(This was my homily from Friday at the ISBF meeting in Bengaluru.)
Most of the Church remembers St. Peter Damian as the bishop, a cardinal, a reformer. But he was first and foremost a monk. As a matter of fact, we Camaldolese claim him as one of the greatest saints of our congregation, mainly because he was the biographer of our founder St. Romuald, and his monastery at Fonte Avellana in the Marche region of Italy is one of the crown jewels of our congregation. Peter Damian was a major proponent of the eremitical life, though the congregation that he headed was in large part cenobitic as well. But he is mainly known in the rest of the Church for his work in greater ecclesial reform. One author wrote that he was one of the outstanding personalities of the 11th century, if not the entire Middle Ages. He was much sought after for advice by a series of popes, and eventually named bishop of Ostia and then a Cardinal. That’s when he got involved in protecting the rights of the church against secular corruption and in the reform of the secular clergy and the episcopacy.
When I think of someone like Peter Damian, I can’t help but wonder: what is it that fires the heart of a reformer? If it’s just someone who has a personal agenda, the reform is going to go nowhere. St. Francis of Assisi wouldn’t have lasted; our St. Romuald wouldn’t have lasted; the Cistercian abbots wouldn’t have lasted if their reform was only their personal agendas at work. Like Saint Peter Damian, the true reformer’s zeal always has to be rooted in personal conversion—as today’s gospel tell us (Mk 8:34-9:1) everyone has to take up their cross and follow Jesus—and the reform grows from out of that. It’s an organic thing. If we try to orchestrate it, it’s destined to fail. St. Francis heard the call: “Rebuild my church.” But that was based on him rebuilding Francis first.
This is the lesson we have to learn from Peter Damian––not to go out and reform, but to go in and reform. His first movement was there––to the inner journey, to the inner work, to what we in the monastic tradition call conversatio. The thing is, if we do this work of conversatio, we never know where the Spirit is going to take us, what the Spirit is going to do with us when we have been molded into what Spirit wants us to be. We might be sent to evangelize! We might be sent to our deaths! We might get asked to push a cart and be a chai wallah in downtown Bangalore. And we might be called simply to stay home in our cell and sit waiting, patiently, content with the grace of God.
But that’s not our business. Our business, again as today's gospel tells us, is to lose our lives for the sake of the gospel. Our business is to be clay in the hands of this God, to reform our lives continually and make ourselves available to the Spirit. We have in our congregations what is known as the triplex bonum, the threefold good of solitude, community and this third thing that we don’t like to name, but originally it was missionary martyrdom. We like to think of it as some kind of absolute availability to the Spirit, losing your life for the sake of Christ and the gospel. Whatever we do even in terms of our own inner healing and growth, what we do in terms of personal conversion itself, is a gift to the Body, making ourselves an instrument for the Spirit.
Peter Damian himself wrote to a hermit-recluse at Sitria, in what I think of as the most eloquent defense of the eremitical life and the contemplative life in general, “The Church of Christ is united in all her parts by such a bond of love that her several members form a single body and in each one the whole church is present.” (I, by the way, used that for my ordination announcement.) So it goes both ways: what goes on in us is also important to the whole Body; on the other hand what goes on in the Body is important to us. If we are living true to our vocations, if we have really died to the world, then not only do we have a gift to offer the rest of the church––we become the gift that we offer to the rest of the Body.
So let’s pray for that ourselves, that we might take up our cross and follow Jesus, that we may lose our lives for the sake of the gospel, for the fresh new way of thinking that comes from our experience of union with God through contemplation, prayer and meditation, and the energy to embody it and enact it, so as to be a gift to the whole Body of Christ in the bond of love.
