ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD: A LAY CISTERCIAN ASSESSES THE PRODUCT OF HAVING IN HIM THE MIND OF CHRIST JESUS.

Every now and then, I get the urge to look back on my life and ask if it was worth it. I realize that the past is no predictor, let alone guarantor, of present behavior. Life is a process of trying to determine whether the three longings I feel at the deepest level of my humanity are real or false. This ongoing struggle to discover an even deeper reality to my humanity is fueled by three unquenchable urgings of my self to become more and more like Christ (capacitas dei) and to move from my false self (Seven Deadly Sins) towards being more human and thus fulfill what nature had intended for me from before there was an is.

These three unconscious, subconscious, or even conscious fires that burn like the bush before Moses, one that is unquenchable, are:

1. THE PASSION TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE MYSTERY OF MY HUMANITY. Knowledge, says St. Thomas Aquinas, must come before love. Quite coincidentally, Erick Fromm, in his Art of Loving, states that authentic love involves a profound longing to know more about self and others. This deepest level of knowledge is profound, in my worldview, and means I want to bring what is of importance to the other person within my range of experiential growth. In a very imperfect example, this is what heaven will be like, to be one with the knowledge of all other humans in, with, and through Christ as a universal translator. Profound knowledge, unlike mere human knowledge, derives its energy or capabilities from a different source. In human interactions with the environment and other people, I am a person born into the flow of life, with all its complexities and consciousness that I can absorb in my brief span of mere human existence. My human knowledge is limited by the scope of what I can absorb with the tools and languages I have mastered to integrate the interrogatories of life and answer fundamental questions about my purpose. Language here is all the ways I have discovered to look at what was, what is, and what seems to be in the future, and to ask why. Science is a language, and within science, sub-variants are physics, chemistry, and mathematics. I don’t know any of these in depth, and yet they inform my abilities to find meaning insofar as I can assimilate what I know of them into a holistic view of all that is. Science gives me a way to look at what I can see and even some of what I can’t, and to make sense of what takes place around me and what I store in my consciousness and unconsciousness, to craft a mosaic of my experiences. If human knowledge is good, what is the reason we have reason? Why do I have the ability to ask WHY, and no other life forms are at that level of evolution? This led me, in my search for the mystery of my humanity, to look beyond just the limitations of my eighty-six years and wonder if there is more to humanity than me plopping into time for a few years, then vanishing forever. Profound knowledge is my discernment about life that speaks to a dual citizenship: one in humanity, with all its languages and experiences, to help me discover my humanity; and a deeper level of my humanity as a citizen of a realm that runs concurrently with my humanity but is significantly more potent than human progress. This next level of my humanity, the evolution of matter and time into energy itself, needs me to make a choice to enter it. Evolution itself evolves from matter to energy, from time to infinity, with a power that humans cannot generate. Profound knowledge means I get help from another nature, other than human, one from which humanity germinated and continues to grow in complexity and consciousness. This progressive intelligence exists at the highest level of human evolution. It contains
   the energy and power to elevate my mere human knowledge to an awareness I could not attain with human language and logic alone. This is where my profound knowledge can get what it needs to move to that next level of my longing, for which knowledge alone won’t quench– love.
