On Monastic and Eremitical Life in the Future

[[Dear Sister, Sorry for the back to back questions. Recently I was on retreat at a Trappist monastery. During vespers on the last day of my retreat I took a good look at the monks in choir and realized that due to the age of the monks and the lack of vocations that this monastery (barring a miracle) will be gone in 10 or 15 years. It made me incredibly sad. I also realize that this will be the case for most monastic communities throughout North America (and probably Europe too).  While there are a few happy exceptions to this trend (many of which are very traditional) I fear monastic life is dying and with it many beautiful traditions and more importantly much wisdom that will not be passed on to a future generation of monastics. This realization raised many questions for me. I would love your opinion on them:

 

1) Do you think the growth in the hermit vocation is a response to the general collapse of religious life after the Council?]]
 

Thanks for your questions. I am still working on the one prior to this one so no problems that you wrote again. In fact, it's a help to me and I am grateful. First though, let me say that I definitely don't see what is happening to religious life as a "collapse". What people became used to was actually not the norm but an exaggerated instance of numbers. We know that the average life cycle of a congregation is ordinarily around 150 years. This is typical for Apostolic or Ministerial congregations which are founded for specific ministries and needs. For monastic congregations the shift in numbers does not mean the monastic life is dying out, much less "collapsing". Monastic life has evolved over time, throughout time and will continue to do so. Today, for instance, the popularity of oblates represents a shift in the form in which monastic values are embodied but they depend on vowed monastics so a shift in numbers here may point to a new form of monasticism with greater presence among the covenanted laity but not without vowed representation and (perhaps) leadership. Most of the religious I know recognize that even when communities die (or, better said perhaps, achieve the completion of their historical lives and missions) their charism continues if the congregation has worked to provide for this, and they trust that God will ensure the continuance of religious life itself in whatever form that will take. I agree with that view of religious life as providential --- which certainly includes monastic life itself.

 

Regarding the upsurge in eremitical life, no I absolutely do not see it as a result of some sort of "collapse" of monastic life  While the Trappist community you saw was ageing and perhaps dying out, that is not the case generally. Even so, the upsurge in eremitical life, to the degree these vocations are authentic, is more representative in the Western Church at least, with the Church's new-found esteem and provision for this vocation in canon law. The vocation never died out in the Eastern Church and I believe the Western Church would not have experienced the dearth of vocations it did had it recognized the vocation universally in law or truly esteemed it as the Eastern Church has done right along. Another source of authentic eremitical vocations is the countercultural, paradoxical, and prophetic reaction to individualism (and several other "isms") so prevalent today. Canon 603 defines an ecclesial vocation which is individual but not individualistic. I sincerely believe that  the hermits I know who live their lives as consecrated Catholic hermits, and thus as those publicly professed (whether  in community or under c 603) have, out of the love of God, embraced an essentially ecclesial vocation in profound reaction to the dis-ease of individualism (and those other "isms") which so afflict our culture.

 

[[2) It seems most hermits look to communal monastic life for their inspiration by adopting the charism of these communities as the inspiration/grounding of their lives as hermits (i.e. Camaldolese, Carthusian, Cistercian).]]

 

Remember that monastic life grew out of (and sometimes was an attempt to protect the very best impulses of) eremitical life and a radical discipleship, not the other way around. However, that said, it is also true that in monastic life we see preserved and developed the values and spirituality of eremitical life, particularly the communal or ecclesial seedbed leading, for instance, to authentic solitude and "separation" from the world. We look to monastic life because it ordinarily provides the necessary formative context for human growth and spiritual maturity which allows one to hear an authentic call to the silence of solitude in eremitical life. The larger Church, per se, does not ordinarily do this where once it did. So, for instance, if we want to understand values and praxis central to eremitical life, values like silence, solitude, assiduous prayer, penance, the evangelical counsels, the value of manual labor, the importance of community for solitude (and vice versa!), etc., we mainly have to turn to monastic houses and communities. Generally speaking, silence and an understanding of, much less an esteem for solitude-in-community simply cannot be found in parish churches. Contemplative life (which eremitical life always is) itself tends to be found and supported effectively in community, (and again generally speaking) not in contemporary parishes. Regular prayer (Divine Office, contemplative prayer, the cultivation of the Evangelical counsels, and life rooted in Scripture or the Rules of Benedict, Albert, et al., also cannot generally be found in parishes.)

