Showing posts with label silence of solitude. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silence of solitude. Show all posts

06 July 2022

A Contemplative Moment: The Silence of Solitude

 
The Silence of Solitude

"Solitude has nothing to do with existential neurosis, but is rather a creative search for the flame of love that burns in God's heart. . . .What occupies the center. . .is the existential solitude of God himself. This is what the human heart wants to absorb and this is where it wants to rest. The eremitic solitude is in no case a fruitless and spiritually empty isolation, a cold indifference toward people and the world, or a selfish passiveness. Just the opposite, it is a space of redemption, full of spiritual life and meant to accept and change any human distress, sorrow, or fear."

"Solitude, which paradoxically we happen to notice most intensely when we relate to another "thou", is a fertile soil in which grows our authentic life's calling of solitude by choice. Only one who is fully aware of the great value of human relationships, bonds, and connections can decide on giving them up in order to find them anew in an even fuller way. So, the choice of an eremitic calling should be made in freedom and humility. The person who is called to remain alone and makes his independent choice for solitude is, above all, a herald of the absolutely precious and meaningful love that is continuously going on in the depths of the triune God. . . .

To be a hermit means to relate to the mystery that is present in every human life and makes one feel small and powerless. To see with the eyes of faith the marvelous and eternal beauty of God means to be invited to come out of oneself and to give oneself up to God. . . .. In this sense, the eremitic calling is a consequence of meeting the original depths of the Trinity's solitude. . . . The reality of God is thus the original source of any solitude, an impenetrable abyss that calls to the profound depths of solitude of the human heart. Having heard that existential call of God's solitude, people respond to it by opening up the whole secret of their hearts."

Fr Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam: The Eremitic Life

27 February 2022

Purpose of Stricter Separation from the World

I have received an email asking a question I wrote about in 2011, so I am reposting this response here. I am hoping it leads to further questions, not least, those that will help to clarify the validity of stricter separation from "the world" in an eremitical life. I am thinking about a couple of sentences in a new document from CICLSAL re c 603 I believe this begins to address: [[The hermit who distances [herself] from the world does not flee out of fear or contempt. [She] lived in the world and is called, Christianly, to seek to love it and to look at it with the eyes and the love that God revealed to us in Jesus. . .one separates oneself from the world to save it, one moves away to integrate it. The exterior become interior, the distant becomes near, the excluded is desired included. This is why separating does not mean fleeing.]] par 24 The Hermit Life Form in the Particular Church. "Guidance" CICLSAL, 2022.


[Dear Sister, what is the purpose of "stricter separation from the world" in your life? You have mentioned it as an element of hermit life, but I really don't get it. The Sisters I know are deeply involved in this world and it seems to me it is what Christ was all about. Can you help me understand?]]

Great question! I have written a little about stricter separation from the world, especially what it does and doesn't mean, so I would invite you to check out labels leading to those articles for additional thoughts. But you are correct, I have not really written about the purpose of stricter separation, nor have I spoken explicitly about the validity of this approach in spirituality --- which does indeed seem rather different from Jesus' usual way of doing things. In fact, "stricter separation from the world" was not something I would have chosen myself without circumstances which led me to understand it differently than I did as a young Sister. As your own comment suggests, at first or second glance, it hardly seems to comport with a Christian perspective which honors the incarnation and the sanctity of all creation in Christ. For me it always sounded selfish and lacking in charity --- not to mention in generosity!

It is important to remember that separation from the world means first of all separation from that which is resistant or uncongenial to Christ, and that it involves detachment from that which promises fulfillment, meaning, and hope apart from him and the God he mediates. This sense of the term "world" refers to anything which is untrue, distorted, resistant to life, to love, and to all the rest of the values which constitute life in God. But it is not God's good creation, therefore, from which we mainly separate ourselves. It is "the world" of falsehood, chaos, and meaninglessness, and this means that it is not something distinct existing merely outside of ourselves, but instead a reality which is intimately related to the darkness, woundedness, distortions, and sclerosis (hardness) of our own hearts.

Keeping this in mind, there are several reasons then for embracing stricter separation from the world. The first is that such separation distances us from the constant reinforcement of values, behaviors, expectations, and so forth which bombard us otherwise. Consider all the things we each see every day that tell us who we are and must be --- despite the fact that almost none of them are consistent with the values of the Kingdom of God! The second reason has to do with allowing ourselves the space and time --- and the silence and solitude --- to meet ourselves without all the supports, props, and distractions of "the world." It is hard to see ourselves for who we really are otherwise. Once the props are down or removed, we come to experience our own poverty. When we are not measuring (and in fact CANNOT measure) success, integrity, fruitfulness, etc., according to the terms constituting, "the world" we come face to face with what we are really all about. So, the first part of stricter separation is all about reality checks. Conversion, after all, requires confrontation with truth.

The third and most fundamental reason for stricter separation from the world is to allow the space and time needed for a meeting with God. If our hearts (and so, our very selves) are, in part, darkened, distorted, sclerosed and untrue, they are also the place where God bears witness to himself and the truth of who we are. All the elements of the eremitical life, including stricter separation, are geared towards the meeting (and eventually, union) with God which verifies (makes true), heals, and brings to fullness of life. It is in this meeting that we learn how precious we are despite our very real human poverty, here that we learn how constant and secure God's love, here that we begin to have a sense of what we are really capable of and meant for. It is in this meeting with God that we come to know genuine freedom, come to experience an imperishable hope, and are commissioned to go out to others to summon them to something similar.

There is a fourth reason for stricter separation from the world then. We must step away from the distorted perspectives and values that constitute "the world" in order to love it better. We leave it in order to be made capable of affirming the deeper truth and beauty of the world around us. We come to know everything in God and that leads us to see with God's eyes. Hermits assume a marginal place so that they may also serve a prophetic function by speaking the truth in a way that affirms the world's deepest and truest reality. It will also summon to conversion. Stricter separation from "the world" allows us to love God's world into wholeness. It is a servant of true engagement and commitment. Stricter separation from "the world" is a tool for loving the whole of God's creation; it is neither escapist nor selfish and cannot be allowed to devolve into these. Abba Evagrius said it this way, [[The monk is someone who separates himself from all so that he can be united to all.]] Treatise on Prayer #124.

But why a LIFE of stricter separation from the world? Hermits witness to separation from the world as a basic dynamic assisting us to come to the freedom that results from being the person God makes us to be. The hermit reminds us again and again of the primacy of the foundational relationship that grounds our being, and of the task of individuation it summons us to achieve on a day-by-day basis for the whole of our lives. We are made for life with God and we are made for a life loving the whole of God's creation. That requires some separation from the world and the rejection of enmeshment with it. Hermits say this particularly clearly with their lives.

15 June 2017

Solemnity of Corpus Christi: Celebrating a Power Made Perfect in Weakness

Because Sunday is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi and because tomorrow's first reading is Paul's "earthen vessels" text (2 Cor:4:7-14) I am reprising the following post from two years ago. I am hoping to get another piece up on tomorrow's readings --- a version of a reflection I will do for my parish community -- but that might not be until tomorrow or Saturday some time.

