Hermits, The Antithesis of the Rugged Individualist or the One Who is a Law unto Herself!

[[Dear Sister, I have two different questions. 1) You once wrote a piece about hermits, canon law, and herding cats. I remember you both agreed and disagreed with the person who said legislating for hermits was impossible and like herding cats. Recently you said in another piece that hermits were like fingerprints, each unique but with recognizable patterns, whorls, loops, etc. I know you think highly of canon 603 but I wondered if you thought it was sufficient to legislate the life of solitary hermits. Does there need to be canon  law on the formation of hermits, on time frames prior to profession and final profession?  2) Also, why do you see individualism as so completely antithetical to eremitical life?  Aren't hermits the consummate individualists? If each is an 'ecclesiola' as Peter Damian (and you too) say, then doesn't this make each hermit a kind of law to him or herself?]]

Is Canon 603 Sufficient to Govern and Nurture Solitary Eremitical Life?

First of all I do believe canon 603 is sufficient, generally speaking. I think there need to be some guidelines about formation, time frames, minimum ages and experience required for admission to discernment and profession, as well as regarding the distinction between being a lone individual and being a hermit in some essential sense, and also some significant cautions on what canon 603 is NOT meant for. However, at this point in time I don't see any reason these things would need to be codified in canon law or through an actual papal motu proprio for instance.

Bishops  and Vicars for Religious need to be able to discern with each candidate while doing justice to the flexibility of canon 603 and the diversity which is part of the history of eremitical life itself, but they also need additional help understanding the Church's desert tradition and the very challenging history of this canon so that not just anything is called eremitism. Especially they must recognize that not just any form of aloneness is called "eremitical solitude" nor can just any form of living and working alone be called eremitical life. The misuse of canon 603 as a stopgap to profess individuals who wish to be religious while merely desiring or needing to live alone is a significant problem that must be avoided. The vocation must be a truly eremitical one. At this point it seems sufficient that in addition to the canon and the expertise of canonists and theologians (especially ecclesiologists), hermits contribute their own experience in these matters and dioceses do the same. One of the reasons for this blog as well as for something like the Network of Diocesan Hermits is to allow for this kind of reflection in a way which is available to anyone looking for assistance in implementing canon 603.

Solitary Hermits and Individualism:

Some critics of this blog have been very critical of diocesan hermits providing insights from their own living and reflecting on canon 603, the life it governs and nurtures, and therefore, their reflection on the kinds of life it absolutely should not be mistaken for. Whenever I have fielded questions or objections or even quotations from these folks I have the sense that they are most upset by my position that not just anything goes, not just anything can be called eremitical life in line with the Church's own understanding and eremitical tradition. Canon 603 is not meant to profess those who simply could not be professed any other way (though there will be a handful who could not be professed in community and who discover a genuine call to eremitical life). It is not meant to govern a nominally pious life without meaningful theological education and formation in spirituality --- especially in desert spirituality. Neither is it meant for those who want to live some silence and some solitude (even significant amounts of these) or desire mainly to separate themselves from others or from the post-conciliar Church, but who do not really hunger to live a LIFE of the silence of solitude.

It is the notion that "the silence of solitude" is the charism of the diocesan hermit, the gift the Holy Spirit creates in her life and the gift she herself brings to the Church and world that might help me answer your questions about individualism. A lot of people think of a hermit's work as praying for people and while I agree that is an important piece of our lives, I don't think it is the main work we do. Rather, our main work is to allow God to work in us, that is to become God's own prayer --- a prayer that witnesses to the fact that the grace of God is truly sufficient for us and God's power is made all-embracing (i.e., is perfected) in weakness. There is nothing individualistic in this. Instead there is a real dying to self so that one might be fully transparent to God, fully human in God, and witness to all of this so that others might also allow themselves to become who and what they were made to be in God. The hermit is a person in communion; they live in communion with God, with themselves, and in the heart of the Church for the sake of others. There is no room for individualism nor selfishness here.