 

[[3) What effect do you think the collapse of monastic life will have on the hermit vocation? It seems to me that without a connection to a living monastic tradition the hermit life will become unanchored.]]

 

While I don't believe eremitical life will disappear, I believe it will become even rarer if monastic houses disappear. Canon 603 allows for hermits who are formed mainly within parishes or dioceses, but these vocations are truly very rare. What is crucial to them is not merely the silence of solitude but the fact that the values of eremitical life are embedded in and supported at every point by the life of the Church itself. Camaldolese hermits "live alone together". Diocesan hermits live the silence of solitude only with the support of a parish and diocesan structures but also may find these insufficient and require the more intense and explicit contemplative life of the monastery for support and inspiration. Eremitical life must be anchored or rooted in specific practices and values; these are most fundamentally ecclesial, spiritual, and human values not merely monastic; but at the same time they have been lived and embodied most faithfully and consistently in monastic life. To the degree people can really find these values in their local churches (or in accounts of monastic life, etc) eremitical life will continue as the rare vocation it is. Paradoxically, at the same time, to the degree people find these values to be important but threatened to disappear from the local Church, eremitical life will continue to arise as a prophetic reality, just as it did in the days Constantine published the Edict of Milan and inadvertently triggered the rise of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  

 

Unfortunately, I believe the existence of authentic eremitical vocations will be more threatened by ignorance and individualism than by the growing loss of numbers among those living monastic life itself. Today, dioceses sometimes (maybe often) fail to distinguish between lone individuals and authentic hermits; this leads to the undiscerning and unwise profession of "vocations" which cannot persist except as aberrations of eremitical life. Eremitical life is marked by great freedom and no hermit is identical to any other, but license and freedom are not the same things. To the degree diocesan staff don't understand eremitical life and mistake it for merely being someone who lives a relatively pious life alone, candidates discerning eremitical life may substitute individualism for eremitism without noticing what is actually happening.

Importantly, we cannot treat hermits as though they are something other than rare. Eremitical life is simply not the way most people come to human wholeness or genuine Christian discipleship. Especially, we cannot see them as the replacement troops for diminishing numbers of cenobitical religious. The two forms of religious life are related but not interchangeable and dioceses will need to resist the impulse to treat them identically or to look for numbers in either form of religious life. Similarly, we cannot allow c 603 vocations to be replaced by individuals who actually reject Vatican II and the wisdom it codified and is now found embodied to some extent in the post-Vatican II Church. (I say to some extent because I believe Vatican has not been adequately received by the Church yet.) Vatican II is part of the Church's authentic Tradition and we cannot allow individuals who reject that part of the Tradition to isolate themselves from the contemporary Church while taking refuge in a canon which was actually made possible by the Vatican II Council and it's call for the revision of Canon Law itself. I think this specific use of canon 603 represents a particularly disreputable form of individualism which cannot be validated as diocesan eremitical life.

[[4) Finally, it seems to me that growth and vocations in the monastic life is mostly among communities that are quite traditional (i.e. using pre-Vatican 2 liturgies). I don’t think dismissing them, as some do, is the answer. The monks and nuns of these communities are well educated, hard working and living their monastic life with integrity. In short, they are “doing and living it.” And they have been for decades. They aren’t a flash in the pan. It seems that if monastic life is going to survive then the future belongs to these communities as they will be the only ones in existence. What are your thoughts regarding this phenomenon and what implications, if any, will it have for canon 603 hermits?]] 

 

I don't believe the pre-Vatican II monastic communities will be the only ones in existence in the future. I think in this matter you have overstated your case. At the same time, I recognize that Canon 603 itself with its clear effect upon eremitical vocations is, again, a direct result of Vatican II and its return to earliest Christian sources and impulses. If the pre-Vatican II monastic communities you mention are to continue and be something the post Vatican II church can learn from, they will have to do so in dialogue with the contemporary Roman Catholic Church and with contemporary monastic life. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much evidence of a desire to embrace such dialogue by the communities you are referring to.