2. THE PASSION TO KNOW THE DYNAMICS OF LIVING LOVE AT THE DEEPEST LEVEL OF MY HUMANITY. If knowledge allows me to choose what WAT I must use to traverse the seemingly impenetrable morass of logical hoops to reach not just human love, but pround love, then my free will uses this WAY to produce a TRUTH that is beyond human comprehension, the abandonment of the present notion of love to step out in front of me to hold the opposite of what my humanity says being human is. I must discover who I am and why I am by denying who I am (citizen of the world) to embrase a more unknown realm, that of loving others as I do myself, of serving others who may not deserve it, of loving those who hate me and revile me, and to ask for mercy for all humans for they know not what they do. The product of this transformation from mere human to profound humanity can only take place when I accept that there is meaning and also energy beyond what my humanity can produce. For lack of a better analogy, I call this God or Divinity. What I learn from this absorption from a higher nature, I must translate into a language with which I look out of reality to solve the riddle of THE GOD EQUATION. Being absorbed into the Lay Cistercian way of thinking (where I had to make new wine skins to create my own authentic space) made me more and more aware of the vulnerability of reliance on mere human truths rather than one where I consciously and deliberately choose God’s way to look at reality and my purpose in it.
3. THE PASSION WITHIN ME TO KNOW AND LOVE THE TRUTH WHICH WILL SET ME FREE FROM BEING HOSTAGE TO THE IMPERFECTIONS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. My big takeaway from being a Lay Cistercian is that it is futile for me to know God as God is, due to my lack of both the capacity to hold the information and the measurements that are alien to my humanity. What is possible is for me to use my interaction with the Sacred to access truths beyond human reasoning and my ability to process them through my experiences and languages, gleaned from a lifetime of longing to become what I believe to be true. I remember sitting in the upper room chapel at St. Meinrad School of Theology, trying to squeeze the Trinity into my life experiences. At that time, what came to me was that I should not seek to know or prove a God for which I had neither the capability to know, love, and serve, nor the capacity to hold whatever I gleaned from this encounter. It was then that I realized that my nature would never permit me to prove God, but that I could sit in the presence of pure knowledge, pure love, and pure truth to absorb what Jesus says I need. In Lectio Divina, later on, I came to the realization that the act of longing to fill that three-fold void in my heart could only be possible if I abandoned all my conditions and preconceptions about Jesus and just sat in the presence of Jesus and asked the Holy Spirit to give me what I need to be fully human and to begin to satisfy the three fold longings in my heart. These three aches in the deepest part of my self don’t go away while I live in this human body but are only satisfied by, as St. Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Being one who has been accepted by the Trappists and the Abbot of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, Conyers. Georgia, and who has been a professed Lay Cistercian for some eight years, I have learned so much about myself, not by reading books, although Scriptures and Cistercian authors have helped me sharpen what the Holy Spirit has presented to me. Ever so slowly, I began to be aware that I must listen to what God speaks to me, not what I speak to God. This takes the form of taking time to go to that upper room of my inner self and waiting. I am not waiting for Jesus to be present so much as preparing myself to be present to Jesus through the energy of the Holy Spirit.

