Several years ago, someone told me, “Thank you for your service,” when I told them I had been a U.S. Army Chaplain. No one had ever said that to me before. I can remember being very touched by the comments.
Two days ago, I went to the Leon County Tax Collector’s office to pay a property tax bill. They have a number system and I was number 123. I pressed the button and got two numbers, 123 and 124. At the time they were on number 87. It took me nearly one hour and forty-five minutes to go from 87 to 123. There was an old gentleman who sat near me waiting for his turn. He had number 190. I thought to myself he would have to wait for three hours to get service at the window. I gave him my extra ticket number 124 just moments before my number was called. I had never seen him before and I think I will ever see him again.
I went to the counter #8 and the woman was very hyper because of the multitude of people in the waiting room. When she had finished giving me a receipt for my property tax check, I told her “Thank you for your service!” She was visibly touched and moved by what I said.
I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone would thank people for their service, meaning not just for helping them once, but for their lifetime of commitment to public service or health care? If you agree, just begin to tell people this simple greeting. You may not make a big difference in the world, but you will make the world of this person in front of you a little
On Sunday mornings, after going to church services, many people eat out at the favorite diner or restaurant. I like to see family eat together. This scenario reminded me of one of my Lectio Divina meditations on having a meal with Christ, a.k.a. The Eucharist. I got to thinking of how we who have not had the privilege and honor of meeting Jesus in person can actually have breakfast with Jesus. That is exactly what happens when we go to Eucharist.
It is always difficult when the founder of a movement or a religious order dies. I am thinking of Mother Theresa in particular and how her community had to go on without her enthusiastic spirit to help them. The same could be told of the Apostles in the upper room. Jesus came to them again. They must have been flushed with excitement to see Christ once again in the flesh, although they knew his body had died. The rumors of his resurrection from the dead were fresh and spread among the disciples. What stood out for me in this upper room experience was the statement, “Blessed are those who do not see yet believe.” (John 20:29) I like this passage because it is the way I believe. What Jesus handed off to the Apostles happened 2000 years ago, yet we have the same Christ in front of us, not in memory but in reality. How is Christ made real in these our days of unbelief and actual hostility to the message of Christ to love one another? As usual, the answer was right under my nose, when I had breakfast with Christ at Eucharist.
Here are my thoughts. It all begins well before I go to Eucharist. There is the period of temptation that floods me with ideas such as you don’t need to go today, just lay in bed for twenty more minutes, or why waste your time going to la-la land, or even the famous one about you can meet Jesus on the golf course as well as you can at church? Every time I try to be in the presence of Christ, I am tempted. Every time!
The reason for Church is a gathering of the faithful to proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes again. Church is not only a building but the living Body of Christ in this age. The Church universal is composed of those who have died and gone before us in Faith, those who struggle with the effects of original sin while still on this earth, and those awaiting purification for their sins. It is a sign of deeper spiritual awareness when you can see Christ in those around you, particularly those with whom you disagree or who are repulsive. St. Benedict has that idea in his Rule, Chapter 53, The Reception of Guests. “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. (Matt 25:35).
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
It is one of those curious ironies of the secular age in which we live that Black Friday, the shopping day after Thanksgiving, is more important than Good Friday. Of course, Good Friday was never important, even before the rise of the electronic age, our dependency on all things on-line.
That in all things, may God be glorified. -St. Benedict
We all live in a world that has been contaminated by Original Sin, the archetypal sin of Adam and Eve that defines the condition in which we live. Our theology tells us that we are all born with Original Sin which keeps us from participating in the bounty that Jesus restored to us by his death on the cross and resurrection. Baptism, an act of faith of God in us with our response, wash away this Original Sin, but there is a catch. The effects of the sin remain. We must die, there is behavior not consistent with who God is. We receive the Ten Commandments but struggle to keep them. With Christ, things become clearer. We now have a Mediator between us and God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. True to the effects of Original Sin, we don’t all agree on what that is. There is confusion, conflicts, and positions that are contrary to the teachings of the Master. One thing about religion, there always were conflicts, especially in the early church. Google the various heresies. In the midst of this confusion, I find myself wanting to focus just on having in me the mind of Christ Jesus. (Phil. 2:5). I have chosen the Cistercian approach to life (silence, solitude, prayer, work, and community) as a way for me to move from self to God. Along the way of my journey, there are great teachers that can help me struggle with living the Life of Christ. One such person is Pope Francis. Here is what he had to say about increasing love.
Pope Francis on Fasting and Prayer
Here are some penitential practices for all year long.
Pope Francis proposes these 15 simple acts of charity as concrete manifestations of love:
THE BEST FASTING:
If we all practice this style of fasting, our everyday will be filled with peace, joy, trust in each other, and life.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Do you have to use the restroom, when you die and go to Heaven? Do you have claustrophobia in Heaven? Will you be able to go to the Emergency Room? How can you travel from place to place? Who fixes your food? These and thousands of other questions about Heaven we neatly tuck away in some far corner of our mind and never ask about how this can be. What is Heaven, anyway? Who would want to go there?
Heaven is the only place where we don’t know what is in store for us but we want to go there and sell all our possessions to obtain it. As a human being, we live our whole life in the physical universe (matter, time, energy) but we access it through our five senses as interpreted by our brain (mental universe). As the philosophical dictum says: what is received, is received according to the disposition of the recipient. In English, that means everyone looks at the world through a lifetime or their unique experiences and learned values. To enter the spiritual universe, it takes an act of the will, one that is a gift from God to us. What is in the spiritual universe on earth is what is in Heaven. Have you found it yet?
The problem comes in when you miss the train because you hold a set of values that don’t lead to Heaven or when you put a false center in your life.
As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I have made a commitment to follow the Rule of Benedict and use the Cistercian practices and charisms to ensure I am close to the heart of Christ. Through silence, solitude, prayer, work, and community, I want to discover Heaven on earth and transform the physical and mental universes through the spiritual one. To do that, I have to transform myself into the Life of Christ. To do that, I must love God with all my heart, mind and strength, and my neighbor. To do that, I must daily have in me the mind of Christ Jesus. (Phil.2:5) I am far from that perfection.
Here are some of my thoughts about Heaven as a result of my Lectio Divina.
The Gift of Love13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly,[b] but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (NRSVCE) |
So, what is Heaven like? If, through contemplation, your heart is ever close to the heart of Christ, you will know the answer in its fullest sense. God is love.
Praised be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever, the God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages. Amen and Amen. –Cistercian Doxology
At the core of what it means to be a follower of The Master is doing what he taught. Spirituality is not a head thing as much as a head and heart thing.
St. Benedict, in his Chapter 4 of the Rule, wanted monks to do what Christ taught us. He lists practices that those follow can use to have in them the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5). I read at least five of these practices every day in the hopes of becoming more like Christ. Loving is about doing something, first with your own temple of the Holy Spirit, then with others to complete the words of Christ, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their with them. (Matthew 18:20)
THE MOST DIFFICULT BEHAVIOR TO LEARN
In my case, as an aspiring Lay Cistercian in process of becoming more like Christ but being so very far from perfection, the most difficult thing I must learn is to not returning evil for evil but good for evil. It sounds so easy to do but goes against everything human are emotions and will are acculturated to respond. This is the result of original sin. When someone tells me I am an utter failure as a person, a failure as a husband, a failure as a Catholic Priest, someone who only lives in La-La Land, someone whose mother did not teach him right, the normal tendency is to strike back bring up the faults of the other person. You hurt me and I will hurt you back, only more so. This leads to much of the fighting and anger between and among spouses, families, and friends. If you give back love for evil and peace for hurtful comments and accusations, it is not normal, but it is what Christ wanted us to do. I Thessalonians 5:15
When you offer the peace of Christ to those at Eucharist, you offer Christ to one another. You proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes again. You do what Jesus taught us.
WORKS OF MERCY
Mercy is a virtue to have compassion for, and if possible, to alleviate the sufferings of others, according to New Advent. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10198d.htm
When your heart touches the heart of Jesus, something wonderful happens. The encounter produces God’s own energy in your heart, as much as you can accommodate. A contemplative practice, such as Lectio Divina, opens up the heart to the reality of love, if only for a moment. What comes from this awareness must be “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Read Matthew 22:34.
The corporal works of mercy are:
The spiritual works of mercy are:
If you love me, says the Master, love one another. Have mercy on others as I have mercy on you. Words to live by. Words that are the fruit of faith. Go, do them.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
My wife and I recently took a trip to Nashville to visit our daughter, Martha. Of course, we had to take along our dog, Tucker. Nice trip for a couple of days, but then my wife asked me, what’s next?
I said that our daughter was coming to Tallahassee for Thanksgiving visit. What’s next?
I began to think about the time from now to whatever happens until I die. Here are some thoughts, hopefully not too morbid.
Die. And then what?
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What person or thing do you love the most in your life? What is the one person or thing that, if you took it away, everything else would crumble? This is the center of your life, the one principle upon which all other moral principles and meaningful values are based.
I only bring this up because it is important for my own growth in the Life of Christ within me. You see, there is no room for anyone else as the center of my life. There is only one because God is One. The secular world would place family, spouse, mother or father as the center. At one time, so did I, until I realized that I was only thinking of the limited ways of the world. It does make sense to place your spouse as the most important thing or person in your life if you live in two universes (physical and mental).
As one who can only aspire to be a Lay Cistercian, I admit that I do not place my spouse or even family as my center. I do that because I have found something deeper about love than human love. That is not to say that I don’t love my wife and daughter. I have come to see layers of love, far greater and deeper than I had ever imagined. I experienced the dark side of love, that which says you love someone, even if they can’t or won’t love back, or have some form of mental health issues or alcohol or drug dependence. Jesus gave us a hint, when he told his disciples, (Luke 6:32) “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.”
Ironically, when you place Christ as your center (my center is Phil 2:5), all else follows. The words of the Master guide us in growing from self to God, “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you besides.” The best way to love our neighbor is to love God first with all our heart, our mind, and our strength. It takes a lifetime of experiences to learn that seeking God has been right in front of my nose every day.
I must tell you, I had trouble with letting go of my perceptions of what love should be. I think this is due to my taking the meaning from what this world says about love and the priorities of relationship. This is another example of the difference between what the world thinks and what Christ says we should do. Placing God first means everything else is number two. Adam and Eve didn’t get it and placed God second and themselves first. What seems like a no-brainer, is giving up part of your independence to affirm dependence on God, or, put another way, Thy Will Be Done.
LEARNING POINTS
That in all things, may God be glorified, –St. Benedict
When reciting the Liturgy of the Hours, particularly the Office of Readings, the Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, I frequently make mistakes. You know, forgetting my place, saying you instead of yours, or mispronouncing the name of a tribe of Israel or those incredible names in the Old Testament. I used to worry about being correct all the time but had to acknowledge my imperfections so much that I just accepted them as part of prayer. Here are ten things I have learned about prayer. You might have experienced other ones.
Praise to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. The God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the Ages. Amen and Amen.
The following comments are my own reflections from the document on Lay Cistercian Journey discussed at a Gathering Day of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery on October 1, 2017. It is part of our on-going Junior Professed Formation Program. Each month, our Lay Cistercian Advisor, Brother Cassian, OSCO, presents various approaches to 20th Century Cistercian Spirituality for Lay Cistercians based on the documents of International Lay Cistercians. What follows is the Lourdes document on Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey. Look it up for yourself on:
Click to access Spiritual%20Journey%20FINAL%2020June2014.pdf
Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this fie part document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God. This the fifth and final paragraph of the document. The text is bolded for your ease of reading. My reflection follows.
5) Life in Christ
The Lay Cistercian’s road is one particular way of living the universal journey of human beings into God. The presence of Christ is the heart of our journey: “He is the way, the truth, the life.” It is necessarily a journey accompanied by others. It is the quest for the encounter with Christ who transcends us and abides in us. Our greatest hope is that the gift of discovering Christ in one another will be the path of holiness and joy for us. Our journey is inspired and nourished by the sisters and brothers in the Cistercian family; for this, we will be eternally grateful.
After reflecting on our identity (Huerta 2008) and working on our formation (Dubuque 2011), we as Lay Cistercians sought to go to the heart and source of these two realities. We discovered an encounter with a Presence: Jesus Christ, the source, and summit of our journey. Jesus calls us through our brothers and sisters to be witnesses of the Gospel in the world, enlightened and supported by the Cistercian tradition as it is embodied in the nuns and monks who accompany us.
May Mary, Queen of Citeaux and model of obedience, show us the way to our full transformation into the image of her Son.”
For me, the purpose of my life is to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5). Since I was a lad of 23, they have been my mantra and the source of my spiritual nourishment. When I read the Lay Cistercian statement number five, The Life of Christ, it was like a homecoming. It is the nuclear fission of my spiritual life. I look at my journey to Forever in terms of a lifetime of what I have learned about what is meaningful and what lacks substance, or, as I like to call it, cotton candy (tastes good but there is no nourishment for the body).
There are some assumptions about my purpose of life which I feel I must share with you what I think when I hear or read The Life of Christ.
After reflecting on our identity (Huerta 2008) and working on our formation (Dubuque 2011), we as Lay Cistercians sought to go to the heart and source of these two realities. We discovered an encounter with a Presence: Jesus Christ, the source, and summit of our journey. Jesus calls us through our brothers and sisters to be witnesses of the Gospel in the world, enlightened and supported by the Cistercian tradition as it is embodied in the nuns and monks who accompany us.
The document calls us to discover an encounter with Jesus Christ. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I try to do what nuns and monks in the monasteries do, i.e., love God with all their hearts, their strength and their souls, and their neighbor as themselves. What they do is to seek God through practices and creating a school of love to move from self to God. Sounds simple, but for me, it is a lifetime of trying to take some of these charisms and, using the Cistercian practices I have learned, apply them to my own secular situation. The question is not, is it better to be in a monastery than try it in the secular world with family, job, distractions, and the struggle to live in a secular world that does not value Christ. I would not have it any other way.
Life in Christ is both my purpose (have in you the mind of Christ Jesus), the journey, and the ultimate goal, Heaven. How can I fail, if I focus on becoming more like Christ and reproducing the passion, death, and resurrection in my life? Since I can never love God with all my heart and soul, through Cistercian practices, I can allow my heart to sit next to the heart of Christ and absorb His love.
Through Him, With Him, and In Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, the God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages. Amen and Amen.
The following comments are my own reflections from the document on Lay Cistercian Journey discussed at a Gathering Day of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery on October 1, 2017. It is part of our on-going Junior Professed Formation Program. Each month, our Lay Cistercian Advisor, Brother Cassian, OSCO, presents various approaches to 20th Century Cistercian Spirituality for Lay Cistercians based on the documents of International Lay Cistercians. What follows is the Lourdes document on Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey. Look it up for yourself on:
http://www.cistercianfamily.org/documents/Spiritual%20Journey%20FINAL%2020June2014.pdf Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God. This is the fourth segment, one that embodies the effects of moving from self to God. Something wonderful happens to one who surrenders his or her whole self to be shaped by the inexorably dynamic energy of being in the presence of Christ. You inexorably beginning to resemble that which shapes you. This is my journey.
The text is bolded for your ease of reading. My reflection follows the bolded text.
4) Formation/Transformation: its importance for spiritual growth
Formation within the Lay Cistercian community is a lifelong journey into the richness of the Cistercian charism. Formation must be both personal and communal.
It includes the following:
a) The practice of Lectio Divina and prayer
b) The Rule of Saint Benedict
c) Knowledge of the treasure of Cistercian literature
d) The Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours)
e) Self-knowledge
f) The importance of the Eucharist and other sacraments
g) Spiritual Accompaniment. The practice of both exterior and interior silence and listening is emphasized in living the Cistercian charism. The annual retreat is a means of reinforcing community and relationship with God.
As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, the formation part of the journey is being present to the one who forms, in this case, Christ Jesus. There are two dimensions to the formation process: the individual as the ultimate repository of and depository of faith, “have in you the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 2:5). The second dimension is that of one community of faith, the crucible wherein Christ can shape the individual in His image and likeness. Without the individual, there is no one to form in the image of Christ. Without the community, all sharing in the same Cistercian charisms and practices, there is no formation. Without Christ Jesus, there is no transformation from self to God.
A good example of the formation that leads to a transformation is experienced by those who are in a loving relationship. Long distance relationships tend not to last very long. Why? The answer is obvious. You must be present (physically, mentally, and spiritually) to each other on a consistent basis to grow deeper in love and affection. East and West coast marriages are not sustainable, although they do happen. As a Lay Cistercian, I want to commit to being present, not only to the Lay Cistercian community of the monastery of the Holy Spirit but more importantly to be even closer to the heart of Christ, through being present with them. I count myself fortunate that I have two such communities of faith, one Lay Cistercian with both laity and monks, and the other one the Eucharist Community of Good Shepherd parish, Tallahassee, Florida, with Father Mike Foley as its representative of Christ.
There are four ways in which I want my heart to be as close to Christ as possible (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34)
1. TO BE PRESENT TO CHRIST, BE PRESENT TO THOSE WHO LOVE HIM WITH ALL THEIR HEARTS.
As a Lay Cistercian, I want to commit to being present, not only to the Lay Cistercian community of the monastery of the Holy Spirit but more importantly to be even closer to the heart of Christ, through being present with them. I count myself fortunate that I have two such communities of faith, one Lay Cistercian with both laity and monks, and the other one the Eucharist Community of Good Shepherd parish, Tallahassee, Florida, with Father Mike Foley as its representative of Christ. Some people don’t get it. They see the Church as composed of sinful people, which it is, but fail to see the effects of grace and God’s love for these same people. Which is greater? That people are sinful, which we all are because of original sin, or that they overcome their own sinfulness through faith and grace by trying to love God with all their hearts? Part of the formation is being present to others who have in them the mind of Christ Jesus, part of the Lay Cistercian formation is being present to the monks and learning from how they practice the various acts that lead to humility, obedience, solitude, and silence. A big part of it is the community helping you to open your heart to seek God right before you, in the moment. It may not be a spectacle or like going to a rock concert, but it works.
2. TO BE PRESENT TO CHRIST, DO WHAT HE TELLS YOU. St. John’s Gospel is the only one to tell the story of the Wedding Feast of Cana. In that account, Jesus turns water into wine, no small feat. The mother of Jesus, Mary, tells those helping Christ to “…do what he tells you.” Such a nondescript comment yet inserted by John for a reason. The whole Gospel proclaims the divinity of Christ and his mission. Like the wine-stewards in the biblical account, what he tells you may not be consistent with what they know to be the case, i.e., all the good wine is served. The point is when Jesus tells us to do something, it may go against our nature, it may not be comfortable to do, it may not make sense. All of these stories are just part of what Jesus taught us, according to the end of John’s Gospel. (John 21:25) It makes me wonder what other stories are out there that never made it into written Scripture. Part of the being a Lay Cistercian has to do with seeking God in Christ by placing your heart next to the heart of Christ. What Christ tells us in these encounters is always based on giving glory to the Father by doing what God tells you. This is the personal part of the formation, one that leads directly to action. It is in the obedience to doing what God tells you to do that formation becomes transformative. This is the transformation from self to God, not that we ever reach the finish line, as St. Paul says in Philippians 3: 8-16. We still run to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured us.
3. TO BE PRESENT TO CHRIST, REALIZE THAT THE LOCAL COMMUNITY OF FAITH, IN THIS CASE, BOTH THE LAY CISTERCIAN AND MONASTIC COMMUNITIES, ARE THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST HIMSELF ON YOUR JOURNEY.
One of our Lay Cistercians told me that, the late Father Anthony Deliese, OSCO, told him he should consider being a Lay Cistercian. He asked Father Anthony was are the requirements to be one. Father responded, “You just have to be a sinner.” To attempt the lifelong journey of formation that leads to transformation does not mean you are NOT free from the effects of original sin. It does mean that the practice of moving from self to God is just that—work, as St. Benedict states in his Chapter 4 of the Rule, “Tools for Good Works.” Doing good works or good behaviors produce good outcomes or products. The Reformation’s notion of good works was that you could buy your way to Heaven. Get rid of this bias when you hear these words. No one deserves Heaven, it is a gift of faith. It is the result of those behaviors practiced in the context of a community of faith that produce energy or grace. No one deserves Heaven. When we as a community do those actions Christ taught us, they produce grace, God’s own energy. We call them sacraments because they are sacred moments where we can touch the heart of Christ and thus go with Him to give glory to the Father (John 17:3-26). This is Christ’s center. In so far as the whole community all focuses on this same mission, we are one together in Christ Jesus. This differentiates us from communities such as Elks Club, Moose, Kiwanis, Knight of Columbus, or Little League. They are good but they do not give us what we need for our journey to Forever. Many time we can’t see the grace they produce, but we can always see the good works emanating from Cistercian practices and contained in the charisms we seek in our lives. We see it most clearly in the communities of faith to which we belong. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, this is one of my faith communities, as I mentioned previously. It is no wonder then that one of the ways for this school of love to be present to Christ is for it to be present to each other, differences of personalities and perspectives notwithstanding. That is why Gathering Day is so important.
We cultivate silence and solitude as Lay Cistercians in the context of the grace we receive from each other on Gathering Day. That is an extension of our community practices together, which we will discuss shortly.
4. TO BE PRESENT TO CHRIST, PUT YOURSELF IN THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST.
We read above in the Lourdes document on The Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey that it is a lifetime commitment with both individual and communal dimensions. As I reflected on this fourth way to be present to Christ, I thought of myself, the individual, as being the temple of the Holy Spirit, although I must admit a broken down, old fragmented one. Each of us who accept Christ as really present in the Sacrament of Eucharist is like the tabernacle in the Old Testament, the Holy of Holies, and the tabernacle that holds the leftover loaves from the distribution by Christ. (Matthew 14:15-21). Are we worthy to do this? Indeed not. Lay Cistercians need to awaken the soul and be aware that we need the Cistercian practices that lead to charisms that, in turn, produce in us the mind of Christ Jesus. (Phil 2:5). Daily!
A chance conversation one day at Starbucks with a young woman brings this fourth way into focus for me. I was waiting in line for my coffee when I noticed a young girl have a copy of the Rule of Benedict in her hands. Naturally, my senses all quickened and I got up the nerve to ask her how she liked it. She said she had been to a retreat recently and picked it up at their bookstore. She did not know much about it. I told her I could share with her what I know and we sat down to a quick cup of coffee. I told her about Chapter 4 of Benedict’s Rule and how I try to read it every day in the hopes of becoming more like what I read. We talked about the various practices, such as Liturgy of the Hours, Eucharist, Lectio Divina and other practices which I had as part of my schedule. She said that she was recently divorced and it was probably due to her former husband being in California, while she was in Florida. They thought it would work out, and it did for nearly a year. “We needed to be present to each other more,” she said. I thought of what she said whenever I think about my Lay Cistercian Journey. I not only need to be present to Christ but also to the Cistercian community of faith. It is one of the reasons I drive five + miles once a month to attend the Gathering Day with other Lay Cistercians. Long distance love can cause the ardor to wane. I am convinced that is why many people leave the Church, because, as G. K. Chesterton says, “..it is not that they have tried the Church and found it wanting, but they have never tried it at all.”
For me, the Cistercian practices, as outlined in the Lourdes document on The Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey, help me to focus and refocus my energies on Christ each day. Each day! I see it as a way to fill up my tank each day with the energy of God, giving me the strength to keep myself from falling into a long-distance relationship with Jesus. The Cistercian practices are not unique to the Church, but, as coupled with the readings of Cistercian monks and nuns and other more recent writings, such as The Cistercian Way, by Dom Andre Louf, OSCO, provide context to what might otherwise be like drinking concentrated orange juice. http://nunraw.blogspot.com/2010/08/andre-louf-ocso.html
PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE
As one who can only aspire to be a Lay Cistercian, my Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey is, both unique in where I find myself on my journey, but also based on the solid, centuries-old heritage of Cistercian spirituality, such as the practices and following the Rule of Saint Benedict. I have found that the following holds true for me:
CISTERCIAN PRACTICES TO HELP ME ON MY JOURNEY
a) The practice of Lectio Divina and prayer.
I try to practice the discipline of Lectio Divina each day for at least thirty minutes or more. As I become more and more converted to having in me the mind of Christ Jesus, I find that I look forward to the time in silence and solitude that I spend on my one and only Lectio Divina reading, “have in you the mind of Christ Jesus.” The key here is making Lectio a habit, one that produces that which it signifies, love, without reservation. I also call this fierce love.
Guido II, the Carthusian Prior, devised a four-step ladder or rungs of accomplishment to help his monks reach the ultimate and rare relationship with the heart of Christ, i.e., contemplation. They are reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I do best at Lectio when I purposefully set my mind to saying over and over my reading (Phil. 2:5) and then let what comes to mind just happen. I wrote over 36 books as a result of my Lectio encounters with the love of Christ plus the blog you are now reading.
b) The Rule of Saint Benedict. I can see someone who reads St. Benedict’s Rule as thinking this is just for monks and nuns who are Benedictines, Cistercians, or Carthusians. I am far from being anything of an expert on St. Benedict in any way, but I want to follow his way of spiritual perfection to help me move from self to God. Here are some of my reflections on the Holy Rule.St. Benedict wrote the Rule as a way to focus monks on living in a community of very different personalities and backgrounds without killing each other. It is that.
c) Knowledge of the treasure of Cistercian literature
This practice is still in the process of unfolding. I am reading current Cistercian authors. Here are some of the primary sources I have found helpful, for those who wish to dig deeper.
http://www.osb.org/cist/ An inexhaustible source of all things Cistercian and Benedictine.
http://www.carlmccolman.net/books-to-explore/ This is probably, in my biased view, the best website for things Cistercian with emphasis on Lay Cistercian. Carl is a Lay Cistercian at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Georgia.
https://books.google.com/books?id=YIdqbXFOvwwC&pg=PA218&lpg=PA218&dq=early+cistercian+authors&source=bl&ots=stMKzJ4eso&sig=WU4WdO78ATEa_j17NIJRACNOLko&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEi9-I4fLWAhWoz4MKHahxCc4Q6AEIPjAD#v=onepage&q=early%20cistercian%20authors&f=false. This huge URL title is the Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order.
https://www.cistercianpublications.org/Category/CP-CT!OCW/Other-Cistercian-Writers A great site for Cistercian books from Cistercian Press.
d) The Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours)
One of my favorite practices to move from self to God is Liturgy of the Hours. As organized in the Rule of Benedict (c. 540 AD) is typically prayer seven times a day, five of which may be in the form of choir chanting. The hours are Office of Readings, or Vigils, Morning Prayer, formerly called Lauds, three short, mid-day hours, Evening Prayer and Compline (Night Prayers). When you attend these hours at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, Conyers, Georgia, especially Compline before bedtime, the Abbot will bless each person with a sprinkle of holy water. How nice.
