the whole field

Now that you’ve loved

it’s the end of your love and the

start of your loving career.

You’ll not love another;

you’ve gone from your mother for real!

Stand to me now and make

sense of the things that you feel.

                                                Danny Black

I was asked to preside at a wedding this past weekend. I always think that it’s kind of funny in the Catholic tradition that a celibate man stands up in front of a young couple about to be married and gives them advice. As if! But as I was thinking about what to say, I occurred to me that there were a few lessons that I had learned from the monastic life that could apply to the married life, so short of advice I thought I could share some things I’ve learned from experience.

The first one is the main vow we monks take. It’s called conversatio morum. Literally it translates something like “conversion of ways.” Thomas Merton called it the “vow of conversation,” and I think it applies well to the married state, too. What it means is that we are always in conversation with our vocation, we are always asking our state in life, what should a monk do? what should a husband do? what should a mother do? But for a married couple I guess it always means that there is a vow of conversation between them as well; from now on out they are not making decisions just for themselves, but for their partner and eventually for their children, their family.

When I made solemn vows I picked the gospel reading from Matthew chapter 13 about the man who found the treasure buried in the field. But he didn’t just grab the treasure and run––he bought the whole field! For me that whole field is not just walking around in white robes or chanting the psalms or sitting in meditation. It means whatever is going on with my monastic community and congregation, as well as lots of personal ramifications of the choice of lifestyle that I have made. And for the married couple the “whole field” I guess means all that they each bring to the relationship, each of their families, each of their background, each of their career choices, and whatever the future holds. It’s like two ecosystems meeting; sometimes it could lead to an environmental disaster! It’s like two weather systems meeting; sometimes it feels like a perfect storm! Their love for each other is the treasure buried in the field, but they find out that they have to buy the whole field. It can come as a shock along the way when each of them starts to realize what that whole field entails, but that treasure buried in the middle of it somehow makes the whole field holy.

Another one of my favorite images of monasticism is what our former prior general Emanuele said to me once. I was speaking to him about monasticism as a container (this is part of a longer story, but I’ll spare you…) and he said to me, “But, Cyprian, monasticism isn’t a container; it’s an energy.” I disagree a little bit with that––I think it’s both a container and an energy––but still his point is important, and the same applies to marriage. Marriage can feel like a container, “settling down,” and to some extent that is true. But, first of all, the couples’ love for each other is the energy inside that container. Maybe the word “container” isn’t the best even; marriage holds the energy and focuses the energy, but it’s not supposed to suppress the energy. It’s important that that energy be always cared for and nourished. We use the word “procreative” for married love; that word means even more than having children. Love is creative, love gives birth to other things. That’s just what love does. It gives birth to community, to art and beauty, to justice and peace.

The last lesson is something I heard just the other day from an 86 year-old monk. We were talking about how it is so hard for young people to commit to monastic life, and I thought that this could apply again to any vocation, including especially the married life. He said that the problem with young and old is that they think of a vocation as an end. But really what we commit to is a journey. Our vows are the beginning of a journey, and we have no idea where the journey is going to take us!  It’s a marvelous unfolding frightening mystery. And that somehow ties in to the other three already mentioned. It is the energy of our vocation that takes and sustains us on that journey. And on that journey we vow to stay in conversation and constantly convert ourselves. In that journey we discover the rest of the field that we have bought along with the treasure that we found buried in it.

There’s a reason that a couple gets married in front of a bunch of people, partly because all those people gathered there are a part of that whole field! And also because those people are there to remind the couple, when and if things get tough, that they have committed to the whole field, to remind them that this is a journey they are on and to which they have committed themselves.

I have found that the energy of my monastic life has led me to live my life in a way I never would have imagined 20 years ago. It’s been an amazing journey, especially these past ten years up in Santa Cruz and on the road. And the same with the young families that I have been lucky enough to be surrounded with these years; they have taught me so much as I watched them wade through the surprises, disappointments and even great tragedies in their lives; as well as I have watched older couples walk beside them, sometimes just being gently present and supportive, at other times really holding their feet to the fire, reminding them of the commitment that they made to the whole field, to the journey, just as my elder brothers and sisters in religious life have both encouraged me and challenged me to stay with it.