[[Dear Sister, if a person is chronically ill then isn't their illness a sign that "the world" of sin and death are still operating in [i.e., dominating] their lives?  . . . I have always thought that to become a religious one needed to be in good health. Has that also changed with canon 603? I don't mean that someone has to be perfect to become a nun or hermit but shouldn't they at least be in good health? Wouldn't that say more about the "heavenliness" of their vocation than illness? ]] (Concatenation of queries posed in several emails)

As I read these various questions one image kept recurring to me, namely, that of Thomas reaching out to touch the wounds of the risen Christ. I also kept thinking of a line from a homily my pastor (John Kasper, OSFS) gave about 7 years ago which focused on Carravagio's painting of this image; the line was,  "There's Another World in There!" It was taken in part from the artist and writer Jan Richardson's reflections on this painting and on the nature of the Incarnation. Richardson wrote:

[[The gospel writers want to make sure we know that the risen Christ was no ghost, no ethereal spirit. He was flesh and blood. He ate. He still, as Thomas discovered, wore the wounds of crucifixion. That Christ’s flesh remained broken, even in his resurrection, serves as a powerful reminder that his intimate familiarity and solidarity with us, with our human condition, did not end with his death. . . Perhaps that’s what is so striking about Caravaggio’s painting: it stuns us with the awareness of how deeply Christ was, and is, joined with us. The wounds of the risen Christ are not a prison: they are a passage. Thomas’ hand in Christ’s side is not some bizarre, morbid probe: it is a  union, and a reminder that in taking flesh, Christ wed himself to us.]] Living into the Resurrection

Into the Wound, Jan L Richardson
My response then must really begin with a series of questions to you. Are the Risen Christ's wounds a sign that sin and death are still "operating in" him or are they a sign that God has been victorious over these --- and victorious not via an act of force but through one of radical vulnerability and compassion? Are his wounds really a passage to "another world" or are they signs of his bondage to and defeat by the one which contends with him and the Love he represents? Do you believe that our world is at least potentially sacramental or that heaven (eternal life in the sovereign love of God) and this world interpenetrate one another as a result of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection or are they entirely separate from and opposed to one another? Even as I ask these questions I am aware that they may be answered in more than one way. In our own lives too, we may find that the wounds and scars of illness and brokenness witness more to the world of sin and death than they do to that of redemption and eternal life. They may represent a prison more than they represent a passage to another world.

Or not.

When I write about discerning an eremitical vocation and the importance of the critical transition that must be made from being a lone pious person living physical silence and solitude to essentially being a hermit living "the silence of solitude," I am speaking of being a person who has moved from the prison of illness, for instance, to illness (or any form of brokenness or woundedness) as passage to another world through the redemptive grace of God. We cannot empower or accomplish such a transition ourselves. The transfiguration of our lives is the work of God. At the same time, the scars of our lives will remain precisely as an invitation to others to see the power of God at work in our weakness and in God's own kenosis (self-emptying). These scars become Sacraments of God's powerful presence in our lives, vivid witnesses to the One who loves us in our brokenness and yet works continuously to bring life, wholeness, and meaning out of  death, brokenness, and absurdity.

To become a hermit (especially to be publicly professed as a Catholic hermit) someone suffering from chronic illness has to have made this transition. Their lives may involve suffering but the suffering has become a sacrament which attests less to itself  (and certainly not to an obsession with pain) but to the God who is a Creator-redeemer God. What you tend to see as an obstacle to living a meaningful profoundly prophetic religious or eremitical life seems to me to be a symbol of the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It also seems to me to remind us of the nature of "heavenliness" in light of the Ascension. Remember that one side of the salvation event we call the Christ is God's descent so that our world may be redeemed and entirely transformed into a new creation. But the other side of this Event is the Ascension where God takes scarred humanity and even death itself up into his own life --- thus changing the very nature of heaven (the sovereign life of God shared with others) in the process.

Far from being an inadequate witness to "heavenliness" our wounds can be the most perfect witness to God's sovereign life shared with us. Our God has embraced the wounds and scars of the world as his very own and not been demeaned, much less destroyed in the process. Conversely, for Christians, the marks of the crucifixion, as well therefore as our own illnesses, weaknesses and various forms of brokenness, are (or are meant to become) the quintessential symbols of a heaven which embraces our own lives and world to make them new. When this transformation occurs in the life of a chronically ill individual seeking to live eremitical life it is the difference between a life of one imprisoned in physical isolation, silence, and solitude, to that of one which breathes and sings "the silence of solitude." It is this song, this prayer, this magnificat that Canon 603 describes so well and consecrated life in all its forms itself represents.

Bowl patched with Gold
We Christians do not hide our woundedness then. We are not ashamed at the way life has marked and marred, bent and broken, spindled and mutilated us. But neither are woundedness or brokenness themselves the things we witness to. Instead it is the Sacrament God has made of our lives, the Love that does justice and makes whole that is the source of our beauty and our boasting. Jan Richardson also reminds us of this truth when she recalls Sue Bender's observations on seeing a mended Japanese bowl. [[“The image of that bowl,” she writes, “made a lasting impression. Instead of trying to hide the flaws, the cracks were emphasized — filled with silver. The bowl was even more precious after it had been mended.”]]  So too with our own lives: as Paul also said, "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing power will be of God and not from ourselves."  (2 Cor 4:7) It is the mended cracks, the wounds which were once prisons, the shards of a broken life now reconstituted entirely and transfigured by the grace of God which reveal the very presence of heaven to those we meet.

29 August 2016

Eremitical Silence: Harrowing as well as Hallowing

[[Dear Sister, I appreciate what you say about silence as redemptive but I wonder if silence is always a comfortable reality for you? You have written that most folks find silence frightening and I am wondering if you ever do? Thanks.]]

Great questions! I have written about the silence of solitude most of the time to stress that it is not a matter of being isolated or ultimately alone and most of the time that fact is comforting and consoling. But there are certainly times when being in silence is neither comforting nor consoling. Moreover, while God is present during these times he is present more in a felt sense of absence or remoteness because during these times we are thrown back upon ourselves "alone". At these times even prayer can be anguish because during these times of focused quiet especially when we open the depths of our hearts to God, we are plunged into memories of our own deepest experiences of pain and abandonment in order to plumb them to their depths. At least that is how it seems to me at these times. In experiencing some forms of woundedness and trauma we did not have a sense of God's presence; we were (we thought and felt) wholly alone and helpless. Sometimes in order to re-experience those times we may also need to re-experience that felt sense of God's absence as well. It seems to me that silence carries and conveys these kinds of experience most fully and profoundly. At these times silence can be immensely painful and, as you say, even downright terrifying.

But, painful and terrifying or not, this is one very real dimension of eremitical silence. Anyone who has walked in the deep desert has not only heard this silence but felt it on their skin. It presses in from every direction. Our loudest yell or whistle are ineffective and merely momentary; they are small and weak things immediately swallowed up in the silence as though they had never been while the desert silence remains pristine and inviolable. The hugeness of the silence here seems to laugh at our efforts at making a mark or disrupting things and we are left with a sense of our own infinitesimal smallness as the silence humbles us with its seemingly infinite expanse and depth. There is a weight to such silence, a kind of substance or solidity we would like to hold at bay because in doing so we can sometimes temporarily hold our own deepest pain and anguish at bay as well.  But to enter the silence, especially to commit to live our lives there, is to commit not merely to the comfort and solace of the silence of solitude, but to the terrifying quiet and aloneness whose  weight breaks open our hearts and minds and reveals the unhealed woundedness and suffering we have kept repressed and submerged there for so very long.  At these times images of Jesus' saving descent into hell (which we now pray to know first hand) or the desert Fathers and Mothers' battle with demons in the depths of the desert (which we already know first hand) take on a new significance and poignancy for us.

Silence, especially the silence of solitude can be hallowing as the touch of God is holy-making and healing, but eremitical silence can also be harrowing as the fire of abject aloneness or hell is harrowing. The personal work silence makes possible and even necessary will eventually lead to the hermit's healing and holiness. Even so, there is no doubt that God is sometimes present in  what we experience as absence and a challenging remoteness; it is when this is true that eremitical solitude can become the kind of hell already described; it is occasioned by the weight of her desert's immense silence, solitude, and the hermit's own commitment to obedience. This harrowing quality of silence, especially the silence of solitude is something she assented to when the Bishop publicly and solemnly questioned her on her willingness to embrace the various elements of this vocation shortly before admitting her to perpetual profession; it is likewise something she knowingly embraced in her vows and in accepting consecration.

29 March 2016

Why is Silence so Important to a Hermit's Witness?

[[Dear Sister, why is silence so important for the witness of a hermit? One hermit's blog writes a lot about hearing God speak to her and getting messages from Saints so I was wondering if that was typical? My pastor has spoken of silence being necessary to hear God speak to us in the depths of our hearts but that seems pretty different to me than having God send messages and making "assignments". Is silence part of the "experience of redemption" you recently said was so central to the hermit's life?]]