FROM FORMATION THROUGH INFORMATION TO TRANSFORMATION AS A LAY CISTERCIAN.

My Cistercian Way, one where I use Cistercian practices and charisms, as I know them, and apply them to the unique parameters of my daily living, is not what I think I want, but to extend or step out in front of myself (existere) through abandonment of my will to listen to God in the upper room of my inner self and keeping my mouth (and brain) from interrupting. Silence and Solitude are attributes or Charisms that allow me to just sit in the presence of God as one willing to say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” At the core of my current position of Faith, Hope, and Love is the realization I don’t have to do anything but sit (stand) in the presence of Christ and ask the Holy Spirit to “Do unto me according to your word.”

The progression of my interaction with the Sacred goes something like this each day.

1. I feel the longing to be in the presence of Christ and wait for whatever happens.
2. I make a conscious effort to go to that upper room of my inner self and do Lectio Divina.
3. The LECTIO I have used since 1963 is “Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), and I always begin with that phrase.
4. What comes next is my MEDITATIO, where I use the techniques and tools of St. Benedict’s Chapter 4 of the Rule to just read and try to assimilate their power. At this point, I still tend to ask God for what I want and use techniques, such as consciously taking one idea and deepening it, but asking God for the grace to make it happen to me.
5. Next is ORATIO, which is always the prayer of St. Charles de Foucauld (since 2024) for abandonment of my will to just be present to Christ and listen to the whisperers that come from the intimate love between two persons, one of mere human nature and frailty, with the other being both human and divine. Energy always permeates reality from the higher to the lower nature, not vice versa. Waiting to hear “with the ear of the heart” is both adoration and a recognition that God is God and that I am a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit in the process of becoming.
6. The product of all this time spent with the one I love is called COMTEMPLATIO or just reteating to that upper room of my inner self (Matthew 6:5) and sitting on the couch next to Christ, whom I have invited to be with me (along with the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, and St. Michael), keeping my heart and mind shut (focused) on what Jesus thinks I need for where I am now and as I am. In the past, I have set the time for CONTEMPLATIO to 15 minutes. As I grow in the transformation from citizen of the earth to citizen of heaven, I notice that time has changed for me, as well. I don’t worry about time (Chronos), but rather about the joy of just being present with Jesus and listening for his heartbeat, so that I can sync mine with His. As a Lay Cistercian, following the Rule of St. Benedict and the practices and charisms of the Cistercian (Trappist) approach to the Sacred as I know it, prayer becomes not a specific time (Chronos) but rather praying without ceasing (Christos). Each day is a lifetime where I must sacrifice my will to listen to Christ through the Holy Spirit and thus, together, present myself to the Father to give praise and honor due Him.

I have identified several lessons learned in my travels from information (know) to formation (love) to transformation (serve) by just sitting there seemingly passively, but with the roaring of all my being, synapting more and more of my mental and spiritual awareness to add to who I am at the deepest level of my humanity (capacitas dei and conversio morae), never feeling more human. A Lay Cistercian shares the fruits of Lectio Divina as they are today. All of these products are the result of Christ’s grace that leads to the final stage of Lectio Divina that I follow, that of ACTIO, as championed by Pope Benedict XVI.

SIMPLICITY – Simplicity, as a consequence of Lectio Divina, is one of those hidden gems that are only discovered after I reach a certain level of transformation, where I don’t worry about formulae for Lectio Divina or even what outcome I have in mind. Instead, it is a quiet realization that the more complex and challenging I find the practice, the simpler its solution is. This trait carries over into all my spirituality and practices, where I now seek a simpler lifestyle and eating plan, and a vastly reduced dependence on things in life in favor of virtues. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity and to know that all I need to do is place myself in the presence of Christ and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

MOVEMENT– One concept that keeps resonating with me is that all life, from beginning to end, is in constant movement in complexity and consciousness. I am one with all reality that ever was, or is, or will be, because I popped into this grand flow of matter and time for eighty-five + years to be able to use my knowledge (as I have assimilated it). Free will (the choices I have made, both good or evil) to move to that next level of my human evolution, is one that points to not only my individual lifetime, but a part of the ongoing flow of humanity and all that know that they know. I am one with the flow of reality from Alpha to Omega, that same complexity and living consciousness of all matter, life, as it inexorably moves through space and time towards a predestined conclusion. As such, you and I get one chance to put all the pieces together. One profound awareness is that I can’t move on in a way that is consistent with what reality is without help from a source outside of my humanity, one that allows me to glimpse “through a glass darkly” the purpose of life (heaven on earth) and my own peculiar purpose in discovering how all reality fits together to lead to that deeper level of my evolution (heaven in heaven). I discovered an unattributed map of reality that seems to allow me to see myself as part of a predesigned destiny and must discover the hidden secrets in plain sight that allow me to move to that next level of my humanity, that of adopted son (daughter) of the Father and an heir to the kingdom of heaven in heaven after I die.

I use movement to go from mere human longing to become more in knowledge, in love, and in truth, so that I can actually travel that sometimes circuitous route to becoming the person I was designed to be since before the world was. Jesus is the Word, one made flesh by the will of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that you and I have the authentic way that leads to a truth beyond human imperfection and so lead a life now in this lifetime to prepare to decorate a mansion prepared for me in that next level of my evolution. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity and movement, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in the presence of Christ and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