I especially wish Danny and Katy happiness, courage and prosperity in the years ahead, as well as Claire and Nick, married just two weeks ago. And I am feeling enormous gratitude for all the young couples and their beautiful babies who have surrounded me these years with their joy and life and courage and hope for the world.

not to conquer but to serve

 

The joys and the hopes,

the griefs and the anxieties of people of this age,

especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted,

these are the joys and hopes,

the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

            Gaudium et Spes

I’ve been doing so much reading about the Second Vatican Council these days, partly because there is so much interest around it this year as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of its convening. I just finished a wonderful book called “What Happened at Vatican II” by John O’Malley, that my confrere Fr Bruno recommended, that for me read like a action novel! I know that a lot of things have been excused, and sometimes wrongly, in a stretching of this nebulous “spirit of Vatican II,” and yet I came away from that book thinking that there really was a spirit to it.

The Roman Catholic church doesn’t like to think of itself as ever changing, especially when it comes to dogma and doctrine, so instead three different words were used––aggiornamento, development, and resourcement. That first word in Italian means “updating.” This is what the saintly Pope John XXIII wanted for the church, and updating, to open the windows and let the Sprit blow some fresh air in, especially after 500 years of a very solid post-Reformation counter-Reformation stance, protecting against all enemies, especially theological ones. Where the “development” came in was, for example, not 100 years earlier popes were condemning ecumenical dialogue, religious freedom and what they called under the large banner of “modernism,” which included things like new academic disciplines directed at Scripture as well as any talk of evolution. All of those by 1965 were embraced and encouraged, and many of the theologians who were silenced in the years before––Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin––wound up having great influence on the final documents of the council. That was quite a development, and it left a small but vocal minority very unhappy, leading some even to go into schism, as in the case of Archbishop Marcel Lefevre. The resourcement, on the other hand, is a French word that basically meant skipping back, sometimes up 1,500 years, and returning to the sources, back to the apostolic times and the Patristic era, the earliest era of church teachings, and for religions orders and congregations it meant going back to the original inspiration of their founders and recovering their original charism, intent and hopefully fervor as well. That was all part of the spirit of Vatican II––updating, developing, and going back to the sources.

But there was something more, of which these three were just manifestations. Whereas the stance of the church at least for 500 years had been to circle the wagons and condemn anything that we didn’t agree with, there were no condemnations issued out of the Second Vatican Council. Instead, an unheard of theme got brought up over and over again––“dialogue with the world.” So much so that the Council fathers issued a document that was addressed not just to the church, but to the world! Gaudium et Spes––and it begins with those marvelous words:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of people of this age,

especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted,

these are the joys and hopes,

the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.

For theirs is a community composed of human beings.

United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father

and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for everyone.

That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with humankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.

Hence this Council, now addresses itself without hesitation,

not only to the children of the Church

but to the whole of humanity!

This was the spirit of Vatican II: dialogue with the world––not antagonism against the world––not circling the wagons and protecting ourselves against the world––dialogue with the world. As a matter of fact in his opening address to the second session of the Vatican Council Pope Paul VI called on the church to change its attitude toward the modern world, in these words I have reflected on countless times:

NOT TO CONQUER BUT TO SERVE

NOT TO DESPISE BUT TO APPRECIATE

NOT TO CONDEMN BUT TO COMFORT

O’Malley adds this list, that the vision of Catholicism was moving

…from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to inner appropriation.

We heard these wonderful words about Jesus in the gospel today, that he was move with pity for the crowd because they were like sheep without a shepherd. One might think that they are only addressed to those who officially minister in the church. But that’s not how I understand it. By our Baptism we all share in this triple vocation of Christ who was prophet, priest and king––and king as Vatican II was at pains to define it––king as servant. It is notable that the documents of Vatican II never refer to the papacy as a monarchy; the pope too is simply the “servant of the servants of God.” We are supposed to “rule” the world by being its servant. Why? Because they are like sheep without a shepherd, Christ wants to be their shepherd, and we are the body of Christ.