Like a local Church the hermit is an ecclesiola, a little Church. But this means she represents the whole and is intimately related to the larger Church, first every other ecclesiola (Christian person), then the parish, then the diocesan Church, and then finally the universal Church. Each person, but especially the hermit is a microcosm of what it means to be called, to live the response in a way which is always transparent to the God who calls, and to do so for the sake of others. The hermit lives a life in which she is free to plumb the depths of communion with God. She is free to be herself in the fullest way possible in an intense and all-encompassing relatedness. She is not, however free to do just anything she wants. That is not freedom after all; it is license and it is similarly the hallmark of individualism. Thus I say the eremitical vocation is actually antithetical to individualism. To represent the Church (as any Christian is ecclesiola) and to live this vocation in the name of the Church is to be a person-in-relationship more than it is to be an individual in some senses of that term.

Hermits, A Law Unto Themselves?

The canon 603 hermit is never a law unto him or herself. Her life is given over to the will of God and to the law which that God writes on her heart. She lives a life whose parameters are defined by Canon and proper law (Rule or Plan of Life) as well as by the living eremitical tradition of the Church. It is a life nurtured by the Sacraments, fed by the Word of God and lived under the various forms of supervision of Bishop, delegate, spiritual director, and pastor as well as by an oblate chaplain or other similar figure in cases of oblature or associateship with an institute of consecrated life. She is vowed to God through profession of the evangelical counsels and thus she is bound to obedience to God in the hands of a legitimate superior; she is bound, in other words, both morally and in law. The "hermit" who is not so bound (and who thus mistakes license for genuine freedom) has been a perennial thorn in the side of eremitical leaders and reformers throughout the history of the Church. St Benedict castigated these, St Peter Damian did likewise as did Paul Giustiniani and many many others.

Certainly the notion of hermit as rugged individualist and law to him or herself is common as a stereotype. A few years ago I blogged about a journalist's t stupid identification (sorry but it's true!) of Tom Leppard and one other person as living classic and somehow edifying lives of eremitical solitude. I would suggest you check out those posts with labels like "stereotypes," "Tom Leppard," etc. In contemporary theology (Paul Tillich, 20 C.) we would recognize the autonomous person as antithetical to the theonomous person; that is, we would find the person who was a law unto herself as antithetical to the one who has God as her law (that is, the Lord and driving dynamic of her heart). The hermit is almost a pure paradigm of theonomous life. Certainly this alone is what s/he aspires to and represents when s/he says that by her life s/he witnesses to the fact that God alone is sufficient or that in God we are called and fulfilled as human beings who live for one another. And isn't this also the definition of Church, namely the community of the called who find their fulfillment and missionary purpose in the God of Love who is both their nomos (law) and telos (goal)?

I sincerely hope this is helpful. Your questions are important ones and ones I am keenly interested in so thanks for those!

On Thinking About the True or Inner Self

[[Dear Sister Laurel, you referred recently to the "true self" and I have seen references to this in other writers dealing with spirituality. Keating and others in the Centering Prayer movement refer to this and I have the sense it is a monastic way of speaking. My problem is I have never found a good presentation of what it is or is not. I know that the false self is the ego self but is the true self our soul or our heart or what exactly is it? Is there someone I can read on this?]]

This is a great question because defining the true self is difficult and treating it as a kind of "little person," homunculus, or piece of ourselves somewhere inside us is a real danger. I tend to think of my true self as that self God envisions and calls me to be. If I need something a little more tangible (or that at least feels more tangible!) I think of it as the Name by which God knows and calls me. It is as much potential as it is real(ized).This emphatically does not mean that there is a kind of template, much less an invisible person hidden deep within us. The true self is not our soul nor perhaps even our "heart" (though as I understand "heart" the two are profoundly related). In any case, the true self is a dialogical event which comes to be in the very moment of obedient response to the Word and Summons of God. In a sense when we speak of the true self we are talking about a reality in the mind or heart of God as well as an event which is the result and embodiment of his love as it is received at any given moment in our own lives. It is that person we are when we are most truly alive, most truly ourselves, most truly living from and in God. Merton refers to it as "a spontaneity," and finds it in every deeply spiritual experience, "whether religious, moral, or even artistic." In The Inner Experience he writes:

[[The inner self [another term for the true self] is not part of our being, like a motor in a car. It is our entire substantial reality itself, on its highest and most existential level. It is like life, and it is life: it is our spiritual life when it is most alive. It is the life by which everything else in us lives and moves. . . .The inner self is as secret as God and, like Him, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not "a thing." It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation. All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence. the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart, and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his (its) presence.]]