Really excellent questions --- especially the last one about the experience of redemption and silence. I think that silence is central to the hermit's experience of redemption and that it is an important piece of the witness she gives for precisely this reason. One of the really difficult experiences accompanying and often intensifying people's sufferings is the apparent silence of God. Folks who leave the Church often complain that their prayers went unanswered, that God was silent and unresponsive. They conclude either that God is unloving or uncaring, or perhaps that God is simply too remote, truly impersonal, and thus too, entirely irrelevant. They may similarly conclude that God is powerless or simply non-existent and that prayer is useless and the result of juvenile or at least naive wishfulness.

Novelists write powerfully about the silence of God and the way God is indicted by this. In the work, Silence, Shusako Endo pits the incredible suffering of the people against the apparent silence of God. Survivors of the Holocaust put God on trial because their prayers were apparently met with silence; they accused God of having failed to keep the covenant God had made with his people. They had been his People but the evidence of the holocaust's millions murdered indicated God had failed to be their God. The silence of God is one of those realities which challenges us most profoundly and to which our faith is most vulnerable. It is also a reality which is central to the eremitical life both as a challenging and penitential context expressing our yearning for God, and as a consoling element reflecting our wholeness and completion in God. Silence can be an expression of isolation, meaninglessness, and the seeming unresponsiveness of God or it can be an expression of the covenantal solitude in which we are completed as persons and come to quies, or shalom.

I can't say that God speaks TO me directly very often but I can say that God is frequently, even continuously speaking me, that is, calling my name and summoning me to fullness of life and wholeness. I have learned that most profoundly in silence and in the life that comes in silence. So many times silence reflected my own emptiness and incapacity --- just as it does with all of us. At one point before I became a hermit I thought I had reached the end of my strength, the end of my ability to see any meaningfulness in my life, any potential for serving God or his People. I had nothing to say except the single question, "WHY?!" and in asking this, I expected no real answers. It was most usually the silent cry of anguish I myself was. Only rarely was I able to pose it directly, to speak it aloud or claim it as my identity which called for an Other. Silence in those times was a terrible trial; but it was also a gift which opened me to a transcendent truth and love beyond anything I could have imagined.

In my own life I needed a God who would not simply answer my facile or sometimes desperate prayers but would instead embrace me in all of my poverty, emptiness, and inarticulateness, a God who would love me enough to bring life and  wholeness out of these. That required entering into these realities in silence to plumb their depths --- depths beyond words, thoughts, images, even beyond my more usual cries of anguish, apparent yearnings, etc both to meet God there and to open these realities to God. Isn't this the very nature of prayer Paul speaks of in Romans 8:26: [[the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;]] In time it (silence) became a necessary condition for the gift God would make of my life and the circumstances of that life. It became a piece of what my life witnesses to --- namely the importance of entering silence in all of its depths and painfulness precisely so that God can bring life out of death and an articulate and meaningful "word" even out of complete muteness. All of this is something that happens in silence.

As a result I generally distrust the notion of a spirituality which is or seems to be little more than a series of "messages" from God or "assignments" or "locutions," and "visions." I distrust this especially in one claiming to be a hermit. Not only are these seductive and potentially idolatrous, but, except in rare instances which are truly of God, they seem to me to be distractions from the silence of solitude. I don't think they are typical of eremitical spirituality at all. Hermits grapple with silence; more importantly though, they grapple with their own frailty and poverty in silence. They allow the absolute Silence and cosmic Song we know as God to embrace even their life's worst and most painful silences, and transfigure these so that they too may sing their part in what hermits call "the silence of solitude" --- the covenantal "quies" and communion with God the authentic hermit (indeed, the authentic human being) truly is.

As noted above, out of our personal and external silence and physical solitude comes EITHER what the tradition refers to as "the silence of solitude" and the achievement of quies or hesychasm which result when human emptiness and divine fullness meet one another and powerless muteness is embraced by the Love we know as God, OR our lives are and remain a searing indictment of God and God's silence. It is, I think, a terrible temptation in such circumstances to "hear" God speaking to us in locutions, to find God in visions and in the facile assurances of some fraudulent spirituality or shallow form of piety, but it is my experience that the revelation of God's presence and power generally comes in silence. (That is, it generally comes silently in a way which embraces and transfigures our own deepest silence.) Redemption itself comes in the meeting of our own profoundest silence which is deeper than, but encompasses all the joy and anguish, all the poverty and potentiality we know, and the incredibly fecund silence of the Love-in-Act which grounds and summons the cosmos into existence out of nothing.

Because the encounter of these deep silences is redemptive, then yes, silence is a central part of the redemption to which a hermit witnesses. This is so just as entering the terrible inarticulateness and even muteness of apparently meaningless suffering or the silence of senseless death while encountering the terrible silence of God is part of the redemption achieved in the Christ Event. In that event what could have been the most damning indictment of God's silence becomes instead the most profound witness to the scope and power of Divine Love's embrace.

As I have noted here before, our culture knows little of dwelling in silence. It fears it, considers it fruitless and perhaps significant of failure; knowing it is both associated with suffering and can unmask and occasion suffering, we generally fill it with sound of every kind. We deflect it and distract from it and when noise becomes too great we layer more noise on top of it rather than embracing  greater silence. We all know the truism that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God --- or to meet ourselves in the silences of our own hearts, much less to plumb these to their depths. We also know, I think, that as a result shallowness and superficiality mark our lives and relationships.

In our relationship with God we may fill our side of things with prayers and should we somehow meet the silence of God during a prayer period, we are apt to claim instead that God was absent or uncaring or simply failed to hear us. But hermits witness to the need for silence and solitude in becoming truly human --- in becoming the prayer God has made us to be. Beyond the need for external silence and physical solitude they witness to the silence of solitude that results when we allow ourselves to struggle with(in) and fall through these lesser silences deep into the hands of the Silent, Living God whose Word we are meant to enflesh and whose counterparts we are made and called to become.

17 February 2016

Witnessing to the Truth that God Alone is Enough

[[Dear Sister Laurel, am I right when I say you are writing that it is not only about living alone or even the other things hermits do, but WHY they do these things that is most important? Also, I see why you say that being a solitary is not always the same as being a hermit but isn't that just a matter of externals? Don't solitaries and hermits witness to the same thing?]]

Thanks for the questions. It is always good to hear from someone grappling with what I write. It is also terrific to get a chance to clarify when I haven't been clear enough. So, let me give that a shot.

First, it is true that it is WHY hermits do what they do that is most important but it is also the case that what they do and why they do it are inextricably wed. What I mean is that they are called to witness to Christ's redemption precisely by living as they do. If they live in some other way the witness they give is a different one. Let's say that the witness one is meant to give is that redemption in Christ empowers one to give one's life in service to others, that it allows one to let go of other ways of validating one's life and simply give one's life for those Christ loves. If this is the case then one must live a life geared to ministering to others. All kinds of active ministries are possible and many different living arrangements will support and contribute to this witness.  At the same time, if one wishes to witness effectively or credibly to the redemptive power of the Christ Event one cannot live in a way which contradicts that witness.

So, let's say that because of the message of the Cross one believes that God redeems and makes infinitely meaningful the life of one who is responsive to God's grace even when they are otherwise incapable of anything else, even when the discrete gifts they have been given have been lost or made unusable, even when their weakness or sinfulness or failure is their main or only other contribution to the situation. How would this person live in order to proclaim this message? Again, there are many ways but it seems to me that one of these is more radical than all the others, namely, eremitical life.

Traditionally it has been said that the essential proclam-ation of the hermit's life is that "God alone is enough." When we unpack this statement it is a restatement of the message of the cross: God can and DOES complete us as human beings, only the God of Jesus Christ can and does  redeem us, only that same God can and does make infinitely meaningful and fruitful those lives which have been marked and marred by death and senselessness in all its forms; only God can make freely and sacrificially loving those lives that have been isolated, reviled, rejected, and betrayed at every turn. Only God can make a gift of our lives when the circumstances of life and our denial of or collusion with those circumstances have made of them all that I described above.  Only such a God can and will still the scream of anguish one becomes or transforms the muteness and emptiness of a failed and relatively loveless life without God into a jubilant canticle empowered by an inexhaustible Love-in-Act. Only the God of Jesus Christ raises the demeaned, absurd, and alienated inhumanity of a sinful and godless autonomy to New Life which is essentially "theonomous".