We have no idea what will face us in the future––but the signs of the times show, and some great thinkers among us believe that, us that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could be heading toward some great ecological disaster, of worldwide financial collapse, or some horrible nuclear disaster––not to mention random acts of terrorism or horrendous senseless violence like we had this past week in Colorado. We are going to need each other, to be shepherds to each other. But even more, the world––which God loves so much––is going to need us as its shepherds: not to conquer it but to serve it; not to despise it, but to appreciate it; not to condemn it but, especially, to comfort it, in the name of Jesus who had compassion on the crowds; Jesus, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, who is our peace, who has broken down the dividing wall of enmity, who proclaimed peace to those who are far off and those who are near, through whom we have access in the Spirit to the Father.(cf. Eph 2:14-18)

cyprian

21 july 2012

easter and the temple

When the soul is wholly united with God
and baptized in the divine nature,
it loses all hindrances and sickness and inconstancy
and is at once renewed in a divine life.
(Meister Eckhart)

Partially because of our trip to the Holy Land this year, but also inspired by Pagola’s book on Jesus, I’ve really been fixated on the Temple this year as I prepared for Easter. I’d like to take you back to last Sunday for a moment, Palm Sunday, when we read the story of the passion of Jesus. This being Year B in the liturgical cycle, we read from the Gospel of Mark. In Mark’s gospel specific mention is made of the high priests’ pointing to Jesus’ incident in the Temple––the so-called “cleansing of the temple”––as a motive for their wanting to put him to death. Mark brings it up in the scene before the high priest, and then it appears again in the scene at the cross when the soldiers are mocking Jesus; Mark also gives us that dramatic scene of the curtain of the temple being torn in two, from top to bottom at the moment when Jesus died. That incident just keeps coming up over and over again. Many scripture scholars think that it is that provocative gesture in the temple that was the main reason for the Jewish authorities’ hostility against Jesus, and the decisive reason for them handing him over to Pilate and the Roman authorities. It’s not the Jews in general, mind you, who are upset about this, but this wealthy, powerful minority, the priestly class that was aligned politically with the Romans and who had a lot invested in the institution of the Temple with they themselves as the sole mediators of God’s mercy. (The Temple scene is also Jesus’ last public action; the authorities won’t let Jesus do anything after that.)

We must understand: the Temple was untouchable; ever since the time of Jeremiah the authorities reacted violently against anyone who dared attack it. So to do something like Jesus did––to go in with whips and cords and knock over the money changers’ tables––could be seen as an attack on the very heart of the Jewish tradition, or at least a serious attack against the institution, because the Temple was the symbol around which everything else revolved, Jewish religious, social and political life. There are different interpretations of what Jesus’ action meant. It could be that he was aiming at an elimination of the whole institution of sacrifices for absolution and the atonement of sin; maybe he was denouncing of the hierarchical priesthood and the whole political economic and religious system that had built up around it. Perhaps he was saying that none of this really had anything to do with God, that none of this had any place in the reign of God, and that his co-religionists had gotten totally off course somehow.

Of course if you think about it, this whole movement away from the Temple had already begun back with John the Baptist. We rarely note that John himself was from a priestly family through his father Zechariah, but John had abandoned the Temple to perform his ritual cleansing outside of the sacrificial priestly temple system, out in the Jordan valley, outside the Promised Land looking in. And now a few months later along comes this homeless wandering rabbi from Podunk Galilee who is signaling that the God of the poor and excluded does not and will not reign from that Temple, does not and will not legitimize that system. Whatever the case may be, this symbol of the Temple must be important, since it keeps appearing on the horizon.