Canon 603 hermits may draw from some of the values found in monastic life lived in these congregations and houses, but c 603 eremitical life remains the fruit of Vatican II and is shaped charismatically by the same Holy Spirit that occasioned Vatican II and inspires all authentic monastic and consecrated life. (By the way, as something of a postscript I should note that monastic houses don't necessarily lose members because they are inauthentic in their living of monastic life, and neither is it automatically true that the traditionalist communities you are speaking of gain members or demonstrate continuing numbers because they are living authentic and healthy monastic life. The situation is very much  more complicated than that and once again numbers are not the guiding criterion here any more than they are with eremitical life.)  

These are my initial thoughts on the things you have written about. I think of it, therefore, as the first step in a continuing dialogue. I hope you find it helpful.

It is Only With the Heart that One Sees Rightly

Recently a parishioner sent a postcard to the daily Mass folks. Buzz and his wife, Diana, are doing The Way (El Camino de Santiago) and are on their way to St James de Compostela. The postcard quoted St Exupery's Little Prince: "It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Certainly on such a pilgrimage we come to see people in more profound ways than we do when we look at them superficially. In the best cases pilgrims begin to see one another in ways which make them more whole and takes delight in them --- warts and all. It reminded me of a reflection I did one Friday just two or three weeks ago regarding the beam in one person's eye and the splinter in another!

Also recently I read the story of someone who, as a result of some sort of 'private revelation', apparently "fled Mass in horror" because she had supposedly seen "through the masks" of people attending Mass, perhaps most especially the priest presiding there. She wrote of seeing various persons' flaws, seeing raw, unfiltered truth, and she is trying to make sense of this way of seeing that happens to her at Mass. In light of this deeply disturbing experience (for the person writing about it has written about also being profoundly troubled by it in the past) there is some monastic wisdom which is critical to keep in mind, namely, we only see a person truly when we see them as God sees them. Keeping this in mind will help us hear what is being said again and again in the Gospel readings throughout this whole week.

It is one thing to see a person's flaws. That is certainly part of the truth of who we each are. But it is not the deepest truth and it is the deepest truth which the grace of God empowers us to see and work towards.  The less profound "truth" we may also see can become literally diabolical, that is, it can divide, throw, or tear apart (diabolos comes from the Greek, dia for apart and balein, to throw). It divides the see-er from her own heart, it tears apart the one seen in this way by treating a part of them as the whole or most important truth, and it can result in ripping apart the community in which such things occur. Such truth is meant to be filtered, filtered through hearts that see as God sees, that love as God loves --- with a mercy that does justice, a love that makes whole. Otherwise, the result is true misery for all involved. In light of all this I wanted to repost this piece I put up several years ago:

It is Only With the Heart that We See Rightly.

In one of the best selling books of all time, The Little Prince, there is a dialogue between a fox and the Little Prince. It occurs over a period of time. The Fox begins by explaining about what it means to be "tamed,"  and he notes that it involves forming ties with others. He begs the Prince to "tame him" and over time (the prince agrees to "waste time" in this way!) the Little Prince does so while the Fox allows himself to be tamed; in other words the Prince works to become the Fox's friend and the Fox becomes his. As a result the most mundane parts of reality are also transformed. Golden fields of wheat which hold no interest for the Fox ordinarily (he eats only chickens!) now remind the Fox of his friend's golden hair and occasion joy. When the time comes for the Little Prince to leave the Fox is sad, and then he gives the Little Prince his most precious secret, a secret he says most men have forgotten: [[It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.]]

In last Friday's Gospel story Jesus knows that there is more than one way of "seeing" and he equates one of these with a destructive blindness which will lead everyone into the pit together. He warns that an untrained person is apt to harm someone and needs to get proper training before trying to act as a teacher. And he reminds us via this story that we ourselves are often afflicted with a beam in our own eye but that we are equally often one who blindly criticizes and offers to extract a splinter from another's eye. We hear one of Jesus' most damning judgments as he says: "You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your own eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from in your brother's eye!"