This is one of the most important practices for Lay Cistercians, but it is not without its difficulties. The official prayer of the Church is meant to be chanted by two choirs of respondants. Since Lay Cistercians do not live in a monastery, this can be challenging. Personally, I am fortunate to have a group of the laity at Good Shepherd Parish, Tallahassee, Florida who wish to pray the Liturgy of the Hours in choir. We recite but do not chant the Psalms. (Office of Readings, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer).
Here are some of my observations as one who attempts to be a Lay Cistercian who recites the Liturgy of the Hours.
e) Self-knowledge
As a Lay Cistercian, knowledge of self is critical to my journey to Forever. I know that, without the constant taking up of my cross and renouncing myself, I will slip on the slippery slope of thinking that I am a god. Read what St. Paul says in Romans 7:19.
I am not a rotten piece of flesh covered by a thin candy shell of grace from Christ. Such a radical, Reformation position does not take into account the transformation of the heart and the power of the Sacred Heart to make all things new. I am a responsible person, one who has free will and the self-knowledge to learn from my mistakes and ask for God’s mercy. My human nature, is not rotten anymore than Christ’s human nature was rotten, but, because of the original sin of Adam and Eve, I am wounded and in need to take up my cross daily and reproduce the sufferings of Christ, as St. Paul says in 3:9-17. As a Lay Cistercian who seeks God in whatever the day brings, my strength is not in my own self-knowledge but rather in having in my the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5)
Cistercian spirituality, to my utter astonishment, stresses:
Simplicity: God is one, so spirituality, the more complex it is, the closer it is to One. More is not better in prayer and actions. The contemplative approach is seeking to meet God within us, then listening to what is said, and finally doing what Jesus tells us. I like to use the analogy (conscious of the fact that all analogies fail to capture or adequately describe our relationship with God) of me sitting on a park bench in the snow, waiting for God to show up. Every day, I come to that park bench (Liturgy of the Hours, Lectio Divina, Eucharist, Rosary, Reading Scripture, Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament). I know that the heart of Christi always there, but it is enough for me to show up every day in the hope that He will see my intentions and grant me mercy, forgiveness, and make all things new in me for that day. One of the lessons I have realized, as a Lay Cistercian is that each day is a lifetime, you begin each day with morning offering, then Cistercian practices, and whatever happens, it is that in all things, God be glorified. (St. Benedict and I Corinthians 10) If God is love, then love is One. It is the Mystery of Faith, slowly unfolding its secrets, only to be fully revealed in Heaven, the end of our journey.
Balance: It is not good to burn yourself out on spiritual practices, although sometimes I think St. Bernard came close. Balance in my life as Lay Cistercian means I don’t isolate myself from daily immersion in the problems of this world. It does mean I don’t take my values from it. I like to think of myself as a pilgrim with no home or sense of comfort while I am on this earth. My values come from Chapter 4 of St. Benedict’s Rule, which I try to read and into which I conform each day. Renouncing self-has become a big theme in my spiritual journey, in the past few years. Here too, balance is needed to keep from tripping over the edge of my path. I don’t want to be a fanatic about Cistercian spirituality, just a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit who sits in the back seats of church, not daring to look up to Heaven and proclaiming, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
f) The importance of the Eucharist and other sacraments
Sacraments are sacred moments when the individual in, with, and through the community of faith, encounter the God in, with, and through Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. They are special occasions where we receive God’s own energy to help in our formation. They are instituted by Christ Himself to give us what we need to move from self to God. In all these occasions, we place our hearts next to the heart of Christ. We receive the strength to have in us the mind of Christ Jesus. As part of the Cistercian practices that lead to our formation, Sacraments allow us to be transformed in, with, and through Christ to become more like God and less like our sinful selves.
With time, I have found that I can see beyond mere physical reality to mental reality (meaning) and spiritual reality ( God’s meaning). Thus, sacraments are not merely physical activities by a group of people but are the means by which the Body of Christ, the local community of faith, transforms itself from self to God. This mystical view of sacraments, lost with the over-zealous desire of reformers to dump control over them by the monarchical church, is key to transforming oneself as a Lay Cistercian. In a mystical view, the sacramental experience is a lifetime one, given to the Church to help individuals get to Heaven.
A LIFETIME VIEW OF GOD’S GIFTS TO US
Sacraments are gifts like Faith is a gift. We don’t deserve Christ coming to us under the appearance of human activities, but where two or more are there, Christ is in their midst. Here is how I view these gifts in my Cistercian journey. There are four phases containing seven sacramental gifts.
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12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants[d] any longer because the servant[e] does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. |
BAPTISM — In Baptism, we are born of water, water symbolizing new life, making all things new again. But it is more than that, it is what it signifies, washing away the sin of Adam and Eve, cleansing us once and for all from Original Sin. We are now washed clean in the blood of the lamb, whiter than snow, as the Psalmist says. We are friends of Christ and adopted sons and daughters of the Father, in, with, and through Christ Jesus. There is a problem. Baptism does not take away the effects of the sin of Adam and Eve. We must still suffer, feel pain, get sick, grow old, have personal setbacks in life, we are prone to evil while not being evil ourselves, and we must all die.
Baptism is not just a one time bath in water, although it is that. Once baptized, we become adopted sons and daughters of the Father and must try to follow God’s will as best we can. We pray to help us renew our baptismal commitment. We say the Creed at each Eucharist to renew our baptismal pledge to renounce Satan and all his allurements. We ask for God’s help to keep us centered on Christ as we live our daily lives.
CONFIRMATION– This is the gift from God that keeps on giving. Once we have been accepted by God as adopted sons and daughters, we find that we are a pilgrim in a foreign land, the land being secular thinking and what the world thinks is true. The Spirit of Truth comes to make his home in us, so much so, that we are called temples of the Holy Spirit. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I am a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit, one covered by all kinds of vines and with visible cracks in my facade. Remember, Sacraments are outward signs instituted by Christ to give us grace, God’s own energy. How thoughtful our God is. We get just what we need, the Holy Spirit to help us discern how to see what the world cannot see, and to hear what the world cannot hear. We can contemplate the depths of the spiritual universe and place our very hearts next to the heart of Christ without being destroyed by pure energy. Christ is our mediator, the one who help us transform from self to God, the purpose for our lives, the one who awaits us in Heaven. As St. Paul says in Philippians 3:8-21,
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8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ,[e] the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ[f] and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;[g] but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Beloved,[h] I do not consider that I have made it my own;[i] but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly[j] call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. 16 Only let us hold fast to what we have attained. 17 Brothers and sisters,[k] join in imitating me and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. 18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. 19 Their end is destruction; their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship[l] is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21 He will transform the body of our humiliation[m] that it may be conformed to the body of his glory,[n] by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. (NRSVCE) |
2. God sustains us with his own energy. In the knapsack of gifts God gives us both individually and communally, Eucharist is our food for the journey. For Christ, doing the will of the Father was his food. For us, doing the will of Christ and thus the Father is the food that will sustain us in the spiritual universe.
MERCY — As we approach the reading of the Word we proclaim that we are unworthy to hear the Word of God and ask God and Christ to have mercy on us and wash us with the waters of forgiveness of our sins. As we approach the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ, we proclaim that we are not worthy for Christ to come under our roof. This act of humility, as given by the Roman Centurian, is transformative.
PEACE — We receive God’s own peace in our hearts. It is transformative because anything that comes from our heart being next to the heart of Christ means we grow toward the greater nature (three natures: divine, human, animal and living). For one who can only hope to aspire to be a Lay Cistercian, this is an often overlooked gift from God. We have just given all honor and glory to the Father through Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit, the ultimate act of sacrifice acceptable to the Father. Now, the Father tells us that we will have in us His very life, that which is pure energy, pure love, pure knowledge, and pure service. This peace, however, must be shared, as it states in Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34, love your neighbor as yourself. That is why we give each other the gift that God has given to us. This peace which is given by you to another is transformative.
BREAD AND WINE — The Eucharist is the Last Supper, the Passover from slavery to freedom each time we proclaim the death of the Lord until He comes. When you die, your family and a few friends will remember you in their thoughts and maybe in a few old, faded photographs, thinking about the fact that you once were. When Christ died, there were no books Jesus wrote (except to use the Torah and writings of the Prophets). His disciples and the Apostles probably panicked and went into an upper room to re-group and decide what to do now that the reason for their movement died. The only social and religious ties these pioneers had was the Temple, The Torah, and the Jewish festivals of their ancestors. After Christ died, his disciples were disorganized, fearing authorities, unsure of what Christ taught. What caused a 360 degree turn around? With the reception of the Holy Spirit, their eyes were opened that is, they saw how everything fit together to the glory of the Father. They were no longer fearful but fearless, They knew what to say. Some Apostles and disciples wrote Gospels, a heroic account of Christ using the Greek and Roman heroic myth form (authority from higher person, mission, impossible tasks overcome by the hero, suffering greatly, the descent into hell, dying in some cases, rising from the dead, ascension, and triumph) http://www.storyboardthat.com/articles/e/classical-hero Some, like St. Paul founded a school to stretch the message to the Gentiles through personal journies and writing letters.
Early followers did the only thing they knew, they wrote down what they remembered from what Christ taught. St. John says, in the last part of his Gospel (John 20:30-31) that there were many other signs that Jesus worked and the disciples saw, but these are not recorded in this book. There are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing this you may have life through his name. This statement is at the core of what I hold as my interpretation of Cistercian spirituality. The beauty of Cistercian practices as we describe here is putting your heart next to the heart of Christ through various activities. It is this simplicity of love that I desire to emulate in my life as I try to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus. Eucharist is the food of angels but also the food that is God Himself under the appearance of simple bread and wine.
THE REAL PRESENCE
After the Apostles met Christ in the upper room, they were changed. Physically there was no change, but spiritually, they now knew why Jesus came and what they had to do to tell others about it. They also knew that those who followed Christ would need to see the Lord as they had done. They used the Last Supper, Reception of the Holy Spirit, Baptism, Mercy and Forgiveness, Marriage and Priesthood, plus preparation for the journey to Heaven. Early followers of the Master also got zapped by the Holy Spirit and were never the same. Christ is present to them in many ways:
The Last Supper--when they ate the bread and drink the wine, they proclaim the death of Christ until he comes in glory. This is the mystery of faith.
The Body of Christ– it is difficult to see the Body of Christ when all you see are sinful people trying and failing to love God. If all you see is the negative beam in the eyes of others, maybe you should take the beam out of your own eye first and have in your the mind of Christ Jesus.
Christ in our neighbor — St. Benedict talks about treating guests as though they were Christ. This is called hospitality and one of the Charisms of both Benedictine and Cistercian heritages. It is more difficult for us to see Christ in others than for us to find Christ at Church on Sunday morning, although He is there. We know we are disciples of the Master when we can love those who hate us and do good to others when they persecute or belittle you for Christ’s sake.
Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament — this is the big leagues of Catholic spirituality. I consider it the ultimate place to contemplate the heart of Christ. Of course, this is possible because of Faith. Faith is not just intellectual belief, but the radical conviction that Jesus is present under the sign of contradiction, a wafer of bread. I must struggle to believe this because it goes against reason, but it is reasonable. “O Lord, I believe,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “help my unbelief.” He also said, “For those who believe in the Real Presence, no answer is necessary. For those who do not, no answer is possible.”
3. Do what Jesus tells you. Mary told the wine stewards, who came to her with the concern that there was no wine for the wedding celebration, “Do what he tells you.” (John 2:1-12) The same can be said for the Jesus who lives in the Body of Christ in our day. The question becomes, what does he tell me to do? What does he tell the community to do? How we answer that depends on how much we act on what Jesus tells us to do. t helps that we have twenty centuries of trying to have in us the mind of Christ Jesus to discern truth from error.
FORGIVENESS AND MERCY: The gift that sustains us in a world of original sin.
One of the ways Jesus is really present is through the community of faith. He bids us cultivate mercy and forgiveness of others, as we ourselves wish mercy from Him. This was so important to Christ that he instituted a formalized way that the community could receive the grace (energy of God) to make all things new, once again. As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I am keen on the fact that I don’t go around committing moral every day. The problem for me is, as I read Chapter 4 of the Tools for Good Works in St. Benedict’s Rule, I am so far from even reaching, much less sustaining them, even with God’s own energy through the sacrament of Reconciliation. I am a mere perpetual novice, a pilgrim in a foreign land, one who will never achieve what I seek. Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. At least Christ walks by my side on my Lay Cistercian journey.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation or Penance was instituted by Christ to make all thing new in Christ. As Christ stressed Mercy, so we, followers of the Master must do what he tells us. We must cultivate in our hearts the mercy that comes with unconditional love, but we must be careful not to succumb to the temptation of the world that beckons us to equate mercy with justice. If you have mercy on those who do not believe or who hold teachings contrary to the Apostolic heritage, you don’t have to agree with them that what they hold is correct. If you do, you are not from Christ.
SPIRITUAL PROPAGATION
There are two gifts that Jesus left us that propagate the Church and ensure it is ready for the next generation to love Christ with all their hearts, minds, and strength and our neighbor as ourself: Matrimony and Holy Orders. Remember, Sacraments are holy moments where the community of believers generates new life (Matrimony) and sustains the life of Christ through service to the Body of Christ(Holy Orders).
4. The gift of healing.
Jesus heals each of us, believers and non-believers. When we get to Heaven, we will see just how much Jesus did for us and just how much we were aware of it during out lifetime. I think we will also be astonished at who is in Heaven and the good they did in their lifetime. I don’t want to be too proud to think that I am on a conveyor-belt on the way to Heaven. I know that we will be judged, each one, according to our good works, not our bad ones.
Healing is a gift, instituted by Christ to give us God’s own life through the Body of Christ. Only Christ can heal, or anyone to whom he gives the gift. In the upper room, John 20:23-24, he breathed on the disciples and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit, for those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.”
The gift of healing is one to prepare us either to continue our journey of life or to prepare us to meet Christ in the next.
g) Spiritual accompaniment
The practice of both exterior and interior silence and listening is emphasized in living the Cistercian charism. The annual retreat is a means of reinforcing community and relationship with God.
What makes a Cistercian monk or nun, according to some of the Brothers who have taught us how to be Lay Cistercians, is silence and solitude. Not all Cistercians belong to the strict observance. Two divisions of Cistercians come down to us from the time of St. Bernard: Regular Observance and Strict Observance.
The following excellent description of what is Cistercian is taken from the website of Our Lady of Dallas, a Regular Cistercian observance. “Cistercian monks and nuns derive their name and origins from a place in France called Cîteaux (in Latin, “Cistercium”), where in 1098 St. Robert of Molesme and twenty-one monks founded a seminal monastery. Today, two canonically distinct religious orders share the heritage of Citeaux: the Cistercian Order (O. Cist.), sometimes called ‘Common Observance’ Cistercians; and the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.), more commonly known as ‘Trappists’ on account of their derivation from the seventeenth-century, French reform associated with the Abbey of La Trappe. Both orders have men’s and women’s monasteries with communities throughout the world.” https://www.cistercian.org/abbey/history/the-Cistercian-order/index.html
For those who wish to dig deeper still, try the following: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03780c.htm
All Lay Cistercians exist because they have an Abbot/Abbess who accepted them as Lay associates of their Monasteries. I am fortunate to have been accepted by Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery (Trappist) in Conyers, Ga. http://www.trappist.net/lay-cistercians. We learn about Cistercian practices and charisms from the monks, both brothers, and priests. Five pillars of the Strict Observance Cistercians (Trappists) are silence, solitude, pray, work, and community. I am striving to put these five anchors of contemplative spirituality into my life as a layperson. I have a long way to go but am making some headway. It is indeed a journey with Christ not only the prize but a welcomed companion on the journey.
As a member of the Lay Cistercian community, I promise to make an annual retreat and other practices that I have commented on above, as ways to focus my mind and heart on Christ with all my strength and love my neighbor as myself. You would think it gets easier the older you get, but I find the Wiley One often creeps into my thinking trying to pry me away from practicing my Cistercian charisms, broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit that I am. It is my journey, and there is great joy in having Christ walk with me on the journey to Emmaus, once again. Once you have seen the Lord, nothing is the same again in your life. I will suffer any indignity, any discount, any attempt to get me to think of Cistercian spirituality as la-la land, and open opposition to my travel to Gathering Day in Conyers, Georgia, as St. Paul says in Phillipians 3:10-11, “…all I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death. That is the way I hope to take my place in the resurrection of the dead.”
Praise to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now and Forever, the God who is, who was, and who is to come, at the end of the Ages. Amen and Amen.
The following comments are my own reflections from the document on Lay Cistercian Journey discussed at a Gathering Day of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery on October 1, 2017. It is part of our on-going Junior Professed Formation Program. Each month, our Lay Cistercian Advisor, Brother Cassian, OSCO, presents various approaches to 20th Century Cistercian Spirituality for Lay Cistercians based on the documents of International Lay Cistercians. What follows is the Lourdes document on Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey. Look it up for yourself on:
http://www.cistercianfamily.org/documents/Spiritual%20Journey%20FINAL%2020June2014.pdf Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God.
The third part of the International Lay Cistercian document has to do with the central place of community in becoming more like Christ and less like you.
The bolded text is the document followed by my reflections.
3) The central place of community, lay and monastic, as a means of spiritual growth. Our response to the call of Christ leads us into a Lay Cistercian community where we are mutually enriched in a relationship with each other and with the monastic community. The monastic community recognizes the presence of Cistercian values in the lay group and authorizes it to be called a “Lay Cistercian Community.” Walking with others brings richness, as the sharing and communion experienced are sources of support and joy. The community also creates constraints, requiring patience and listening, and could cause suffering. We recognize that community is an essential and indispensable element of our journey, a necessary means of spiritual growth. We must learn to love those who are called to the same community, sharing with each other with honesty and humility. Thus, we learn to see Christ in one another and to love as Christ has loved us.
Here are a few ideas I have, after reading the section on the place of community in Lay Cistercian life.
I have always been impressed that St. Benedict compiled a list of rules to allow itinerant, 5th-century monks to live together without killing each other. He was influenced by the writings of St. John Cassian http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03404a.htm. who lived in the 4th Century. These rules are like the banks of a river, setting boundaries of human behavior so that the waters of the human condition can flow without too much interference. What Benedict did was to give a blueprint to many monks or nuns to live a life focused on Christ, the mystery of Faith. There are four principles that I see St. Benedict stressing to his monks.
Part of the Mystery of Faith is the simultaneous dwelling of imperfect and sinful humans with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. How could Christ possibly trust his Church to sinful and weak humans, who can choose the wrong path and yet sincerely lead us toward Christ? How can the Church be Holy as in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, yet be populated by sinful persons like ourself? Part of the answer is, we are not rotten persons but merely weak and choose the wrong path sometimes. Community brings us back to what is good and true each time. If all we have is our own forgiveness of our own sins, we have a fool for a god.
As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian and follow the Rule of St. Benedict as practiced by Cistercians, I do not live in a community of faith that constantly interacts with other Lay Cistercians. Yet, the Gathering Day affords me the opportunity to interact with community members who each have different gifts of the Spirit and ways to seek God. When we share our deepest feelings about moving from self to God with other Lay Cistercians, I myself experience the God in others and so, “we learn to see Christ in one another and to love as Christ has loved us.”
The Real Presence of Christ is not just under the appearance of bread and wine, although it is most certainly that. It is also the Real Presence of Christ under the appearance of each other. There is one faith, one Lord, one Baptism, one Spirit, one priesthood, and one God with three distinct persons. Community uncovers what is real, although invisible, and allows me to seek God as only I can do it.
LEARNING POINTS
Praise be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, both now and Forever. The God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages. Amen and Amen.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
The following comments are my own reflections from the document on Lay Cistercian Journey discussed at a Gathering Day of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery on October 1, 2017. It is part of our on-going Junior Professed Formation Program. Each month, our Lay Cistercian Advisor, Brother Cassian, OSCO, presents various approaches to 20th Century Cistercian Spirituality for Lay Cistercians based on the documents of International Lay Cistercians. What follows is the Lourdes document on Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey. Look it up for yourself on:
http://www.cistercianfamily.org/documents/Spiritual%20Journey%20FINAL%2020June2014.pdf Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God. The text is bolded for your ease of reading. My reflection follows.
Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God. Today, we look at the response to the call. The text has been bolded for your ease of reading. My reflection follows.
2) The Response: Seeking to embody capacitas Dei. This encounter with the Cistercian spirituality embodied in a particular monastic community, leads us to seek to integrate the Cistercian values into our daily lives.
MY RESPONSE:
In the previous blog, I had you look at the document prepared by International Lay Cistercians to be used by each particular monastery. In my own experience, it took me three or more years to hear the call to join the Lay Cistercians. I had always wanted to be a Cistercian monk, but now I could join my brothers and sisters as a Lay Cistercian, or at least I could apply for membership. Later, I was to find out that the Holy Spirit Monastery has accepted as a group of Lay Cistercians, those not Roman Catholic. They are called Ecumenical Lay Cistercians. It is wonderful! But I digress.
My response to the call was an insatiable appetite to be less and less of me and more and more of Christ. As St. John says, “He must increase and I must decrease.” (John 3:29-30) I can’t say I was overly religious or pious, but it is like a bee instinctively coming back to the hive, from whence it derives its purpose for being.
If you talk to any Lay Cistercian, you will have a unique and inspiring story of their journey to accept the very strict practices of Cistercian spirituality as a member of this particular community. In my own case, the prior seventeen years, I had been applying to join the Catholic Church, with no permission being granted. The reasons for such a long period of time are complicated. I am a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest. When I left the active ministry in 1982, my ministry did not stop, just went underground. I eventually applied for laicization (the bishop is not my immediate superior, only my wife). This process is one of going from excommunication to one of full communion again with the Body of Christ. That was important to me because of the heritage taught to me by my parents, so I applied to the Pope, at that time Saint Pope John Paul II. Unlucky for me, for sixteen years, the Pope did not see fit to grant any requests for laicization, so I waited and waited. It did not help that my paperwork was lost once and I had to start over from the beginning. I have Msgr. Michael Reid to thank as my guardian angel who helped me write out the three inches of paperwork required and who did not treat me like I was the bottom of a birdcage.
So you see, my call and response were not without trauma and challenges. I could not appreciate the resurrection of Christ without His passion and death on a cross. I appreciate where I am as a Lay Cistercian as a result of overcoming my personal obstacles. One of those obstacles was my own stubborn will and ego. I had to let go of all the anger and resentment I had for the Church and substitute for it faith, hope, and love. These are not just platitudes, but inform my behavior with what they signify. It helped that I saw things, not as the world sees them but with the mind of Christ Jesus (the purpose of my life as found in Phil. 2:5). Even in my struggles, I silently and inescapably I was so angry with the Church (in my twelfth year of waiting for some word, any word from the Church that I even existed) that I took the complete course of instruction for converts to Anglicanism at St. Peter’s Church, Tallassee, Florida. I credit them and Father Dudley with helping me refocus my energies on the Catholic Church my heritage and true love. If it were up to the people of St. Peter’s Church, I would be an Anglican today. They were inspirational and many of them said they were former Roman Catholics. I simply could not make the jump from my heritage to one I considered good but not completely Apostolic. On my Lay Cistercian Journey, Anglicans refocused me on Christ and helped me move to a place where I could be accepted so that I could accept Christ as my center.
To even respond to the call from Christ to be a Lay Cistercian takes God’s own energy to help me see and overcome my pride and the sin of Adam and Eve, obedience to the will of God.
Well, that is me to date. I’m not perfect but in process of becoming. What I have in place is the framework from my monastic community to help me integrate these values and charisms into my daily life, the same life that must take up the cross daily and follow Christ.
LEARNING POINTS
That in all things, may God be glorified. St. Benedict
The following comments are my own reflections from the document on Lay Cistercian Journey discussed at a Gathering Day of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery on October 1, 2017. It is part of our on-going Junior Professed Formation Program. Each month, our Lay Cistercian Advisor, Brother Cassian, OSCO, presents various approaches to 20th Century Cistercian Spirituality for Lay Cistercians based on the documents of International Lay Cistercians. What follows is the Lourdes document on Lay Cistercian Spiritual Journey. Look it up for yourself on:
http://www.cistercianfamily.org/documents/Spiritual%20Journey%20FINAL%2020June2014.pdf Over the next two to three weeks, each day, I will be commenting on one part of this document as it affects me as an aspiring Lay Cistercian, struggling to move from self to God. The text is bolded for your ease of reading. My reflection follows.
“1) The Beginning: the call Christ calls us to a contemplative way of life lived in the light of the Cistercian charism, and into a relationship with a particular monastery. The principal aspects of the call can be summarized as follows:
a) Awareness or deepening of an inner life
b) Desire for a prayer-centered life
c) Recognition of the intervention of the Holy Spirit
d) Awakening of reciprocity with God
The awareness of the existence of an interior life takes a particular form: the discovery of our capacitas Dei (our capacity to be transformed into the likeness of God).
This call to the Cistercian way of life requires discernment. It is lived out in community with others who have received the same call to the Lay Cistercian journey.
2) The Response: Seeking to embody capacitas Dei
This encounter with the Cistercian spirituality embodied in a particular monastic community, leads us to seek to integrate the Cistercian values into our daily lives.
3) The central place of community, lay and monastic, as a means of spiritual growth
Our response to the call of Christ leads us into a Lay Cistercian community where we are mutually enriched in a relationship with each other and with the monastic community. The monastic community recognizes the presence of Cistercian values in the lay group and authorizes it to be called a “Lay Cistercian Community.”
Walking with others brings richness, as the sharing and communion experienced are sources of support and joy. Community also creates constraints, requiring patience and listening, and could cause suffering. We recognize that community is an essential and indispensable element of our journey, a necessary means of spiritual growth. We must learn to love those who are called to the same community, sharing with each other with honesty and humility. Thus, we learn to see Christ in one another and to love as Christ has loved us.
This spirituality is not disembodied. It strives to meet the challenges of stability in spite of geographical distances and the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of community outside group meetings.
The difficulties are never considered only as obstacles but are also a means of spiritual growth, which is made possible by grace and community support.