One way to look at it is that Jesus was signaling was that the Temple has been relocated. (I’ve spoken about this so many times, this term I get from the theologian James Alison). There’s a beautiful phrase from the prophet Ezekiel that is the preferred text to be sung for the Sprinkling Rite during the season of Easter, the rite that reminds us of our Baptism; it’s also recommended to be sung immediately after the renewal of Baptismal promises at the Easter Vigil: I saw water flowing from the right side of the temple; the water brought God’s life and his salvation. Of course in its original context, Ezekiel is having a vision of life-giving power pouring from the new Temple in Jerusalem. He describes a river of fresh water that flows from out of the east side and slightly south through the Kidron Valley, incidentally where John in his Gospel tells us Jesus went with his disciples Thursday night before he was arrested. Ezekiel’s vision is of a miracle that attests to the life-giving power of God dwelling in the sanctuary. But under Jesus everything gets ‘relocated,’ including the Temple and the sanctuary. Remember John puts the ‘cleaning of the Temple’ right in the beginning of his gospel; and after Jesus takes the whip of cords and drives everybody out they challenge him––“What sign can you show us for doing this?”––he says, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Of course they take him literally as if he were speaking about the building, but John lets us in on the secret and whispers to us off to the side, somewhat parenthetically, he was speaking about the temple of his body. That’s why we speak about it at Easter time. The Temple has been ‘relocated.’ It was a building, which had already gotten destroyed once. And the vision that Ezekiel has of a new Temple is actually not another one of brick and mortar, but a person in whom the fullness of the godhead dwelt bodily. The life-giving power of God now dwells in that sanctuary, the sanctuary of Jesus’ heart. So of course when we sing this phrase at Easter––I saw water flowing from the right side of the temple––, we are supposed to remember that the Temple is now Jesus’ own body; as we are still remembering and are supposed to call to mind what we heard on Friday, again from the Gospel of John, how one of the soldiers thrust a lance into his side and immediately blood and water flowed out. This blood and water of course symbolize among other things the sacramental life of the church, specifically Baptism and Eucharist, but most of all (as Ronald Rolheiser spoke so eloquently to us about last year) they symbolize the very stuff, the very energy of life flowing out of this new temple, the Body of Christ.

But it doesn’t stop there, and that’s why we celebrate Baptism at this celebration. St Paul understood the implications of all this and never tires of reminding his readers that the temple gets relocated again, from the body of Jesus, to our bodies, through Baptism, if we immerse ourselves totally into the death-kenosis-emptying like Jesus. And so the words of the 1st letter to the Corinthians: Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? I can almost hear Paul shouting this last line: God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple! That thing that I read years ago that Carl Jung wrote comes to mind again, that life seemed to have gone out of the churches, and as its next dwelling place the Holy Spirit appears to have selected the human individual. This comes as no surprise to Christians. That’s what happens in Jesus’ dispensation. Do you not know that you are God’s temple by the Holy Spirit who dwells within you? What Carl Jung had stumbled upon was authentic Christianity: The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit living in us. And if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you then God will raise our bodies too… glorious copies of his own. Maybe that’s why Jesus performed that provocative act in the temple, to let us know that as its next dwelling place the Holy Spirit has selected the human individual––his body, our bodies, our beings. That’s also why we sing that phrase from Ezekiel while we are renewing our own Baptismal vows. The water––the waters of the Spirit, the waters of Baptism––flows in and out of us. That’s what Easter is all about.

And this then is what it means to be church, to be the body of Christ, the fullness of the one who fills everything. There are these words of St Peter that we will hear several times during the Easter season: like living stones let yourself be built into a spiritual house. This is what it means to be church, to be stones and a house, a temple out of which the love of God, the Holy Spirit, would pour like a stream of life giving water, pour out like love, like charity, as creativity, and participation, full active and conscious participation not just in the liturgy and life of the church, but, as St Peter says, participants in the divine nature, participants in divinity, participants in creation, the blood and the water flowing out of us, the Temple that we are individually as out of our communities, our churches, our families. Our Baptism, our immersion into the death-kenosis-emptying of Jesus leads us to live a life of union with God too, like branches on the vine.