Jesus clearly understands several things; he knows what the fox reminds us most "men have forgotten": First, that seeing rightly (compassion) is something we do with our hearts and this requires a kind of training. It is the kind of training one does when, over time, one helps (trains) a child to grow in a certain way. It takes years to "train" a child's ability to stand upright, to help them become persons who love themselves and others, who are capable of giving themselves to the world in a way which makes it better, richer, more holy. It takes years to help a child become responsible for their own hearts as we ourselves are called to be responsible for our own hearts Our hearts are, as I have said here a number of times, the places where we meet and respond to God, but they are also those places within us where obstacles to this meeting reside; for this reason they need to be "trained"  (formed, healed, nurtured, strengthened, aided) to see rightly. The responsibility for forming our hearts, for taming them (what Christians call growing in holiness), is a lifelong process of being made capable of compassionate seeing by living with and from Christ.

Secondly then, he knew that the way our attention is avidly drawn to the splinter in another's eye SHOULD lead us to suspect the beam in our own; that is, we should suspect the real obstacles to accurate vision, to compassion, exist in our own hearts. They represent ways of seeing we have made our own whether they have come from our culture, from peer pressure, from our own needs, successes or failures, from the hurts of childhood, or wherever. Because of this I think Jesus understood very well that we ordinarily operate from habitual ways of seeing and behaving which are less than Christian; we operate from characteristic attitudes of the false self that serve as lenses which distort our own vision and prevent us from seeing rightly or compassionately with the heart. In terms of the Gospel, and the story of the Little Prince, they are the lenses which prevent us from making neighbors of those we meet or know, the lenses which prevent us from loving others, from letting others "tame us," and therefore from becoming friends.

 Two pieces of monastic truth:

Monastic life encapsulated Jesus' teaching in a number of ways, but there are two pieces which are especially important here. The first is the monastic teaching on what are called "the passions."  The passions are obstacles to humility, that is, they are barriers to recognizing and celebrating the truth about who we are in regard to God and others. Thus they are also obstacles to compassion, to seeing others with the same kind of loving truthfulness. They are most often the beams in our own eyes and hearts which cause us to overreact to the splinters in our brother's or sister's eyes. They are the symptoms of woundedness and disease in our own hearts which cause us to project onto others and fail to love them as we ought and as they deserve. As Roberta Bondi reminds us, "a passion has as its chief characteristics perversion of vision and the destruction of love." (To Love as God Loves)

Common passions we are all too familiar with include perfectionism, a kind of habitual irritation with someone or some situation, anger, envy, depression, apathy or sloth, gluttony (which often has more to do, Bondi points out, with requiring novelty than it does with eating), irritable or anxious restlessness, impatience, selfishness, etc. In each, if we consider their effects, we will notice these habitual ways of relating to ourselves and our world cause us to see reality in a distorted way (this is one of the reasons we think of seeing reality through the green haze of envy, the red film of anger, or the black wall of depression, and so forth). Further, they get in the way of being open to or nurturing the truth of others --- that is, they are obstacles to love.

Similarly they are destructive of sight and love because they cause us to transfer onto others our own flawed expectations, values, failings and woundedness.  We know this by its psychological term: projection. It is a serious disordering of our hearts and minds that Jesus apparently understood well; it is a result of our own brokenness and sinfulness, and it assures not only that the person being projected onto CANNOT be heard or seen for who they are, but also that the one doing the projecting becomes more and more locked into their own blindness and inability to love the other as neighbor. The wisdom of Jesus' admonition, "Remove the beam from your own eye before you attempt to remove the splinter from your brother's," as well as the appropriateness of his anger in calling others on their hypocrisy is profound.

The second piece of monastic wisdom here we should remember, and one which is closely related to the importance of dealing with these passions has to do with the nature of really seeing another truly. In our own time we are very used to acting as though we only know someone really well when we see their flaws. We approach people and things "critically," searching out their failings and weaknesses and when we have discovered them, we believe we have discovered their deepest truth. How often have we heard someone say something like: "I thought I knew him, but the other day, he acted to betray me. Now I really know who he is!"