Moreover, the statement "God alone is enough" implies the corollary that such a God is worth entrusting our entire lives to. It says the Gospel of this God is worth giving our entire lives for. This God and his Gospel are worth letting go of all worldly possibilities, relinquishing every discrete gift and talent, every potentiality we may possess EXCEPT for hearts and lives which are open to being completed and transfigured by him in his Christ. Entrusting our lives in this way is the essence of faith. In Christ when we are empty we are full, when weak powerful, when we seem most alone we exist in communion with God and all that is grounded in God, when silenced and mute our lives can and will sing with the grace and justice of heaven. When every prop is kicked out or otherwise relinquished, God alone is enough.

This paradox is the radical form of the gospel truth which animated and flowed from Christ's own profound obedience unto death --- especially death on a cross. Similarly it is the paradox which stands at the heart of the hermit's vocation that she must (and can really only) witness to as radically as she is called to do in the silence of solitude. For this reason canon 603 defines a desert spirituality which seeks not only to define a contemplative life given over to God in prayer, but in which the externals of one's life reprise the loneliness, muteness, weakness, and  incapacity, of the cross of Christ. Again, the obedience, that is, the openness and responsiveness to God we cultivate in the personal poverty, asceticism, silence, and solitude of the desert is transfigured into the silence of solitude, the joy-filled quies of rest, stillness, and eternal life in God. THAT is the witness of the hermit's life and it is important that the externals correspond and contribute to this witness.

A Final Note on the Noun Solitary:

A solitary in the sense Anglicans use the term with regard to canon 14.3 may not live a desert spirituality. I am sure they each do witness to the redemption achieved in Christ but most apparently do not feel called to live as hermits or need to witness to the paradox of the cross with the same radicalness.** Nor, of course, is there anything wrong with that so long as the two terms are not used interchangeably. The Anglican Church recognizes solitary or "single religious" who do not need to be hermits. The Roman Catholic Church on the other hand, does not; thus, in her tradition solitaries tend to be hermits who are part of a coenobitical community but who live in cells apart from the others. Grimlaicus' Rule for Solitaries was written for just such hermit monks. Thus too, when Roman Catholicism speaks of solitary hermits she may now also mean diocesan hermits professed and consecrated under canon 603, hermits who are not part of a monastic or eremitical community. These might be considered solitaries but most use the terms hermit or anchorite as reflected in canon 603.

 **N.B., especially in this context radical does not mean better; instead it implies a kind of fundamental truth and simplicity. It is important to remember that throughout the history of the Church the fact that hermits did not engage in active ministry nor live in community led to the inevitable question of how loving and how Christian such a solitary vocation could be considered. Within the Body of Christ there are many members and, as a recent Sunday lection reminded us, they are all important to the functioning of the whole.

Hermits are spoken of as existing at the heart of the Church. Sometimes this is meant to refer to their prayer and there is certainly profound truth in this --- especially so long as we understand prayer to be the work God does within each of us in our poverty. ([[In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.]] Rom 8:26) And of course prayer would also be the language of the silence of solitude, the unique charism of eremitical life but that eschatological quies to which we are all called and from which all legitimate ministry itself flows. To witness to this basic and universal foundation and call is an act of love hermits commit to on behalf of the entire body of Christ --- another reason to insist on the ecclesial nature of such a vocation. What sense would it make otherwise?

31 January 2016

On the Redemptive Experience at the heart of Eremitical Life (Followup to last two posts)

[[ Thanks for answering my follow up question. What happens if a person has already had the kind of life-changing redemptive experience of God's love before they decide to become a hermit? Does your criterion for discernment still work? I am thinking of the way canon 603 came to be with the dozen or so monks you have written about who had to leave solemn vows in order to pursue eremitical life. It seems they must already have had a life-changing redemptive experience which happened prior to eremitical solitude don't you think?]]

Really great questions! In the case you mention, monks who come late to a sense of an eremitical call, it seems clear that while they had already had the central redemptive experiences which allowed them to be solemnly professed and consecrated as monks after years of formation, and then allowed them to live this life faithfully with patience and growing in union with God, they must also have experienced something truly life changing in a very striking and compelling way if it led them to seek secularization and dispensation from their solemn vows. While the growth in wholeness and holiness which led to this compelling experience was not one of eremitical solitude it was very definitely one of the silence of solitude which is characteristic of monastic life.

There is some difference in these two forms of the silence of solitude but in my experience they are more alike than different and call for and complete one another. That is why monastics take regular "desert days" in order to have time and space for eremitical silence and solitude and hermits like myself take retreat time at places like Redwoods Abbey where the experience of shared silence and solitude is so very real. Monks and Nuns need desert days as an intensification of the silence, solitude, and freedom of the eremitical life which complement life in community. Hermits need the experience of shared solitude, values, communal prayer, and general monastic sensibility which complements and even completes the solitary eremitical life in the Church. The point, however, is that these two forms of the silence of solitude, while not identical, are profoundly related; they naturally complement and call for one another.

In the history of monastic life the solitude of the early desert Fathers and Mothers often led them to create communities; later in monastic communities monks and nuns saw eremitical solitude as the summit of the monastic life which is centered on seeking God. Even so, when monks like those whose lives led to the eventual establishment of canon 603, monks who have given their entire lives to God in monastic community decide to leave everything they have known and loved for decades in order to follow a Divine call to eremitical solitude, we must see that this is part of a vocation to a redemptive transformation. I admit I have only corresponded very briefly with one of these original monk-hermits in British Columbia (he wrote me to discuss an article I had published). Your question makes me want to renew my correspondence and ask him about the character of the call he has lived as a hermit. What I am sure of is that sometimes a change in our vocational call (say from community to eremitical solitude, for instance) represents an intensification and deepening of the redemptive experiences we have already known. While I was not thinking about this in my earlier answers I was not excluding it either.

The bottom line in all of this remains that a hermit, to be authentic and credible, must demonstrate an experience of God's redemptive love experienced in the silence of solitude. If they have had such an experience they will be capable of witnessing to the gift that eremitical solitude is meant to be in the Church. If not, their eremitical life will be relatively empty, formalistic, and perhaps even fraudulent. Every vocation is a call to the redemptive love of God; every vocation is a way of sharing that same redemptive love and witnessing to it to others. Every vocation is a particular gift to the Church whose charismatic quality witnesses to the way the love of God meets concrete human potentials and needs. The way we discern a vocation is by attending to the gift of God's love and the concrete ways that love shapes our lives. If our lives are not shaped in a salvific way within a particular state of life we must, it seems to me, conclude either that God has not called us to this state or that we are somehow rejecting or avoiding God's call within this state.

When the Church must discern the nature of a vocation as rare, as counter cultural, and even as uniquely prophetic as is solitary eremitical life, she must be able to discern that this life shapes the candidate for profession, consecration, and beyond in a distinctly salvific way. While the process of discernment and formation allows for a diocese following a candidate or temporary professed hermit for a number of years in order to be sure this is the case before admitting them to perpetual profession and consecration, the history of eremitical life is also full of those who call themselves hermits as a validation of individualism and self-centeredness. It may well be the Church does not find a convincing redemptive experience at the heart of a candidate's life and will need to refuse to profess or consecrate them.

10 September 2015

"Stay Quiet All Day, Say a Couple Prayers . . ."