Jesus’ life, ministry and death––and especially his resurrection––teach us that God has nothing to do with death. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the fullest. God does not require vengeance and punishment to be propitiated and mollified. We don’t need to sacrifice children or animals nor mutilate our own bodies. The letter to the Hebrews adapts Psalm 40 and puts on the lips of Jesus: You did not wish for holocaust or offerings, but a body you have prepared for me. The word “body” really meant one’s whole person, and that is what Jesus offered up to his Abba––his whole being. Jesus’ sacrifice was a humble, contrite heart; Jesus sacrifice was emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, of a life poured out in service to the reign of God. Jesus’ whole life was a perfect offering––and it’s within the context of that that he allowed himself to be handed over to the Romans and sacrificed by the high priests “for the sake of the people.” It is in thus emptying himself that the fullness of godhead dwelt in him bodily and we receive from that fullness grace upon grace. The marvel is that the Father still raised him on high because God is about life, not death. He gave it all over and he got it all back, transfigured, glorified. And so Paul tells us to offer our bodies, our whole beings, as spiritual sacrifices pleasing to God, that you may come to fullness in him, to empty ourselves and die with/like Jesus so as to be filled with the very fullness and to become ourselves living stones of a temple not built by human hands. This is what we remember when we remember and why we remember our Baptism at Easter, because God’s Temple is holy and Jesus was that Temple, and you are that Temple, and I am that Temple, and we are that Temple.

splanjnizomai

Your task is not to seek love
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
(Rumi)

I had to preach twice these days and it wound up that both times were about something that I have been thinking about a lot…so I decided to write it all down here and share it with you.

The other day we heard the reading from the prophet Hosea chapter 6, which ends with a poignant phrase––I can hear at least three different musical versions of it in my head: It is love that I desire not sacrifice; the knowledge of God rather than holocausts. This is a theme that crept into later Hebrew thought. Hosea had said earlier: Your piety dissolves like a morning dew! and it’s already evidenced in Psalm 50 and 51, for instance (the latter of which we actually used for Mass that day): You are not pleased with sacrifices; / burnt offering from me you would refuse. / My sacrifice a contrite spirit; / a humble, contrite heart you will not spurn. And of course the famous invectives of the prophet Isaiah, my favorite being from chapter 58: You say, ‘Why do we fast and you do not see?’ … Is this not the fast I choose: loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your home. Karen Armstrong would say that this is the Hebrew tradition waking to the perennial philosophy, the awakening to a sense of individual moral responsibility. And in some way it’s the core of the message that Jesus has for his co-religionists right in line with the prophets, trying to make sure that the “main thing remains the main thing.”

That reading from Hosea was paired yesterday with the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18) both praying in the temple, the Pharisee, convinced of his own righteousness was “praying to himself (!)” boasting to God about his righteousness and tithes, and the tax collector was beating his breast, saying “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” Of course Jesus says that he, the tax collector went home justified because those who humble themselves will be exalted. It was kind of surprising to me that the reading from Hosea wasn’t paired instead with the call of Levi/Matthew, the tax collector (maybe it is somewhere else in the church year), because it is in that story that Matthew has Jesus quoting Hosea, when others around (the ‘righteous’) criticize him for eating with sinners, and Jesus turns to his critics and says, Go and learn the meaning of these words: ‘It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice…’ Of course what’s equally interesting there is that Jesus does not quote scripture exactly, as often happens, and the modifications he makes are always significant. He says ‘mercy’ instead of ‘love.’ Of course, we could say that mercy is a special kind of love. And that’s what we’re after; that’s what caught my attention.

We often think of mercy in relation to forgiveness, or else in terms of some higher creature having pity on some lower creature, like acts of ‘charity.’ But mercy is wider than that, it’s more like compassion. Note how Islam understands this and puts those two together: Bismillah ir-rahman, ir-rahim! A look at the difference between Jesus and John the Baptist will show you what I mean. John is preaching a baptism for the forgiveness of sins; if Jesus has any ritual it’s his open table––he eats with sinners whether they have repented or not. This is one of the things that confuses his co-religionists: he makes no issue of purity or forgiveness or their repentance before he hangs out with people.

