WE DO IT FOR YOU
Today (July 20, 2013) on the Church's
calendar we have the option of celebrating a little known saint, Saint
Apollinaris, who was said to have been consecrated a bishop by Saint Peter
himself, and then was sent to Ravenna in Italy as a missionary where he was
martyred under the reign of Emperor Claudius. What makes that so auspicious for
us is that Saint Romuald, the founder of our congregation, entered the monastery
of Saint Apollinaris in Classe, just outside of Ravenna after Apollonaris
appeared to him, twice. Actually he appeared to him again later urging him to
return to San Apollonaris as abbot. (None of those times turned out too well:
the first time his brother monks tried to throw him off the second floor
balcony; the second time the abbot himself tried to strangle him, but never mind
that...)
I myself have a connection to all of
this. Back when I was finishing my BA and studying Art History, I fell in love
with Romanesque architecture and specifically with the mosaics of Ravenna, both
at the mausoleum in town called the Galla Placidia (whence comes that mosaic of
the two birds drinking out of the fountain that is our stemma and the
symbol of the World Community for Christian Meditation), and then in the grand
basilica in Classe, long before I had ever heard anything about Romuald or this
rag tag bunch of monks called Camaldolese. The first time I was there it was as
a monk, and I could barely enter in the church, I was so overcome with emotion
to see it all up close.
When we were beginning to make
preparations for this celebration of the installation of the new prior, I was
consulted, as much as the liturgist as a candidate. I made it known in the
strongest terms possible that I would really like to see it be a very small
celebration, mainly for the community, maybe our support staff and one or two
invited guests. Instead it was decided that there would be a more or less open
invitation, on the heels of the recent Camaldolese Assembly at Asilomar
Conference Ground, because this would be a big deal for our friends as well. So
you see just how much influence I have, the sheer gravitas of my presence and
the weight of my personality! I say that with a bit of humor and with absolutely
no bitterness, mainly to make the point that actually either way would have been
valid, and somehow the tension between those two options points right to a
tension that I see in monastic life in general and in our Camaldolese charism in
particular, that tension between withdrawal and belonging, you might say,
between being alone and being available.
I chose to stay with the readings of
the day today, mainly the gospel,i
for two reasons. First of all, because Matthew cites the very line from
the prophet Isaiah in regards to Jesus, that Saint Benedict points to in
reference to the attitude an abbot (or a prior as the case may be) should have
in regards to his brother monks: "He is to distrust his own frailty and remember
not to crush the bruised reed."ii The other reason is that that same
tension that I mentioned seems to be going on in this little scene from the
gospel.
In some ways, I have always thought
that the dichotomy that we place between the active and contemplative life in
Western Christianity is what my philosopher friend calls a "false dilemma."
These two energies are only distant from each other because we are so distant
from our own true selves. Father Bede Griffiths was very fascinated with a
concept he got from India called sahaj samadhi. Samadhi is the
final stage of yoga, when one is, as I like to translate it, "absorbed" in some
way into the Divine, whatever that word means to you. And sahaj means
something like natural; and so sahaj samadhi means "natural
contemplation" and the best example of it according to Father Bede was Jesus,
who had gone beyond the categories of active and contemplative. Whether he was
in the desert or in the marketplace teeming with lepers, priests and
prostitutes, he was a pure contemplative, as Bede wrote, "always abiding with
the Father as the source of his being, and always seeing what the Father does as
the source of his action. He is in that state of transcendent awareness in which
he is one with the Father, and at the same time perfectly natural and
human."iii "Perfectly natural
and human"; that reminds me of Athanasius' description of Antony the Great when
his friends came and broke down the gates of the deserted fort where he had been
living for twenty years and Antony emerges and he is kata physin,
Athanasius tells us––according to nature, "all balanced, as one governed by
reason and standing in his natural condition." The ascetical life did not
destroy Antony; he was deified, and deification made him into a real human
being.
What I note about
Jesus is how often we see him go off to a remote place to pray, on a mountain
often; and sometimes he takes his disciples and tells them, "Come away with me
to a lonely place."iv But,
notice, when he is off by himself and his disciples come looking for him he
never says, "Go away, I'm on a desert day." When crowds come looking for him and
his disciples, sometimes the disciples want to send the crowd away, but Jesus
always welcomes them. And sometimes, like today, it seems that he brings the
whole crowd with him––"he withdrew from that place. Many people followed him,"
Matthew tells us.v And as was
said about the early monks in Egypt, "the desert becomes a city."
The spiritual life for Jesus was––and
I suppose the ideal of the spiritual life for us could be––like breathing in and
breathing out, as simple as that. Breathing in the love of God, breathing out
the love of God. Breathing in strength, breathing out compassion. Breathing in
the fire, breathing out justice. Or, simply put, breathing in the Spirit and
then delivering it over, as he did with his last breath of his life on this
earth.