[[[[ Otherwise, I think it could become a very self-indulgent life style (i.e. Stay quiet all day, say a couple prayers, meditate, do a little gardening or something...sounds nice...nothing wrong with it...but certainly not that big of a deal)]]]]

Introduction:

I cut this from an earlier post for special attention because it so irritated me. That was because it was the description of an eremitical life by a person who is seeking to become a hermit and one day, even a consecrated hermit. It was a bit surprising to hear the description of the externals of a life in cell as "nice,. . .nothing wrong with it. . .but certainly not that big of a deal" unless one were to add certain "heroic elements" or mortifications! Though I wrote recently about folks not understanding and sometimes misunderstanding the eremitical life I did not mention this prevalent source of misunderstanding, namely that the hermit life is merely one of leisure, saying a few prayers, doing a little work around the place, some gardening, etc. unless one adds in extra mortifications and prayers to make the vocation more "heroic" and to distinguish it from the life of the devout lay person.

I suppose it is easy for outsiders to see monastic or eremitical life in these terms. It is also easy to find would-be hermits who are about this kind of thing but are not fully committed to allowing God to be God in all of their life's moments and moods. (I suspect this distortion of the life may have been part of the reason the poster described the life in these terms.) Once we forget the deeper God-centered commitment involved in eremitical life our days DO become self-indulgent. And of course it is not only hermits who might do such forgetting; it is those who look on the life from the outside sometimes including Bishops and their curia. The solution, I believe, has often been the piling on of prayers or forms of mortification so the hermit has something to point to, something which can be seen or imitated, something which transforms the vocation from one of being prayer to one of an incessant saying of prayers. Unfortunately, the heart of the vocation is also missed by  insiders as well as outsiders.

The Silence of Solitude:

Because this is so, the way the sentence was phrased and contextualized really rankled. For instance, to reduce "the silence of solitude" to staying quiet all day" was especially difficult for me personally. A couple of Friday's ago I did a Communion service for about 24 people. Before we began I asked if we could sit in silence for a few minutes. The chapel got very quiet, then silent, then (more or less) reached a point of truly shared silence followed by a moment where silence itself was inviting us to allow it to take over the hearts and minds of the group even more fully. There was a weight to the silence as we moved through quiet to silence to shared silence. It pressed against us, and there was a pretty universal sense that everyone had joined in this and had let go of their anxiety.  I stopped to begin the service at that point. It is a rare experience, I think, to find people experiencing shared silence in a parish setting not dedicated to centering prayer or something similar, for instance. In any case, this deeper silence where Silence itself surrounds and penetrates one's heart and mind, where it takes hold of us from some deep place, where God and oneself meet in this hesychasm or quies is the characteristic depth dimension of the silence of solitude spoken of by canon 603. It is as far removed from simply "staying quiet all day" as grape Koolade is to fine wine.

Now, not every moment in a hermitage evidences this intensity of silence (or more intense ones!), but neither are these merely occasional experiences for the hermit. They are common in and characteristic of the first few hours of the day (hours of vigil), common in night watches and quiet prayer, common (though less profound) even in meals taken slowly as one watches the birds or squirrels or deer, and they carry over into and empower the other daily activities. The point is, however, that this Silence requires a submission of self, a giving over of oneself to the God who is the silent ground of reality and desires to grasp us completely and take us into "himself". There was a point during Friday's brief silence that could easily have been broken by someone's anxiety, coughing, shifting in their place, sighing, or other signs that this intensity of silence is unsettling, unfamiliar, or even frightening and is being resisted.That is because people are unfamiliar with this degree of silence, yes, but I think it is also because they sense it is something huge and alive, and far beyond their control, something (or someone!) living that they must give themselves over to or move away from. On this morning in our chapel everyone surrendered to this Silence for a brief time and the result was a shared silence whose first step only was "keeping quiet".

What folks began to experience as they gave themselves over to the silence was what Father Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam, refers to as the meeting of two freedoms, that of the human person and that of God. The deeper the silence the greater the degree of or capacity for freedom. It is what I have often referred to as the charism of canon 603 life: the silence of solitude. This is not only the general environment of the hermitage, it is the goal of the eremitical life and the gift hermits bring to a world of noise, isolation, chaos and estrangement from self, from God, and from others. This communion of two freedoms is the very essence of authentic humanity but opening ourselves to it takes a lot of work as well as self-emptying and the trust we know as faith. The silence it requires from us is not simply the silence of external or physical quiet but the stilling of the voices within us which cry out in insecurity, fear, or self-assertion and even in a hungry grasping for power, prestige, success, and so forth. It is the silence of submission to the sovereignty, mercy, and love of God when we simply rest in "him"; similarly it is the silence of humility we come to know when the gaze of God reveals and communicates a dignity we scarcely imagined we possessed or were called to.

Say a Couple Prayers, Meditate, do a little gardening or something:

The difference between a life of prayer and a series of days where we, "say a couple of prayers" is as great as the difference between "staying quiet all day" and the silence of solitude. No true hermit understands her life as being merely about the saying of prayers. No authentic canon 603 hermit thinks of the requirement of "assiduous prayer and penance" as meaning "merely saying some (or a lot of!) prayers and doing forms of penance". Instead the combination of these two terms signifies a profoundly ordered life focused at every point on allowing God to work in her and take her into himself. As already noted this means doing penance and saying prayers, but even more it means ordering our activities, our choices, our relationships in the ways necessary so that we might become God's own prayer in our world. The difference between a life of prayer, a life where we are made prayer, and a life where each day we "say a couple of prayers" is immense. It might be compared to the difference between a five year old molding clay and a Michelangelo freeing David from the marble.

The primary forms of penance for the hermit are silence, solitude,  and custody of the cell. Custody of the cell includes sitting and waiting on/for God as well as all of the disciplines associated with living well in this place. That means physical and intellectual work, rest, recreation, meals, and so forth all given over to God and lived in a way which allows God to pervade them with his life and love. It is an intense life but, yes, as I said a couple of times in my earlier post, that absolutely also means leisure, namely that which monks and nuns refer to as "holy leisure."  What a life that is lived for the service of God in prayer, silence, solitude --- and the penance associated with these --- actually looks like may well appear to outsiders as one of a few prayer periods, a little meditation, and a bit of gardening or other manual labor. This is especially true given the frantic busyness and unbalanced workaholism which characterizes so much of life in the world outside the hermitage or monastery. But to mistake the nature of the life and to characterize it this way is a serious misreading. It forgets that the heart of the eremitical life is truly "hidden from the eyes of men", that it occurs in the hiddenness of the individual's heart, in the hiddenness of the cell, in the hiddenness of a life wrapped in the Silent heart of God.

It is a bit like describing the work of healing an injured heart as something the surgeon does with his active intervention while the patient's own body does nothing at all. The interventions of the surgeon may repair valves and injuries, but they also wound and tear down as they produce the necessary conditions needed for healing to take over. Real healing happens in  times of leisure. It happens when one rests, eats well (and simply), and generally takes good care of oneself.  Similarly, seeds grow in the night and darkness while the farmer sleeps. Orderly, regular work and attention is necessary for the planting of the seeds, but leisure is also necessary; otherwise the seeds will never germinate or the plants grow to maturity. Again, eremitical life is more fundamentally about being and becoming than it is about doing. And this, in turn, is about allowing God the space and time to love us into wholeness when we can do relatively little to achieve such wholeness on our own. To some extent we provide the conditions necessary for receiving this love, for entertaining it and being nourished and transfigured by it. If the relative leisure and balance of such a life looks little like the muscular and sadly aggressive asceticism of some past times or the similarly driven lives of those who can simply never be still, silent, or marked by a patient receptiveness and waiting, then so be it!

Nothing Wrong With That:

But of course, if an eremitical life does look like this poster described in the sentence provided, then either it is what God calls one to or it is not. If it is what God calls one to then why would we want to add "heroic" mortifications and entirely change the character of the life? If it is not what God calls one to, then how can we say, "Nothing wrong with that"? The point of the original sentence was a comparison: "That's okay for a devout lay person but not for a hermit!"  I am convinced such comparisons are specious. More importantly, they are measuring reality in the wrong terms, namely, in terms of what can be seen and quantified. But in terms of a life lived in communion with God often the only thing we might see as meaningful here is the person's growth in wholeness and holiness: are they more truly human, more compassionate, more generous and loving, more joyful and at peace or are they not?  While these things are recognizable they are not really measurable or quantifiable.

