[[Dear Sister Laurel, I was especially aware that when you write about the standards of your life you are describing what happens in a relationship with God. What you seemed to describe regarding the difference between beginners and the mature hermit was the deepening of a relationship. I could see the variations reflected in the way different people participate in this relationship with God. Too, it seemed to me that the central elements of c 603 had to do with what is essential to live a life in relationship with God. Do you see mature hermits practicing these elements more strictly than beginners? Is there any part of what you live that you practice more strictly now than you did as a beginning hermit?]]
You're welcome, and thank you for making clearer than I may have done myself what is most central in speaking of standards of eremitical life. I agree with you that the essential or constitutive elements of c 603 reflect what is central to a hermit's relationship with God. I do recognize that hermits should be open to living greater reclusion if God calls them to this, and I think hermits from the beginning of their eremitical lives should be open to hearing such a call. I tend not to use the word stricter or more strictly to describe changes in my own life. I prefer the term radical instead of this. That corresponds with increasing depth as well as with an increasingly profound degree of lived personal truth. So I live some things more deeply or more radically, yes, but only occasionally does that translate into being stricter about them.
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Yes, prayer becomes deeper and more extensive as well, as the person becomes not just someone who prays, but God's own prayer in the church and in our world. In light of this, one mainly continues to pray in the way one did as a beginner, and at the same time (as your question clearly recognized), the relationship that is the heart and purpose of prayer deepens and becomes not just central to one's life but one's very breath and blood as well. In some ways, it feels like prayer is not only
not stricter, but that it becomes less strict. Over time, I have shifted from one form of prayer to another or added prayer periods for certain reasons as needed, but there is no strictness about this. Responsiveness and faithfulness or fidelity, yes, but strictness, no; the word just doesn't feel right to me. I suppose it feels like it fails to reflect the integral nature of a Divine call to assiduous prayer and penance.
I think the words responsive and faithful fit all of the dimensions of my life where they might not have when I was beginning eremitical life in 1984 or so. All those years ago, I was finding my way into a vocation, wondering what it involved or allowed and did not allow. I was exercised with discovering not only what such a call required but whether or not it could be considered truly vital at all. Yes, of course, it was an ancient vocation, but was it really also a contemporary one, important for the contemporary church and for our larger world as well? Could my sense of this call be justified apart from my own chronic illness and disability, for instance, or was I mistaken? (More about this in another article).
I began reading and praying and discovered people who helped me see this was very much a healthy, vital, and contemporary vocation. Some of Merton's writings were important (
Contemplation in a World of Action and his "Notes on a Philsophy of Solitude" were particularly helpful; so were the essays in Allchin's
Solitude and Communion, which, in those days, had to be gotten from the Sisters of the Love of God in the UK, and so, put me in touch with their community. Some Camaldolese writing was critical in my discernment, not to mention the existence of the Camaldolese Benedictines in Big Sur. Now, of course, the vocation and my own identity are more just a single thing; in saying this I mean that they are one insofar as I am responsive to God and live my own identity faithfully. So, in all of this, "radically" is a much better word than strictness or any of its cognates.
Today, I believe that c 603's constitutive elements are less things we are called to do (though, of course, they are also that) and more about the kind of persons that hermits are supposed to be. I believe if we consider these elements this way, we will put the accent where it must be, namely on our relationship with God and who we are called to be in light of that. Canon 603 doesn't spell out what it means to pray or embrace penance assiduously, nor does it define "the silence of solitude" or "stricter separation from the world," and this means each hermit will define these in the way and to the extent her relationship with God calls for and depends on these things. The same is true of the way we work out limited forms of ministry: What does my own growth in wholeness and holiness in light of this relationship require? The question I must continue to ask is how my life in hermitage spills over into ministry and how that ministry demands responsiveness and fidelity to God's love in hermitage. Questions about strictness, especially increasing strictness, tend to be unhelpful or even off-point for me.
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