4) Formation/Transformation: its importance for spiritual growth
Formation within the Lay Cistercian community is a lifelong journey into the richness of the Cistercian charism. Formation must be both personal and communal.
It includes the following:
a) The practice of Lectio Divina and prayer
b) The Rule of Saint Benedict
c) Knowledge of the treasure of Cistercian literature
d) The Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours)
e) Self-knowledge
f) The importance of the Eucharist and other sacraments
g) Spiritual accompaniment
The practice of both exterior and interior silence and listening is emphasized in living the Cistercian charism. The annual retreat is a means of reinforcing community and relationship with God.
5) Life in Christ
The Lay Cistercian’s road is one particular way of living the universal journey of human beings into God. The presence of Christ is the heart of our journey: “He is the way, the truth, the life.” It is necessarily a journey accompanied by others. It is the quest for the encounter with Christ who transcends us and abides in us. Our greatest hope is that the gift of discovering Christ in one another will be the path of holiness and joy for us. Our journey is inspired and nourished by the sisters and brothers in the Cistercian family; for this, we will be eternally grateful.
After reflecting on our identity (Huerta 2008) and working on our formation (Dubuque 2011), we as Lay Cistercians sought to go to the heart and source of these two realities. We discovered an encounter with a Presence: Jesus Christ, the source, and summit of our journey. Jesus calls us through our brothers and sisters to be witnesses of the Gospel in the world, enlightened and supported by the Cistercian tradition as it is embodied in the nuns and monks who accompany us.
May Mary, Queen of Citeaux and model of obedience, show us the way to our full transformation into the
image of her Son.”
MY REFLECTIONS:
“1) The Beginning: the call Christ calls us into a contemplative way of life lived in the light of the Cistercian charism, and into a relationship with a particular monastery. The principal aspects of the call can be summarized as follows:
a) Awareness or deepening of an inner life
b) Desire for a prayer-centered life
c) Recognition of the intervention of the Holy Spirit
d) Awakening of reciprocity with God
The awareness of the existence of an interior life takes a particular form: the discovery of our capacitas Dei (our capacity to be transformed into the likeness of God).
This call to the Cistercian way of life requires discernment. It is lived out in community with others who have received the same call to the Lay Cistercian journey.”
Brother Cassian, OCSO, began our session by gently suggesting that how we decided to be a Lay Cistercian was a call. In my own case, I wanted a deeper awareness of the inner life of the spirit. Since I was twenty-two years old, I can always remember wanting to be a Cistercian priest. That was not to be, but the call still remained. When I got the opportunity to apply for membership as a Lay Cistercian, some fifty years later, I recognized this call from Christ once again and applied for membership, not knowing if I would be accepted by the community of monks or laity. A call means someone else is saying something which you either hear or do not hear. God calls all of us to various ministries and service to others and we hear it and do something or not. All I had going for me was the desire to move from self to God by using the practices of Cistercian spirituality. As stated in the Spiritual Journey of Lay Cistercians, a result of the call has been the discovery of the capacitas dei (how full I can be of Jesus). I am reminded of Our Blessed Mother and how her capacitas dei would fill her up to the meniscus of her cup of humanity. One more drop of God could not possibly fill her cup of humanity without running over. We think about that, when we say, “Hail, Mary! Full of Grace!” Mary is not God, but we honor her and ask her help in our own struggle to fill out cups with more of God and less of us. It is a lifetime struggle. Sin empties the cup while grace fills it up. It is for good reason that Mary is the patron of both Lay Cistercian and monastic nuns and monks. She is what we hope to become, and will be, at the end of the ages.
My journey for enlightenment entails trying to practice those tools for Good Works stated by St. Benedict in his Chapter 4 of the Rule of Benedict. I need consistency and persistency in my life to counter the daily effects of original sin. It takes discernment, not only up to the time that you know your calling is for this way of loving Christ but also after you have been a novice or a Junior Professed. That discernment is ongoing and a part of the process of sanctification.
Finally, Lay Cistercians do not live in a vacuum. They are part of a faith community that all focus on moving from self to Christ using Cistercian practices and the tool for Good Works of St. Benedict (Chapter 4). Lay Cistercians see the living Christ by seeing Christ lived out in each member of the community of faith. It is for this reason that a requirement to be a Lay Cistercian is to attend the monthly Gathering Day at the monastery. For me, that is a five-hour drive from Tallahassee to Conyers, Georgia. If I look at the drive as a chore, I would probably not be a Lay Cistercian. I would say it is too far to drive. If I look at it as someone who finds a deeper meaning to life by joining others who center themselves on Christ is their daily routines of life, it is not too far to drive. I offer up this challenge in reparation for my sins and hope of God’s grace in my seeking God. The default for humans is not what the world offers but what God has in store for those who love him. To put it another way, both Heaven and Heaven on earth are God’s playgrounds, and these are His rules, not our own.
In our session, one of our members stated how Christ as the center of all our longings and searching is the difference between just doing meditation or “being spiritual” and Lectio Divina, a significant difference. Jesus, God Himself, not only tells us what we must do to be fully human but actually, shows us. (See Chapter 4 of St. Benedict’s Rule).
Read the following from the Confessions of St. Augustine, Chapter 1. about the call.
1. Great are You, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Your power, and of Your wisdom there is no end. And man, being a part of Your creation, desires to praise You, man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that You resist the proud,
— yet man, this part of Your creation, desires to praise You.You move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You. (emphasis mine) Lord, teach me to know and understand which of these should be first, to call on You, or to praise You; and likewise to knowYou, or to call upon You. But who is there that calls upon You without knowing You? For he that knows You not may call upon You as other than You are. Or perhaps we call on You that we may know You.
LEARNING POINTS
More on #2 to come.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Here are a few thoughts I had from my Lectio Divina (Phil. 2:5) on original sin.
Ever since the sin of Adam and Eve, humans have experienced the side-effects of that original sin. They are work is difficult, childbearing is with pain, there are murder and other serious dysfunctions to the original human purpose. In other words, the default now is one of struggle and eventually death. Genesis 3.
This archetypal characteristic of what it means to be human is what God used to bring us to eventual reconciliation through with and in Jesus Christ. Christ’s life would be one of suffering, disappointment in others’, and eventual death on a cross, in order to fulfill His purpose–to reconcile all things in Himself to the Father with the Holy Spirit. The Pascal Mystery does rightly proclaim, O Happy Fault of Adam!
There is one catch. When we live the Christ life, we do not live in the world as we see it. We live in the Kingdom of Heaven. That means we do not take our motivation, our purpose, our meaning from what the world offers. We are pilgrims in a foreign land, one that will seduce us with our own importance, like it has done to many in the United States. It takes work to renounce ourselves daily and follow the path of Christ, one of humility, obedience to the will of the Father, and love with all our hearts, our souls, and our strength plus our neighbor as yourself. We cannot do that alone. We need the energy and grace of the Spirit by asking mercy from the Father for our many failures.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I try to fail and try and fail to be perfect or love God with my whole self (Matthew 22:34). God forgives me each time and each time I say, “well, here I am again. It’s me.” The Cistercian practices of Liturgy of the Hours, Eucharist with the real presence of Christ, Lectio Divina, a meditation on Scripture, all help me focus on God rather than me. It is with God own energy that I can praise God at all. To Him be glory, honor, and praise, for all eternity, the God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages. Amen and Amen.
If Christianity becomes too easy, you know it is not authentic. The first thirty-five popes we all martyred because they loved Christ. Christianity lite is nothing but cotton candy–tastes nice but there is no nourishment. Not all who said Lord, Lord will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
That in all things, God be glorified. — St. benedict
Jesus left us no book of instructions on how to get to Heaven other than what he taught his disciples. St. John says, in his Gospel that the whole world could not contain all the stories of what Jesus did. (John 21:24-25)
Here are some thoughts on following Christ.
No one can say Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit.
That in all things, may God be glorified. St. Benedict
Here are some thoughts from my Lectio Divina meditations that you might find interesting.
Wonder if… you did not have to struggle sometimes to complete your contemplative practices.
Wonder if…you were not tempted to stop going to Eucharist because it is where you not only give glory to the Father through Christ but also receive the real presence of Christ in your heart.
Wonder if…you did not have to have humility and obedience to God’s will but could do anything your impulses and desires dictated.
Wonder if…you convince yourself that you could have a long-distance relationship with God rather than being the hands and feet of God where you are.
Wonder if…you fell away from the Church because you thought it was too hypocritical and yet failed to uncover the dynamic presence of Christ through contemplation and service.
Wonder if…you do not have a clue that the purpose in life is to love God with all your heart, your mind, and your strength and your neighbor as yourself.
Wonder if…you feel that you have the truth informed by faith but do not practice it.
Wonder if…you can’t see God.
That in all things, may God be glorified. St. Benedict
You must have recited the Our Father hundreds of times in your lifetime. It is a stylized prayer, one that we recite from Scripture at every Eucharist. Like all prayers that we say over and over, we have a tendency to take the words for granted. That is why Lectio Divina is so important. Lectio is a system of four steps that take time to do it effectively. Guido II’s four steps are reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Everyone wants to get to contemplation (feeling God’s presence) but either we do not allow for enough time or our minds’ attention span won’t let us focus on the reading long enough for our spirit to be at peace.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, one of the things I have learned from the monks at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Georgia, is that it is all prayer, the time you take, the temptations to do something more important, the interruptions, and the small successes you reach, through the grace of God in you.
I recite the Our Father each time I pray the Rosary. I have just recently begun to stop and think about the first word, Our in the Our Father. When Jesus says to his disciplines, thus shall you pray. Matthew 6: 9-14
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“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, 14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. |
What struck me was the Our. Jesus is not telling the disciples to pray to YOUR Father in Heaven but includes Himself. The Father is indeed the Father of Our Lord as well as our Father. For me, that means Jesus is one of us, brother of the flesh, a sharer in our weaknesses, like us in all things but sin. Jesus knows our struggles to pray and is one with us. In fact, this the prayer Jesus uses to the Father when He prays.
Next time you say the Lord’s Prayer, think about Our.
that in all things, may God be glorified. St. Benedict
NOTE: The following blog is excerpted from a book I am writing about the subject.
I do not attempt a scholarly treatise on the forces that shaped the early Catholic Church in this blog. There are complex Greek and Roman influences and myths that contributed to the context in which the heroic journey of the Christ found a mission. I don’t really know that much about all the primary sources and don’t have the time to devote to hours and hours of scholarly research. What I do offer are my ideas based on my Lectio Divina of Phil 2:5.
It is important to note these two influences because contemplation takes its heritage from one of them. The two forces that shaped the Catholic Church are the humble, monastic church and the triumphant, royal church. They could not have been more opposite yet tied together by opportunity and common purpose. You may have different names for these. I choose two influences rather than multiple because I want to share with you how I think the Catholic Church today is still in anguish over these two completing yet almost antithetical poles of practice, each having their own assumptions and sets of believers about what Church looks like. Of course, this is oversimplifying such a complex subject, but in my Lectio, I teased out two magnetic-like forces that have shaped Lay Cistercian spirituality. To be honest, I live in both the monastic and monarchical types of poles or influences. Until recently, I had never thought that there even were these forces of history that pull against my faith. They do.
OUR FAITH AS HERITAGE
Not only do individuals have faith but so does the Church Universal, as well as Church of the local. To be clear, I am using Church here to signify those who are still alive on earth practicing their faith, those in Heaven having completed their race and won the crown of victory, and those awaiting purification. Christ is the head and we are members of His body. Over the years, these members practiced their piety and lived out their purpose in life in many ways, one of which was a monastic approach to life, while most found it practical for them to belong to the triumphal, monarchical church. Both traditions are our heritage. The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. We deal with the One aspect in this blog.
THE FAITH COMMUNITIES OF THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES OF THE CHURCH
For three centuries, the Church is trying to find its identity. Is it Jewish? Is it Gentile? Is it neither. Read Acts of the Apostles to get a flavor of the controversies. St. Paul writes to the struggling faith communities of the early Church, each with their own particular issues. St. Paul teaches us that all are One in Christ Jesus, no matter who brought the Faith to them. There is no Jew, Gentile but all are one in Christ Jesus. Note that he does not address individuals but rather communities of believers. Faith is not only an individual assent but the individual is enveloped in the faith covenant of the local community through Eucharist and the practice of Christ’s teachings or mercy and forgiveness.
THE MONASTIC CHURCH
By monastic, I do not mean the physical act of joining a monastery, but the contemplative spirituality to seek God and to move from self to God. The Gospels are all about learning how to have in us the mind of Christ Jesus. It is this singular purpose that compels people to focus on loving God with all their hearts, their souls, and their strength and their neighbor as themselves. Following Christ can’t be that easy, can it? Yes and No. Yes, it is that simple, but no, it takes a lifetime of struggle to love with all our hearts. This movement, as I understand it, began in the 3rd Century with Anthony of Egypt (252-356) who lived as a hermit in the desert. St. Benedict (c. 540) wrote his Rule based on the influences of John Cassian, “…A monk and ascetic writer of Southern Gaul, and the first to introduce the rules of Eastern monasticism into the West, b. probably in Provence about 360; d. about 435.” (www.newadvent.org), For my purposes, I am going to use St. Benedict’s Rule as a pivotal point in creating and organizing groups of people to work and pray in the context of community. In the larger sense, the term monastic refers to the contemplative approach all believers use to seek God and grow from self to God by using various practices such as the Eucharist, Liturgy of the Hours, and Lectio Divina.
A few characteristics:
Love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole strength and your neighbor as yourself. (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34)
The community is important as the living Body of Christ, those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith, and those awaiting purification.
Obedience and humility to the will of God are important. This usually takes the form of a community of believers with one visible head, such as abbot, abbess, bishop, superior, or even Pope, to make Christ present to believers. In monastic influence, it is all about seeking God through following a rule of love.
The practice of the behaviors Jesus taught us is important. St. Benedict goes so far as to name them as tools for good works. They are tools, not ends in themselves.
The stress is on simplicity, lack of focus on material goods in favor of the poverty of the body and spirit.
THE MONARCHICAL CHURCH
The second type of church, woven seamlessly with the monastic, is the triumphant church, taking its governance and outward trappings from the royal court, into which it was assumed with the Edict of Milan. “Edict of Milan, a proclamation that permanently established religious toleration for Christianity within the Roman Empire. It was the outcome of a political agreement concluded in Milan between the Roman emperors Constantine I and Licinius in February 313. ) The proclamation, made for the East by Licinius in June 313, granted all persons freedom to worship whatever deity they pleased, assured Christians of legal rights (including the right to organize churches), and directed the prompt return to Christians of confiscated property.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Edict-of-Milan
The Church did not assume the state into itself but was instead transformed by it to what we have today. There is a Pope who is now seen as an emperor of the Faith, complete with crown, crosier, ring, chair (cathedra), courtiers, homage, and similar courtly etiquette. That is the church most people see when they look at the Catholic Church. People who reject the Catholic Church seem to do so because they want something more or they don’t find what they are looking for. I discovered that what I was looking for was right under my nose all along but I did not dig deeper to find it. What I found was the endless riches of heritage and writings of the Apostolic fathers and mothers who struggled with the same issues I have.
In both the Roman and Eastern rites, the influence of the state was evident. Because of the rich heritage of Roman Law, the Church began to codify behaviors and identify which behaviors were appropriate and which were not. You can read the actual text of the Council of Nicea, an early Ecumenical Council (a gathering of all the outlying bishops and religious representatives) to strengthen the Faith of the One Church. www.newadvent.org The heritage of our past is the pathway to the truth of our future. When a friend once asked me what I believed and I responded that I am Roman Catholic, she said she felt sorry for me that I am missing out on loving Jesus and all I had was a bunch of anachronistic laws.
Characteristics of the monarchical church
This includes our heritage, sometimes referred to as tradition, which we hand down to those who are marked with the sign of peace in each age. When someone told me that I what I believed about Eucharist was just my opinion, I responded that it was, also the opinions of all the faithful for the past twenty centuries. Heritage is not the doctrine but also practice, both monarchical hierarchy and monastic practices, that move from self to God. The monarchical church stresses conformity to belief (heritage) of the church, the Body of Christ.
THE NEED FOR TWO DIMENSIONS OF ONE CHURCH
In each age, there is this intense desire to love with your whole mind and heart and strength and your neighbor as yourself. (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34) It is sometimes this mystical dimension of spirituality that is missing in those who just see the church as being monarchical or hierarchical, keeping the rules and complying with what the church says, even when it is not what the church actually says but what some priest thinks it says.
Authority
Stay close to the teachings of the Holy Father, the Ecumenical Councils and the heritage of the church. Authority to bind and lose for the One Church was given to Peter and his representative, not someone who might disagree with this or that teaching.
Knowledge
You can give your opinion as to a Bible passage or revelation from the Holy Spirit, but remember to temper all spirituality with obedience and humility to the visible representative of Christ on earth, be that woman or man.
“I am not you; you are not me; God is not you and you, most certainly, are not God.” mfc
Contemplation
If authority and knowledge pertain to the mind, then contemplation and service pertain to the heart. Both dimensions are needed as said in the Baltimore Catechism’s definition of the purpose of life (which I learned in 7th Grade), “to know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with God in the next.”
Service
Bringing God’s own energy into you means it must do something as a result of being in your spirit. I call that service, but some call it good works. You can’t have God inside you and be the same you. The tools for good works are found in St. Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 4. I read it every day. If you are Protestant, good works as I use it are the spiritual outcomes or products of having in you the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:6), not actions to buy your way to Heaven. Faith is a gift, not a birthright and we can lose it as easily if we take it for granted.
BOTH CHURCHES ARE ONE
I had a big problem trying to comprehend how my friends could be fallen away from the Faith of the Church and yet happy as an Episcopal. Why was I so satisfied with my Church and others couldn’t find what I did? First, no judgments here. I actually took two years instructions to be Anglican and decided I could not support their notions of Eucharist and Authority. I have no problems with others who can do that. This situation caused me to question my own Church and what you read is the result of my Lectio Divina about it.
There is only One Church with two dimensions, based on the influences inherited down through the centuries. The depth of this Church is bottomless, as far as I can tell. You won’t access it unless you first recognize it and then move into the monastic or contemplative mindset. I did that by aspiring to be a Lay Cistercian and following the Rule of st. Benedict to the best of my ability as a layman. I can let it consume me, if I am not careful, which is why I need balance in my spiritual life. The monarchical church provides me with balance in terms of my heritage and doctrines that come from the Apostles. These teachings are reflected in each age by the teachings of the Holy Father and the Ecumenical Councils.
The key for me is this. The monastic church has opened up for me the ability to seek God through Cistercian practices that lead to charisms (good works) of humility, hospitality, obedience, silence, solitude, work, pray, and community. I have discovered how to move from self to God, although I am far, far removed from being there, I know what the end-game looks like and I want to strive for it with all my heart, all my soul, and all my strength by loving neighbor as myself.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
It might seem like a contradiction to say that you can practice silence in the midst of the turmoil of living life each day. Traditionally, monks and nuns are those men and women who seal themselves away from the so-called noise of living in order to gain the ability to focus solely on God. They are called contemplatives. I am not a contemplative, merely one who aspires to follow and learn from the Cistercian spiritual men and women who have gone on before me.
Silence is not just the absence of noise or sound but rather a disposition of the mind to use both silence and solitude to focus on allowing God to speak. To be sure, there is the noise of daily living inside as well as outside the monastery. Again, using one of the rules of the Spiritual Universe, the Rule of Opposites, as soon as you think SPIRITUAL, you think the opposite of what the world considers silence. The silence of the heart for one who seeks God is different than the one who seeks to be alone without any sounds. What is most active is the mind and the human mind searches an invisible but instinctual sense of belonging. This famous passage is from St. Augustine’s Confessions (Lib 1,1-2,2.5,5: CSEL 33, 1-5) in which Saint Augustine states “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Contemplation, without the source of divine energy and the authentic object of human focus, is just thinking nice thoughts about life. For someone who wants to move from self to God, nice is not nice enough.
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/dr-italy/
When I attended the Bureau of Studies in Adult Education at Indiana University in 1974, I spoke with a devotee of transcendental meditation who was a classmate, when that was still in vogue and had a great discussion about the merits of freeing the mind from the burdens of noise and distractions to just focus on just being. Over the years, as I tried meditation and focusing on my being, I was left without of any meaning or product from my endeavors. Later on in life, I focused my contemplation on the Lectio Divina and just sitting on a park bench and waiting for God to show up, or as the Spirit prompted, to just be content to have my heart next to the heart of Christ. What transcendental meditation could not do for me personally was to bring God into the equation, which in the last analysis is the only game in town worth playing. What sounds like a complete waste of time is actually the sign of contradiction. God speaking in the midst of chaos, God making sense out of the senseless Tower of Bable that asks us to follow this or that way and gain meaning. Again, the words of St. Augustine, that great seeker of meaning says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
It is the time it takes to carve out space and line it with the silence that is the enduring prayer of glory and honor to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I face the silence of God every time I try to enter into contemplation with the Holy. I face the silence of the world every time I try to focus on The One. I struggle to not let interruptions interrupt my conscious linking of my self to God. I know that I let go; God does not let go. It is being aware that the total act of my offering of self to God is itself a prayer of God’s great patience and love for such a broken-down old Lay Cistercian. That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
When I look up something that puzzles me or confuses me, which is almost 100% of the time, I use these five sites when I think of contemplative spirituality. I thought you might like to see what they are and bookmark them. I offer these sites as an aspiring Lay Cistercian in search of wisdom and humility.
NUMBER FIVE: CISTERCIAN WEBSITES OF NOTE
You will find many hours of enjoyment clicking on and reading the various sites that pertain to Cistercians. There are two branches of the Cistercian observance, Regular Observance ( O. Cist.) and Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.). Of particular interest to me were the sites that pertain to Lay Cistercians and those highlighting the early history of the movement.
NUMBER FOUR: LAY CISTERCIAN WEBSITES OF NOTE TO MOVE FROM SELF TO GOD
http://www.citeaux.net/wri-av/laics_cisterciens-eng.htm
http://www.trappist.net/about/lay-cistercians
http://www.carlmccolman.net/category/laycistercians/ Read this website. Carl is a Lay Cistercian of Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Georgia, also where I aspire to be a Lay Cistercian. My favorite website of an individual practitioner of Cistercian piety.
NUMBER THREE: RESEARCH SITES TO GROW DEEPER INTO CHRIST JESUS
http://newadvent.org If there is one source I use more than others, it is New Advent. It contains the Catholic Encyclopedia, Summa Theologica, Bible, Early primary sources or Fathers of the Church, plus other great links. Don’t miss this one.
NUMBER TWO: TEACHINGS OF THE MAGISTERIUM (Vatican)
http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html This is a site on which I have spent many happy hours looking up the actual texts about what the Church actually teaches, as opposed to what people say we teach but don’t.
NUMBER ONE: MY WEBSITE
https://thecenterforcontemplativepractice.org This is my own website. I put it as number one because I use it the most, not because I think it is the best. It is the result of my daily Lectio Divina and a poor attempt to share some practical ways to practice contemplative spirituality with an emphasis on the Cistercian heritage. I had tried to give you a variety of website that I use to grow from self to God. They have all helped me to look at who I am in relationship to God (He must increase, I must decrease).
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
If you are the same person at fifty-five, spiritually, that you were when you were twenty-five, something is wrong. Life is too short. You don’t want to waste time on just treading water your whole life. If you are not growing deeper, you probably don’t have the correct mindset to love with all your heart and soul and strength (Matthew 22:34).
One of the ways I try to break the bonds of boredom and challenge myself to delve into the Mystery of Faith is by having a focused lifestyle that puts Christ first, or as the Scriptures say, “Seek first the kingdom of heaven and all else will be given to you besides.” (Matthew 6:33). This does not mean you have to be a fanatic about Jesus or have to think about religious stuff all day. It does mean that your life goals or your center, should be appropriate for what is in your heart. Where your heart is there will be your treasure.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, one of the things that I have learned, one that I actually knew for the last fifty years, but did not grow deeper with, was to have a schedule for my spiritual piety. Lay Cistercians are supposed to perform certain practices, but the reason they do this is to have consistency and persistency of focus on Jesus. My practices are:
Recite the Liturgy of the Hours – I am fortunate to have a community recitation of the Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, and Evening Prayer in common. If you want to grow deeper in Christ Jesus, you have to pray together in a community of believers. If you don’t have such a group, you may wish to start one. Email me. It doesn’t cost money but will cost you focus and perseverance in having in you the mind of Christ Jesus. (Phil 2:5) I recite the night prayer privately. It takes time and energy to turn from what you want to do to give glory to the Father through Jesus, but it is the time you take and the inconvenience that is, of itself, the prayer of glory and praise that no one is the whole world can give but you. Frequently, I have thoughts in my head that say, “Are you out of your mind? Why are you wasting your time praying when no one is there?” My answer is the sign of contradiction. It is when you think that everything does not make sense that it makes the most sense. It is when you are challenged to find meaning with three universes (physical, mental, spiritual) and not just with two (physical and mental) as the world urges you to do. This is the folly of God, which is wiser than the reasons of humans. It is the effort you make to have in your the mind of Christ Jesus that is meaningful, not the completion of this or that prayer.
Receive the Eucharist –
Do Lectio Divina — Every day, read, meditate, pray and contemplate your center. My center is Phil 2:5. It is the only Lectio (reading) I have done for the last forty years. In terms of moving from self to God, the move is imperceptible but real.
Read Chapter 4 of the Rule of Benedict — Every day, read this through to completion. These are the tools for good works. They are not ends in themselves but behaviors to help you love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. (Deuteronomy 6).
Recite the Morning Offering — Each day, as soon as your feet touch the floor in the morning, give glory to the Father through Christ and ask for the grace to do God’s will to the best of your ability. This should take all of sixty seconds. Every day!
You don’t have to have a schedule like they do in the monastery, but at least try to perform one or more of these practices consistently and persistently. (www.trappist.net/schedule) Pray as you can, not as you can’t, says Brother Michael, O.C.S.O.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Can you think of just one concept or quote from Sacred Scriptures upon which all the others rest? Put another way, what is the bulls-eye of the bull’s eye of a target, the exact center? Again, if you had to write down just one quote upon which everything rests, what would that be? Jot it down now.
That is the question, actually two questions, that I asked in my book entitled Six Threshold of Life: How to prepare to live…Forever. You may find it in the Store section of this blog.