Again, there are fraudulent hermits out there. If we look at the externals of their lives they may look very like those of authentic hermits. (In fact, despite outward appearances, they may simply be laying about all day or they may even be all about harsh penances, overburdening physical labor, a focus on nonstop suffering, and endless prayers where God is never given a moment's time or space to break into or expand his presence in the person's heart and life; thus these latter persons might end up looking like they are some kind of Ãœber-hermit or something!) Such lives, both those of  layabouts and those of  Ãœber-hermits  are indeed self-indulgent and the original poster is rightly concerned! This is one of the reasons discernment is sometimes difficult and takes time.

Assuming we are not speaking about someone who is simply not praying, not working at all, not maintaining silence or living in solitude, the fruit of the life is measured, not merely or even mainly in terms of externals (of course fidelity to one's Rule is essential), but in terms of personal growth, growth in compassion, in the capacity to love others, as well as growth in patience and openness to the presence of God who comes to us in the most ordinary things. Again, assuming one's Rule is built around c 603's central elements and one is faithful to that Rule, only in the presence of these latter "fruit" can the person living as a hermit claim to be doing as God wills --- and that, of course, is the bottom line in gauging the quality of any eremitical life.

P.S., I wanted to thank the author of the post cited here. He asks great questions and I count on him adding something to this blog on a pretty regular basis. He wrote to apologize for irritating me and hoped he had not really offended me. I reassured him in response and do so here as well that the irritation is/was my problem not his. Also if I did not respect and trust him and his questions I would have needed to pull more punches than I did with this answer. Meanwhile this questioner uncovered a really significant misunderstanding of monastic and eremitical life I had not mentioned earlier. Again, he has my thanks!

28 July 2015

More on the Hiddenness of the Hermit Vocation

[[Hi Sister Laurel, thank you for telling your story from the perspective of using gifts vs being the gift. Two things surprised me a little. The first was the idea that the hiddenness of the eremitical life has to do mainly with the work God is doing within the hermit. This really is the vocation of the hermit and where else can it happen but in hiddenness? The second was that in letting go of a concern to use the gifts God has given us and instead focusing on the gift God makes of us we are involved in what the Gospel calls "dying to self"! I had never thought about it that way but this is the sense it made to me. The motto, "Let go and let God" fits here doesn't it?]]

The Hiddenness of the Hermit Vocation:

Thanks for writing. You got it exactly right with regard to the hiddenness of the eremitical life!  I especially liked your rhetorical question, ". . . where else can it happen but in hiddenness?" Most of the time when hermits speak about the hiddenness of their lives they speak about people not knowing they are hermits or doing things anonymously. Others speak of not wearing habits, not using titles or post-nomial initials and the like lest the hiddenness of the vocation be betrayed. I have written several times now about the tension between the hiddenness of the vocation and its public character --- its call to witness to the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church in this way of life. All of these have some greater or lesser degree of validity but I think that when we recognize that eremitical life is about letting God do God's own silent and solitary work in the hiddenness of the human heart as we move more and more toward dwelling within his own heart in Christ, we have put our finger on the heart of the matter of eremitical hiddenness.

It seems to me that in every person's life God works silently in incredible hiddenness. The hermit commits her entire life to allowing this and witnessing to it. The very fact that she retires to a hermitage witnesses to her commitment to and faith in this hidden work of God. The fact that she embraces a life of the silence of solitude is a commitment that witnesses to it. Those of us who wear habits, use titles and post-nomial initials that prompt people to ask about our lives are a commitment and (paradoxically) witness to this incredible hiddenness. It is always striking to me that when people learn I am a hermit they tend to be completely off-footed. I noted that recently I played violin for a funeral held in our parish and that this was well-received. People understood this use of gifts and they wondered what I did here at the parish; they expected that I taught, perhaps music, or that I was a liturgist or any number of other things but they looked a bit stunned when they heard I was a hermit and rarely played violin this way. No one actually said, "Oh what a waste," of course; surprise and maybe puzzlement was what was generally expressed. I am hoping folks realized that the violin expressed and reflected what happens to my own heart in the ordinary silence and solitude of my hermitage.

In any case, the gifts we occasionally use and those we relinquish in the name of our lives as hermits witness to the essential hiddenness of those lives and of the God powerfully at work there. We know that God works this way in every person's life but it seems to  me that relatively few people actually commit to revealing this by embracing an essential hiddenness. Cloistered nuns and monks do so, hermits do so; it is a witness our world needs --- and one that throws folks off-balance when they meet it face to face. The Kingdom of God comes in this way. It grows silently in the darkness and night when we can do nothing but trust in the One who is its source. It bursts forth when we have reached the limits of our own patience, when we have finally relinquished any pretense of control or even understanding. It comes in victory at the same time we admit defeat and steals upon us -- gently silencing the prayer that storms heaven so that heaven can simply sing within us.

 Prayer is certainly the hermit's main ministry but only if it is genuinely the work she allows God to do in, with, and through her, the work which allows her to set her own concerns, frailties, strengths, and even her talents and gifts aside so to speak so that the hidden work and presence of God may flourish within her. I have written before that it is the hermit's very vocation to become God's own prayer in our world; in fact, that is really the fundamental vocation of every person because it is the thing which characterizes authentic humanity. Hermits, it seems to me, undertake this with a special dedication in a way which is largely stripped of the activities and ministries which, while usually revelatory, may actually distract attention from that foundational presence at work in the solitary silence of every human heart. See also, Essential Hiddenness: A Call to extraordinary ordinariness for a post on the universality of this call.

God-given gifts and Dying to Self:

Ordinarily we speak of dying to self in terms of using our gifts generously and selflessly. This is an entirely valid and critical piece of what dying to self really means. However, I think the idea of letting go of significant gifts God has given us so that who we are ourselves, that is, so that we are who God makes us to be most fundamentally, is the real witness of our lives; it is a special and even more radical kind of dying to self peculiar to the eremitical life --- though we find suggestions of it in old age, chronic illness, etc. This really is a new insight for me --- one, that is, I have only just begun thinking consciously about in connection with the idea that the hermit's life is an essentially hidden one. It is a paradox because at the same time we let go of those gifts we become freer to use them without pressure or self-consciousness should appropriate opportunities arise. Even so, we are not our gifts, not most fundamentally, nor is our life ultimately about a struggle to protect or even to use those gifts.  And when we are deprived of those gifts or of the ability to use them by illness or other life circumstances the deepest or foundational meaning and mystery of our lives can become clear. This too is a form of dying to self --- perhaps the most radical form short of the physical death of red martyrdom.

I think hermits have known this right along.  It is what allows them to use the term "white martyrdom" for their lives. I have written here that I once thought of contemplatives and hermits as selfish rather than selfless. Back then I was thinking of the multitude of wasted gifts and of some sort of failure to honor them but I was not thinking of a life which explicitly honored the giver of all gifts in a more transparent way or was a naked expression of (dependence on) that giver and the redemption he occasions in us. At the same time I was very young; I had not really faced a situation where my own God-given gifts were either unusable or where, in my brokenness, emptiness, and incapacity, I knew more fully and clearly my own need for radical redemption --- much less had I come to actually know that redemption.

Only as I came face to face with these and the immense question "WHY?!" that drove me did I begin to sense that eremitical life could "make sense of the whole of my life." My sense of this, however, was still inchoate; it was as unformed as my own eremitical identity for I was not, in any sense of the term, a hermit. In time, and especially in the silence of solitude, God did with my life what the Gospel promises and proclaims. He loved me into wholeness and continues to do so. That hidden, unceasing, and unconquerable redemptive Love-in-act is what my vocation witnesses to. Hermits have seen right along that their witness is more fundamental and radical than even the use of God-given gifts for the sake of others can make clear.

One of the reasons the hermit life will always be rare is because we need people who use their God-given gifts in the multitude of ways which enrich our lives every day. In no way am I suggesting that such gifts are unimportant or, generally speaking, should not be used in assisting in the coming of the Kingdom of God. This is the usual way we cooperate with God and reveal God's life to others.