I’m getting some of these ideas from Pagola’s book again (“Jesus: An Historical Approximation”). He points out that in contrast to the holiness code––“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy”––Jesus radically transforms our way of understanding and living the imitation of God. He says instead, and again, it is always instructive when Jesus adapts the words of scripture–– “Be merciful just as your heavenly Father is merciful.” (In another place he says ‘be perfect’ but somehow that is God’s perfection––mercy.) It is God’s mercy, God’s compassion that we are supposed to imitate. And the meaning of this compassion/mercy––I go back and forth, as Pagola says translators do with these words––is summed up in the Aramaic word that Jesus would have used: rahamim means literally ‘bowels,’ or better yet it’s what a woman feels toward the child she carries in her womb, nurturing, nourishing, caring for. This is, of course, quite close to the Hebrew word rahum (not to mention the Arabic as above), which again describes “a compassion that comes from the bowels and involves the whole person.” The Gospel writers instead use a very unique Greek word when they speak of Jesus having compassion: splanjnizomai, which again means a feeling that comes from out of the bowels. So when they say about Jesus that he had compassion on the crowd––like when he sees the crowd of 4,000, or when he cured the sick, or when they ‘are like sheep without a shepherd’––it means literally ‘his whole body shook’ or even ‘his guts quaked.’

What I am getting at is, perhaps we could translate Hosea to read, “I don’t want your sacrifices, your rituals, your liturgies: I want your bowels to shake.” If our rituals, our sacrifices, our liturgies, our yoga, or zazen, our tapas–asceticism don’t lead to that, then they are like a morning fog.

But, God says, “I want your bowels to shake toward me as well as toward others!” This mercy-compassion has two sides to it. On the one side tremble before the Divine presence in awe of the merciful womb from which you came that is love without an opposite. And then loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your home. We should quake before the mystery of Divine love, who quakes in compassion for us (“who humbled himself to share––and immerse himself––in our humanity”), and then in turn we should quiver with compassion when we encounter others in need of something to eat, who are hungry, naked, lonely––‘like sheep without a shepherd.’

And then today I had to preach again (it happened to be the 62nd birthday of Shantivanam; we had ‘Western’ birthday cake for breakfast!). The guys from the formation house came over too and it was quite a festive liturgy. But they kept the readings of the day, and I am glad they did. It was that marvelous reading from the prophet Isaiah chapter 49 that ends with the unforgettable phrase, Could a mother forget her baby, be without tenderness for the child in her womb? Well, even should she forget, I will never forget you. Sometimes I think it is amazing that we don’t refer to God as mother as much as father, because we have all those words again in that reading. Before that beautiful closing line about the mother and the womb, Isaiah has already used the word rehem four times, referring to God’s love, and that is translated literally as ‘womb love.’ And then the psalm that was chosen to accompany those readings was Psalm 144, which sings over and over again the Lord is gracious and merciful, now using the word hesed, scholars say is that love which is beyond a mother’s love, if there could be such a thing.

This seems to me to be the very heart of the Abrahamic tradition, the revelation that God is mercy-compassion, ir-rahman ir-rahim, every surah of the Qur’an reminds us. The very nature of who/what we call God is this––rahum–mercy/compassion. So it is almost anachronistic to ask God for mercy. God is mercy, all God does is mercy, love-without-an-opposite. Maybe we could say with Rumi that “our task is not to seek mercy but merely to seek and find all the barriers within ourself that we have built against it.”

Again, it is a marvel to me that we don’t speak of God more as mother. Jesus is constantly showing a God who he calls Father but who acts like a mother, and Jesus himself, while male, is always showing a whole different, much more maternal side of masculine love. I was thinking of when Matthew tells us about Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem, and he says, How often I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings… As a matter of fact Raniero and I were remembering a beautiful retreat that our Fr Romuald (of blessed memory) on Jesus as mother, based on the writings of Julian of Norwich.