Threshold One: What is the purpose of life? This is actually the larger of the two questions. It is, what does God say the purpose of life is, to be precise. Look up Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34. These two identical pillars of spirituality speak of loving God with your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole strength and loving your neighbor as your self. Isn’t it ironic that the pillars of both the Old and New Testaments are identical. What does that tell us?
For those wanting to follow rules, this is the one and only rule you need to follow. In the Gospel, it states that we should seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all else will be given us besides. Look up Matthew 6: 33. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (NRSVCE)
We get so tied up the notion that religion is all about keeping the rules. While it is true, it is also true that God desires mercy and not sacrifice. Doing and practicing the laws is greater than just being able to keep them, like a check-off or laundry list. The heart always wins out over the keeping of rules for the sake of keeping the rules.
Threshold Two: What is YOUR purpose in life? This is HOW you plan to find meaning using the purpose of life you listed in question one. I call this my center, my personal ground of my being, the reason why I am happy, that which makes my life worthwhile, the reason I can sustain myself in time of personal trauma. My personal center is only eight words long. It is also the one reading I do every day in Lectio Divina meditation and contemplation. Every day! My center is found in Philippians 2:5. Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus. It is more important than my marriage relationship. It is more important than my children’s relationship. It is the most important because in doing this, I achieve all my other goals. It is first seeking the kingdom of heaven.
But this is more than just memorizing a Scripture passage and then forgetting it. This phrase is what informs all my thoughts and aspirations. It is what I want to become. It is what I hope to be with God’s help. When I had cardiac arrest (2007), this is what keep me going. It is what I first thought about when first told that I had leukemia (2014).
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I use the spiritual practices and charisms of Cistercians to help me to grow even deeper into the Mystery of Faith, even in the midst of pain and suffering. Life has purpose and meaning for me because of both the purpose of life and the purpose of my life.
If you can answer these two questions correctly (there are many false answers out there), then not only fulfill what it means to be human but also what it means to be an adopted son or daughter of the Father. You can’t image how much peace you feel.
I share with you some of my ideas from Lectio Divina Meditation and Contemplation based on Philippians 2:5.
This morning, I was looking at my orange tree in the front yard. I had previously had many orange blossoms but now just ten teeny, tiny green buds were visible. I thought of how my spirituality was like that tree, dependent upon good soil, water, free from disease, all to make fruit. The nature of this tree is to live, grow, make fruit, and then die. It reminds me of the Canticle from Daniel 3 that we pray in the Psalms at the Liturgy of the Hours.
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Let the earth bless the Lord; |
I often wondered about this hymn of praise to God and how a tree, like my orange tree, could possibly give praise to God and highly exalt him forever. Trees are not human, so how could they possibly give praise like we do when we pray. There is an answer, if we look deeper into the nature of life itself. Nature just is. It obeys the laws of just being itself without any complicated restrictions. It is only when we look at human nature that we find aberration and perversion of nature. Adam and Eve were created by God to be caretakers of the Garden of Eden. They were to help all creation function according to its nature, without getting in the way of what should be. And what should be? That is up to the Creator, not Adam and Eve.
Creation is good because God is good. Adam and Eve are good because God does make good stuff. When I look at my orange tree, I can begin to see how it can give praise to God by being an orange tree. My orange tree does not try to be an oak tree or a morning glory. It gives praise to God by being consistent with its nature. I know that the orange tree acts according to its nature because it bears good fruit. If it does not bear good fruit, I will cut it down and cast it to the curb to be taken away to the landfill.
Orange trees can praise God by being what nature intended. When it comes to humans, we have a problem. Because humans have free will and can change what is natural to their nature (human), we can choose those things not good for us (sin). In fact, we can even be little gods, without even recognizing we are doing it. Worshipping yourself is the big sin since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, not sexuality or anger. Pride goes before the fall, so to speak. I am my own church, I am my own religion, I am, in every respect, my own god, and I have a fool for a congregation. My orange tree does not want to be a god, it wants to be an orange tree because that is what it is. By being what it is, it gives glory to the Creator. Poor humans! We are condemned to wander the earth in search of meaning and where we fit, even though we stumble over the truth in our quest for being god. I have a human nature, one that has the natural default to be a caretaker of God’s Garden. Something happened to that birthright because of Adam and Eve. They changed the effects of the relationship with God. Human nature was now prone to do not only good but also evil. God tells us what evil is but we must still struggle with doing good. Like Adam and Eve, we must work to be spiritual, not just sit back on the conveyor belt of life and go to Heaven.
Something wonderful happened to this paradigm as it pertains to God. Philippians 2:5-12 states that God did not remain in the safety and security of his nature, but took on a new nature, one sinful and prone to sinfulness. Jesus gave us the ability to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father once again. There is a difference. We must work for our food and we must struggle to do God’s will, taking up our cross daily to follow our Master. No free lunch. Daily!
When I see my orange tree each morning, I think of how it glories God by just being what it is created to be. I think of how I am created in the image and likeness of God but need God’s grace and energy to sustain myself as my wounded human nature hobbles toward the goal line (death) and the prize (happiness with God…Forever).
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, the Cistercian practices (silence, solitude, work, pray, and community) help me to be more focused on the purpose of life, which first learned in 7th Grade: to know, love, and serve God in this life, and be happy in Heaven…Forever. (Baltimore Catechism)
To continue from Daniel 3:
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“Bless the Lord, all people on earth; 88 “Bless the Lord, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael; |
When Hurricane Irma was on track to come directly over Tallahassee, many of my friends and church members told me that they would pray for me. What does that mean? When we pray in times of dysfunction or stress, do we seek God to take away that which threatens us? Do we seek a miracle to calm the winds and the seas, like Jesus did for the Apostles?
Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. In this case, some pray to avoid the crisis, some to keep them safe, others for protection in times of storms or peril. We all do it. God is manifest through nature. When we pray, using the prayer Jesus taught us, we ask that God’s will be done, that we have our daily bread (physical and spiritual) and that we forgive others as we want to be forgiven, that we not be led into temptation and, most importantly here, that we are delivered from evil.
The lesson is that God gives us what we need to survive whatever happens to us, even death. Prayer is our way to connect with God to admit that God is still God and we are not the center of the universe. What we pray for indicates our level of spiritual awareness. The Lord’s Prayer is a template for us because that is the prayer Jesus used.
Here is one of my favorite Psalms describing what I feel in my heart about prayer and its efficacy.
Psalm 103Thanksgiving for God’s GoodnessOf David.1 Bless the Lord, O my soul, 6 The Lord works vindication 15 As for mortals, their days are like grass; 19 The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, |
One thing I lacked about seven years ago before I became an aspiring Lay Cistercian, was order in my life. I have since devised a way for me to seek God as a Lay Cistercian member of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Ga. Each person will be different in the way they practice contemplative spirituality. Here are some of the things that make up my spiritual system. It is my spiritual pathway. I don’t always do them, but they are my default behaviors and practices none the less. The following is excerpted from my book, Six Thresholds of Life, found in the Store section of this blog.
AN EXAMPLE OF MY CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUAL SUPPORT SYSTEM
The following pages are samples of the horarium (hourly agenda) I use to organize my day as a Lay Cistercian. I must tell you that I am retired and have time to devote to the practice of how to love as Jesus did. Not everyone has the great opportunity I have to pray the Liturgy of the Hours and Rosary in the parish. If I don’t keep it, no big deal, but it is an anchor.
My Center: Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus. –Philippians 2:5
Five or Six Practices to support my center: These are Cistercian charisms and practices.
1. Silence—When I think of silence, I think of lack of worldly noise. But, it is more than just lack of external noises, like television, children playing, going to work, and traveling in a car. For me, I try to be conscious that all these sounds give glory to the Father through the Son, in union with the Holy Spirit. I try to make a space where I can reflect on my center with some degree of privacy. Silence of my heart helps me sustain the other Cistercian charisms and practices and so grow in fierce love.
2. Solitude— Solitude, for me, means carving out space and quiet time to focus on how to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus. For the Cistercian monks, solitude means carving out a time and space that permits them to focus on loving God with their whole heart, whole soul, and whole mind without external distractions. For the Lay Cistercian, we also concentrate on fashioning a little prayer nest but we live in the secular world and therefore embrace all the distractions as part of our prayer to the Father. St. Benedict says, “That in all things, may God be glorified.”
3. Prayer—Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. As a Lay Cistercian, I actively put myself in the presence of God using prayer, both public and private. Even if I sometimes feel that prayer is repetitious and rote, I have noticed that the more I try to grow deeper using prayer, rather than fighting the externals, the more peace there is in my spirit. It is resting my heart in the heart of Christ that helps me love fiercely.
4. Work—Work as the world sees it is a means to make money. Work with a spiritual approach is transforming the ordinary tasks of the day into those that give glory and praise to the Father. Work is prayer if offered up as praise and glory to the Father.
5. Community—Lay Cistercians gravitate towards communal gatherings to refresh the soul and to transform themselves deeper in the mind and heart of Christ Jesus. Even though there is a great distance between us, we link together as one in our commitment to each other because we are all linked through the mind and heart of Christ Jesus. Sharing Christ with each other nourishes the Spirit in me.
My spiritual goals for the rest of my life:
1. Take up your cross daily and follow Christ. The cross, in this case, is being consistent in spiritual practices. Although there is no penalty attached for not performing them, the more you want to have in you the mind of Christ Jesus, the more you will have what you wish for. Take what comes your way and transform it through Christ Jesus.
2. Solitude in the midst of community. Community here means a support and sustaining faith group, such as Lay Cistercians of Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Ga. and Good Shepherd faith community at daily Mass and Liturgy of the Hours, with its ministries to the poor, the sick and those in need. Where two or three gather in my name, says the Master, there I am also.
3. Work to share my writings and adult learning about Cistercian spiritual practices.
4. Be open to the possibility of the manifestibility of all being! What seems like a mouthful of cotton candy is actually a way of saying that I will be more conscious of loving God with my whole heart, my whole mind, and my whole soul and my neighbor as myself.
Spiritual Practices I use to sustain my center:
These practices are little nests I carve out of my routine, not because I need the discipline but because they place me in direct contact with the mind and heart of Christ.
Eucharist – The Sacrament of unity with God through Christ Jesus with the Holy Spirit as Advocate. This is the bread of Heaven. This is the pure energy of God for my transformation. This is my destiny in one prayer of gratitude with the community of believers.
Lectio Divina—This ancient, monastic practice allows me to grow deeper in spiritual awareness, there are four steps. Read (lectio); Meditate (meditatio); Pray (oratio); Contemplate (contemplatio).
Meditation and Spiritual Reading: This practice gives me a time to focus on Scriptures, Spiritual Readings about how to grow deeper in Christ Jesus.
The Rosary: Meditations on the life and purpose of Christ Jesus One of my favorite practices is a mantra-like prayer to help me meditate on the high points in the life of Jesus.
Liturgy of the Hours: This practice, refined by St. Benedict in 580 AD in his Rule of St. Benedict, organizes the monks to pray the Psalms seven times a day. I pray the Psalms at least twice a day. The key is consistency and prayer in common, if possible. It is the prayer of the Catholic Church every hour of the day, every day of the week, giving praise, honor, and glory to the Father through the Son in union with the Holy Spirit.
Eucharistic Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament: I believe that Jesus Christ is present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearance of the bread. This is an ancient practice and one of the most revered of all practices. If this is indeed the living Christ, why would you not want to visit? This takes fierce love to practice.
How I organize my daily practices:
Horarium: (This is the default pattern of my spiritual practice.)
4:00 a.m. Rise
4:10 a.m. Silent Prayer
Morning Offering Dedication of the Day
Monday: In reparation for my sins and those of the Church, those on my prayer list
Tuesday: For all family, friends, teachers, those on my prayer list
Wednesday: In honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Immaculate Heart of Mary, and St. Joseph, those on my prayer list Thursday: For all Lay Cistercians, Monks of Holy Spirit Monastery, Monks of St. Meinrad Archabbey, priests and religious of Diocese of Evansville, Monks of Norcia, Italy and those on my prayer list Friday: For an increase in grace to love God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and my neighbor as myself.
Saturday: For all deceased, an increase in my faith through the Holy Spirit and for those on my prayer list.
Sunday: To give praise, honor, and glory to the Father through the Son my means of the Holy Spirit, the God who is, was, and is to come at the end of the ages
4:30 a.m. Liturgy of the Hours: Readings in private (optional)
5:00 a.m. Exercise at gym: (Monday through Friday)
6:30 a.m. Breakfast:
7:00 a.m. Private prayer: Lectio divina in private
Spiritual reading in private
8:00 a.m. Liturgy of the Word: Morning Prayer in common Rosary in common
9:00 a.m. Holy Mass: In common
10:00 a.m. Exercise at gym: (Monday through Sunday)
11: 15 a.m. Work: Writing, Blog, Special Projects
12:30 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Liturgy of the Hours: Midday Prayer in private
1:15 p.m. Work: Writing, Blog, Special Projects
4:00-5:30 p.m. Adoration before Blessed Sacrament in common
Lectio Divina and Meditation in private
Liturgy of the Hours: Evening Prayer in common
5:30 p.m. Supper
6:00-7:30 p.m. Exercise at gym or swimming
8:00 p.m. Liturgy of the Hours: Night Prayer in private (optional)
8:30 p.m. Work: Writing, Blog, Special Projects
To be fair, I don’t always perform this schedule as written above. I do try to do it, however.
That in all things, may God be glorified. — St. Benedict
You don’t want to make God angry. There was one thing that did provoke anger on more than one occasion. It was saying one thing in public but holding a different position in your heart. It was duplicity. It was hypocrisy.
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27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. 28 So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (NRSVCE) |
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13 “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.[d] 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell[e] as yourselves. 16 “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath.’ 17 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred? 18 And you say, ‘Whoever swears by the altar is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gift that is on the altar is bound by the oath.’ 19 How blind you are! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 So whoever swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it; 21 and whoever swears by the sanctuary, swears by it and by the one who dwells in it; 22 and whoever swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by the one who is seated upon it. 23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you, tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! 25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup,[f] so that the outside also may become clean. 27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. 28 So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. 29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, 30 and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. 33 You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?[g] 34 Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, 35 so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation. |
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
During one of my Lectio/Meditations on Phil 2:5, I had the following thoughts which I share with you now.
All Christians have the temptation to play God games. The games are human responses to what we think God is or what we think God thinks. Scriptures are one way to ensure that the words of God come from those living from around the time of Christ. Christ himself never wrote a book. St. John’s Gospel 20:30-31 and again in John 21:24-25 that the whole world would not be able to contain the works Jesus did. The disciples were eyewitnesses to these works. What is written down is for our benefit, that we “…might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing this you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)
Adam and Eve were the first to play God games. They knew the rules of the game (don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), played, and lost. (Genesis 3) The rest of us all reside use the same board to play our games. At the core is the wish to be God, which means we are our own center of reality, not God. We probably sin (missing the mark) but don’t even realize we have lost the board game because we have constructed games in our own image and likeness, not God’s.
Here are a few board games that I have caught myself playing, and with which you might identify.
MY GOD CAN BEAT YOUR GOD
When we are self-righteous to a fault, we place ourselves alone as the arbiter of Scripture and the center of reality, thinking that Scripture can never be in error. In fact, we make ourselves our own religion, and of course, everything we say is true, because, after all, we must be correct because of faith. The lack of humility and obedience to what God actually says often prevents us from seeing what is true.
TWO VIEWS OF THE SAME WORDS: I was chatting with some of my colleagues at work, several years back, and they were condemning people who did not hold their view of the Scriptures. They thought everything in Scriptures was absolutely true and must be believed absolutely and obeyed. I asked them if they observed the Jewish prohibitions (Deuteronomy 27:15-26). They said they did not know. Belief trumps any historical ambiguities. The problem with this extreme view is each person determines what is true.
On the other hand, those who hold the Historical Jesus philosophy about Scripture hold that Jesus never existed, or that all Scripture is just the mutterings of deluded followers, not Jesus himself. https://www.indy100.com/article/did-jesus-exist-7489786. With these assumptions, I would put Julius Caesar on par with Jesus Christ. The problem with this extreme view is no one can prove that anyone existed or that the words written down were true.
GOTCHA!
This is a game whose purpose is to prove that I am wrong. Of course, it presupposes that you are correct. This game is about tossing phrases from Scripture to disarm your opponent and prove them wrong. I don’t play this game, although people try to play it with me.
A few years ago, I had breakfast at Starbucks with a couple of friends of mine. The subject, as it usually does, drifts toward religion. I said I had just come from Eucharistic Adoration for an hour. They told me I was an idolator because only God should be adored. It did not go well that I agreed with them. They had assumptions in their mind that I could never intellectually or emotionally answer to their satisfaction. They told me that the Real Presence belief was not found in Scriptures. When I quoted Matthew 26:26-29, to play the game correctly, they told me my interpretation was just my own belief and I was entitled to my opinion. They held different opinions. I said that sounded like relativism to me (each person is their own god and their own church). I quoted the response that St. Thomas Aquinas gave to those who don’t believe in the Real Presence. To those with faith, no answer is necessary, to those without faith, no answer is possible. There was no answer back from them, other than that is your opinion. I told them that indeed it was my opinion and the opinions of multitudes for the past twenty centuries. Unfortunately, we stopped having breakfast together.
THE GOD OF THE GOLF COURSE
I don’t play golf, but one of my relatives said that he can get as much from playing nine holes as he does going to the Eucharist on Sunday morning. I asked him if he was equating the two. He told me that it didn’t matter. He did not believe in the Real Presence but felt the presence of God when he played golf on Sunday morning.
Read Chapter 4 of St. Benedict’s Rule to keep from self-idolatry. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, I have to keep before me the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5) each and every day. Every day is a new chance to love God with all my heart and mind and strength and my neighbor as myself. Fail though I do, I seek to finish the race and gain my reward.
PEEK-A-BOO
This is a game that people who live in two universes (physical and mental) play when speaking of the absence of God. In this game, they have their hands over their eyes so they can’t see what is real, but they keep their fingers spread apart so they can actually see how to navigate the currents of life without drowning.
The problem with participants in this game is one of assumptions. Although everyone tried to come up with one workable theory of all that is, they still continue to look at only the physical and mental universes while neglecting the spiritual one.
What games do you play as God?
That in all things, God is glorified. –St. Benedict
The following ideas are excerpted from my book, The Three Rules of the Spiritual Universe. You can access this book in the Store part of this blog. In my Lectio Divina/Meditations/Contemplations, I was presented with these three ideas about the spiritual universe. They are big picture themes of the Spiritual Universe, not rules to limit inquiry or innovation. You may have more rules, these are the ones I use.
All of my books use a vertical format: there is an idea at the top of the page and then my commentary on it. Each page is a different idea, threaded together with a theme for the Chapter. It is for meditative purposes and could possibly be used for contemplation.
“There are several rules or laws of the spiritual universe,
just as there are laws of the physical universe. One of these
laws is The Rule of Threes. The Rule of Threes states that
there is only one reality possessing three independent
and distinct universes. The three universes are one, yet
quite separate. The three universes are the physical, the
mental, and the spiritual. The Rule of Threes is important
because you will not see all of reality by just looking at
the physical or mental universes. To see life from a deeper
point of view, you must use the Rule of Threes. You won’t
get to Heaven unless you have aligned all three universes
properly.” –Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D.
TO DISCOVER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, YOU MUST USE THE RULE OF THREES
RULE ONE: THE RULE OF THREES
There is only one reality containing three separate universes. God only
speaks spiritually, not in English.
RULE TWO: THE RULE OF REVOLVING CENTERS
Humans default to their animal nature without mental and spiritual help.
RULE THREE: THE RULE OF OPPOSITES
In the physical and mental universes, what is true are
power, greed, self-indulgence, influence,
sex, riches, and fame. I am the center of the physical and mental universe. In the spiritual universe, the opposite is what is true.
THE THREE RULES OF THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE
1. THE RULE OF THREES Humans have reason for a reason. The purpose of life is to look at every day with fresh eyes, even if they are sleepy. Those who are spiritual see with three universes, the physical sight, mental enlightenment, and spiritual wisdom. All truth is one, but with three layers or universes, each quite distinct.
2. THE RULE OF REVOLVING CENTERS
Humans are spiritual animals, but animals nevertheless. While in the physical universe, there is a constant battle between the spirit and the flesh. It is only with spiritual
energy from God that humans can consistently and persistently keep their centers intact. To aid humans, the Master gives us help, both individually and collectively.
3. THE RULE OF OPPOSITES What may seem true in the physical universe is just the opposite in the spiritual universe. When you are weak, then you are strong.
If you wish to be a leader, you must serve all. If you wish to get to Heaven, you must be as a little child. With this rule, you learn to speak spiritually.
THOUGHT: TO DISCOVER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, YOU MUST USE ALL THREE RULES
You are capable of living in three realities or universes simultaneously. Think about that statement. If you are human, you automatically live in two universes. Some of us never progress to the third universe, the spiritual plane of existence.
1. The physical universe — all matter, all chemical elements, all physics, all that lives
belong to this universe. On this level, humans are just a species of animal.
2. The mental universe — only humans live on this level. All humans begin their lives in the Garden of Eden, where pleasure is the norm. This universe is one of reason. Only humans can reason. Only humans have a mind to find out their destiny. They have their life span to learn how to get to Heaven. They have reason for a reason.
3. The spiritual universe — this is the Kingdom of Heaven where all dreams do come true. God has invited us to share this universe with him. What a deal! This universe begins when you put God at your center. The only way to enter this universe is by a free use of your will. Humans are spiritual apes, only capable of fulfilling their destiny with God’s help.
CONSIDER THIS IDEA VERY CAREFULLY!
How many universes can you live in at the same time?
You are born into the first reality, that of the physical universe. All matter lives in this universe. Humans alone have evolved into the next universe or mental reality.
We evolved, learned, and gradually discovered meaning. The third universe is strictly voluntary. It is the reality of the Spirit. You can’t measure it. That does not mean it can not be measured. It is the universe of faith informed by reason. Our challenge, as humans, is to integrate these three realities as one, in order to make it through the threshold of death into Heaven. Some of us believe this to be true, while others do not. Life is a discovery of what is meaningful. Humans use their minds to soak up reality
and try to make sense out of it. Spirituality is a way to put value and meaning in the proper perspective. Each universe is given to us to solve the mystery of our destiny.
These three universes are three parts of the grand mystery. Humans must figure out this mystery in order to move on to their final destination. It is the ultimate Monopoly
game. In this game, we learn what to hold onto and what to sell. Our purpose is to gather as many riches as possible. We are made for Heaven, not earth. We are made for Forever, not just for eighty years or so. Play to win!
YOU WON’T NOTICE THREE UNIVERSES BECAUSE THEY HAPPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY
1. Not everyone believes in three universes. Most of us just ignore the signs God gives us.
Some become bored and fall away from their core principles.
2. The Scientific reality is what you can measure. Is it correct? Of course, it is.
3. Philosophical reality is reason. The mind deduces what is not logical, what is visible and invisible. Is it correct? Of course, it is.
4. Spiritual reality uses belief in a reality that is not seen. Is it correct? Of course, it is.
5. So, how can all three levels of reality be correct? They are each looking at one part of
reality and not the whole. Reality is one yet has three dimensions or universes. The three are one. The one is three.
7. The ultimate challenge in life is to know your purpose. That purpose is somehow bound up with three dimensions or universes.
THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE REALITY HAS THREE DIMENSIONS
THOUGHTS FOR FOOD
3=1 is the formula to Forever.
Astronomers tell us that dark matter may make up most of the known universe. We can’t see it, but we think it exists. See the website: http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/
darkmatter/dm.html Dark matter has faint mass. What we don’t know about the universe is more than we know. The same can be said about the interface between the physical universe and spirituality. The physical universe is evolving, but so is the interface between the mental universe, and that of the spiritual universe. Humans are slowly growing towards the collective purpose for which they evolved if they don’t kill each other first. Darwin was correct to notice the evolution of the species. His problem was that he just did not look far enough. We have the physical universe to thank for the condition that allows us to live at all. We have the mental universe to thank for the condition that allows us to wonder and learn from our collective wisdom. We have the spiritual universe to thank for answering the questions of why we are here, and the direction of our destiny. The authors of Genesis were not scientists but rather poets, marveling at the order of all that they saw. Darwin was only looking at the physical universe with the power of the science of his time. You are able to look at all three universes and seek the purpose of why you are here. Some of us only see two universes.
HERE ARE SOME LEARNING POINTS
More about this topic in subsequent blogs.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Well, there I sat, as I always do, in the Tax Collector’s seat at Good Shepherd Church, Tallahassee, Florida. The last bench is marked with a handicapped sign, but that is not why I sit there.
You are no doubt familiar with the parable of the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14.
The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (NRSVCE) I sit in the Tax Collector’s seat because, like the parable, I keep my head bowed and keep repeating “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict |
In my Lectio Divina meditation on Phil 2:5, I had some thoughts which I would like to share.
What kind of love is there that compels someone to do something they know will eventually result in great pain and even death? And not just any death, but death by crucifixion, scourging, beatings and wearing a crown of thorns. I wouldn’t it. It is completely the opposite of B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, where pleasure and the avoidance of pain drive behavior.
Only the human will can act against its best interests and choose what may seem like a contradictory purpose to our nature. Yet, people do it all the time.
Here are some of my Lectio Meditation thoughts on forgiveness.
What is the distance between your birth and death? What is the distance between when a flower germinates and when it drys up? Everything has a beginning and an end in the physical and mental universes, even thoughts. In terms of behaviors, humans move from activities that have a beginning but also will end sometime in the future. Love has a beginning, struggles to maintain its integrity and then an end. You are the center of these two universes unless you add the spiritual one
Once you add the spiritual universe to the mix, which means that God is the center of all three universes and not you, there is a different dynamic at work. Now each day becomes a new beginning because you never love God with ALL your heart, ALL your soul, and ALL your strength. Each day we all far short. This is due to the effects of the sin of Adam and Eve. We get sidetracked from doing God’s will and even forget about God for large stretches of time. It happens to every human. Notice what happened to St. Peter and his profession of faith in his Master. Matthew 26:69-75. St. Peter’s denial merits a full paragraph in Matthew’s Gospel account, so it must be important. In the spiritual universe, which exists on earth and in Heaven, the beginning and end start with a morning prayer to think about your purpose in life and to commit, unlike Peter, to do the will of the Father in Heaven each day. Each day! Take up your cross each day and follow the Master.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, my morning offering takes the form of a thirty-second prayer for God to help me love with all my heart, forgive my failures in the past, and make all things new for just this one day, one day at a time.