But monastic wisdom is just the opposite of this notion of knowing. It is strikingly countercultural and counterintuitive. In monastic life we only really know someone when we see them as God sees them: precious, sacred, whole, and beautiful. We only see them rightly when we look past the flaws **to the deep or true person at the core. We only see them truly when we see them with the eyes and humility of love. As we were reminded by Saint-Exupery and as tomorrow's Gospel implies strongly, "It is only with the heart that one sees rightly," --- and only once we have removed those distorting lenses monks call passions, that is, only once we have removed the beams from our own eyes will we be able to do this!

** N.B., I do not mean looking past these flaws in the sense of ignoring them completely (it may or may not be loving to do so) but rather looking past them so they may be seen within the context of the deeper truth and relatedness to God as ground and source. These flaws are tragic but they are tragic precisely because of the deeper truth of every person. Secondly, we must see the deeper truth not only as reality but as the person's profoundest potential. Looking past the flaws means loving the person in a way which summons them to realize their potential by healing and transcending the flaws. Only seeing with the eyes of the heart make this possible.

Questions on Formation, Flexibility, and Providing Space for the Holy Spirit

[[ Sister Laurel,  I would like to become a diocesan hermit, but I can't go away to a monastery or anything like that. How would I get the formation you say I need? Also, do you know the newsletter, Raven's Bread? There are a lot of people on that and they live as hermits without formation. Some are married and claim their spouses understand their need for solitude. They just seem a lot more flexible than you do on some things.  . . I wonder if you allow enough room for the Holy Spirit to work however he will in a person's life. . .  I think I am already a hermit, but it sounds like you might not.]]

Formation is not an Added Burden but a Means to Freedom

Thanks for your comments and questions. One of the things I have tried to make clear in what I have written about formation is that it occurs in the silence of solitude under the hermit's own initiative and the grace of God. It is not a formal program put together or administered by a diocese, nor does it consist in formal stages like postulancy, novitiate, and so forth. It does, however, involve stages of growth, and these chart the  person's movement from lone person to hermit. If one is seeking to be professed under canon 603 and a diocese believes they might be suitable for this, a diocese will monitor a candidate's own formation, her own growth as a person and transformation into a hermit as part of a process of discernment; the diocese may thus decide that certain experiences are important for the hermit's own growth and the diocese's own discernment, but this is not the same as creating and administering a formation program.


The second thing I have tried to make clear is that ANY form of life involves formation; to the extent we want to do something well and authentically there must be training, education, perseverance in the disciplines these require, and so, conversion and growth in these. Eremitical life takes skill and discipline; the solitude it demands is dangerous to those not called to it and risky even for those who are --- especially in an urban setting which militates against it at every moment. As already noted, I really believe that only the truly naive could think otherwise. While people approaching dioceses are surprised to hear a diocese won't simply admit them to vows as a hermit without a period of discernment (personal formation in living the life is implied here), I wonder if these same folks would be very surprised were they to imagine knocking on a convent door only to be told this is not how it works;  they won't be professed there simply because they walk in off the street and request it! I doubt they would be surprised at such a conclusion. My insistence on the need for formation, as I have said before, is not meant to lay unnecessary burdens on the candidate, but instead to make sure they provide for ways to grow in the skills and discipline (which lead to the freedom) necessary to live 1) a paradigmatic life of assiduous prayer and penance 2) in the silence of solitude 3) on God's behalf and on behalf of all those precious to him.

You see, one problem I run into all the time is that few people today really know what it means to live the silence of solitude. This is much more than living silence and physical solitude though it depends on these. Even fewer know what it is to live a life of assiduous prayer and penance, or really, what it means to be a desert dweller. Beyond this, still fewer imagine doing these for God's sake or the sake of others. As I have said many times, there are many forms and degrees of solitude; very few are eremitical. Stereotypes aside, whether it is email from people who cannot turn off their TV sets or disconnect from their cell phones and iPods, those who prefer not to live alone (some actually cannot do this and this is often, though not always, a different matter), folks who believe the eremitical life means simply being a lone person and doing whatever it is they can or desire to do by facile appeals to the "call of the Holy Spirit," correspondents who are married but believe that God is calling them to be hermits and celibates nonetheless, or from those who believe ANY degree of solitude in their lives means they are hermits, I am afraid I hear a lot from people who are entirely naive of the demands of the canon or who are seeking more to justify an individualistic bent and lifestyle rather than from folks who are hermits or who may ever really discern an authentic call to this.

