to spend Holy Week than in Jerusalem?  Well actually, probably just about anywhere.  The shoving and pushing of tens of thousands of pilgrims in the backstreets and narrow alleys of the old city; the hawking of wares and souvenirs, by Arab merchants, the contemptuous glances and spitting of the ultra-orthodox, the omnipresent soldiers with their UZIs cocked and ready, the mutual hostility of Greek monks and the Franciscan friars—you really don’t want to spend Holy Week in Jerusalem.  But come to the Holy City some other, less frenetic week.  Every week is Holy Week in Jerusalem; every day Good Friday.  And a visit to the Holy City really is—while not what you might expect—a truly holy  time.

      Aethteria was a nun from what is today Spain or perhaps France who in the first half of the 380’s made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and in a letter to her fellow nuns back home recorded the events and ceremonies of Holy Week as it was celebrated there.  It is amazing how the Palm Sunday and Good Friday services in particular are still very much what we celebrate today, though considerably longer due to the size of the crowds Aetheria encountered and the desire to make maximum use of the whole sacred space covered by Christ in the city of his passion and death.  The procession of palms, for example, began on the Mount of Olives, crossed the Kidron Valley, and entered the Holy City proceeding to the martyrium, the shrine built over Calvary.  Through the night of Holy Thursday the faithful proceeded carrying torches from the Garden of Gethsemane to the city along the path which Christ’s captors would have taken him to the house of the High Priest.  It was a dramatic experience to be sure to walk what was believed to be the very same ancient paths as Christ had trod his last night.  And yet the liturgies were dramatic in their simplicity—being mostly the reading of the prophets, the singing of the passion according to Saint John, and the prayers.  The liturgies of lent, and in particular of Holy Week, very much reflect the more spartan and plain worship of the early Church.  And that is something many miss today in their attempts to “restore” the liturgy we knew before the Council.  Until the Council of Trent the genius of the Roman Liturgy had always been its utter starkness.  That starkness today is best preserved in the monastic liturgies, especially those of the Cistercian (Trappist) abbeys.  And while Krakow is my favorite place to spend Holy Week, Seville the most fascinating, and Jerusalem, without a doubt the most astonishing—for a truly holy week, go to Spencer or Gethsemane or  Wrentham or Snowmass and pray with nuns or monks.   