I told the guys too, thinking of the birthday of this place, Shantivanam, that I remembered my first visit to Camaldoli in Tuscany, the “mother house” (or “Mothership as some of our friends like to say) how after all my other monastic experiences––the traditionalism of San Miniato, the stoicism of Gethsemane, the relaxed austerity of Big Sur, the high church Cluniac sensibility of St Meinrad––the monastery at Camaldoli reminded me of my Sicilian grandmother with her arms out and a big kiss and a pot of tomato sauce on the oven. And I mentioned who the rotunda at New Camaldoli reminds so many people of a womb, and for me it is that too, New Camaldoli being the place that nurtured and gave birth to who I am today. On top of that I was reminded how Fr Bede loved this image of God as mother, and how he loved to stress union by communion and the mystery of love that was the center of the Christian mystical experience. And he for all his world fame and lofty theology remained a consummate guestmaster all of his life, welcoming visitors here and giving so much time to them as well. I hope Shantivanam and all our communities can ever strive to be this for a world so in need of this mercy.

Speaking of mother love, my days are winding up here now. Someone asked me what I was going to be doing at Shantivanam this time and I said, “Absolutely nothing,” because I was hoping to make this a retreat time after all the work and traveling of the past year (England, Israel, Italy and now southeast Asia). But I didn’t think it was be this much nothing, but I have been serious about giving my body a break to heal this hip injury. Amma Mary Louise has made life very comfortable and made sure that I was overfed (not what one would expect in India) with fruits and vegetables and eggs. I even get scolded for doing my own laundry and again if I walk too much or too fast. And she and I have had lots of opportunities for long conversations over breakfast in her kitchen and Eucharist together each afternoon (she herself is having trouble walking). So I have been well mothered myself. Now some work kicks back in. I have some errands to run in Trichy tomorrow, then JP and his group of 40 are coming Friday and Fr John Robert and I will lead them in a retreat until Sunday when I head out, taking the long way home re-tracing my steps––Chennai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and God-willing California on Friday the 30th.

Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim!

lectio divina and dharma mama

Some perform sacrifice with material possessions;
some offer sacrifices in the shape of austerities;
others sacrifice through the practice of Yoga;
while some striving souls, observing austere vows,
perform sacrifice in the shape of wisdom
through the study of sacred texts.
(Bhagavad Gita 4:28)

Monday, 12 march, 2012

I’m getting out tomorrow. I’m happy to be going back to Shantivanam, but I’m a little sad to see this time end. It really has been a wonderful retreat, with just my holy books and computer, and lots of time alone. A guitar would have been nice.

I’ve also got a wonderful novel by Amitav Ghosh with me called “The Glass Palace” which I lucked on in the airport in Malaysia. It’s all about the Indians in relation to the Burmese and the Malays during the late colonial years, and it takes place in all three of those countries, in many places where I’ve been. Its climax happens during World War II when the Indians begin to question their allegiance to the British Army who still treats them like indentured servants, and questions the difference between colonialism and Fascism. Last year I read “The Mulberry Empire” which took place in Afghanistan in the period just prior to then, also about the end of the colonial period in that region. We may not realize how this crescent is all lined together––from Afghanistan through Pakistan, India and then on to Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, and on into Indonesia, not to mention Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam just above, and what an impact European colonial times had on the delicate ecosystem of the region. I couldn’t help but feel as if I were in the midst of it as I sat reading while hearing to the temple bell and the rush of traffic outside of my window and hear the news about the latest disaster in Afghanistan, the American soldier killing 16 civilians. I think a big part of the problem is and always will be that we have no idea what is going on in the psychic matrix of another culture’s soul.

After the visit to Pondicherry, I’ve been really inspired by Sri Aurobindo again, both personally and philosophically. I actually kept imagining him wrapped in his white dhoti, retired to his private chambers the last decades of his life, studying, writing (volumes) and practicing his Yoga, while the Mother attended to all the business of the Ashram, during my “retreat” here. I’ve got his “The Yoga and Its Objects” with me, along with my Gita and a cool travel sized copy of Prabhavananda’s translation of the Upanishads, besides a beautiful little copy of “Rumi’s Poems” that Claire gave me in Singapore before I left.