Why Spend Time in a Monastery?

With this in mind, let me explain how one of the elements I have suggested can be really helpful to diocesan hermits or candidates and why I encouraged it. I have suggested that candidates without the benefit of religious formation especially, but not only, would benefit from extended time in a monastery. I have done this because the silence and solitude in a monastery (especially smaller monasteries that accept retreatants) is of a different character than most people have ever experienced. It is lived with and for others and this is a significant quality which the hermit's own silence of solitude must also have. In a monastery it becomes very clear that the silence of solitude is there to allow God space and a continuing opportunity to reveal himself in each Sister's life and in the community as a whole. One guards both silence and solitude here so that others can seek God, find, and be found by him in the profoundly intimate ways he desires. One guards these then for God's self , for one's Sisters and also for the larger world --- some of whose inhabitants may come here hungering for a silence and solitude (or the silence of solitude) the world generally has lost entirely or cannot provide for.

There is no way to replace this experience I don't think. In Stillsong I live it in a similar but not identical way because I am alone with God for others, but not together with others. (The Camaldolese describe the experience I am speaking of as living alone together.) In the monastery what I experience is a shared reality and because it is shared and nurtured together (anyone eating  in silence or praying silently for an hour with a dozen others will know this), it can be an intensely educative, re-vitalizing, and affirming experience for the hermit --- and I think especially for the urban hermit or the hermit who, for instance, must live with a caregiver and needs to know what is really possible to expect when people live together. So I encourage this as part of the hermit's own formation and discernment because she must be able to live something very similar in her own hermitage. She can't do this if she doesn't even know it exists or if she thinks the silence of solitude merely means the absence of external noise and closing the door on others. Additionally of course, it is really helpful to know others who are living as one does and who embrace the same values, schedule (generally speaking), praxis, etc. When one believes one is doing something strange or singular it becomes very much harder; when one knows others who are faithful to the daily discipline and praxis one is also committed to it is empowering and sustaining.

Allowing Room for the Holy Spirit:

While I am not referring to you here, your comments remind me of those I have received from others. I am surprised when I hear from folks evincing interest in profession under c 603 or in living as a hermit yet who resist making concrete commitments to regular prayer, penance, silence, solitude, or a schedule which calls for disciplined living because they "need to let the Holy Spirit guide them as to what to do". I wonder if we are speaking about the same Holy Spirit. You see, I have found that the Holy Spirit speaks to us in both the successes and failures we have in living our commitments, and less so in the absence of these and similar commitments. In other words, in my experience the Holy Spirit reminds me of how my commitments serve my vocation or not, how they allow me to grow or not, how they empower me to function or not. It is not the case that the Holy Spirit speaks out of a vacuum or like a bolt from the blue --- at least not in my general experience..

I think that suggesting commitments and structure will get in the Holy Spirit's way (which, right or wrong, is what I do hear you saying) is analogous to someone saying, "Oh I don't need to practice the violin to play it, I'll just let the Holy Spirit teach me where my fingers should go (or any of the billion other things involved in playing this instrument)." "Maybe I'll play scales if the HS calls me to; maybe I'll tune the violin if the HS calls me to. You mean I can't do vibrato without practicing it slowly? Well, maybe I will just conclude it doesn't need to be part of MY playing and the HS is not calling me to it." What I am trying to say is that if someone wants to play the violin they must commit to certain fundamental praxis and the development of foundational skills; only in so far as they are accomplished at the instrument technically will they come to know how integral this discipline and these skills are to making music freely and passionately as the Holy Spirit impels. Otherwise the music will not soar. In fact there may be no music at all --- just a few notes strung together to the best of one's ability; the capacity for making music will be crippled by the lack of skill and technique. In other words, the Holy Spirit works in conjunction with and through  the discipline I am speaking of, not apart from it.