But at the same time there will always be a few of us who have come to a place where chronic illness (or whatever else!) made this impossible; and yet, through a Divine mercy and wisdom we can hardly believe, much less describe, we have been redeemed and become gifts more precious than any or all of the individual talents we once carefully developed and shepherded. Through a more radical and counter-cultural kenosis (self-emptying), in the hiddenness of a life more fundamentally about being made gift than about using our talents, hermits are called to witness to the inexhaustible, transcendent, and redemptive reality dwelling in the very core of our being -- the infinitely loving source and ground of our lives. Those redeemed and transfigured lives say, "God alone is enough!" With St Paul (who himself was stripped and emptied by life's circumstances and who spent time in the desert learning to see the new kind of sense his life held in light of the crucified Christ), we proclaim in the starkest way we can, "I, yet not I but Christ within me!"

09 July 2015

From Silence to the Silence of Solitude: The Imperceptible Journey

[[Dear Sister, I think of silence as a negative thing; it is something which is the absence of sound or noise. I do understand a little of what you mean when you say it is more than this but only a little. Maybe that's because I have a hard time being really quiet in prayer and when I am quiet I am afraid nothing is happening or that I am experiencing dryness or something. I mean I don't hear anything and I am supposed to be listening for God. I don't feel anything and God is supposed to be there loving me. What am I missing?]]

Thanks for a great question and especially for sharing what is a pretty intimate experience and concern. First of all I can't really say if you are missing anything, much less what that is, but I can say a little more about the nature of silence in prayer, and especially what I and others call "the silence of solitude". I also want to say something about dryness in prayer and what might be happening to you which would certainly not be dryness.

Our first and more superficial experience of silence is a "negative" thing --- not in the sense of it being without effect or constructiveness, but in the sense of taking or stripping away that which is unhelpful. It involves the quieting of noise, both external and internal, personal noise and the noise of our environment. We each experience this whenever we assure that our prayer space is conducive to prayer; it is part of clearing the space of any clutter, of journaling about the things that are really bothering us or are a matter of concern so that we can close the journal and hand it all over to God when we sit in prayer. It is a matter of stilling our breathing, relaxing our muscles, dropping our defenses and any façade we may hold because of work, etc, and simply bringing ourselves to the moment in an act of self gift and trust.

Already I think it is becoming clear that in prayer we move imperceptibly into the realm of the "positive" dimension here. We move from the things we can more or less do ourselves, the setting of the scene, to the silence which is the work of the Holy Spirit within us ---- as much God's Silence as our own. The quiet act of trust we call faith is one of these. It is an empowered act, not something we can do of ourselves. That is why theologians like Paul Tillich speak about faith as the "state of being grasped. . ." and St Paul speaks of our knowing God but even more properly, of our being known by God. (Remember that Paul does not tease these two apart; he points to the first as a true description and then to the second as even more fundamentally true.) Profound silence is similar. While our descriptions of God often focus on creative speech or word, God is also and simultaneously a transcendent Silence out of which language and all the rest of reality springs; thus we often speak of God as "abyss," ground, or depth dimension --- all of which are most fundamentally matters of a deep but vital and dynamic silence.

In prayer what happens beyond the "negative" work of coming to relative silence we all recognize as our own work is that we are taken hold of by the profound Silence which is God. When this happens it is hard or even impossible to tease apart the silence we "achieve" and the silence that is "achieved" in us. It is at these times we know the communion with God and the whole of God's creation which is most clearly and profoundly what we call the silence of solitude . You may remember that I wrote, [[. . . the silence of solitude refers to what is created within the hermit, or better put perhaps, it refers to the person . . . who is created by the dialogue with God in the hermitage.  This is what I referred to when I spoke of shalom, or the wholeness, peace, and joy that is the fruit of an eremitical life. Much of the "noisiness" of human yearning and exertion is silenced; so is the scream of self-centeredness and the inability to listen to or hear others. One is at peace with God and with oneself; one is at home with God wherever one goes.]] All of this happens in prayer and is carried through the rest of the pray-er's life.

It is the Silence of God that stills our human yearnings and striving. It is the Silence of God that meets our own tentative and struggling attempts at quiet and completes them. It is the loving, embracing, silence of God that takes hold of us in prayer, soothes our stammerings and quiets our cries of anguish and emptiness. But it does so much more than this as well. God's own Silence is the silence that holds all things together in a way which makes sense of them; it is the all-embracing quies which makes music of the individual notes and rhythms of our lives and world. It is the deepest reality out of which all creation comes and all reconciliation is achieved, the hesychia in which everything truly belongs and is one. When and to the extent the Silence of God grasps us we become God's own prayers in our world, articulate words reflecting God's life and meaning, magnificats which are the transfigured stammerings of the journey from isolation and absurdity to genuine solitude and song. There is a reason Mary is sometimes called "a woman wrapped in silence"; only part of that has to do with her struggle and pain and inability to express what she knows and ponders in her own heart. The greater part has to do with the embrace of God which holds and makes sense of all things.

I think sometimes what people mistakenly call dryness is this incredible Silence. Maybe real dryness also means resisting this silence, fearing it and refusing to entrust ourselves to it, refusing to let it take hold of us or resisting resting in it even though we also yearn for it. Personally I know that I rarely feel dryness in prayer simply because I am not hearing or sensing anything. God is present and at work --- loving, calling, touching, healing, creating --- all the things God is and does in and as profound silence. I know and trust that. More, I know Silence as the Divine reality that can and does comprehend me even as it resides and sings within me. What I am encouraging you to do is to trust this Silence, this kind of no-thing, this abyss which is actually the fullness of God --- a fullness far too "big" (such an inadequate word!) to even perceive sometimes --- and don't label what happens in prayer as "dryness" quite so quickly or easily as you might otherwise do. From my experience I would say that what we are "listening for" is this transcendent and mysterious Silence. The love we are hoping to feel is actually an experience of this profound quies and sense of being encompassed and contextualized, the experience of being comprehended in every sense of that word by the Silence which is God.

As a kind of postscript, let me say that it is this Silence I think e. e. cummings knew when he wrote the wonderful poem I have had in the side bar of my blog since the day of my profession.





love is a place
& in this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds



25 June 2015

A Few Thoughts on Custody of the Eyes

[[Hello Sister Laurel, Thank you for putting up the piece about the new movie. Custody of the eyes is not a phrase we hear much about today. When I looked it up I found a reference to "10 reasons men should always practice custody of the eyes" and some forum posts talking about avoiding lust, but why would cloistered nuns be practicing custody of the eyes so much to name a film about it? I mean is it really that central to life in a cloister? What am I missing?]]

Hi there and thanks for the questions. I agree that custody of the eyes is kind of an old-fashioned term and not one we use or, for that matter, practice much today, but in a congregation such as the Poor Clares or the Trappistines, for instance, it is a significant value which has a good deal less to do with avoiding lustful feelings and more with protecting the privacy, and more, the silence of solitude of one's Sisters and of the house more generally. Interestingly, custody of the eyes is meant to be combined with a genuine sensitivity to the needs of one's Sisters (or others more generally); for instance, one is expected to be aware if someone needs something at table and offer it, or to do something similar in work situations with tools and materials being used, so custody of the eyes does not mean closing oneself off to others, cultivating general unawareness, isolation, or anything similar. I think custody understood in this more balanced way is one of those values we ought all to cultivate as appropriate to our own states of life. It seems to me in some ways it is a vital practice our own technological and media-driven world really needs.