Please don't misunderstand me, I
think that for most of us mere mortals it is not that easy, and I think that
there will always be a place for the purely contemplative life. And our
constitutions say right at the beginning that, "In both the hermitage and the
monastery" we monks are to "attend to the contemplative life above all
else."vi And the reason I think
that there will always be a place for the purely contemplative life is this: we
are one body, the body that is the church, the body that is the human race; and
a conservative guess would say probably 90% of the body is active almost all the
time, and so some part of the body has to be contemplative to give it some
equilibrium. My friend John likes to quote Thich Nhat Hahn who says that when
the boat is rocking on a stormy sea someone in the boat needs to sit still.
That's our job, to sit still. The Katha Upanishad says, "every now and then some
wise souls seeking immortality turn the gaze inward." That's our job––to turn
the gaze inward. But we don't do it just for our own sakes; we do it for the
body, the body that is the human race, the body that is the church, the Body of
Christ, and even in some way, as Saint Paul intuits, the body that is "all
creation that is groaning and in agony"vii while we work this out. We are
not separate from the Body; we are part of the body, as our Don Emanuele put it,
"an image of the praying church." Abhishktananda said that the monk is not
supposed to worry too much about the canals downstream, he is supposed to stay
close to the well. Not because we're better, not because we are wiser or holier;
just because that's our job; it's what we do for the sake of the body, the body
of the church, the body of humanity, the Body of Christ.
I remember so distinctly September
11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C., we
were on retreat with Laurence Freeman; and I remember at Mass that morning
looking around the rotunda at all my brothers with their arms raised singing the
Our Father, and I thought to myself, "This is exactly where we are supposed to
be." While the rest of the country and many in the world were running around
dazed and horrified (and rightly so!), while jets were being scrambled over the
sky and military units mobilized, here we were standing in our silly white robes
with our hands stretched up to the sky murmuring our prayers––and that is
exactly where we were supposed to be. Even in the midst of that crisis, someone
had to remember the holy words, someone had to sing the holy songs, someone had
to remember the stream of life-giving water that promised to flow from out of
the believer's heart, someone had to remember that Jesus ordered us to "Love
your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you," especially then when no one
else could remember.
We monks sometimes make the mistake
of thinking that we are the center of this life, of this monastery. But we are
not. I love the altar in the middle of our rotunda; it always reminds me what
or, better, who is the center of our life: God in Christ. That altar
there for me is like a well, and those who stay close to that well stay close to
the center of our life, because they stay close to God in Christ. That altar is
like a
cauldron, that's what the center of
our life is, and so all those who stay close to that cauldron, stay close to
what Saint Bonaventure calls "the raging fire that carries the soul to God with
intense fervor and burning love." If I may stretch the metaphors a little more,
that altar is like the foundational stone that Jews say is buried deep inside of
Mount Moriah over which the Temple was built, and which they think is the very
center of the world; this altar is like the ka'ba in Mecca, cleansed of
all its idols, around which the pilgrims on hajj process as if the whole
world were swirling around it in surrender to God the Merciful and
Compassionate; it's like Mount Arunachala in South India, a symbol of the
Shiva-lingam, around which pilgrims circumambulate singing songs, that is meant
to melt the ego of anyone who meditates on it in their hearts. We're not the
center of this life; we're circling around the center, God in Christ is the
center, our practice is the center, all those things that will remain after more
than one generation of us are in our graves; and whoever stays near to that
altar, that well, that raging fire is at the center of our life.
But what I really mean to stress is
that we're here for you, and we need to stay here for you. We do our job
for the Body because you do your job for the Body. We get up at 5:15 in the
morning and croak out our feeble prayers because you get up at the crack of dawn
and feed your children. We show up here four times a day to pray because you
show up at your work five, six days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day to build a world
of justice and peace. We fast and pray and keep vigil in our cells because you
bear such pain and loneliness and we want to bear it with you. We take care of
each other here in our lives of charity because we have learned from you how to
do that, how to care for a sick friend, how to guide a dying loved one to
death's door with dignity; we do this because you feed the hungry and clothe the
naked. We do our job because you do yours.
All that to say that this is your
monastery too. If we lack sometimes in extraverted energy and social skills, if
not all of us travel around the world doing concerts or writing books or
preaching retreats and sermons, please don't think we have forgotten you or what
our job is. We are here close to the well to keep the waters flowing for you
too, so that the waters flow downstream and so you can come and dip in any time
you need to. We keep the fire burning so that the whole world can see it, and so
you can come and warm yourself and re-light that spark of divinity within you
whenever you need to. We keep murmuring these sacred words and holy songs over
and over again in case you forget them and need to hear them again to be
reminded. We stay near this altar to remind you that the altar around which we
really circumambulate is the altar of the heart, our hearts, your own heart,
because that's where God is, in Christ: the Spirit poured into our hearts, so
that we can be deified, and in being deified become truly human for the sake of
the Body.
cyprian, osb cam
20 July 2013
i Mt 12:14-21
ii Is 42:3; RB 64:13
iii Bede Griffiths, River of
Compassion, 273.
iv Mk 6:31
v Mt 12:15
vi Constitutions and
Declarations, I.4
vii Rom 8:22
cyprian, osb cam 20 July
2013