CONNECTIVITY– Another result from resting in the presence of Christ (sub alaraum suarum) under the shade of His wings, is my awareness that I am connected to all other believers that Jesus is Lord (limited to other believers by degree of truth and non-judgmental about anyone’s sincerity). It is not an accident that the early Church stated that “Outside the Church, there is no salvation. It is the consciousness that I am linked because of Christ with the Holy Spirit (My Advocate) and the Father (My Creator) to all that is, that is a prayer of unity and conformity to the eternal will of the Trinity, opening myself to the ontic possibility of the manifestability of all being encountered. In reality, connectivity is the entanglement of matter, life, reason, and free will, plus the addition of the Christ Principle that gives energy and direction to all that is. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity, movement, and connectivity, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in the presence of Christ and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

DIGGING INTO THE DEPTHS OF WHAT IS — Digging into the depths of my Catholic Faith has saved me from being mundane and complacent. It is the greatest temptation for anyone who aspires to “Have in them the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 2:5) My awareness from placing myself in the presence of Christ and just waiting, head bowed, heart open to the ontic possibility of any being encountered, means I am passionate about growing deeper with Christ (casacitas dei) and moving ever deeper into the mystery of my humanity (conversio morae). No longer do I just pray the rosary or take time out of my earthly routine to focus on Christ in the tabernacle of my heart (Eucharist Adoration for shut-ins), but in all things, I find myself inexorably drawn deeper or more profoundly into the mystery of my Catholic Faith, the never-ending story. The difference now and when I was younger seems to be my daily consciousness that every layer uncovered by the Holy Spirit of what I thought I knew about Jesus reveals a new, hidden reality I did not previously know. Jesus bids me to make all things new, not just one a year, but as a constant process of discovery and freshness to what might otherwise seem as a rigid and constrictive Faith. Quite the opposite. I am aware that I can’t begin to probe the mind of God and be considered an equal (Adam and Eve made that mistake). Still, I can use the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, an energy outside human capability, to probe the depths of my humanity with all its unique complexities of good and wrong choices. Behaviorally, I find myself excited by this new growth of experiential Catholicism, which has, at its center, Jesus Christ, and by the various ways, as a Lay Cistercian, that I can just be present to the one I love and wait. I remember sitting on the porch of my home in Vincennes, Indiana, on a summer day, rocking the night hours away with family or friends. No agenda, just quietly enjoying each other’s company and the cool Indiana night. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity, movement, and connectivity, and to grow through the love of Christ, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in His presence and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

MAKING NEW WINESKINS — My task, as I am now able to begin to pull all of reality together, is to be a new wine skin maker to hold the constant wine Jesus turns from water into wine in my every waking moment. Read the Scriptures in Luke 5:36-39 to reflect on what Jesus is telling you about making all things new each day.
36^* And he also told them a parable. “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new piece, and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.

37 Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.

38 Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.

39 [And] no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”^*

Commentary on verse 39. “The old is good: this saying is meant to be ironic and offers an explanation for the rejection by some of the new wine that Jesus offers: satisfaction with old forms will prevent one from sampling the new.” (www.usccb.org)

The temptation from Satan for believers is to become satisfied with the heritage of the Catholic Church from the past rather than to learn the skills of taking what is routine and ordinary and seeking out its deeper meaning through, with, and in Christ. Traditionalists risk not growing into an ever-deeper love of Christ when they freeze doctrines as they understand them and equate orthodoxy with the immutability of old wine skins. Progressive thinkers run the risk of uncoupling growth from individual and group patterns of thinking and of abandoning what our Catholic heritage and doctrines have preserved for centuries against the slices and cuts of new thinking. Balance is needed, and Christ provides that in my Lectio Divina and Eucharistic Adoration. I am the only Catholic who can make all things new with Christ, but I must make sure I am anchored in what Christ wants me to become. This is the fantastic heritage we have as Catholics through the Church, to bring new wine and place it in new wineskins, not old ones. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity, movement, and connectivity, to grow through the love of Christ, and how to make new wineskins to hold the new wine Christ gives me each day, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in His presence and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