More, my own experience is that one learns that appropriate flexibility is rooted in a disciplined life. Without the foundation I am speaking of we are not talking about flexibility but instead disorder and relative laxness and fruitlessness. Regularity does not mean rigidity, but in my own experience, one has to commit to prayer, lectio, an essential silence and solitude, regular rest, rising, recreation, meals, etc if the Holy Spirit is going to have a chance of being heard. If your criticism has to do with the fact that I am clear that married people cannot be hermits (by definition they are not solitaries), or that canon 603 grew out of Bishops' experiences with experienced monastics with significant formation who grew into an eremitical vocation and that its structure and requirements implicitly include significant formation, I plead guilty! We can all use words in any way we like, but too often doing so carelessly or without real knowledge simply empties them of meaning; in the case of the term "eremite" (or hermit), using this for any lone person (or anyone who spends any time at all in physical solitude) ensures not only that the word will be emptied of meaning but that the truly isolated and alienated have no one to look to as a sign that such isolation can really be redeemed and transformed into the silence of solitude.

If Time in a Monastery is Not Possible:

While the experience I am thinking of is not easily replaceable, one can break aspects of it down into significant elements and try to build one's life around those. What I would suggest you consider doing is to read about life in a monastery, and especially that you take note of the elements which monks and nuns speak about that are elemental to their lives. In order to build a life around these you will need to change the way you relate to others and the world around you in some fundamental ways. You see, I am not speaking about building IN a little silence or a little solitude or a bit of prayer or penance here or there. I am not suggesting that doing lectio once or twice a week is identical to building one's life around this, for instance. The first thing a stay in a monastery occasions in our lives is a break with our ordinary environment. To some significant extent you will need to achieve that on your own and construct a life around the elements which are central for a monastic or a hermit.

There are certain central pieces of such a life in which you may need actual instruction. Office or Liturgy of the Hours is ordinarily one of these --- especially if you choose to sing it. Just finding your way through the book can be daunting without help. (At the same time, once you get it down fundamentally you may experiment with it in many many ways and pray it in ways which are truly the fruit of the Holy Spirit.) Lectio is another and your spiritual director may be able to help you with this. Still, actual instruction in Scripture is also crucial. Quiet prayer may be something you are already skilled at, but if that is not the case, you might find a group near you that prays silently together. Doing this as a group is amazingly nurturing and supportive. Even if you cannot spend an extended period of time in a monastery, you might well manage three or four full days at a time after you get to know the community and they agree to assist you. (If you are serious about becoming a diocesan hermit your diocesan Vicar for Religious or Delegate for Consecrated Life might be able to aid you in making the connection needed and also recommend you be allowed to participate more or less fully in their daily lives for limited periods of time every few months or so --- if initial experiments in this go well.)

Remove the Beam from Your Own Eye: On Passions and Projection!

I saw a TV program a couple of years ago where a brilliant eye surgeon became schizophrenic soon after finishing his residency and establishing initially himself. His symptoms included visual hallucinations and an extensive delusional system so, delusional and in denial about his own illness, he attributed his symptoms to a mysterious eye problem which he decided to research and work out a treatment for. Most of the research involved taking poor and disabled persons in halfway houses and convincing their caregivers that they required SIGNIFICANT eye treatment including multiple laser and other surgeries. He sincerely believed that this work was helping people and that it would save his own life and career (this was all part of his illness afterall), but what he did was both criminal and destructive. Minor all-too-usual untreated eye-problems in the poor were magnified in the doctor's mind and became the justification for sadistic and careless experiments which always did more harm than good and were often irreversible. In a way it illustrates what happens to all of us in smaller and less floridly psychotic ways with regard to our own faults and the faults of others, and especially it reminds me of tomorrow's parable from Luke.

Jesus reminds us that a blind person who tries to lead others will lead everyone into the pit. He notes that an untrained person is apt to harm someone and needs to get proper training before trying to act as a teacher. And he reminds us via this parable that we ourselves are often afflicted with a beam in our own eye but that we are equally often one who blindly criticizes and offers to extract a splinter from another's eye. We hear one of Jesus' most damning judgments as he says: "You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your own eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from in your brother's eye!"