It only takes a moment, but, in the spiritual universe, a moment is a lifetime.
That in all things, may God be gloriied. –St. Benedict
Most of the retired people I know say that they are busier now than when they were working full time in their job. The big fear people have, when they first retire, is am I going to have enough to do to keep busy? I know in my own case, having forestalled retirement three times from my original date of 2006, I finally retired full time in 2011.
Everyone has a different way they approach retirement and keeping busy. I did not want to end up in front of the television binge-watching Bizarre Foods (which I like) as the center of my life.
I had written over forty books by 2017, and published thirty-four by this time (you can see some of my handiwork in the Store section of this blog). I began this blog in 2017 and try to keep it current four or five times a week. This helps me more than anyone else, but who else is there who will take care of my mental capabilities? I have a purpose in life, above and beyond the mega-purpose I espouse in my book, Six Thresholds of Life.
THE PURPOSE OF MY LIFE
I have a purpose in my life, one which no one can take away from me, one that does not change with the wind, or is politically correct, one that I have discovered at the very core or center of my being. This is my center. Retired or not. Working or not. Happy or not. Fulfilled or not. It informs what I do and who I am. It is actually not a thing but a living, dynamic person, a relationship with God that is beyond playing games, such as, my God can beat your god, and Name that god.
If you have not identified your center, the one idea, thought or statement that sums up who you are, who you want to become and will last as long as you do, then I encourage you to do so now. My center is eight words long and you can look it up in Philippians 2:5. My center helps me in both retirement and when I was working in gainful employment.
I am reminded of the statement in Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the kingdom of Heaven and all else will be given to you besides.” I must have read that passage over two hundred time without picking up on the deeper meaning. You can say you have faith in something, but there is a deeper growth than faith (I Corinthians 13:13), one where faith has you. One where you wake up one day and say, Wow! That makes sense! I tried it and it works! One where love is the greatest and deepest part of faith. As I become more and more a broken down, old temple of the Holy Spirit, I am reducing all these practices from many to a few. One of these few is, seek first the kingdom of heaven.
In my retirement, this simple thought informs the way I approach life. Do not worry about what you are to eat or drink, says the Master, I will take care of you. The difference is, I REALLY BELIEVE THAT TO BE TRUE, and act upon it through my Lay Cistercian practices to allow me to seek God is simplicity and truth.
If you have read some of my other blogs, you know that I suffered cardiac arrest (Widowmaker) in 2007 and Leukemia (CLL type) in 2014. I wrote a book about my experiences entitled You Know You Are Going to Die, Now What: A cancer survivor reflects on how contemplation helps confront three questions you must face head-on–A Journal. What gets a person through such life-skewing traumas? The answer for me was, not a what but a who. I simply defaulted to my center, which was, “Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus.” It doesn’t cure cancer, but it cures the spirit and refocused me on what is really important–love.
MY HERITAGE
Look to your heart. Where your heart is, there your treasure will be. I am so gifted by God (faith to believe, hope trust that what I believe is, and love and behave in such a way that my faith and hope is real), that I am humbled that God would think so much of sinful, fragile humans, such as me, to entrust his grace and precious body and blood within my body. I am truly a temple of the Holy Spirit, although undeserving and in need of constant renewal and forgiveness for my sins. Each day, at Morning Prayer and Eucharist at Good Shepherd community in Tallahassee, Florida, I ask for the grace to love God with my whole heart and soul and strength and my neighbor as myself. Every evening, when I see how I did, I always come up short. Humans can only try to be perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect. We never completely make it. The difference is why I begin the next day trying to run the race once more, as St. Paul says in Hebrews 12: 1.
The heritage I must pass on, even if those around me do not accept it is, the purpose of life is: love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength, plus, love your neighbor as yourself. As a retiree, a senior, or whatever you are, that is all you have to do.
Of course, doing it means, in my case, with my particular background, given my experiences, I do so as one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian and follow the Rule of Benedict as practiced by Cistercians, specifically Trappist monks, and nuns.
As a retiree, I have everything I need to fulfill my destiny as a human, as a member of the living Body of Christ, as a Lay Cistercian, as a humbled husband and father.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
The following spiritual practices are those I use in my daily attempt to love God with all my heart. I like them because they allow me to focus on my purpose in life, to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus. (Phil 2:5-12) I will never reach it, of course, but as a beginner Lay Cistercian, I will try to be faithful to the practices handed down through the centuries. These practices work for me and I don’t speak for anyone but myself. Future blogs will highlight each one of these practices in detail.
Where your heart is, there your treasures will be? What are your treasures as you pack for the journey to…Forever. List the practices you do and how often you do them.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Here are some thoughts about my struggle with contemplation and what I have learned about Lection Divina as one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian. I try to follow Guido II’s four steps of seeking God. The following is text from Guido II (1140-1193) Carthusian Prior author of The Ladder of Monks. Read it for yourself and make your own conclusions. http://www.ldysinger.com/@texts2/1180_guigo-2/02_lad_sel-lec.htm
| II. CONCERNING the FOUR RUNGS [of the Ladder] |
|
| ONE DAY while I was occupied with manual labor | |
| I began to reflect on man’s spiritual work, | |
| and suddenly four steps for the soul came into my reflection: | |
| reading,
meditation, prayer, [and] contemplation |
| THIS is a ladder for monks (lit.“the cloistered”)
by means of which they are raised up from earth to heaven It has [only a] few separate rungs, yet its length is immense and incredible: |
|
| for its lower part stands on the earth, | |
| while its higher [part] pierces the clouds and touches the secrets of heaven. | |
| JUST as its rungs have various names and numbers, | |
| so also so they differ in order and merit; | |
| and if one diligently searches out their properties and functions | |
| – what each [rung] does in relation to us, how they differ from one another and how they are ranked- | |
| he will regard whatever labor and study he expends as brief and simple compared with the great usefulness and sweetness [he gains]. |
| III THE FUNCTIONS of THESE AFOREMENTIONED RUNGS | |||||||||||||||
| FOR the sweetness of a blessed life: | |||||||||||||||
| Reading seeks; | |||||||||||||||
| meditation finds; | |||||||||||||||
| prayer asks; | |||||||||||||||
| contemplation tastes. | |||||||||||||||
| Reading, so to speak, puts food solid in the mouth, | |||||||||||||||
| meditation chews and breaks it, | |||||||||||||||
| prayer attains its savor, | |||||||||||||||
| contemplation is itself the sweetness that rejoices and refreshes. | |||||||||||||||
| Reading concerns the surface, | |||||||||||||||
| meditation concerns the depth | |||||||||||||||
| prayer concerns request for what is desired, | |||||||||||||||
| contemplation concerns delight in discovered sweetness. | c | ||||||||||||||
|
Some thoughts on how spirituality and time interact.
Seven lessons humans need to learn, in order to live in three universes.
“Many people are more concerned about where they came from than where they are headed. You only enter spiritual time with a free act of the will. You make an act of the will for what will be, not for what has been.” —The Center for Contemplative Practice
The following blog comes from my book on Spirituality and Time, entitled The Woman Who Changed Time: Spirituality and Time. The book may be found in the Store section of this blog. I write vertical books, so be warned. Vertical books are those containing a question at the top of each page followed by my comments on the remainder of the page. They are ideally suited for blogs. I have excerpted one section, spiritual time, in this blog. Other blogs will explore physical time and mental time.
WHAT IS SPIRITUAL TIME?
If the spiritual universe is X, can you solve for X?
Mathematics can teach us about the invisible universe of spirituality. Like dark matter, we cannot SEE it but we can deduce its presence through other measurements and deduce its existence from its effect on other known phenomena. In a mathematical formula, the spiritual universe is like solving for X. Like the Pythagorean Theorem, the square on the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In physical reality, we can see matter and energy, and measure it. We can use our mental energies to deduce a solution or solve for X if we know the formula. Humans have discovered mathematics, the sciences, medicine, physics, and chemistry to answer the question, “What is it and how does it work?” Our mental thinking is invisible yet no less real. It leads us to make choices. Unlike Yogi Berra’s purported saying: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it,” our mental capabilities allow us to choose what is valuable. Yet, what is of value to us may not be valuable in terms of what is good for the last part of the equation– that third side of the triangle. Spirituality is the logical consequence of two universes, separate yet inexorably interdependent. This spiritual universe is analogous to the dark matter of the physical universe, only it is opaque.
The Logical Conclusion to Human Growth.
Spirituality begins when we make a conscious choice to move from a human-centered existence to one that is centered on THE OTHER. You will spend a lifetime, if you are so fortunate, trying to discover what that means. In my own mind, I have discovered the equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Once thought to be unsolvable, it has only been solved recently. http://www.mbay. net/~cgd/flt/fltmain.htm. My thinking has led me to look at reality in threes, or, The Rule of Threes: the physical universe, mental universe, and spiritual universe, but with a twist. I have attempted to take everything I ever learned about my time on earth and link it together. In doing that, I used Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas about how the universe is growing. Does time move in a straight line? I don’t agree with the straight line description. I think time is more like concentric circles that form when you drop a pebble on the surface of a clear pond. Instead of the rock causing the ripples, I found myself looking at those ripples and looking for the rock that caused it. Spirituality is the like a pebble that is dropped into the pond of time…it causes ripples. It is the logical consequence of time and matter. Spirituality allows humans the tools to discover the direction that time is headed. It fulfills our nature.
Authentic spirituality…is selecting what is aligned with pure energy.
You are free to choose whatever spirituality you want, but remember that not all spiritual thinking will lead you to fulfill your destiny. People who have a devout spirituality that says, “It is moral to fly a plane into the World Trade Center in the name of God,” are missing the point. So, is everyone’s spirituality correct just because they are free to choose it? If you are free to choose drugs, binge drinking, indiscriminate, unprotected sex, indecent exposure, as some of these halftime football shows advocate, is that authentic? Who is to say? You have all the time you have in your lifetime to find out what is meaningful. When you choose spirituality, you must also choose what that means. Not all religions lead to the truth, the way, and the life. Life is a quest for the truth. Authentic spirituality, regardless of what philosophical expression you select, means your value system is based on three principles:
The Two Dimensions of Spiritual Time.
If you want to live in the spiritual universe, you must choose to do so. You must also choose what is authentic and real about spirituality. Once this happens, you live in spiritual time. There is a macro level of spiritual time, one particular to the human race. Spiritual time began with one person making a conscious decision to move forward. There are two dimensions of spiritual time. One is personal and one describes the condition of the human race.
Learn how to sew with The Golden Thread.
You have heard of our early ancestors as hunter-gatherers haven’t you? Did you know humans are also sewers? We humans like to link things together mentally. We want to know how it all fits together. In the physical universe, we use thread to sew our clothes and mend our socks. In the mental universe, we use a mental thread called logic, to put an invisible thread through every action we do, and every thought we think. There is a reason why humans behave as they do. Maybe, in the short run, it is for self-satisfaction. We have evolved to sharing with others. In the long run, we think about things like religion, where it all fits, and how my life has meaning. Usually, people who are older tend to think more about the deeper thoughts about their lives. When we have a trauma or life-shaking event, such as cancer in our own bodies, or the death of a relative, we move quickly to think about the deeper part of life. Ever wonder why people in prisons all of a sudden get religion? Why are some people so religious, when they find out they are going to die? In the spiritual universe, the one we choose freely, we are given a Golden Thread to link everything we find of value to our future destiny, Forever. We need a sense of urgency to focus on what is most important in life.
Mary teaches us to sew with The Golden Thread.
Spiritual time is important because what we thread together during our lifetime, we take with us into a universe without space or time. You can only take with you those items you have sewn together with a Golden Thread. That seems impossible. How can an individual link together all these experiences, these wonderful times, and the relationships that made life worth living? The Golden Thread is God. Each and every morning, as soon as you sit on the side of the bed, make a morning offering of that day to God. A simple prayer might be: “that in all I do today, in all my thoughts and actions, may God be glorified.” If you make this act of the will, every human thought or activity automatically has a Golden Thread put through it, as long as those thoughts and deeds are consistent with God’s laws of spirituality. The Golden Thread for each human who freely chooses spirituality is the link between the wonders of the physical universe with the mental universe, and finally with those of the spiritual universe. Those relationships of intimacy and friendship, consistent with God’s will, all have a Golden Thread running through them. So, what’s your point? We are able to use the Golden Thread because Mary made a choice for spirituality that was acceptable to God.
Spiritual time on earth prepares you for spiritual time in Heaven.
Why are you here on this earth? Is there a destiny out there towards which all of us inexorably march? The answer is “Yes.” It is one of the reasons that spiritual time completes physical and mental time. There is a reason we humans evolved using human reason. The mental universe allows us to store those values and experiences we wish to take with us as we move to spiritual time after we die. Our circuits were not wired to live in a state of pure energy, pure knowledge, pure love, and pure service. Spiritual time is the universe that “always is.” How would humans relate to that? It would fry our circuits. There must be some artificial environment within spiritual time to allow us to survive. There is. Those links we sew with The Golden Thread show that we know what it means to be fully human. We take with us what we sew during our lifetime. Mary is the only human, with the exception of her son, who was perfectly human. Yet, Mary became perfect because God filled her with his energy. In three billion years, we humans might reach that stage of maturity, if we don’t first kill ourselves. For Mary, it was instantaneous. Mary was the first one of us to use The Golden Thread. Because she said “YES,” we reap the benefits and have a chance to fulfill our destiny.
Meditations on Spiritual Time.
More on physical time and mental time, next time.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Here some crazy ideas about time travel and immortality.
I recently wrote a blog about taking a trip to California. I left for Los Angeles on a Friday and returned on a Monday. No problems. Nice flight, but somewhat tiring for an old geezer. In reflecting on this trip, I am reminded of original sin. Original sin, remember, is the result of disobedience and lack of humility by Adam and Eve. There are consequences to that archetypal act of our first parents. For one thing, nothing lasts forever, that is to say, nothing in the two universes of time and matter.
When I watched some episodes of time travel in the Star Trek series, there was warp drive or traveling at various times the speed of light. Nice touch for the television series, don’t you think? Time travel and nudging those hypotheses and theories of Einstein is well beyond the world I live in. Yet, if time travel is moving through time, we do that each and every minute of our day until we die. We move from Point A to Point B, perhaps not in distance, but in time. Case in point is my trip to California. I left on a Friday but returned on Monday. I traveled through time, although in only two universes. There are no exceptions to this effect of original sin. Even with a warp drive, it is still Point A to Point B, although the points are very far apart. Now add three universes to the equation about what is real. The spiritual universe does not exist in space or time. It simply is. So, there is no Point A to Point B time travel, only Point A. In the spiritual universe, Point A is Point B. It is also a person, whom we call God for lack of an adequate description. When I embarked on my trip to California, I knew that I would return on a certain date. The same holds true for everything that exists in two universes. I know I was born and I know I will die. I know that, if I go to college, and stick it out, I will be graduated in four years, all things considered. Why is that? Why can’t I take a vacation that lasts Forever? Maybe because I don’t live in that condition. My two universes have the limitations imposed on it as a result of original sin. Everything will decay, eventually. I will die, so will everything else around me, with a few exceptions. What we learn does not die. Only recently, we have had the technology to use information, wisdom, scientific studies and research into cancer cures and medical procedures to help sustain life. Unfortunately, humans still hate each other, drive cars into people they don’t know, in the name of a religion that disavows it.
Doesn’t sound like my trip to California was very productive. It was because I complied with the rules of nature. It was because nature complied with its own laws, i.e., the sun came out, there were no volcanoes, etc…
WACKY IDEAS
Wonder if the earth is actually its own spacecraft traveling through, not only space but through time towards a destiny in the future called Omega? Science can’t verify this because it is using the wrong set of assumptions and may not be able to let go of reason long enough to think outside of matter and time to something far more interesting, pure energy. In my book series on this topic, entitled Spiritual Apes, I talk about this in more detail. You can find them in the Store section of this blog. Pure energy is love, as set forth in The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Jesuit paleontologist. It sounds crazy that love would be the energy that fuels all of reality. Agreed! Yet, we have reason for a reason, as I am fond of saying. Like a neutron star that spews forth its deadly cosmic rays to everything around it, pure energy radiates love and is 100% of a person’s nature. The significant thing is that this person is not human at all but divine nature. But there is more, in Philippians 2:5-12, my favorite passage in Scriptures and the center of my life, it tells of how God took on the nature of a man with all the effects of the original sin of the race, without individual sin.
If there is a place without space or time and we are headed there, it would make sense to warn us how we should live later on, so as to prepare for this new approach to life, one that has no end, one whose energy is not the Sun but the pure energy of God, one where our human nature can thrive in a climate of peace and fierce love. God would not hurt us nor give us cause to regret our choice. That is why Jesus had to show us how to live in the life to come.
We actually are time travelers, but when our time in two universes has expired (the body dies), we open another chapter in the journey, that of being with Jesus. This is spiritual time (three universes) and not two.
One of the admonitions that I have found in Scripture, used over and over, when the Sacred (an angel) meets one of us (the Blessed Mother) is “Don’t be afraid!” (Luke 1:31.) It is what I thought about when I was told I had cancer (leukemia) in 2014. Contemplation allowed me to wait in the presence of the Lord God and soak up whatever God wanted me to have. To be sure, salvation by faith does not mean we can ever take it for granted or that we are on a conveyor belt to automatically get to Heaven. Heaven depends upon God but if we get there depends on us with God’s help, of course. That is good advice for any time traveler who goes from visible to the invisible reality.
Hope is a theological virtue that gives us the ability to believe in a person or a concept. I believe in love as the purpose of life and am trying not to be afraid of what lies ahead.
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Last month, I took a trip to California to visit my favorite Aunt, Sister Adrian Marie Conrad, S.P. She is a Sister of Providence from Terre Haute, Indiana. Although it only lasted four days (two of which were for travel), it was very memorable. You see, Sister Adrian Marie is 97. The family did not want to wait until a funeral to meet together, so we decided to meet before both of us finish our journey on earth.
I bring this up because, on the way out to see Sister, I did Lectio Divina in the airplane. All of my Lectio reading (or thinking, in my case) comes from Philippians 2:5. These are my thoughts.
This is a great trip to California. I had no hassle with luggage because I carried my overnight bag with enough stuff for two days. I wondered what it would be like to carry my lifetime bag when I die. What would I take to Heaven with me, given God’s mercy on this broken-down, old Lay Cistercian? I would take the following item.
THE GOLDEN THREAD — I received the Golden Thread when I was baptized (September 29, 1940,) at 1:00 p.m. in Vincennes, Indiana. I did not know it until much later in life, actually when I was 70 years old, but the Golden Thread binds all things together and these I can take with me to Heaven. It is this sense that I can take all of my pets with me to Heaven. The Golden Thread links all my life experiences that I have identified as being a thought, word, or deed leading from self to God. In English, that means I can thread the delicate rays of the morning sun on the green leaves in Tallahassee to the goodness and greatness of the Creator. The only thing this thread will not penetrate is sin and unauthentic love. What I thread with my Golden Thread will be the context of my Heaven. To the extent that I have loved others as Christ has loved us, my reward will be complete.
I have used the Golden Thread to bind the following:
What have you packed in your suitcase for the trip to eternity? One of the most beautiful expressions of what lies ahead is not even from our Christian tradition but comes from Egyptian mythology. It is about Osiris.
When someone dies, as I have learned it, you die and go to the nether world of darkness to await being brought into the light. Before you can begin your life in the light, Osiris, god of the nether world takes your heart with all its imperfections and places it on a scale. He takes a single feather and places it on the other side of the scale. If your heart is as light as a feather, you can proceed to the light. That may be why the Egyptians left the heart in the mummified body and did not put it in a Canopian jar with the rest of the organs.
I have always liked that story. To make your heart as light as a feather means you must not take yourself too seriously but do God’s will, not your own. For me, that means receiving the Eucharist, Lectio Divina, Divine Office, Spiritual Reading, and Rosary as often as I can. For me, it means that I avail myself of the gifts that God Himself gave those still remaining on earth to help them in their struggle to keep their hearts light, i.e., the Eucharist, Forgiveness of Sins, Penance, Repentance, and the Sacraments.
It is not too late to lighten your burden of stuff that you have accumulated over the years. In any event, you would probably not make it through security with St. Peter.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
When someone gives you a gift, such as Christmas time or your birthday, you naturally think of money, expensive articles of clothing or fancy kitchen appliances. Most of these gifts are what we want, not what we need.
What gifts would God give us to help us achieve the purpose of life (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34)? What are those bits of help, those tools, those footprints in the snow for us to follow, those snatches of wisdom from the Prophets, Apostles, and Saints to guide us through the briar patch of original sin and its false becomings and promises? God would not abandon his adopted sons and daughters to the Evil One. Consistent with natural law, he would give us how to find our North on the compass of life but not do it for us. He would tell us He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life but not make the journey of life for us. He would tell us, like the story of Lazarus that we have the Moses and the Prophets. (Luke 16:16-31).
We keep asking God to be merciful to us, but there is an interesting take on this in Matthew 6:9-13, also known as the Lord’s Prayer. Instead of an individual asking for forgiveness, Jesus takes it one step further. He says, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Notice here that mercy and forgiveness from God are contingent on how we forgive others. It is all about the sincerity of the heart, of course, known only to God.
It is prideful of us to think God will automatically forgive us. Something to think about when you are judging others as not being what you think Jesus wants them to be.
Here is a thought: did we evolve the notion of forgiveness as in natural selection? From what did it evolve? If it did evolve from us, current the state of affairs with political opportunism the new morality of the masses, makes me wonder how far we have evolved from our animal ancestors. There is too much hatred in the world, and Satan is exploiting weak minds and hearts all in the name of freedom from anyone telling them what God thinks It is classic idolatry. There will be a price to pay. To remain on this path much longer will result in enduring God’s wrath that will blot out the hatred as sure as Sodom and Gomorrah. Wait and see!
Mercy and forgiveness of each other lead to fierce love which banishes hatred. I must emphasize that only God’s love banishes hatred, not love as the world defines it.
What follows is an excerpt from my book on God’s mercy, entitled For Behold, I Make All Things New. You can find it in the Store section of this blog.
“Jesus did not go to all the trouble to become one of us, only to abandon us to our own self-destructive tendencies. Not one of us could survive the journey to Heaven. Genesis tells of our roots as living in a world of sin, original or archetypal sin, being alienated from God, complaining about pain, prone to the vagaries of nature and ultimately dying. The profound Genesis statement is that everything around us, including ourselves, is subject to decay, aging, and eventually death. It was to be the purpose of Jesus, Son of God, to provide us with the opportunity to reach Heaven if we so chose. There was one catch. We would still have to live out our lives in a condition of alienation and decay. I call that condition the effects of original sin. That is why we still have problems focusing on the purpose of life and your purpose of life. That is also why spirituality is a struggle and why we sin, sin meaning we miss the mark of loving God with all our hearts and minds and our neighbor as our self, (Deuteronomy 6:4 and Matthew 22:34 ff) Jesus became one of us to show us how to overcome the effects of original sin and to live…Forever. Jesus told us, in effect, I will show you the path to everlasting life, but you must still walk it yourself and it is not without difficulties. Just because your road is rocky doesn’t mean you are on the wrong road. I will give you my own energy (grace) to help sustain you, but you must still struggle with living in a world that does not know me. Those who use these gifts, and there are seven of them and persevere to the end, will make it to Heaven. It won’t be easy, says our Master, but neither was my dying on the cross. It is the price you must pay to be my disciple. These lessons focus on one of the seven gifts of grace Jesus gave us, Forgiveness. To use a dialectic example, Forgiveness is the antithesis of original sin, the thesis is the decay and death of all matter and time. The synthesis is living with God Forever, the restoration of the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, the fulfillment of our destiny as human beings. Each day is a lifetime of trying to love God with all your heart, mind and strength but failing. These reflections are the product of my Lectio Divina contemplation and, hopefully, will provide you with some insights into how to take up your cross daily and seek Christ Jesus.” –Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D.
That in all things, may God be glorified, –St. Benedict
One of the things I like about science and the discovery of wonderful, new ideas is the ability to wonder about things and make hypotheses about why they exist. The human mind is made to wonder about why something is and to try to find solutions to perplexing problems. When I have a computer problem with either software or hardware, I am more excited about all the ways something can work and why it does not work. It is thrilling, actually.
Since my view of reality is not only the physical universe (what is and how it is) and the mental universe (what is it is, why it is and when it is) but also the spiritual universe (where does it all fit and why it is), I wonder about things both visible and invisible, things measured with instrument, things reasoned with logic, and faith informed by reason.
Here are some of my Lectio Divina meditations and contemplations based on Philippians 2:5. I have no idea why they popped into my head, but they did. Are you listening, Holy Spirit?
WONDER IF… spiritual reality is no la-la land, as some try to tell me, but actually what is most real, a sign of contradiction with physical and mental universes.
WONDER IF…each universe (physical, mental and spiritual) has its own measuring stick for what is real and what is true.
WONDER IF…it is impossible to measure the spiritual universe with the yardstick of the physical or mental universes. No wonder science mocks spirituality as being too subjective and mushy. If I used their assumptions about invisible reality, I would reach the same conclusion.
WONDER IF…The measuring stick of spirituality is not material at all, but invisible. The measurement of the Spirit is love ( John 10:6-18) and the tools are Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34. http://www.ecatholic2000.com/benedict/rule.shtml
WONDER IF…you won a Pulitzer Prize for Mathematics, could solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, have a doctorate in Theoretical Mathematics, but fail to discover the reason we have reason and the existence of pure energy.
WONDER IF…as the scientist, Teilhard de Chardin said, love is the greatest energy and it is so far beyond us that we are mere infants in our quest for discovering one, unified reality.
WONDER IF…we can actually take our dog and/or cat with us to Heaven (to be fair, all animals). Christ takes us to Heaven with him, and we can take our beloved pets with us, if we know how. Do you?
WONDER IF…God spoke to you in contemplation that you could take any reality you want with you when you go to heaven. You are only allowed one suitcase, but what a suitcase that it. It contains the Golden Thread with which you bind all things together to God’s glory. You can bind a sunset when you link it with gratitude for God’s goodness to us. You can thread a Bach chorale or Tocatta and Fugue with it when it reminds you of the great majesty of the Creator.