In last Friday's Gospel lection we heard the Matthean observation that the eye is the lamp of the body. In Matthew a good eye is a generous one; a bad or evil eye is the opposite. Additionally, one of the meanings of Matt's observation is that what we look on changes us and can be a source of light or (increasing) darkness. This can occur in many ways. We read classic works of literature or contemporary books that enlighten and shape us. We do the same with art and media of all sorts. Unfortunately, this may involve "literature" which demeans the human person, or it may involve visual input that does not even pretend to be art --- and rightly so. More commonly for most of us, it involves commercials or TV programs which objectify us, make a parody of and trivialize our lives even as they presume to tell us who we are, what we desire, and need, what we ought to value, buy, otherwise spend resources on, and so forth. Custody of the eyes in this kind of thing means allowing God to shape us and show us who we are and what we really need. It means refusing to allow others to define us or our own hearts especially. Custody of the eyes is a necessary element in being our (and God's!) own persons.

On the other hand, what we look on, that is, what we choose to look on and the way in which we do so speaks about our hearts; that is, it reflects either the light or the darknesses of our own hearts. Here is where generosity or its opposite become critical. We see this when we look on another person and judge them on the basis of appearances, or otherwise jump to conclusions on the basis of past hurts; but we also see it when we allow our compassion to perceive a person as God's own precious one who is really very like us, when we look with awe at the beauty which surrounds us or find beauty in the simplest thing rather than with the vision of someone who is bored and jaded and incapable of being truly surprised, and so forth. Custody of the eyes has as much to do with truly allowing the eyes to be the lamp of the whole person as with simply avoiding lust or lasciviousness.

Custody of the eyes allows a person to attend to their own hearts without constantly being distracted by the activity and sights around them. Especially, as it does this, it assists us in becoming people who see things truly, that is, who see things as God sees them. Moreover, it provides space and the gift of privacy for others with whom one lives; especially it provides for the communion we call "the silence of solitude" in which they too are seeking to dwell so that they too may be persons who see as God sees. Custody of the eyes intends our living with focus; it fosters the containment and denial of the incessant voice of curiosity and even prurience that has been intensified with the computer and social media environment and assists in following through on a project without getting distracted. (N.B., even the monastic cowl or cuculla ("hood") helps us maintain custody of the eyes and appropriate focus.) Thus, I think, the practice of custody of the eyes is rooted in a true reverence for others and for ourselves even as it helps create an environment where others may experience the same.

In a cloister or a lavra, for instance, silence does not cut us off from others or the demands of love. It is not a neutral reality but one that is carefully cultivated and allowed to flourish in love for the others who are also seeking God just as we are. It enfolds us each and joins us together in a supremely respectful embrace which is deeper than any word. It is a gift we offer one another. Custody of the eyes serves similarly and seems to me to be a piece of the monastic and eremitical values of stricter separation from the world and the silence of solitude especially. It too is ordered toward loving others and providing the gifts of space and privacy in which they may seek and commune with God while at the same time making sure they are profoundly supported in this.

07 June 2015

Marking (the Feast of) Corpus Christi: Divine Power Perfected in Weakness

[[Dear Sister, if a person is chronically ill then isn't their illness a sign that "the world" of sin and death are still operating in [i.e., dominating] their lives?  . . . I have always thought that to become a religious one needed to be in good health. Has that also changed with canon 603? I don't mean that someone has to be perfect to become a nun or hermit but shouldn't they at least be in good health? Wouldn't that say more about the "heavenliness" of their vocation than illness? ]] (Concatenation of queries posed in several emails)

As I read these various questions one image kept recurring to me, namely, that of Thomas reaching out to touch the wounds of the risen Christ. I also kept thinking of a line from a homily my pastor (John Kasper, OSFS) gave about 7 years ago which focused on Carravagio's painting of this image; the line was,  "There's Another World in There!" It was taken in part from the artist and writer Jan Richardson's reflections on this painting and on the nature of the Incarnation. Richardson wrote:

[[The gospel writers want to make sure we know that the risen Christ was no ghost, no ethereal spirit. He was flesh and blood. He ate. He still, as Thomas discovered, wore the wounds of crucifixion. That Christ’s flesh remained broken, even in his resurrection, serves as a powerful reminder that his intimate familiarity and solidarity with us, with our human condition, did not end with his death. . . Perhaps that’s what is so striking about Caravaggio’s painting: it stuns us with the awareness of how deeply Christ was, and is, joined with us. The wounds of the risen Christ are not a prison: they are a passage. Thomas’ hand in Christ’s side is not some bizarre, morbid probe: it is a  union, and a reminder that in taking flesh, Christ wed himself to us.]] Living into the Resurrection

Into the Wound, Jan L Richardson
My response then must really begin with a series of questions to you. Are the Risen Christ's wounds a sign that sin and death are still "operating in" him or are they a sign that God has been victorious over these --- and victorious not via an act of force but through one of radical vulnerability and compassion? Are his wounds really a passage to "another world" or are they signs of his bondage to and defeat by the one which contends with him and the Love he represents? Do you believe that our world is at least potentially sacramental or that heaven (eternal life in the sovereign love of God) and this world interpenetrate one another as a result of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection or are they entirely separate from and opposed to one another? Even as I ask these questions I am aware that they may be answered in more than one way. In our own lives too, we may find that the wounds and scars of illness and brokenness witness more to the world of sin and death than they do to that of redemption and eternal life. They may represent a prison more than they represent a passage to another world.

Or not.

When I write about discerning an eremitical vocation and the importance of the critical transition that must be made from being a lone pious person living physical silence and solitude to essentially being a hermit living "the silence of solitude," I am speaking of a person who has moved from the prison of illness to illness as passage to another world through the redemptive grace of God. We cannot empower or accomplish such a transition ourselves. The transfiguration of our lives is the work of God. At the same time, the scars of our lives will remain precisely as an invitation to others to see the power of God at work in our weakness and in God's own kenosis (self-emptying). These scars become Sacraments of God's powerful presence in our lives, vivid witnesses to the One who loves us in our brokenness and yet works continuously to bring life, wholeness, and meaning out of  death, brokenness, and absurdity.

To become a hermit (especially to be publicly professed as a Catholic hermit) someone suffering from chronic illness has to have made this transition. Their lives may involve suffering but the suffering has become a sacrament which attests less to itself  (and certainly not to an obsession with pain) but to the God who is a Creator-redeemer God. What you tend to see as an obstacle to living a meaningful profoundly prophetic religious or eremitical life seems to me to be a symbol of the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It also seems to me to remind us of the nature of "heavenliness" in light of the Ascension. Remember that one side of the salvation event we call the Christ is God's descent so that our world may be redeemed and entirely transformed into a new creation. But the other side of this Event is the Ascension where God takes scarred humanity and even death itself up into his own life --- thus changing the very nature of heaven (the sovereign life of God shared with others) in the process.

Far from being an inadequate witness to "heavenliness" our wounds can be the most perfect witness to God's sovereign life shared with us. Our God has embraced the wounds and scars of the world as his very own and not been demeaned, much less destroyed in the process. Conversely, for Christians, the marks of the crucifixion, as well therefore as our own illnesses, weaknesses and various forms of brokenness, are (or are meant to become) the quintessential symbols of a heaven which embraces our own lives and world to make them new. When this transformation occurs in the life of a chronically ill individual seeking to live eremitical life it is the difference between a life of one imprisoned in physical isolation, silence, and solitude, to that of one which breathes and sings "the silence of solitude." It is this song, this prayer, this magnificat that Canon 603 describes so well and consecrated life in all its forms itself represents.

Bowl patched with Gold
We Christians do not hide our woundedness then. We are not ashamed at the way life has marked and marred, bent and broken, spindled and mutilated us. But neither are woundedness or brokenness themselves the things we witness to. Instead it is the Sacrament God has made of our lives, the Love that does justice and makes whole that is the source of our beauty and our boasting. Jan Richardson also reminds us of this truth when she recalls Sue Bender's observations on seeing a mended Japanese bowl. [[“The image of that bowl,” she writes, “made a lasting impression. Instead of trying to hide the flaws, the cracks were emphasized — filled with silver. The bowl was even more precious after it had been mended.”]]  So too with our own lives: as Paul also said, "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing power will be of God and not from ourselves."  (2 Cor 4:7) It is the mended cracks, the wounds which were once prisons, the shards of a broken life now reconstituted entirely by the grace of God which reveal the very presence of heaven to those we meet.