Jesus clearly understands several things: First, humility is the opposite of hypocrisy rather than of pride, just as Matthew told us a few months ago. Secondly, he knew that the way our attention is avidly drawn to the splinter in another's eye SHOULD lead us to suspect the beam in our own. And thirdly, I think Jesus understood very well what became the monastic teaching on the passions: namely, that passions are those habitual ways of seeing and behaving, those characteristic attitudes of the false self that serve as lenses which distort our own vision and prevent us from seeing rightly with the heart.

We use the term passion today very differently than 3rd and 4th Century monastics, and very differently from the use of the term in monastic literature generally. For us passions are strong emotions or desires: we say John has a passion for social justice, Ted has a passion for health care reform, Mary is passionately in love with her husband, Nadja has a passion for playing the violin like no one you have ever seen, etc! But monastics use the term in a different sense. Passions in this literature are invariably negative and need not involve strong emotion. In fact they may prevent us from feeling emotions which are really one way of perceiving and appreciating the world around us.

The passions are obstacles to humility, that is, they are barriers to recognizing and celebrating that loving truthfulness about who we are in regard to God and others. They are most often the beams in our own eyes and hearts which cause us to overreact to the splinters in our brother's or sister's eyes. They are the symptoms of woundedness and disease in our own hearts which cause us to project onto others and fail to love them as we ought and as they deserve. As Roberta Bondi reminds us, "a passion has as its chief characteristics perversion of vision and the destruction of love." (To Love as God Loves) Common passions we are all too familiar with include perfectionism, a kind of habitual irritation with someone, anger, envy, depression, apathy or sloth, gluttony (which often has more to do, Bondi points out, with requiring novelty than it does with eating), irritable or anxious restlessness, impatience, selfishness, etc. In each, if we consider their effects, we will notice these habitual ways of relating to ourselves and our world cause us to see reality in a distorted way (this is one of the reasons we think of seeing reality through the green haze of envy, or the red film of anger, or the icy wall of depression, and so forth). Further, they thus get in the way of being open to or nurturing the truth of others --- that is, they are obstacles to love.

Similarly they are destructive of sight and love because they cause us to project onto others our own failings and woundedness. Recently I had the experience that what I wrote on a listserve was misinterpreted negatively. Even the way I punctuated posts was taken to mean something completely negative as was my writing nothing at all! (For instance, because I rarely mentioned God in my posts on eremitical life, I was considered to have no genuine spiritual life or be inadequately centered on God. When I noted that my writing (or anyone else's) should be read without attributions of negative motives and attitudes, something I considered possible because I had not written them with those motives or attitudes, I was instructed that my conscious motives were one thing, subconscious ones were another --- as though the reader could claim to know these better than I did myself! Projection. It is a serious disease Jesus apparently understood well, a result of our own brokenness and sinfulness, and it assures not only that the person being projected onto CANNOT be heard or seen for who they are, but that the one doing the projecting becomes more and more locked into their own blindness and inability to love the other as neighbor. The wisdom of Jesus' admonition, "Remove the beam from your own eye before you attempt to remove the splinter from your brother's" as well as the apropriateness of his anger in calling hypocrisy just that is evident.

There is also a bit of monastic wisdom here we should remember which is closely related to the importance of dealing with our passions. In our own time we are very used to acting as though we only know someone really well when we see their flaws. We approach people and things "critically," searching out their failings and weaknesses and when we have discovered them, we believe we have discovered their deepest truth. How often have we heard someone say something like: "I thought I knew him, but the other day, he acted to betray me. Now I really know who he is!" But monastic wisdom is just the opposite of this notion of knowing. It is strikingly countercultural and counterintuitive. In monastic life we only really know someone when we see them as God sees them: precious, sacred, whole, and beautiful. We only see them rightly when we look past the flaws to the deep or true person at the core. We only see them truly when we see them with the eyes and humility of love. As we were reminded by Saint-Exupery and as tomorrow's Gospel implies strongly, "It is only with the heart that one sees rightly," --- and only once we have removed those distorting lenses monks call passions, that is, only once we have removed the beams from our own eyes!