JUST BEING IN THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST — Another outcome or product of being in the presence of Christ is to wait and patiently be open to what Christ wants me to become. Anytime I find myself in the presence of divine energy through the Holy Spirit, I am more aware that a humble act of kneeling before Christ and seeking to hear His heartbeat next to me is, in itself, growth from a source far beyond what love from my humanity can produce. What I can do is to accept this way as a source of what is true beyond my nature, so that I can lead a new life, one infused with the food of Christ’s own body and blood, one that allows me to evolve to the highest form of existence my humanity will tolerate. All of this by an unquenchable passion to love God with all my mind, all my heart, and all my strength in this life, so I can sustain it in the next life to come. (Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:36) My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity, movement, and connectivity, to grow through the love of Christ, how to make new wineskins to hold the new wine Christ gives me each day, and a passionate desire to just be in the presence of Christ and wait, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in His presence and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

PACKING FOR THE PAROUSIA — An unexpected but welcome awareness from my Lectio Divina meditations these days is the preoccupation with decorating my mansion in heaven, which the Father has reserved just for me. This is where all of the above outcomes begin to come together. I am now passionately pursuing linking all the experiences I have had of knowing, loving, and serving Christ to take with me to heaven. That’s correct! What I do on earth, consistent with what Christ shows me, are treasures that moth does not consume, nor rust corrode. Only the rich get to heaven, but it must be God’s riches I pack in that suitcase of my inner self, that I use to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the purpose of the Torah, this is why Jesus came, so that all humans could know the truth, i.e., how to get to heaven using Christ as our Magister Noster (Master) and the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, St. Michael, and all the Saints (saints) as our heroes and examples of those who have come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and that believing, have eternal life and love with Him and the Holy Spirit, all to the glory of the Father.

From Baptism onward, in whatever life throws at us, we have the real presence of Jesus with us to help us discern what is good from what is evil. We can take the good to heaven with us as the basis of our happiness; we can use what we have experienced with the Church Universal to live out that quantum entanglement of energy from divinity through humanity to me, the individual, so that I can be present to Christ in the tabernacle of my heart, now and forever. My Lay Cistercian practices have taught me to embrace simplicity, movement, and connectivity, to grow through the love of Christ, how to make new wineskins to hold the new wine Christ gives me each day, a passionate desire to just be in the presence of Christ and wait, plus the awareness of what to pack with what I have cherished on earth to decorate my mansion in heaven, knowing that all I need to do is place myself in His presence and wait, confident that He will give me what I need to get to heaven.

HARMONY — Often in the midst of my Lectio Divina meditations, I find myself pursuing trends in reality far from my level of comfort and normal tendencies of spiritual sloth, those that deal with metaphysical and cosmic enganglements. One of many such trends or cross-cutting themes is the duality of harmony and dissonance. Like the good-or-evil description, with good as the default attribute and evil as the absence of good, I think of harmony emanating from the foundations of all that is, or divinity, infusing matter with the complexity and consciousness that compel all that is towards fulfillment. Harmony exists because of its source of existence; dissonance is the abberation or exception to harmony, one could call it sin, if sin is understood as an archer missing the target, either totally or not the bullseye. Since harmony is the natural condition of reality, the notion of humanity as disrupting this flow of energy is primarily due to Adam and Eve’s failure to accept help in navigating the rapids of how to use human free will and knowledge in a way that is consistent with our nature. This archetype of human nature and our need for harmony to restore itself to resonance is intrinsic to everything that is: the physical universe, the mental universe, and the piece that gives meaning to this process—the spiritual universe. Human nature, of what we can observe of its nobility and at the same time fragility to moral ambiguity, exists within the parameters of this dissonance of humanity. Christ is the Principle that restores equilibrium to the choice of humanity to go it alone without help. God becomes human to restore humanity’s proper nature to those who need help surviving the gauntlet of life’s challenges that seek to throw them back into dissonance. Individually, we are prone to the seduction of what is bad for our resources because it feels like it does satisfy the primal urges characterized by the Seven Deadly Sins.

In the end, I am a broken-down, old Lay Cistercian Temple of the Holy Spirit. I can only repeat over and over the Word of the Cistercian doxology:

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever. The God who is, who was, and who will be at the end of the ages.”