WONDER IF…you have the strength to love with Dark Love, that elusive but most powerful part of genuine unconditional love. Dark love is not evil or even dark in the bad sense. Dark Love is the ability to love people who hate you, do good to those who speak all manner of ill against you and Jesus, love Jesus when you have a terminal illness without complaint or hatred, forgive those who have wronged you, especially your family, the closest ones to you. Dark love is the price Jesus paid for our redemption, the temptation he had in the Garden of Gethsemani to let this purpose pass from him, to forgive those who crucified him with the words, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
WONDER IF…you are a pilgrim in a foreign land, a land that does not know Jesus as Lord, a place where Scriptures are not meant to be lived out as a way to follow Christ. People say the words, “God,” “Christ,” “Church,” “Peace,” but have a radically divergent view about what that means, even among themselves. It is a place of false teachings, true teachings, heroic acts of charity by nonbelievers, and sins committed against children and the innocent by those entrusted to bear the good news to the whole world.
WONDER IF…you learned how to overcome your inadequacies and began to feel the presence of God’s energy through contemplation, if only through a foggy glass.
WONDER IF…you hold that death is the end, like an old television set that loses its picture and just fades away to a point of nothingness. You have no hope that there is anything but you as your center, the meaning of life.
WONDER IF…you don’t hold that the Church is the living body of Christ in the world, composed of those living, those awaiting purification for their sins, and those triumphant in Heaven. Any consequences?
WONDER IF…you die and find out that you will be judged each one according to the deeds and not be given a free pass to Heaven after leading a life of libertarian thinking and acting as though you were God, even though you believe God’s grace douses you with grace. Would that change your behavior now? It would mine.
WONDER IF…you woke up one day and found out the world was to end in five minutes.
WONDER IF…all this fuss about which religion is right and whose God can beat your God is so much smoke screen. There can be only one truth as God is one. So, pick a religion or none at all. Why did you pick it? Is it consistent with reason to the extent we know about it? Is it apostolic? It is one, not just now, but from the times of the Apostles? It is universal, open to all who profess that Jesus Christ is Son of God, Savior?
That in all things, may God be glorified.–St. Benedict
Whoa! Wait a minute! Are you saying there is such a thing as being spiritually depressed? Yes, I am! What follows are my reflections from Lectio Divina meditation and contemplation on Philippians 2:5. I asked the question, what are aberrations or dysfunctions of the spirit. What follows is what I received back and wrote in my book, Is Your Life Running on Empty? Moving beyond spiritual depression. Find it in the Store section of this blog.
ARE YOU SPIRITUALLY DEPRESSED?
“You can’t commit a sin unless you are spiritually depressed. The reason you choose what you want over what God wants is that you always choose what is best for you. Sin means what you choose is not good for you and, if you don’t get rid of it, it may kill you.”
Are you spiritually ailing and depressed?
Are the questions on the following pages true for you? When you have reached the end of the section entitled, “Are You Spiritually Depressed?” go back to the beginning and re-read the section on “What Is Your Center?” So little is known of spiritual depression and its interaction with the mental and spiritual universes in which we find ourselves. The interface between body, mind, and spirit is just now being taken seriously. We, humans, are joined at the hip with our spirituality, like it or not. When we talk about spirituality, we usually talk in terms of unseen things, like love, peace, justice. Love, peace, and justice do not live in an invisible world but are made real through us. If you are spiritually depressed, you won’t be able to “see” the spiritual dimension to life. The dark side of the human psyche is capable of the most heinous crimes and unspeakable grievances against humanity. Witness the rash of pedophile priests uncovered or the discovery of genocide, both symptoms of spiritual depression in either individuals or societies. Why do people do those things? The troubling fact is, any of us are capable of all of the above, given the right circumstances. Except for the grace of God.
If you think that no one loves you, you may have symptoms of a spiritual headache. Spiritual depression is the headache of the spirit.
The physical universe is linked to the mental universe, and the fate of both are inexorably bound up with the spiritual universe. All three are separate dimensions, yet one reality. Evolution happens in all three universes. Being African American, Native American, European American, or any other ethnic tribe is not the same as having a human nature. We share human nature together, we may not share our ethnic backgrounds. Is that bad? No, is it a fact.
Spiritual depression means my human nature is not acting in accordance with its intended purpose. There is dissonance in my space, my frame of reality. I have an existential headache. If you have a spiritual headache, you need to take some spiritual medicine, some spiritual aspirin, if you will, to help you gain perspective. Curing a spiritual headache is not that easy. You must first cure the body and the then the mind. Spiritual depression feeds upon the vacuum of meaning created by the mind.
The following statements in the next few pages came from those who may be spiritually depressed. Grace produces change because you are hooked up to the energy of God, and not your own self-contained power source. When you are spiritually depressed, there is a short-circuit in the flow of energy between your physical, mental and spiritual universes. These universes must be aligned because they were intended to produce grace. When you read scriptures and are depressed, nothing will happen. Why is that? You read the words. You comprehend the words. Nothing happens because the power that flows from pure energy is shorted out. It takes time. Be patient! You are the living conductor that channels the flow of energy from God through you to the physical universe and mental universes. If you want to have God’s energy inside you, you must put it there. Everything spiritual is bound up with the freedom of choice and the ability to choose wisely.
Depression Speak
“How could God possibly love someone like me?”
Remember your center? You can’t have both hate and love in the same center? If you keep hatred at your center, you will be spiritually depressed. Having momentary thoughts of hating someone is not necessarily harmful, but it may not be good if they continue to dominate a relationship. If so, all teenagers would be condemned for hating their parents. Hatred is evil because it keeps the energy of the spiritual life from surging through your body and mind. Hatred only destroys those who hate. You can’t hate and be in Heaven. Hatred is a sign you are spiritually depressed. If you are stuck in a hatred
mode, which some are, you can’t love yourself, as the Master suggested. The Master asked us to get rid of hatred, even towards those who have wronged us, like a former spouse. Why is that? Is it easy? Not at all, but it brings spiritual healing. You will know you are a disciple of The Master when you can forgive those who wrong you. You are called to transform what is sinful into what is graceful, but not without help.
Depression Speak
“I hate my former husband or wife for what they did to me.”
Changing a flat tire is part of the journey. If you have been changing it year after year, without learning that you need a spare in the trunk, you are spiritually depressed. You have not learned from your mistakes. Where do you get the spare tire? Spiritual depression means you are so out of focus that you fail to check to see if your spare has air in it, or is even in the trunk. Life will give you setbacks, like the death of a child, the loss of a fortune, your own impending death, the loss of a spouse, severe deformity, and possibly even rape. How do you cope with these set backs? Do you have a spare ready? Your spare is forgiveness. Forgiveness always leads to reconciliation, but it begins with you. You may fall into spiritual depression because you do not seek God’s energy to help you. Forgiveness is not forgetting what happened. It means you are enlightened to see that you are off center and you consciously and willingly want to get back on the correct path.
If life is a journey, are you changing a flat tire on the side of the road only to find you don’t have a spare? Recently, I had a person stop at the door and tell me I had the wrong Christian denomination and that I was destined for hell unless I changed. They looked angry and hateful when they were talking. I asked them if they thought it peculiar that they were trying to change my God for their God. They were stunned! What they wanted was to have me join their denomination, which had a particular point of view about life. I told them that our two religions were so different and that I was, with God’s grace, willing to die for that difference. They left no doubt thinking I was going to perdition and that they were doing God’s will. We all play God games in the guise of truth, don’t we? Be careful in thinking that your religion is so superior that you fail to notice that you fit into God’s plan, not vice versa. You are not God! Pride precedes the Fall of Adam and Eve, you know. You can preach the good news. You may not judge. The part we forget is, God will ultimately judge all of us, weighing the lightness of our heart against the Truth, the Way, and the Life we led.
Do you find that attending church, which so often has been a source of comfort and inspiration, suddenly has become flat and lifeless? You attend the service. You try to listen to the sermon or message. You get up, when your turn comes, and go to communion, but there is nothing there. Have you lost your faith? You may just be spiritually depressed. The problem is not the church. The problem is not communion. The problem is not Holy Scriptures. The problem is not your spouse or your family. The problem is not even you. You are spiritually at odds with your mental and physical selves. You are out of alignment. This feeling, like a headache, is a symptom that something is out of balance. This, in turn, manifests itself in the misalignment of your spirit with your mind, and your body. Like the physical physician who can diagnose then treat illness, someone who is a spiritual coach or director can identify what blocks grace from flowing and they allow you to seek healing.
Do you feel like you are dying of thirst on an ocean of water? Your system will not tolerate salt water. In a similar way, your spiritual self cannot take the saltiness of hatred, envy, jealousy, lust, drunkenness, and still thrive. You have a spiritual temperature that is over “normal.” Spiritual depression means you do not give the spiritual life the life-giving water it needs to survive. The more you drink of sin, the more you are thirsty. We, humans, are destined for life with a being that is pure water for our spirit. Read John 4: 13-14. What is the water of life, the fountain of youth, the living water of which John speaks? Do you have a chance to drink this water? Spiritual depression means you drink, yet nothing happens. You need the water of life, but something keeps you from benefits. What could it be? Drinking the water of life while spiritually depressed is like drinking salt water. It won’t be effective until you take out the salt. Who can do that?
Are you obsessed with the spiritual life? Too much religion and not enough spirituality can lead to a religious depression. Much like a “smiling depression,” what is going on inside is not so evident. A true story: I had known Janice for five years. Each time we would pass in the hallway, she would be smiling and always greeted me with a spiritual comment about how good God was to her. Six months later, I found out that she was treated for severe depression, stemming from family problems. She held her emotions in check for fear of losing her job. She was a single parent. She turned to religion out of desperation, becoming obsessed with the spiritual universe. One problem: being depressed, she did not have the proper perspective. She drove everyone around her crazy with her rants and raves. She needed a psychiatrist to help her gain some equilibrium, not a minister. What is true for our physical and mental selves is also true for our spiritual self. Being obsessed with religion won’t make you any more spiritual, it may be a sign of spiritual depression. Treat the body first, then treat the spirit.
You can read the word of God all day long and quote scripture “until the cows come home,” yet if you don’t do what scripture tells you, you have missed the boat.
The Scriptures are the footprints of those who have taken the spiritual life and walked in it. It is a history of our failures and successes. It is the record of our wanderings and our awakenings. It is a guide for the perplexed mind. It is the Word translated into fl esh.
Have you ever heard of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, sometimes called SETI? Scientists have huge antennae facing the Heavens, listening for any signs of intelligent life out there. Did you know that you are the antenna that receives signals of pure energy from a power source so immense, it does not even live in our physical universe–not enough room. You, and you alone are the power source, the receiver, the universal translator, of pure thought, pure love, and pure service. Think of it! Why are you given such awesome responsibility by an alien being? The answer is as simple as it is complex: to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy one day in Heaven.
RESPONSIBLE FAITH
After you have prayed and prayed, and given yourself to God, but nothing happens, now what do you do? It is good to put your cares, your fortunes, your very center into the hands of God. It is better to realize that when you gave God your cares, God gave them right back to you. Have you noticed the transfer? God doesn’t take responsibility for your actions, God wants YOU to take ownership of your life, and show how His grace can set you free. Spiritual dumping is when you say that God’s will be done and let God worry about it. Nothing will ever happen when you dump responsibility on God. It is when God dumps grace or pure energy on you that you explode into a symphony of activity. You have heard it said, “How can a good God allow bad things to happen to the poor and children?” The real question is: How can YOU let bad things happen to the poor, widows, the elderly, and children? A Hurricane hitting the coast is not evil, a tornado cutting through Zenia, Ohio, is not evil in itself. If you are spiritually depressed, you won’t know the difference. You will be waiting for a phone call from God that will never come. You are the phone, the receiver, and the operator.
RESPONSIBLE CHARITY “Thy Will Be Done” means God trusts YOU to act as if God were here with you. Because you continue to be graced by God, you are responsible to make love take root around you. Going to church is good. Going to church to get the strength to deal with a broken marriage, a child who has been killed in an automobile accident, losing your life savings to a con-man, failure to get that job or promotion, humiliation at being called racist names, put down because you are a believer, is better. Going to church because you are in need of spiritual replenishment because you are the occasion for others to receive God’s grace, is best.
You are a conduit of goodness when others put you down. You are the lightning rod of patience when your family rages against you and calls you unforgivable names. You make love happen where ever you are. You can’t do that if you are spiritually depleted. Your cell phone needs recharging or it will run out of power in one to two days. In the same way, you will run out of spiritual energy, if you are not plugged into the source of pure energy. The Master is the resistor between the pure love of God and you. Otherwise, your circuits would be fried. No one comes to the Father except through the Son.
What are you doing giving your responsibility back to God? God wants to know if you can take it.
• Your purpose is to know, love and serve God while here, so we can be with that same God in Heaven. “…Thy Will Be Done On Earth As In Heaven.” Matthew 6:19
• You must let God’s grace work through you, with you, and in you so that the Father is given all honor and glory.
• When you are angry, jealous, have vengeance toward someone who has wronged you, want to kill someone, want to drink yourself silly every weekend, what to sleep with a different female every night for Twenty-five years, you can’t focus on God’s will. You have too many distractions. That is called spiritual depression. You may not even notice it.
St. Benedict says, in Chapter 4 of his Rule, that, if we do any good, God should be praised as the author of it, but that if we do any evil, we take full responsibility for our sins.
If you are a car, do you feel that you are long overdue for an alignment, yet too lazy to take yourself in? We all need alignments. No, not the science of chiropractic, but an alignment of our physical body, our mind, integrated with our spirit. If you are spiritually depressed, your plugs may be dirty, your timing might need adjustment, or you might need your tires aligned. As long as you remain on earth in your present body, you are governed by the physical laws of nature. Alignment won’t stop death, and alignment won’t prevent you from veering off the road of life if you have the wrong center. What it will do for you is fi ne tune your perspective so that you can see with the eyes of the body, think creatively with your mind, and choose what is good for your spirit. When your spirit touches God’s spirit, you have the energy to gain perspective, although one that lives in three universes, not just two. The challenge in life is to choose continuously what is authentic and true. Maintaining your spirituality, like taking your car in for a tune-up, takes time out of your busy schedule. Do you have time?
Is your light bulb burned out and you are just too tired to replace it? Laziness can be a sign of spiritual depression when it becomes avoidance. We always find time to do what we want, if it rewards us. The reason you are spiritually depressed is: YOU DON’T THINK GOD IS WORTH IT! You need to plug into the source of energy again. God is someone “out there, rather than in here.” You may be spiritually tired. Call it what you want, you just can’t see to get up in the morning on Sunday and go to church. You still believe. You still call yourself spiritual, but you just don’t have the will to go to church. Avoidance is a symptom that you may be spiritually depressed, much like a high temperature means something is wrong with the body. You are spiritually depressed and may be trying to avoid meeting God. Time management has a saying: you always have time to do what you think is good for you. See any parallels? Read Mark 4:21-25.
Why would you take the trouble to enter the spiritual universe only to hide the reason you make the commitment in the first place? Spirituality is about making all things new. That takes work.
Has someone you loved just died? Anger over someone who has passed through to be with God can be directed at that person for leaving you. You are so angry at your spouse for leaving you with the bills, not knowing about social security, not having any idea of finance. What was once taken care of by someone is not your responsibility. You may even resort to turning around your late spouse’s picture so you won’t have to look at it. Your anger may also be directed at God. If God is good, why did he take your spouse, your child, your loved one? How can a good God accept evil? As a result of negative thinking, you might slip into spiritual depression and not even know it. When you are angry at God, it is ironic that it is that same God who gets you out of your spiritual stupor. You can get into a DaVinci Code mentality that what is plausible must be true. Get a grip! My friend’s wife had just died. He told me that he was an atheist, but attended the Unitarian Universalist church. He ranted and raved about how God could be so cruel as to take his wife. Is there something wrong with this picture?
Do you find life boring? Your physical self is inexorably linked to your mental and spiritual selves. When there is a symptom in your behaviors that something is not quite right, you will see events as black and white. Some cultures think this way. The Ying and Yan are black and white. In these cultures, gray is ambiguous. Ambiguous is not good. If you are in the gray areas, you won’t even know that you are depressed. If you find God boring, God just smiles and gently gives you more time to discover what is truly meaningful. When God finds you boring, that is when you should worry. That won’t happen. Being bored with life means you have problems with purpose and meaning. If you always want to be served by others, you will lose the spiritual dimension. This asks the question, “What can you give to me?” Our Master wants us to ask, “What can you give to others?”
When your physical, mental, and spirituality universes are aligned, you have resonance. You can not be bored because your energy comes from God.
Do you think that money makes the world go around? If not, what does? More money won’t help a millionaire find authentic meaning. You can have all the money there is and still have that nagging feeling that you missed something in life. The answer is not more money. Where you do find purpose in your life? What price are you willing to pay to get it? Money may buy you respect. Money may command the attention of others when you check into a luxury hotel. Money may buy you boats, buildings, blondes, and bonds. Money won’t buy you love, or spirituality. You are destined to find meaning all by yourself. You are not alone, of course, but you are born, live in the company of other humans, and then die alone. Spirituality provides you with the perspective that says, “I am one with the source of all energy. I have a purpose. I need to be here, now.”
God’s Bed and Breakfast is waiting for those who want to check in. When you are clinically depressed, you often want to sleep all day. When you are spiritually depressed, oddly enough, you may often want to just sit read the Bible, without having a thought in your mind about God. In the mental universe, relationships are too difficult to endure, so you want to be alone. In the spiritual universe, depression is a lack of meaning and focus. You know you should attend church, have meaning in your life, but nothing happens. You feel guilty. Spiritual depression is dissonance of the Spirit, your lack of alignment with your physical, mental, and spiritual selves, and your inability to communicate fully with the energy you need to sustain yourself as spiritual. Like any depression, it may not go away without help. Don’t forget to cure the mind as well as the spirit. The two are inexorably linked together. If you are spiritually depressed, you will get a bill. All your food will taste bland. You won’t be able to enjoy it because the spirit in you is not in sync with your physical and mental selves.
Do you have a spiritual headache that won’t go away? We mentioned earlier that headaches are physiological signs that something is wrong with us. It may be stress, allergies, sinusitis or something more serious. A spiritual headache is a symptom that shows itself by what you say, what you do, or by what you don’t do. When you think your religion is better than anyone else’s; when you hate other people who hold differing spiritual views from your own; when you make pompous moral judgements about who will go to your view of Heaven; when you continue to lust after your neighbor’s wife or husband; when your center is filled with lust to the exclusion of true love, then you have a disconnect between your physical, mental and spiritual selves. You are not one in the spirit, you are out of spiritual alignment. You are spiritually depressed. Read Galatians 5. That slight discomfort, the tension you feel, the anxiety you notice, the impatience you feel when you touch core values or meaningful insights, is symptomatic of a spiritual headache. Will you die from it? No! However, spiritual depression may kill your spiritual universe, if not treated. You will surely die from that. Don’t stay in a state of sinfulness.
If you are in a state of sin, you are spiritually depressed. It seems like we got away from sin when we entered the age of enlightenment in the 1960’s. Maybe that was the beginning of our Modern Dark Age, the Age of Self Indulgence. No one knew where sin fit when God was supposed to be so good. If you look at the world and the mess the human race is in, you can see we only fooled ourselves. Sin is still here. It will always be with us. Original sin is the confirmation that our race has not evolved to a point where we can fully control our urges. We do it sometimes, and sometimes we fall on our face. Thank goodness God has a sense of humor. I am not talking about one peccadillo, but rather a prolonged state of alienation from God’s energy. This is like a state of depression. Depression breeds depression in the same way that sin breeds more sin. They are both related. Depression can cause you to enter into temptation and think that what is fun is good for you. If you have a center that is not at one with God, you may be spiritually depressed. Your destiny is not with evil, it is with God. God is not dead, but you may be spiritually depressed. Making all things new means you re-center or realign your realities.
Sin sucks! You may be saying, “I don’t believe you said that!” Think about it! Sin is a symptom of spiritual depression. Sin means that God and I are at-odds. In other words, I am not at-one with my center, or I may have the wrong center. If you have the wrong center, there is a disruption in the harmony between the physical, mental, and spiritual universes in which you live. When you don’t feel just right, it is because your universes are not aligned properly with your intended destiny — to be with God…Forever. Sin means you are not fulfilling the purpose for which you are intended. You act like an animal and not as a human. You grace tank may not be on empty, but your tank just got a bit emptier. Sin not only sucks, but it drains your spiritual energy. The Master prayed that we not be led into temptation. What do you think that meant? Your destiny is to know, love and serve God on this earth, and be happy with God in Heaven. Everything else in life is gravy. Some will never comprehend this because they are spiritually depressed. Open yourself to the possibility of the manifestibility of pure energy, pure Being. You can’t believe how exciting that is.
LEARNING POINTS
1. If you are spiritually depressed, you may not even notice it.
2. If you have the wrong center, chances are high that you are spiritually depressed.
3. If you are in a state of sin, chances are high that you are spiritually depressed.
4. If you are chronically angry or negative, chances are high that you are spiritually depressed.
5. If you are physically and mentally depressed, you may not be able to cure spiritual depression until you first cure the other two universes. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, you know.
6. You are destined to be with God in Heaven. If you are not aligned correctly, you may be spiritually depressed, until you fulfill your destiny by realignment.
I recently wrote a blog about the Fermi Paradox. It may or may not be a paradox but it asks the question, where is everybody out there? We haven’t found so much as a hiccup from SETI, or an organic molecule of life, much less sentient life. According to statistics, there should be life out there and probably is. Like dark matter, much of what we know about extra terrestrial life is hidden in darkness.
Here is a sobering thought: out of all species of animals or plants, why are humans the only ones in our brief history to develop reason? Even then, not everyone uses their reason to full advantage. There are so many competing ideologies seeking to influence the way we reason. So again, what is the reason we have reason?
Science, to its credit, wants to get away from the imprecise reasoning of an individual, subject belief. The problem comes into play when speaking of freedom to hold an opinion, even one contrary to the prevailing political correctness of this or that special interest group. In looking at the bigger picture, something that rises to the level of humanity and not this or that slice of the pie, we have the opportunity to reason even though what we reason may not be reasonable. When was the last time you asked a giraffe to lunch? Do gorillas go the Trader Joe’s to get pork chops? What we take for granted, that we humans are unique in the world, and maybe even in the universe, is astounding.
What is even more astounding to me is how we have come this far without wiping out the race due to hatred, intolerance, and nationalism. Even the Church is not immune to assuming the false trappings of monarchical elitism. One of the worst blunders we have made as a Church was to have it made the state church with Constantine, modeling a monarchical structure with all its pomp and circumstances. We are still trying to shuck off that debacle.
Well, here we stand, as Luther said, we can do no other. Human existence is most definitely in process of discovering meaning. Right now, it does not look so good.
Here are five reasons that I think our human race has developed reason, and only in the last two hundred years, grown to learn from what went before us.
All this leads me to these thoughts. The purpose of life, the reason for reason, the ability to love unconditionally, the foresight to see patterns of historical relevance as God tries to tell us how to get to Heaven, the strength to live beyond our five senses and choose our true self as opposed to what the world sees as meaningful, the ability to communicate with the One and fulfill God’s purpose for us, the choice of my own personal center of reality, how all of this fits together in one reality with three universes, the ability to love fiercely, and how to die well, all depend upon faith informed by reason.
It is no accident that we have the ability to know about the world around us. Part of evolving spiritual awareness, that includes why were are here, and what our role is in preparing for a life to come, is to recognize patterns of progression in thinking and believing. Evolution aside, humans made it through the gauntlet of gene ontology with something no other species has attained, the ability to know that we know and based on that unique quality, to know, love and serve God in this life and to be happy with God in the next.
Humans are spiritual apes, in terms of future natural progression, not just descendants from our animal past. I detail some of these ideas in my three volume reflections entitled Spiritual Apes, which you can access in the Book section of this blog.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
As part of my Lectio Divina, I sometimes get bizarre thoughts and ideas. I was trying to meditate on my Lectio (reading or saying, which is always Phil 2:5) and the fact that humans have frequent temptations to stretch the truth to our own convenience (to make ourselves into God). Quite naturally, I thought of Procrustes. The following is from Wikipedia:
“In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis.[1] There he had a bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith’s hammer, to stretch them to fit. In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; nobody ever fit the bed exactly.[2] Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, traveling to Athens along the sacred way, who “fitted” Procrustes to his own bed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
The procrustean bed is one of the pitfalls of thinking that happens when we think we are god and thus truth is made in our own image and likeness. Naturally, with that view, what does not fit into our “truth” must be either stretched or lopped off to suit our own pleasure. It is classic sin of Adam and Eve. Read Genesis 3. To put it another way, when we place ourselves as the center of our lives, we have a fool for a god. A side effect of this thinking is that each individual is a god, or a church, or the rule of law. It is no coincidence that thinking you are god is the very first of the Commandments God gave to Moses.
There are only two ways to approach reality: one is that you are god, and the other is that God is God.
I AM GOD — Let me lead you down the slippery slope of logic, if you take this path, If you are your own god, there will be no one who can tell you that you are mistaken, no one to challenge your assumptions. Faith becomes belief, belief becomes the center of your life, but also, unfortunately, the center of all reality. You become your own religion, your own church, your own belief system, even if you belong to a church. Why? You are convinced of your certitude because Scripture, as you believe it, it fits your conception of what religion is. No exceptions. Even in secular society, with its disdain for anything that even mentions God stuff, you can notice the struggle of our US Supreme Court to view the Constitution as one of the individual rights versus States and Government rights. Those who lean to the right are called strict constitutionalists and those who tilt to the left are called progressives, those who believe the laws serve the people and not the other way around. It is a tension that permeates religion, spirituality, politics, the law, and even your job.
GOD IS GOD — Genesis, that marvelous commentary on the struggle of human nature to choose self over God, reminded me in my Lectio meditation that those who do accept God as God are suddenly faced with the struggle to decide between what the world wants (I am God) verses what God wants (God is God). If you think that this is simple, think again. Many “isms” claim that they have the truth, that their God is God and not your God. I call it playing God games. It is no coincidence that the tree of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The big question, the elephant in the room is, whose approach is correct and, even more importantly, who tells you whose approach is correct? Well, there it is! Like the television program, Naked and Afraid, we face truth in our all-together.
No wonder science looks at religion and spirituality and utters cries of contempt and disbelief. Logic is abandoned in favor of faith (depending on each individual). No one can tell you what is right but you alone. Of course, the big problem with that is you may not be correct. as the basis for what you believe. You have the right to your assumptions but your assumptions may not be right (correct). If so, you do not have the truth, even if you are convinced you are in the right. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, says our Master.