One of the difficulties in speaking of the true self is our failure to understand it in terms of its dynamic and dialogical quality. We think of it as "already there" waiting passively --- apart in some sense from active participation in our relationship with God, apart, that is, from our participation in God's ongoing and eternal creative activity. But this, I think, is not the case. The true self is what exists to the extent and at the very moment we are in dialogue with God. It is that Self which is actively involved in the I-Thou relationship with God. In a sense it IS this I-Thou relationship embodied in space and time, this God-speaking-human being-hearkening Event we know as "incarnated Word". I have written before that God is eternal because God is always new (kainotes) and is eternal only to the extent that God is always new. I think we have to understand that the true self has a similar kind of existence. Merton's use of the term "a spontaneity" is especially apt --- but we must understand that because the true self always and only exists in and from God there is an eternity to it as well. Still, this eternity is not so much one of persistence (which is a temporal reality) as it is of an eternal now --- a moment by moment giveness and receivedness. My own use of the term Event is an attempt to do justice to the paradox of newness (spontaneity)  and eternity in God and in myself as well.

Similarly, I speak and think of true self in relation to the Name by which God calls me because it helps me remember that the true self is not a template or pattern of characteristics I must somehow embody or live up to. It wholly transcends this just as any Name does. I think it also allows us to speak here of the secret name by which God knows and calls us because often (always?) this is very different from the more usual name by which the whole world knows us or, even more emphatically so from the name we try to make for ourselves. At the same time focusing on Name immediately causes me to understand that existence is a gift I cannot give myself and that the true self is the result of God's own speech as hearkened to by the me it makes more real.

Finally, Name points to the embodiment of true freedom we are called to be and become. There is no pre-conceived "person" or "plan" attached to a name. Instead the bestowal of a name gives us a dignity, a capacity and even a commission which we ourselves will "fill" with content --- and yet, above all, that content is who we are in our relatedness with God and all that is from and of God. If one were to try to capture or define the content of a personal Name one would fail as surely as they would fail trying to capture a living brook or flowing river in a bucket. So too with the true self that, like Godself, is really more verb than noun. All of these things are sort of the counterpart to apophatic ways of knowing God. We know God only to the extent we are known by God and any worthwhile attempt to speak positively about the reality of God must center on saying clearly what God is not. Where finally we come to know God as (an) ultimate freedom so too do we come to know the true self as a contingent freedom --- that is, ourselves as we truly (and "spontaneously") exist in and from God.

Addendum:

One other way the true or inner self is often referred to is with the term "deep self." It is not a term I usually use personally but I was reminded of it and reflected on how it might illustrate what I wrote yesterday. Theologians like Paul Tillich (who was influential in Merton's own thought) refer to God and too, to the literally spiritual as the depth dimension of all reality. When, with Tillich, we refer to God as the ground of being and meaning we are referring to this same depth dimension -- a dimension which grounds and can penetrate and take hold of every aspect of our existences, a dimension of depth which is manifest in our religious, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic lives whenever we are grasped by meaning, truth, beauty, or future, etc --- that is, whenever we are grasped by (an ultimate) concern expressed by or through these.

The depth dimension in all of these human endeavors or functions is their participation in ultimacy and the transcendent. My sense is the "deep self" is that self which is grasped by this depth dimension whenever this occurs; this means it is real in the event of our everyday selves being grasped, shaken, and transformed by depth or Spirit. (Remember that because of Jesus' Ascension the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of authentic humanity!) It is, in other words, all of ourselves taken hold of and shaken by ultimacy (and thus, by an ultimate concern), whether that occurs (as Merton pointed out as well) in the intellectual, the moral, religious, or the artistic realms of our lives. If this seems a bit too abstract or the language feels too foreign, notice how it continues the theme of spontaneity or reprises comments on the event nature of the true self. Because for Tillich faith is "the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern" the true self can be called that self which is taken hold of by faith -- not as believing in x or y, but in the sense of allowing ourselves to trustingly fall into the hands of the living God who, at that moment, makes all things new.

For a very accessible introduction to this notion of "depth dimension" cf Paul Tillich's sermon, "The Depth of Existence" in his book, The Shaking of the Foundations. Also helpful would be his sermon, "Our Ultimate Concern" in The New Being.