The Eucharist: Where the East Meets West

Kennedy Roshi ordains

Trappist monk Kevin

Hunt as a Zen sensei

or teacher

Kennedy Roshi is a Zen Master in the White Plum Asanga lineage who teaches and guides students in Zen meditation.  As his name indicates he is not Asian by background, but American.  Moreover he is a Jesuit and an ordained Catholic priest in good standing with the Church.  He was sent for studies in Japan where he was ordained to the priesthood of the Catholic Church in 1965.  After ordination he studied Zen with Yamada Koun, a distinguished  Japanese Zen Master to whom many Christians came to learn meditation.  Among other Dharma heirs (students whose fidelity to the tradition passed on by the Master) of Yamada Koun was not only Kennedy Roshi but several Catholic Religious—Jesuits, Benedictine monks and Benedictine nuns.  As a Roshi Kennedy himself has the authority to pass on authentic Zen tradition and has ordained several disciples including Kevin Hunt Sensei, a monk of Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer MA.   How can one be a Catholic and a Buddhist?  It is not as rare as one might think.     
      Several years ago I was hiking in Tuscany and struck up a conversation with some English Buddhists who were staying at the same small hotel.  They were there on a wine tour.  Buddhists on a wine tour is somewhat like monks on a brothel crawl.  Buddhists abstain from alcoholic beverages as a matter of ascetic discipline.  Buddhists, at least practitioners of Buddhism, are vegetarian and these jolly Englanders were downing cinghiali, prosciutto, lardo, pancetta, sausages of every description, and whatever other pieces of pork, wild or tame, they could get their hands on like the Taliban was coming to eliminate pigs from the face of the earth.  These “Buddhists” were dilettantes whose “sangha” was more a social club and where the “dharma” was no more than an Asian take on “Prosperity Gospel” religion.  It was to Buddhism what Joel Osteen or Norman Vincent Peale are to Christianity—the Happy Clappy “power of positive thinking” hogwash. 
       Real Buddhism involves discipline.  The Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha are taken seriously.  But real Buddhism argumentably isn’t a religion, not in the western sense.  Buddhism doesn’t posit the existence of a Deity.  I wouldn’t say that it is atheistic in the sense that it denies God; it is just non-theistic.  I think it is more precise to say that Buddhism is, what we in the west would call, a philosophy.  Now I am saying this as a non-Buddhist and I am open to correction, or at least conversation,  on this point—from an acknowledged Buddhist.  I have read extensively in Buddhism for forty years and have a good collection of Buddhist works on my shelves.  I am not an authority by any means, but let me explain what I mean.  And when I say that it is not a religion, in the western sense, I do not intend that to denigrate Buddhism in any way.  But Buddhism differs greatly in the questions it ponders from the question that Christian, Jewish, or Islamic thought—or western atheistic thought—raises.    Or perhaps I had better further refine that: Buddhism differs greatly in the questions it ponders than does Christian, Jewish, or Islamic thought, excepting the mystical strains of those religions.  The bridge of commonality between Buddhism and Christianity  is pretty much limited to the mystical tradition within Christianity.   That is why the official Catholic/Buddhist dialogue is conducted by a panel of Christian and Buddhist monastics.   The various meetings of Catholic and Buddhist monastic scholars which have taken place at the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky in 1996, 2002, and 2008 have been very productive for both sides as the rich heritage of contemplation in both religions has been shared.
        Granted in some forms of Buddhism, and I think in particular of Tibetan Buddhism, there is mention of various “gods” or “demons” but these do not correspond to what is meant by a deity or god in western thought.  Anthropologically they seem to be survivals from pre-Buddhist animism and are some sort of “spirits.”  They are not common to all forms of Buddhism and these micro-gods would be foreign to most Buddhists, particularly those in the Zen tradition.  Even in Tibetan Buddhism they comprise an element more of popular religion than official doctrine. 
       I have always been struck by how most Buddhists, including and perhaps especially the Dalai Lama, have spoken of the western concept of God.  The Asian mind is not binary as is the western mind.  To the west, if A is true then B must be false.  We use scientific medicine or traditional forms of medical practice—herbs, acupuncture, etc.  One is a scientist or a mystic, a Democrat or a Republican, a believer or an agnostic.  In the East this duality seems strange and the Eastern mind is given to living with paradox and contradiction.   In Japan it is not uncommon for a person to be Buddhist and Shinto; in China Confucian and Buddhist. 
      While Buddhism does not posit the existence of a Supreme Being, Buddhist leaders and Philosophers speak comfortably of God and of Jesus without seeming to find a contradiction to their convictions.  In his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps, after the Dalai Lama,  the best known Buddhist author in the West, tells of receiving Holy Communion at a Mass celebrated by Daniel Berrigan.  (OK, I know that isn’t kosher, um, I mean canonically approved, but it happened and Berrigan is a Jesuit so what does one expect.)  The Buddhist Master gives a remarkably clear and vivid statement about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that not only reveals his experience of the Risen Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar but chides those Christians for whom an encounter with the Eucharistic Christ has become so routine as to be no longer truly appreciated.  Western minds have a difficult time wrapping around this ability to reconcile diverse understandings within a single mind and heart but perhaps the problem is not with the Eastern ability to live with Paradox but the Western inability to accept the complexity of Truth.  
        So can one be a Buddhist and a Catholic?  Does being a Buddhist preclude one from being a Catholic?  Well, it depends on what one means by “being a Buddhist.”  It is not necessary to leave the Catholic Church or renounce its doctrines to practice Buddhism’s spiritual path.  When one uses the traditional Catholic distinction between latria (the adoration given to God alone) and dulia, the veneration given to saints or holy persons, one can say that there is no worship (latria)  given in Buddhism to the Buddha or other figures but only the veneration due to wise and noble figures.   
        When the Reverend Marcel Guarnizo refused Barbara Johnson Holy Communion at her mother’s funeral Mass, he did so because she is in a same-sex relationship.   He was unaware that she is a “Buddhist.”  That fact was unearthed by Guarnizo’s supporters only after the fact but it has been used as a secondary justification for the priest’s action.  Of course since he did not know it at the time and therefore it played no part in his decision, it can’t be used to justify it.  On the other hand, should her being a Buddhist have been reason for Ms. Johnson not to have come forward to Communion?  Well it depends.  What sort of Buddhist is Ms. Johnson?  Is she, like those English vinophiles I mentioned a dilettante, a sort of religious tourist to Buddhism, who plays at it weekends?  If she does not follow the disciplines, to some degree, of Buddhism she is not really a Buddhist.    Though even if she practices Buddhism seriously that does not mean she is still a Catholic either.  Has she officially renounced Catholicism through some formal act?  The Church says you don’t just sort of cease being a Catholic.  You have to either formally join some other religious community incompatible with one’s Catholicism or formally reject, not Church teaching, but your membership in the Church.  (I know of a case where a priest required a person who said they no longer were a Catholic to sign a document to that effect and have it notarized before the priest would hire the man as a non-Catholic employee.)   Apparently from the example of Kennedy Roshi and other Catholic clergy, religious, and practicing laity on can practice Buddhist spiritual disciplines and still be a Catholic.  Since Ms. Johnson claims to attend Mass (and receive Holy Communion) at least from time to time, she does not consider herself to have left the Church whatever her involvement with Buddhism may be.