This is an age old problem and one also faced by those Apostles who were filled with the Holy Spirit and told to go out and preach the good news. Imagine! No books except the Torah, no cheat sheet of what Jesus said, each one would have to preach from the experiences he had with Jesus and the disciples. As time went by, St. Paul and his School would chronicle the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and why. These letters eventually made their way into a book called the New Testament but only after several centuries of discernment and usage.
The big problem in the early formation of the Body of Christ was the same struggle we face today: who determines what is from God and is not. If each person can determine what is from God, then the church as we know it today would never have survived. It would not have assimilated the Gentiles and morphed from the Old Testament prophets and teachings into the New Testament which allowed non-Jews and unbelievers to enter the Body. Read Romans 1:1-7. What a radical departure yet the natural progression predicted by Jesus in John 5:40-47. The approval is from the Father through the Son.
It is no wonder that the first expressions of communal faith were contained in the Apostles Creed, and later on in the Nicene Creed. Creeds are a very early statement of what all should hold as true. They are the concentrated orange juice of the early church, the core of what it means to be a follower of the Master. It would take centuries to mix the water of martyrdom and heresies with these truths. It is an attempt by a yet undefined Church, struggling with its Jewish teachings and rituals, to reach out to all who will listen. It is in this uniformity of belief based on authority transferred by Christ to the Apostles that allowed them to receive the Holy Spirit and pass it on to this budding movement with truth from God, not from individuals who wish to be god, like Adam and Eve.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I have determined that I want God as my center. To keep myself honest and not prideful, I must continuously renounce my old self to allow God to enter. I do that in the presence of community, which keeps me honest and the Church, which is a watchful mother that warns me when I take myself too seriously. I try, with many failures, to take up my cross daily and follow Christ. It is the time I take to carry that load that is important, as well as my final destination.
LEARNING POINT
You don’t want to be one who sleeps in a procrustean bed. Remember Procrustes? He died sleeping in the bed he designed and had his legs chopped off.
That in all things, may God be glorified. –St. Benedict
Life may be like a set of train tracks, but with one difference. Did you know you are on an inexorable trip to Omega and might not even be aware of it? Here are some ideas I had while doing Lectio Divina contemplation before the Blessed Sacrament last week. They are nothing short of mind-blowing.
Omega, as I use it here and write about in my 3 book series entitled Spiritual Apes, (see Books section in this blog) is something I learned about from Scriptures from Revelations 1:8, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord God, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” (DRA). Another writer that caught my attention was the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., a Jesuit paleontologist who wrote the book The Phenomenon of Man. He stated that all matter, visible and invisible, was moving toward one point in the future called Omega. His book interested me because he theorized that all matter and time was like a dart board with concentric circles evolving toward one point which he called the Christo-sphere. Sounds like a Jesuit, doesn’t it? At the time, in 1962, I was just a first-year seminarian. Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, had had his writings condemned by ecclesiastical authorities. I liked that a scientist was trying to put forward a plausible theory that reality was one, with science, philosophy, and spirituality being different components, like the story of the six blind men of Calcutta. I have put my spin on this just like thousands of others before me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Where was I? O yes, one point in the future. Later on in life, I added in the notion that God is one (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). So, the One point is not a thing, a destination or composed of time or matter. It is a person composed of pure energy, pure thought, and pure service. I use the word “pure” in the context of someone using 100% of his nature. God’s nature, of course, is divine and we don’t even have a way to measure what that is, EXCEPT to look at Philippians 2:5-12, which happens to be the purpose of my life. Coincidence, don’t you think? Hardly!
Which brings me to the train tracks. When I look at train tracks, I see that they look like they are coming to a point, way down the line. Here is the one point of difference, they don’t ever come to a point. In trying to look at Point Omega, where I believe we are headed, first of all, it is an invisible point. You know what they say about invisibility, don’t you? The problem with invisibility is you can’t see it. Let me put it another way. Science has not yet devised an instrument to measure pure energy, much less agree on one point in the future. Yet, using our human reason, we can augment faith and propose what is reasonable (faith informed by reason) about that which we cannot see. St. Paul says we look at reality with foggy glasses and only see dimly. See I Corinthians 13:12.
These are interesting thoughts to me. Maybe that is because I turn 77 next month and am pushing the Pearly Gates. As St. Benedict says, that in all things, may God be glorified.
LEARNING POINT
There is so much more to learn about science, philosophy and the human mind, but also spirituality. These three are one.
That title statement cannot be correct, can it? Think about it! If God is one, an assumption which I hold, then all that is real is contained in The One. There is no two.
As part of my Lectio Divina contemplation, I reflected on this statement. Over the centuries, we have piled up belief upon belief until the sheer objects of our faith are complicated and hardly simple. One of the side effects of this piling on is our difficulty to distinguish what is essential from what is nice but not at the core of our spirituality. As an example, we hold that the Eucharist is the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, but we also hold that we should go to Eucharist every Sunday. One is at the core of my faith and one is a discipline. They are both important but not equal.
Let me get real simple. If you had to point out one sentence in the whole Scriptures that sums up what everything else is about, what would that be? What is the one center that, if you took it away, nothing else would sustain God’s purpose in life for you? God told us what that was. Do you know? Look up Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:34. This is the only thing we must do in our lifetime to be one with The One.
Think about it and I will give you more to look up next time.
“That in all things, God is glorified.” –St. Benedict
The following blog is excerpted from my book, What Happens to You When Your Pet Dies: Spirituality for Pet Owners. See section in Books.
You can lose a pet in an accident, or it can run away, or you may have to terminate its life due to illness or old age.
We care so much for our pets so much, that it is difficult when we lose them. It is almost unbearable to give permission to terminate your pet’s life. That is your human side showing itself. Why is that?
Are we humans instinctively protecting life? We are the prime species of animals on earth. We are bonded with our pets by our common ancestry. The reason we hate to have our pet put to sleep is our deep, innate respect for all life. It is part of our spiritual blueprint. We don’t put our old human grandparents to sleep when they get old. Why not? When I was a boy, our family has had to put several dogs, some cats, and two horses to death. It was not easy. Maybe we felt guilty because our animal companions always gave us their affection readily. Our pets were part of the family in a very real sense. When they ran away, we got depressed. Why is that? It is easier to lose a pet to an auto accident than to have to make the decision to put it to sleep. Why is that? We grieve for our pets as much as we would for a family member. Why is that?
Our pet is one of the family. When it dies, we grieve as though we have lost a member of the family.
Pets do not live in the human world. They live only in the physical world. Everything in the physical world lives, procreate, survives and then dies.
If humans lived only in the physical universe, like our animal friends, I would have no problem with assisted suicide or even genocide. Who cares? You live, you breed, and you die. The default for our species is life, not death. For humans, we have a choice to be merely human, living only in two universes of physical and mental, or we can choose to live…Forever.
It’s that pesky, spiritual universe that keeps getting in the way. When your center is pure knowledge, pure love, pure energy or service, life is not yours to give or take. It is yours to discover and sustain.
When an animal dies, our relationship with them dies, too. We cherish them in our minds…Forever. We can be closer to our pet than we are to family members. Why is that? Is that bad? What are the limitation of that relationship?
Pets are not human. Only humans live in the mental world. This is the world of reason.
Why is it that we have such a love for animals and make some of them our pets? We share the physical world with all living things. Do Aardvarks prepare your annual taxes? Of course not, you get an accountant. Why do humans have the ability to reason whereas aardvarks simply eat, sleep, procreate, and die? Our pets are not human. Pets cannot respond to you as human, even though we speak to them as though they were our bosom buddies. We tell them our most intimate thoughts, those we would not even share with our spouse, and all they do is give us unconditional affection in return. Pets respond to us according to their nature, not ours. Pets cannot form a human relationship with us. That would have happened between God and humans, were it not for The Master helping us connect with the spiritual universe. Pets don’t go to Heaven, because they are not human. But, because you are spiritual, you can take all of your animal friends to Heaven with you, if you link them to God’s will. Do you know how to do that? It is as simple as wishing it to be so. Everything you value prepares your framework for the life to come.
We take care of pets because we also come from animal stock.
Humans are animals PLUS the ability to reason. We know that we know. We are spiritual apes, in one sense, the result of billions of years of evolution. How else can you explain our lack of development, our sinfulness, our fixation on hatred, war, and power? Human animals are capable of much, much more. We are in the process of maturing as a race. We are just infants in our collective maturity. As an individual, you live not only in the physical world but also in the mental world. Your pet only lives in the physical world. Way down deep, you take care of your pets because you come from the same genetic stuff. You have well over 98% of DNA in common with Chimpanzees. You are not an animal in the same way a possum is. So, what makes you so special? God! We still act like animals sometimes. That tension is called temptation, and we fight it as long as we are breathing. Humans are spiritual apes. Deny it, or affirm it, the fact is, we developed from animals, but with a BIG difference. God gave us reason and free will and made us in His image and likeness. When looking at that helpless kitty at the Animal Shelter, you naturally want to protect it and take it home with you. I do.
We are sad when a pet is sick or in trouble.
We are the care-giver for our pet. We feed it, nurse it when it is sick, spend time loving it by brushing its hair, talking to it, touching it. You must remember that you did not lose a pet, because it was never yours to begin with. You were just the care giver. Your pet is free to be itself. Your pet is not human, even though you grieve for it. Pets can grieve for their companions, but with a difference. Your animal friend can’t put death into any type of perspective. It is only a loss. There is no hope. Humans are the only ones who are not free to be animals. Ironically, it is freedom and choice that are the characteristics of being human. When your pet is sick, what does it do? It is difficult to heal itself. Humans can heal animals. When our pets have cancer, and need surgery, we have the technology to help them. They need our friendship. One of the good things about being spiritual is, we can take our pets with us to Heaven. Heaven is like a containment area God makes to give us a reference point. It is populated with those experiences we linked to God’s will, while we were on earth. That includes all our pets and life experiences that are consistent with who God is.
Reflections on Losing My PetLosing a pet reminds me of my animal heritage. Pets share my early roots, my stock, my genes, and my heritage. Pets are not human, but of all the life forms, they make me reflect on my humanity more than any other. Button is my pet, but she has never once jumped up on my lap. My wife is the mommy cat. I am useless, unless she wants to talk to someone. She is pure Himalayan, and so independent, I’d swear she is a perpetual teenager. My wife and I have cared for Button and has raised her from a tiny kitten, covered in fleas. Button was actually depressed, when my wife went out-of-town for four weeks. I took her to the Vet for signs of depression. When Button is sick now, we are there, just as we would be for our daughter. My wife and I acted according to our nature, caring for the lower species. Buttons is not human. She responds according to her nature — she responds to kindness, the need for food, stroking, and especially kitty treats. We cried when we lost Buttons. Buttons won’t know she is dead. We buried her after linking her with God’s will to our journey. I hope there are no kitty litter boxes in Heaven. |
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| That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict |
The following excerpt is from my book entitled, For Behold, I Make All Things New: A Lay Cistercian reflects on mercy, forgiveness, confession and penance to grow in faith, love, and service.
I can remember it very well. I stood as high as my little toes would allow and had mom measure how tall I was. Since 3rd Grade, I stood there solemnly every year on my birthday and got measured. I could see the lines growing up and up, until my last measurement, in 8th Grade. My crowing achievement was to actually see that I was taller then my mom. Measures are ways to predict time and direction, as well as growth in the spirit, if you have the correct measuring stick. Here is one way I use to tell if I am with reality. This is what I wrote in my book.
(Write a short center statement here.)
Here are some ideas about how to choose an authentic center. Your center should…
Your purpose of life is the measuring rod to see how you close you are to God’s purpose. If you choose a center, you will have difficulty maintaining it, if it is authentic. The reason is original sin. Think of not cleaning or dusting or cutting grass at your house for two months. No laundry, no washing dishes, no fixing spills, just let nature be natural. If we let our human nature go, it would be like your house. This is living in two universes. Without a purpose that is linked to God’s reality, you have no way to overcome the effects of original sin, no way to clean up your house. As a Lay Cistercian I try to follow the practices and charisms of those before me, so that I can free myself from the effects of original sin.
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
The following description is a synopsis of my forthcoming work, whatever you want to call it, entitled THRIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF PURE ENERGY: A Lay Cistercian reflects on invisible reality, The Mystery of Faith, and Eucharistic Adoration. It should be completed in September, 2017.
You may not have heard of Mrs. Murphy, the fictional centerpiece of the late Fr. Aidan Kavanaugh’s writings on sacramental theology. He was a monk, Professor of Liturgics at Yale University, and died in 2008. In 1964, While attending Aidan Kavanaugh’s lectures on sacramental theology and reality at St. Meinrad School of Theology, all of us met Mrs. Murphy, although I confess I did not realize the profound meaning she held back then. Now, I am merely a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit, lucky to even comment about life around me and certainly not an eloquent apologist for any approach to liturgics. In this book, Mrs. Murphy looms large as an archetype of us all, an Adam and Eve for relations with the Sacred. Let me use a quote from Fr. Aidan to give you a sense of his eloquent thinking. https://catholicsensibility.wordpress.com/2007/02/10/remembering-aidan-kavanagh/
“The liturgical assembly is thus a theological corporation and each of its members a theologian. . . . Mrs. Murphy and her pastor are primary theologians whose discourse in faith is carried on not by concepts and propositions nearly so much as in the vastly complex vocabulary of experiences had, prayers said, sights seen, smells smelled, words said and heard and responded to, emotions controlled and released, sins committed and repented, children born and loved ones buried, and in many other ways no one can count or always account for.” (On Liturgical Theology, Chapter 7)
If I understand Father Aidan’s thinking even remotely, it is that the local church is established by Christ to enable its members to communicate and give glory to a God we cannot see, to make sense out of everyday struggles and trials with those we do see, and to find meaning and purpose with a world gone mad with its own importance. In the simplicity of loving our neighbor as our self, within the sacramental and non-sacramental context of the local assembly, the Mystery of Faith, we find purpose, pure energy with the source of all reality, and how to love with all our hearts, our minds, and our strength. God will not leave any of us stranded or without food to sustain us on our journey. If our purpose is to be with God…Forever, then the invisible God needs some way to communicate with those who call him Lord and give them food for the journey and the ability to make all things new, over and over. The context in which we find what we need to make sense out of all of this is the local church, linked by heritage and practice to the Apostles. It is the way to touch the invisible God in our midst, it is the way we claim our adoption as God’s children.
Mrs. Murphy represents an ecclesial everyperson, an archetype like that of Adam and Eve, but one that touches the Sacred through the sheer fidelity and simplicity, fierce love with an unseen and invisible God, but one that is the center of all reality. God did not leave the security of the One to be the object of study groups and biblical-theological exploration but to touch each and every one of us and, due to the sacrifice of Christ, allowing us to touch back, using the only ways we can possibly touch pure energy without having our neurons fried, through Eucharist (community) and seeking love in the most natural, daily life experiences. –Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D.
Sometimes God wait for us on a bench in what may seem like impossible conditions. In contemplation, I realize that there are three levels of awareness I must master.
Good — I wait for God to meet me because I made the appointment with Him and I have something to ask or need help
Better- I wait for God to show up for my appointment, although I did not get a confirmation back. I just want to meet Him as an old friend.
Best: I wait for God to show up with no agenda, no words, no thoughts, no petitions, no hope for my glory. I don’t know if God will show up or not, but I HOPE. In truth, God never left me.
God meets me in snow and rain, in heat and in cold, in Summer, Winter, Spring, or Fall, in the morning and the evening.
The following reflections come from one of my Lectio Divina Contemplations.
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon about pole reversal, which states that our North and South poles have sifted over the billions of years earth has been here? How this came to me, when I was in the midst of a Lectio Divina contemplation on Phil 2:5 is a mystery, but there it was. I looked it up on Google,
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-poleReversal.html
My assumption is: when you enter the spiritual universe (voluntarily, of course) there are two sets of meaning. That of the world (everyday activities) and that of the spiritual universe. Another way to put that is, you can either live in two universes (physical and mental) or three universe (physical, mental and spiritual. All three universes have different yerdsticks with which to measure reality. It would be a mistake to think you can use the same measurements to measure visible reality as you do to identify invisible reality.
Every so often, more common in geological time than you might think, the North and South poles reverse. Down is up and up becomes down. I believe that is what happened with the coming of Christ, but with three universes, not two. It occurred to me that the same thing might happen in the spiritual universe. This universe interfaced with the physical one at the moment of creation and with the mental one when Adam and Eve, our progenitors, first knew that they knew.
In my book, The Woman Who Changed Time: Spirituality and Time, I talk how Mary changed time itself (spiritual time, Christos, not physical time, Kronos), when she resonded to God’s invitation, “Let it be.” This was one of the times when the spiritual poles reserved themselves, and what was up became down. In other words, the gates of Heaven were opened by the unconditional sacrifice of the Son to the Father.
The spiritual universe has no beginning and no end. It is Heaven, the Garden of Eden before the Fall, and the Kingdom of Heaven after Jesus paid the price of redemption on the cross. Redemption comes from a Hebrew word that means, go to the pawn shop and redeem that which you pawned. In this case, Jesus paid the price for Adam and Eve’s pawn ticket and got us out of debt. The problem is, we all inherit the effects of original sin, i.e., we suffer, die, must work for our food, and have temptations to do what is evil, although we, ourselves, are not evil, just wounded.
Based on these assumptions, it comes to mind that there are three times that the spiritual universe turned upside down, up becoming down and down becoming up.
We are created in God’s image and likeness, so we are not intrinsically evil, but merely tempted to do evil. With God’s energy, we chose our true self over our false self, but it is always a struggle. That is why, like St. Peter before us, we say we are disciples of the Master then turn right around and do evil in His sight.
The Effects of spiritual polar reversal are:
I have tried to apply my personal center, Philippians 2:5, to ideas like polar reversal and spirituality and time. Forgive this broken-down, old Temple of the Holy Spirit for his musings.
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
While Cistercians have been around since the mid-10th century, and before them Benedictines from the time of St. Benedict (c. 540) and before them various monastic strains, Lay Cistercians are a very recent movement.
There are two types of Cistercians that trace their foundations to the 10th century, regular observance and strict observance (Trappist), formed after the French Revolution. You may want to look them up for yourself.
Regular observance. https://www.cistercian.org/abbey/
Strict observance: http://www.ocso.org/?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=62
Check out the website of Carl McColeman, professed Lay Cistercian from Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Ga. He has written several excellent books on mysticism and gives retreats you won’t soon forget. www.carlmccoleman.net
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
What might seem like an Indiana Jones fantasy adventure to enter the lost or forbidden realm of the Sacred is indeed the most simple, in keeping with everything about God. You simply go there. Contemplation is seeking God within you, among other places. Close your eyes in a place of silence and solitude and wait.
There are several ways I use to be in the presence of God. One of them is receiving Eucharist every day that I can, another is just sitting in Eucharistic Adoration and waiting for God to sit down with me, another is using Lectio Divina as a step-by-step way to reach the stage of contemplation. Here is how I use Lectio each day for at least thirty minutes. Every day!
The question I get most often is, how can I enter this realm of the Sacred and find the peace you are describing. Here are some ideas to try:
The following list is from my book, For Behold, I Make All Things New. (see Books in this blog)
1. Whenever you use God’s energy, through contemplation or through penance, something wonderful happens inside you.
2. Penance re-aligns your spiritual purpose with God’s.
3. The template for self direction is: God tells you what is wrong; you know what is wrong; you are tempted to either do your will or God’s will; you choose. There are consequences for your choice.: death for your false self, and life for your true self.
4. I have noticed, since being allowed to follow the Cistercian way of life, that change does happen.
5. All humans are destined for Heaven, but not everyone will make it there.
6. Our Master came to SHOW us how to get to Heaven.
7. Everyone has a path in life. Just because your road is rocky, doesn’t mean you are on the wrong road. Walk the path of your destiny.
8. In your life, there are four doors through which you must pass. Do you know what they are and what each means? 9. Contemplation is being present to God without condition, without wanting something, without reserve, loving with all your heart and just waiting for what God has to say. There are no words. 10. No one goes to the Father except through the Son. How does this affect your relationship with God? The purpose for The Master coming to earth was to glorify the Father. What is your purpose?
11. Do you have a practice of doing penance?
12. Don’t worry if other have mercy or not. You are not God. Be content to continuously seek God’s mercy on you every day.
13. Reality is made up of both visible and invisible reality. Science does a good job with one of these.
14. Why do we need to convert our human self toward being like more like Christ?
15. Confession of our need for God’s mercy is part of asking for forgiveness of our own sins. Penance not only makes reparation for our sins but asks to make all things new.
16. Fast and pray that you not enter into temptation.
17. All humans, but one, have only one nature, human. One human, Jesus Our Lord, had two natures, both human and divine. Mary, his mother, had only one nature. She was not God, but the Woman Who Changed Time. 18. Being a disciple of Our Master is not easy. If it is, you may be on the wrong path. 19. Faith is not just an individual profession of faith, it is also being faithful to how Christ taught us to pray, asking for the food to sustain us from temptation and forgiveness when we do not love.
20. All humans are destined for Heaven, but not everyone will make it there. God will decide who goes there, not you (unless you are god.)
21. What you live on earth will be your frame of reference in Heaven. There is a caveat. Your frame of reference must be the same as Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5)
22. Temptation tests us against the false promises of Satan to be like God. Genesis is the architype myth of the human condition and the promise of Hope. It is the same for you as it was for Adam and Eve.
23. Look at the human race as fulfilling its destiny. You, too, have personal destiny that is Heaven. You won’t get their without struggle nor without God’s help. Not all paths lead to Heaven.
24. The purpose of life is to know, love, and serve God in this world, so that you can be happy now and in the next level of reality, Heaven.
25. Life is about packing for the trip to Heaven. Only the rich get to Heaven. You must make sure that you take God’s riches and not your own. What are those riches? Read Chapter 4 of the Rule of St. Benedict. It won’t be easy to get to Heaven without God’s help. Read Matthew 11:28-30. With Christ’s help, your burden is light, even when you struggle to love God with all our self. 26. Obedience to God’s will is the most difficult choice you will have to make, and not just one time, but each and every day. As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I make a conscious effort to ask God for enlightenment as soon as each day begins with Morning Prayer. http://www.breviary.com As the Lord’s prayer states: Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
27. Read Psalm 95. How true it is, even today.
28. Beliefs are those truths we hold with our minds. All beliefs have assumptions. Those assumptions differentiate a Protestant from a Catholic, and a from a Muslim. You should be free to hold any belief system you choose, but know that only one of them can be correct. God is one. Truth is one. Assumptions must not be in conflict with each other, in terms of the assumptions you hold to be true. All humans are destined to be with God in Heaven. Depending on your assumptions, you may believe that people must agree with your assumptions and interpret and the Scriptures as you do. Don’t make yourself God. Read Genesis 20. Heaven is God’s playground, not yours. God is the ultimate judge of all those who live…Forever.
29. You make a bad confessor for yourself. Know why?
30. Yesterday does not count for today. Today is where you live. Love in the now…Forever.
31. God takes care of those who believe in Him.
32. As one who aspires to be a Lay Cistercian, silence and solitude in the midst of a secular world, whose default is original sin, allows me to enter into the sanctuary of my heart and wait for Christ to speak to me when He is ready. Read the beautiful Psalm 148. How can the Sun and Moon praise the Lord? They are not alive. When you have the mindset that sees the Sun and Moon as praising God by being what they are, you open yourself to the symphony of being, all praising God. You praise God, too, by being what you are: an adopted son or daughter of the Father, destined to live…Forever. You praise God by being your nature, the nature destined from before the world was.
33. Hatred and love cannot live in the same room together. Hatred is a way of de-valuing others and yourself. It is not the same as not liking the personality of someone. Hatred means you wish them ill, you can’t stand to be in their presence and you despise their key values. Hatred kills you. Mercy means you value others.
34. Mercy means we must be compassionate towards those who disagree with us or mistreat us or speak ill of us because of Christ. Read Matthew 5. Mercy also means we don’t condone sin, if that person to whom we have shown mercy goes against God’s will. Read John 8:1-11. Remember, sin means missing the mark set by God and not achieving the purpose of Life. Read Deuteronomy 6:8. (You will read these, won’t you?
Pray as you can and when you can. Prayer should be simple, not complex. Prayer should allow your heart to rest alongside the heart of Christ Jesus in silence and solitude.
35. Marriage and Holy Orders are relationships of fierce love that overshadows our faults and gives obedience to God’s thinking. Read Matthew 22:34.
36. Fierce love is love and forgiveness for those who hate you. Fierce love is the love God has for us, in us. There is no place for sin or hatred in the presence of this kind of love. It is the most difficult to achieve because it contradicts our instincts—to hurt those who hurt us, to strike back at those who bad mouth us and call them name, to seek revenge on those who have harmed us.
What follows is a poem about my life. It is, as yet, unfinished, but the elements are all present.
I sing the song of life and love…
…sometimes flat and out of tune
…sometimes eloquent and full of passion
…sometimes forgetting notes and melody
…sometimes quaint and intimate
…often forgetful and negligent
…often in tune with the very core of my being
…often with the breath of those who would pull me down, shouting
right in my face
…often with the breath of life uplifting me to heights never before
dreamed
…greatly grateful for the gift of humility and obedience to The One
…greatly thankful for adoption, discovery of new life of pure energy
…greatly appreciative for sharing meaning with others of The Master
…greatly sensitive for not judging the motives of anyone but me
…happy to be accepted as an aspiring Lay Cistercian
…happy to spend time in Eucharistic Adoration
…happy and humbled to be an adopted son of the Father
…happy for communities of faith and love with wife, daughter, friends
…mindful that the passage of time increases each year
…mindful of the major distractions of cancer and cardiac arrest
…mindful of my center and the perspective that I am loved and must
love back with all the energy of my heart and strength, yet failing
…mindful the energy I receive from The One in Whom I find
purpose and meaning…Forever.
To The One who is, Who was, and Who is to come at the end of the ages, be glory, honor, power and blessings through The Redeemer Son in unity with the Advocate, Spirit of Love.
From The One who is, Who was, and Who is to come at the end of the ages, I seek hope that His words about the purpose of life are true, that He is the way that leads to life…Forever.
With The One who is, Who was, and Who is to come at the end of the ages, I seek the fierce love so I can have in me the mind of Christ Jesus, my personal purpose in life and my center…Forever.
“That in all things, may God be glorified.” –St. Benedict
You have heard of Enrico Fermi, physicist, haven’t you? https://www.space.com/25325-fermi-paradox.html He was having lunch with his friends one day and the subject was life outside of earth. He simply asked, “Where is everybody?” What may or may not be a paradox, depending on who you ask, is a valid question. Based on computations like the Drake Equation, the odds are that there is life out there. But wonder if the opposite is true? What if we are the only ones out there? What are the implications? Think of it! We have no proof that there is even an organic molecule outside of earth’s protective shell. Frankly, I myself believe there must be life out there, due to the sheer numbers of planets in the “safe zone” (not too hot, or not too cold). For a moment, let’s just assume that there is no other life out there. Here are some things I think about, when I think of life on other planets.
Prayer is all about lifting your heart and mind to God. There are lots of reasons to pray. Here is one reason that probably goes unnoticed.
Think about this! You are driving down the highway at 80 mph, clearly above the 70 mph limit, when you realize you are on a road with which you are not familiar. Rather than slow down, you reason that you should speed up to get to a place where you can turn around. Suddenly, a deer darts out in front of your car and you swerve to miss it. The momentum takes the car off-balance and it leaves the road and crashes into a bunch of small trees and bushes. You end up hitting a large tree and barely escape without killing yourself, but the person in the passenger’s seat is killed and your friend in the back is badly wounded and bleeding. In the moments that follow, you find yourself in complete silence, and also in shock. Some people arrive and finally an ambulance comes to pick you up and take you to the hospital. You have five broken bones and a broken nose, but you will live. The two other passengers are not so lucky. They are your best friends, out for a nice ride to keep from being bored before going off to college to study law. There is something else the physician tells you. Your blood alcohol level is way over the limits for normal driving.
THINK ABOUT THIS. All of our actions have consequences, the results of our choices. Some choices have good consequences and some have bad ones. Sometimes the results of our actions don’t show up now but pop up later on in life, or maybe even never at all. Our actions are not created in a vacuum and can affect others even after we die.
Now, let me take you on another adventure, a mythical but real one that happened a long time ago. You are being interviewed for a position to head a large garden. It is the vast estate of a man of means who owns everything as far as you can see. You will be his managers. He wants you to take care of it and see that the animals, the plants, and fish all have what they need to live their lives in happiness and peace. As he takes you around the garden, he points to one tree and says that it is a special tree, his prized possession. He warns you not to touch the tree, for if you do, you will die. The you look at each other, amazed, and walk on. Having given them the grand tour, the owner gives you a chance to freshen up, for it has been a long day. While resting, a swarthy looking woman approaches you and asks if the owner has told you about the poison tree. You say that he had. She goes on to say that, “he tells that to everyone because he doesn’t want you to be like him, powerful and rich.” She just laughed and walked away. Curious about the stranger’s statement, you want to take another look at the tree. It is a normal looking tree with low hanging fruit, ripe and luscious. You reaches up and take fruit from the tree and eat it. And… time changes from that moment on. You can read Genesis 3 to see the consequences of this act of disobedience. The results are what we live with even today.
Here are some of my reflections: both cases were of people who did something that they should not have done. In the first case, it was putting many people in harm’s way by reckless driving and drinking, In the second one, by deliberately disobeying the admonition of the land owner and seizing forbidden fruit.
In the first instance, the driver killed two people, and totaled the car. He said he was sorry to the judge and was let off with a light sentence. Yet, his life was changed forever. He would not go to law school, college, if at all, was years off while he paid his debts. It would seem that saying you are sorry for what you did would be enough, but then there is this: the car is wrecked, lawsuits pending over wrongful death, jail time, monetary ruin for him and possibly his family. To put it another way, if you steal $210,00 from me in fraud, and get caught, then say to me, “I am sorry,” what is there remaining that you owe me? The $210,000. Reparation is the debt that I owe for the wrong that I committed. It is more difficult when the wrong is invisible or happened many years ago.
Let’s look at the second instance, the one where Adam and Eve represent all humans. The offence was doing something that would result in death, but what death. If this was the original sin, an archetype of what it means to be human, death for all humanity was the result, not just for Adam and Eve. Reparation means someone had to recreate the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the tree of life, and apologize to the owner of the garden. Since we are talking in mythical terms, someone had to become Adam and Eve to pay a price for the offense. That is why the term redeem, in Hebrew, means to go to a pawn shop and buy back that which was hocked. Jesus had to be man, to satisfy the debt of Adam and Eve. Jesus had to be God to be able to return to the Father with our apology and give him his rightful glory and honor. Even though Jesus paid the price of his own death, willingly, we all have to live with the effects of the original sin of Adam and Eve. Christ paid off the debt that humanity owed by giving his very life as ransom. (Philippians 2:5-12)
We live in a time-limited universe. We will die. We suffer pain. We endure the temptations to, once more, be like Adam and Eve and eat of the forbidden fruit. The wily one still prowls about seeking whom he may devour. We sin, we get up, we say we are sorry to God, but there is something missing. The $210,000. Jesus doesn’t owe it, we do.
Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. We can make amends for our past offenses and sins in reparation. With humility we can continue to ask God for mercy and forgiveness. Reparation means to repair that which was torn or broken. Reparation is not forgiveness, but is the result of our sins and, like Adam and Eve’s sin, the consequences of our faults and failings. We should acknowledge that the evil we do is ours, as St. Benedict says in his Rule, Chapter 4, but the good we do belongs to the grace of God.
We pray for our parents and family, our friends and faith companions that they be loosed from their sins. There is no conveyor belt that I get on to get to Heaven. It takes work, just as Adam and Eve had to work after their fall. (Genesis 3) I know that Christ draws all things to Himself. I pray reparation petitions for the whole Church as well as for individuals I have place in my Golden Book of Life, to once again make all things new through, with and in Christ to the glory of the Father, in union with the Holy Spirit.
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
The big problem with contemplation for those living in the world is the static that comes from being bombarded with all kinds of interests and projects competing for our time. Face it. There will never be a good time for contemplation (unless you carve out a space for you to experience silence and solitude). Silence is not just a place where there is no noise, but a place where you can focus your spiritual energy on Lectio Divina, or reading from Cistercian authors. Solitude means you find time for yourself, even in the midst of community activities. I like the idea of carving, don’t you? Here are eight tips or ideas that you might find useful in devising a contemplative system in the world of noise and competition for your time.
There are many lessons I have learned about trying to be spiritual in my lifetime. Here are a few.
4 Life is like a cross-word puzzle. I had a Lectio Divina reflection on this idea. When you enter the spiritual domain or universe, you are given all the pieces of the puzzle of life. Some of those pieces you fit into place as you grow older and wiser. Some pieces are not of this puzzle and won’t fit. You won’t know which ones to use unless you get some help. Christ gives you help in this, but will not help you with the puzzle. If you follow Christ and his ways, you will find the truth and the life, or which pieces of the puzzle are true and which are false. You still have to take a lifetime to fit the pieces together to see if they fit. The picture of the puzzle is the center you have chosen for your life. It is the reward for which you have taken time to see what fits together. It is the purpose of your life.
If you want to read an excellent book on Cistercian spirituality as expressed by Lay Cistercians, read Carl McColeman’s book, Befriending Silence.
Although I try mightily, I am constantly tempted to stop any attempts at contemplation. This is like a runner who must find a mental challenge, as well as the physical one of running the distance. In one of my Lectio Divina meditations, I found myself thinking about why it is so difficult to focus on being in the presence of God. I think the reason has to do with original sin, the condition in which all humans find themselves. Spirituality is the act of raising us up beyond this natural default of our nature, to attempt to think about invisible reality. Spirituality, much less contemplation, is not natural. It takes work, it demands focus, it requires energy, and not the energy you get from working out at the gym. I think of that when I am driving the five hours (one way) from Tallahassee, Florida to Conyers, Georgia, once a month. My wife keeps haranging me that I don’t need to travel to the Lay Cistercian Gathering Day at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery. I can pray anywhere. Why waste money we don’t have (actually we do). This is taking up the cross DAILY to follow Christ, being tempted that all this God stuff is irrelevant. Even when trying to move from self to God by using the Lectio Divina method, contemplation is always with its temptations to do something that is profitable, that will make a difference, that won’t take so much wasted time. Contemplation is an illusive treasure and demands my full attention.
Contemplation, in a manner of speaking, is like a diet. Your physician tells you that you need to lose weight. Now comes the hard part. What diet will you choose, or, if the physician gives you one, will you take it seriously? Based on my own feeble attempts to diet, here are some observations of how a diet that applies to contemplation.
As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I would like to share with you some of the practical and real ways in which I pray, using silence, solitude, work, prayer, in the context of community. These reflection are my own and do not reflect any official monastic or Lay Cistercian opinions. I am just a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit who is writing down what I receive in contemplatio. Here is what I try to do consistently and persistently every day.
HOW I USE THE CONTEMPLATIVE APPROACH TO SPIRITUALITY
The following pages are samples of the horarium (hourly agenda) I use to organize my day as a Lay Cistercian. I must tell you that I am retired and have time to devote to the practice of how to love as Jesus did. Not everyone has the great opportunity I have to pray the Liturgy of the Hours and Rosary in the parish. If I don’t keep it, no big deal, but it is an anchor.
My Center: Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus. –Philippians 2:5
Five or Six Practices to support my center: These are Cistercian charisms and practices.
Silence—When I think of silence, I think of lack of worldly noise. But, it is more than just lack of external noises, like television, children playing, going to work, and traveling in a car. For me, I try to be conscious that all these sounds give glory to the Father through the Son, in union with the Holy Spirit. I try to make a space where I can reflect on my center with some degree of privacy. Silence of my heart helps me sustain the other Cistercian charisms and practices and so grow in fierce love.
Solitude— Solitude, for me, means carving out a space and quiet time to focus on how to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus.
For the Cistercian monks, solitude means carving out a time and space that permits them to focus on loving God with their whole heart, whole soul and whole mind without external distractions. For the Lay Cistercian, we also concentrate on fashioning a little prayer nest but we live in the secular world and therefore embrace all the distractions as part of our prayer to the Father. St. Benedict says, “That in all things, God be glorified.”
Prayer—Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. As a Lay Cistercian, I actively put myself in the presence of God using prayer, both public and private. Even if I sometimes feel that prayer is repetitious and rote, I have noticed that the more I try to grow deeper using prayer, rather than fighting the externals, the more peace there is in my spirit. It is resting my heart in the heart of Christ that helps me love fiercely.
Work—Work as the world sees it is a means to make money. Work with a spiritual approach is transforming the ordinary tasks of the day into those that give glory and praise to the Father. Work is prayer, if offered up as praise and glory to the Father.
Community—Lay Cistercians gravitate towards communal gatherings to refresh the soul and to transform themselves deeper in the mind and heart of Christ Jesus. Even though there is great distance between us, we link together as one in our commitment to each other because we are all linked through the mind and heart of Christ Jesus. Sharing Christ with each other nourishes the Spirit in me.
If you think I am some kind of religious fanatic, let me assure you that I am not. What this blog topic is about is ten days of contemplation using the Lectio Divina method. I didn’t always have success at waiting for God, which is what contemplation is all about. I didn’t spend all day fixated on how I would get angry if God did not talk to me. Now, that would be a fanatic. As an aspiring Lay Cistercian, I try to do Lectio Divina (lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio) for at least twenty minutes a day. I only profess to be a beginner at this, so many times I don’t contemplate more than twenty minutes. I am growing, imperceptibly, to a deeper practice, but it takes time. The Lectio Divina stages, or rungs in the ladder, are based on Guido II’s steps to enter the inner self through contemplation. http://www.umilta.net/ladder.html
The key here is doing Lectio every day without fail, even if all you have to show for it is the time you put into it. This reminds me very much of a book I read called The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, particularly as it refers to the advice the fox gives to The Little Prince on the meaning of friendship and the time it takes to develop it. I recommend that you go on-line and read the chapter. http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter21.html
Once you have read it, do you see any similarities between taming and contemplation? Isn’t that a beautiful explanation of invisible reality and the power of persistent contemplation? It works!
Just like the Little Prince, I waited each day for God to be with me, not just in my mind, and my heart but my whole self. (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:37.)
Read two important quotes from The Little Prince.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
It is the time I took in contemplation to be in the presence of The One who is beyond cancer, and has conquered death, that is important. There is no wasted time in contemplation. I said it once more, so that I would be sure to remember.
• Contemplation is part of a five-step process. I don’t just jump into contemplation right away.
• Contemplation is all about feelings not the mind, like being wrapped in a warm, security blanket with The One.
• In contemplation, no words are spoken, no thoughts to drive my personal agenda, and no images in my mind to explore how the lectio (Phil 2:5) would look.
• Lectio is about reading the Word.
• Meditatio is about how that Word impacts my life.
• Oratio is asking that the Word be made flesh in my life.
• Contemplatio is waiting for God to share His energy with me on how to love with all my heart, all my mind, and all my strength.
• Actio (recommended by Pope Benedict XVI) is doing what God instructs me to perform.
THE THREE IMPERATIVES FOR CANCER PATIENTS
While in contemplation, here it what came to me, without my leading God, so to speak.
1. Don’t be afraid. That is exactly what happened to me, when I began to rationalize all the possible worst-case scenarios about dying. I had lost control of my life, not realizing that I never did have full control over it, My thoughts went to the times in Scriptures when angels appeared to Elizabeth and then Mary (Luke 1:13, 31). They sought to calm down Elizabeth and Mary. How would you react, if you saw an angel standing before you? Don’t be afraid, they all said. I think that statement is significant because it shows how sensitive God is to our feelings. This statement just popped into my hear, out of the blue. This is not just the intellectual statement of not being afraid, it is the warm feeling that everything is as it should be and I am going to be alright. All this happened in an instant.
This first statement is the perfect way God would approach me. A gentle way, one which takes into account my wild rides of emotion and intellectual instability when facing serious illness or death. Don’t be afraid is what God would say to us as He meets us for the first time. He did that to me. But there is more…
2. I am with you. God’s response to me in the depths of my being was: Don’t be afraid. I am with you. This was not just any I. This was the only I there is, as in, I AM THE ONE WHO IS. If God is with me, I thought, who can be against me. All of this happened instantaneously.
If you don’t hold to all this God business, you have your family who is with you as you confront the cancer phase of your life, you until you die.
I find it a strength in my struggle to believe all this, that someone who lives in three universes (physical, mental, spiritual) is my friend, even to the point of making me an adopted son. If you have a friend, you want to be with him or her, want to be close to them, to share the joy and happiness of their presence. That is the way I feel about God communicating with this broken-down, old Temple of the Holy Spirit.
• God with me means I can live whatever time I have to the fullest.
• God with me means I can share with family and friends that death is not the end, but a door to be opened.
• God with me means I am humbled by the fact that Jesus became one of us, suffered (like those who have cancer) and died so that we could live…Forever as adopted daughters and sons of the Father.
• God with me means I can sit in silence and solitude and wait for God to approach me when He wants, knowing that I am valued.
• If God is with me, who can be against me, even with cancer or cardiac arrest.
• If God is with me, life is good, even if my road is rocky; at least I know I am on the right path.
But there is more…
3. Good and faithful servant, come share your Lord’s joy.
My contemplative experience gave me great joy, which may seem like an oxymoron. How can you have joy, when you have cancer? How can you experience fierce love, when you know you will die, maybe sooner than later, but you will die. Remember there are two meanings for joy: the worldly one, and the spiritual one. In the worldly one, joy means, among other things, happiness with your family, contentment that you have run a good race with your life, and the satisfaction that you are leaving the world a better place than you found it (if that is so).
Joy, in the spiritual sense, is a sign of contradiction. It means you have happiness with your family, contentment that you have run a good race with your life, and the satisfaction that you are leaving the world a better place than you found it (if that is so). Plus, you look forward to continuing that joy with your loved ones and your positive experiences of what life is all about, in Heaven…Forever.
In my contemplation, I had feelings of great joy and contentment, that I was on the right road, and that the words of Jesus to all of us were true, “Come, Good and Faithful Servants, share your Lord’s joy.”
FINALITY
There were three parts to my contemplatio, all experienced with great security, joy and peace. Compared to anything I will face during the rest of my life, even should it be the end of the world, I am with someone who will lead me, if I sit silently and alone in the silence of my heart.
The scary thing for me is, I know that I have only scratched the surface in contemplating the riches God has given us. As St. Thomas Aquinas, probably the greatest mind to explore how we interact with God, is said to have written before he died, “I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.”
When I deal with cancer or cardiac arrest, or any other ailment, I will always keep my experience of the three in mind:
a. Don’t be afraid.
b. I am with you.
c. Come, share Your Lord’s Joy.
If you are fortunate enough to attend a retreat at Holy Spirit Monastery, Conyers, Ga., in the silent dining room, you will find a sign on the table that reads, “Silence spoken here.” Likewise, if you are committed to seeking God, you will need learn the language of love using the language of silence and solitude within you. To do that you need the code Jesus gave us.
If you have read the reflections I made on perspective, you know my thoughts about living in two universes verses three universes. Living in two universes is not bad, it just is not the whole scope of reality. I think of this, when I hear physicists and astronomers announce with great confidence that you can’t see God, therefore God does not exist. Of course you can’t see God. God doesn’t exist here, in the same way that you do. God doesn’t use words to communicate. He is the Word, three persons of pure energy, the energy of Love, as Teilhard de Chardin wrote. It is into this universe that the human race is propelled and how each individual is compelled to confront the totality of all reality and figure out the mega question: is earth a big spaceship hurtling through space and time towards a universe composed of pure energy with just the right atmosphere to allow us to live for seventy years, or eighty, if we are strong, according to Psalms? Think about that! We are rapidly moving towards a universe where all of us can live in perfection, consistent with our human nature, and never die. It all goes back to the underlying meaning of the Genesis myth, that marvelous drama about who we are, why we are, and where we are headed.It details how we are imperfect yet called to live in absolute perfection, not according to our human nature, but God’s nature—pure energy. In this universe to which we are all aspire, termed Omega by Teilhard de Chardin, there is only The One, there is no two. There is a tick but no tock. Heaven is God’s playground, and if, by some chance, we figure out the code God left us, over thousands of generations and millions of years, and use it to the best of our ability, it will unlock how to live in absolute love (the language of perfection), absolute trust (faith) and absolute service (energy)…Forever. For me, this is called the Jesus Code, or how to speak the language of God by doing what he revealed through Jesus and acting now as though we were already with him. Christ gave us the key to unlock the mysteries of three universes. No all keys fit the lock, only ones that Jesus forged by his death on the cross.
Doesn’t that blow your mind? We are moving relentlessly through time in the direction of Omega while not moving in space. What Jesus did was to show us where to find the key and how to interpret the code that unlocks the doors of eternity. It is within each of us and we can access it through silence and solitude, if we choose. Some will unlock the secrets of reality, many will not get it, many more will not even care, calling the whole effort a feeble attempt by some minds to coerce the rest into believing as they do. Those who have struggled to discover the way, know the truth, and, as they begin to live the life prescribed by God to live in the presence of pure energy, are not phased by three universes because they know what awaits them. St. Paul says, “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” (KJV)
For me, I discovered the key when I was in 8th Grade at St. Francis Xavier Grade School, Vincennes, Indiana in 1950. Of course, it took me the rest of my life to learn how to use the code to open it. I learned how to access my inner self through contemplation and receive the source of energy that sustains me, even with cancer and cardiac arrest (2007).
The morning is dark and lovely with the silence that comes with listening with the ear of the heart (St. Benedict’s Rule, Prologue) to the insights and love only God can share. The cool air of the third day of Spring smells fresh and with just a hint of flowers about. My lectio divina (http://lectio-divina.org/index.cfm) for today, as it has been since 1963 is: Have in You the Mind of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5) It is my purpose in life, the reason why I get up in the morning and drag these old bones out of bed. I have found, to my utter amazement, that my encounters with God the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, using just these eight words, produced over thirty books, with five more on the drawing board. I just write what comes into my head.
This blog is the attempt of a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit (with lots of cracks) to share some ideas. Four years ago, at the age of 72, I was accepted as a Lay Cistercian novice by the abbot of Holy Spirit Monastery at Conyers, Georgia (Trappist). I still aspire to turn my life toward God’s will each day, taking up the struggle to choose the good verses the faux temptations of the secular world that seek to derail me from my purpose. It is a daily struggle to take up my cross and keep myself focused on the prize, as St. Paul says. I have chosen and been selected as a member of the Lay Cistercian family associated with the monks. (www.trappist.net/lay-cistercians). I don’t promise you lofty ideas that change the world. These practices and charisms of Cistercian spiritual have changed me, however, and that I can share with you. My style is personal and meant to be from the heart, so you may find these ideas a bit fragmented–just like life. I don’t care what your religious affiliation is or even if you don’t have one. My own heritage is Roman Catholic and for that I can only give thanks to my parents for handing on to me what they themselves received.
It is my hope that some of these ideas find a home in the ear of your heart and help you discover the meaning of love. “That in all things, God be glorified.” –St. Benedict
The following excerpt is from my still unpublished journal on You Know You Are Going to Die, New What? Three Questions You Must Face Head On
Sometimes is it easier to write down your thoughts before you attempt to express them with others. As a cancer survivor of Leukemia, CLL type, that is what I did and I thought you might like this non-intrusive way of organizing your thinking about the fact that you may or may not die as a resut of cancer, some other like-threatening illness. or AIDS.
Whether you have some faith system or no faith system at all, you have a value system, know it or not. That is your default system of what you hold as your center. Only you can choose what you place at your center, be it money, fame, fortune and glory (as Indiana Jones said in The Temple of Doom) or nothing at all. Before you accuse me of flying under false colors, I will tell you that I am a Lay Cistercian (Trappist) member of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, GA. Although it has influenced my view of reality, I am not trying to make you this or that. I don’t care. I do care about contemplative practices of silence and solitude and conversion of my life to the purpose I have selected. I do care to share with you some reflections on how contemplation helped me secure a North on my compass when I learned I had cancer. I hope that you can apply at least one or two ideas to your situation, given that you know you are going to die soon. I do care that you have an opportunity to write down YOUR thoughts and feelings as you confront yourself and the situation in which you find yourself.
There are three questions that I asked myself, upon learning that I had cancer. I used contemplation (going into the rich interior of my inner self) to seek peace, purpose and forgiveness all within the silence of my own heart. While it is true that you are diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening illness as an individual, you can be sure you don’t have it alone, as soon as you allow your friends to share in your diagnosis and how you assimilate it into your way of thinking. Cancer is always a family disease.
The first part of this workbook, I will give you my take on the three questions that I faced. No apologies. It is what I did, not what you did or will do. In the second part of this book is a journal so that you can write down your answer to these three questions. No one needs to see what you write, unless you share it with them. I encourage you to do so. I will read it, if you want me to do so.
This is the big, elephant-in-the-room question, the so called question everone knows but no one wants to talk about. It is classic avoidance and we all do it. After all, who wants to die? Who wants to be told they are going to die? It affects both patients and physicians. Physicians are petrified because they don’t know how their patients will accept it; patients are stunned when they hear the “C” word and begin playing an endless loop of doomsday scenarios in their minds.
The question is not, nor will it ever be, “Am I going to die?” Name one person you know who will not die? I can’t, except for two persons, but that is the subject of another set of assumptions for another workbook. I received a phone call from my primary physician, Dr. Judith Lewis, M.D., Internal Medicine, one day in September of 2014, stating she had reviewed my WBC count (> 20) and wanted to make an appointment for me with an Oncologist, Dr. Robert Tetreault, M.D., in Tallahassee, FL. She said to me, “Y ou know what we are talking about, don’t you?” I said, “Yes. You are telling me I probably have cancer but you want to make sure with a bone-marrow biopsy.” I thought is was nice that she called me. I hung up and had no thoughts in my mind, which some say is normal, but I did fall back on my center, the set of values and meaning that give worth to my life.
Each of us has a center, one which we alone can choose, based on what we value as meaningful in our lives to that point. When there is trauma and urgency, such as when you are told you are going to die, prisoners get religion all of a sudden, those about to die, want to confess to a Priest, if they are Catholic, people think of their value system, as their life moves before their eyes. You may have experienced this. If what we have selected as our center is substantial and meaningful, we stand on the solid grounds of our humanity, if our center is like Jell-O, we don’t do so well with the news that we are going to die.
Here are three lessons that I learned, when confronted with my mortality.
Lesson One: Keep life simple. Your center is the one ground of your being. The default emotions and feelings, when someone says you are going to die, can be like Kubler-Ross’ five steps of grief:
1 – Denial.
2 – Anger.
3 – Bargaining.
4 – Depression. Also referred to as preparatory grieving. …
5 – Acceptance.
See Google for “Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages”
Not all centers are capable of sustaining you as you work your way through these five stages of grief, let alone provide you with what you need to move to the next stage of your life. When I was told I had cancer, it was like saying, “The world will end in ten minutes.” I don’t remember being depressed or angry, when I actually found out that I had a football-size mass of CLL cells in my liver. Not good. The worst part for me was not the chemo-therapy, the liver biopsy, twelve sessions of at least five hours apiece, but the MRI and PET scans. I am severely clostrophobic.
2. Lesson Two: You die yourself, but you don’t die alone. The family goes through the stages of grief with you. If your family sees you as a defenseless victim they will never raise the one question I need to hear about my dying and what that would mean. Unless someone from the outside (a friend, minister, rabbi or priest) brings this up, it probably won’t be addressed. Every time you meet together, there is the great unspoken taboo that needs to be addressed. What I learned is, it is my death they are talking about, so I must bring up the subject and address it head on. I could not do that unless my ground for walking was concrete and I was in control of my dying well. I don’t control that I will die, but I can control how to die well.
I had my wife and daughter accompany me to the Oncologist, Dr. Tetreault’s office for the results of my tests. I wanted them to know what I know and not begin conjecturing or playing the “what if” game. It worked out well, in terms of them knowing what I know. In terms of the type of lymphoma, it was CLL type and there were a bunch o these cells in my liver the size of a football. I had to have a liver biopsy to see what was going on. Like most non-medical types, I had no idea what that meant, although I did know a little about liver functioning. Modern research in oncology is fantastic and I was given a newly approved drug.
Lesson 3: Be realistic. You know you are going to die, but you have the opportunity to die well.
In the next installment, I will discuss the impact of using Cistercian contemplative spirituality as a way for me to gain control of my life. I cannot control my death.
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