I’m also devouring Jose Pagola’s “Jesus: An Historical Approximation,” which I have been saving as my Christian spiritual reading for this trip since before we went to the Holy Land. It’s just wonderful. (In the name of full disclosure, though this book was a best seller in Spain and won acclaims from half of the Spanish episcopacy and one of the Vatican congregations, it is currently under by another Vatican congregation [the CDF] due to the other half of the Spanish episcopacy.) In it Pagola carefully sums up the best of the most current research into the historical Jesus and presents what he believes to be credible, possible and non-substantial. He for instance gives little credibility to the work or motivation of the Jesus Seminar People (though he cites them from time to time as if to say, “Even they say this…”); nor does he put much weight behind the apocryphal or Gnostic gospels or the novelistic approaches such as “Jesus’ lost years in India” (though again, he does often cite the Gospel of Thomas to back up the authenticity of certain sayings of Jesus). Anyone who ventures into this territory is asking for trouble. Those limitations of course make the left think he’s too conservative, and yet the right is questioning his dividing up the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith. He takes that right on in the introduction, quoting John Paul II and Pope Benedict, and it has never been an issue for me.

There are several reasons that I bring that up: because of a discussion MC and I had, some writing I’ve been doing regarding the perennial philosophy, an e-mail I got recently, and a follow up discussion I had just today with young Dr Prakash. MC carves a really balanced middle road it seems to me when he notes how often the historical critical method can, in my words, “take all the fun away.” He says the same trend in Buddhism can be bothersome as well, trying to pick out authentic sayings of the Buddha. What that has to do with the Perennial Philosophy: perhaps there was a moment in the dawning of the Axial Age, and in each of our developments when the sharp focus of rationality is just beginning to burst through the mythical mind, and the two live together nicely, and we don’t have to explain all the symbols and say what happened and what didn’t really happen. Perhaps this is also the mind that is still at work in us at ritual, in liturgy, for instance, when we’re not supposed to say too much out of the rational mind (in a homily or a sermon), just enough to let the rational mind catch up and shut up. MC says this is not an issue for the most part in India.

Then this e-mail the other day that someone sent me, a link to some talks by a fundamentalist preacher about “false religion.” I looked the guy up and read about him. If the rest of the stuff didn’t turn me off, his unequivocal support of the State of Israel as determined by divine revelation did. He did not support the ‘theology of replacement’ (neither do I, but for different reasons) and so the State of Israel is divinely sanctioned. With all due respect to my Jewish friends, for me that is going too far, and that’s false religion. You can’t use the Bible like that. At least that’s not how we understand it in my tradition. I support the State of Israel too, but not because God said that they must have this particular piece of land to the expense of everyone else on that land, and not so that it will bring about the Second Coming of Christ, but because it’s the right thing to do. And I also with my fellow Americans retain the right to criticize our friend Israel if they do not live up to international agreed upon standards of justice.

So with all that on my mind, Dr Prakash appeared at my door early this afternoon. I wasn’t quit sure if it was an official or a fraternal visit, as we say in the monastic world. If it started as the former––a few perfunctory questions, “How do you feel?”––it quickly became the latter. We talked a little about each other’s lives and his career plans. And then, “So, do you have any more doubts about the Bhagavad Gita?” was how he phrased it. I said that I respectfully disagreed about the assessment he had offered––that the Gita was the milk of the Upanishads––; that I thought it was just the opposite. He took that in stride. And then, some weeks ago someone had challenged me by referring to the most important verse in the Gita, and I did not know what that was, so I asked him. He said there was no most important verse, but that the first word and the last word of the Gita are its summary. Sure enough, I looked it up later: it begins with the dharma and ends with the word mama––“my dharma.” And then he asked me smiling, “So, you spend your life studying this books. What is your goal? What is your dharma?” I refrained from launching into my infamous discourse on telos and scopos (the end and the goal). And we had a good discussion about the various holy books.

After a while he also asked me to compare the Qur’an, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. And that’s what leads me to the present discussion. I said that the Bible was not a book; it was a collection of books and that it was very difficult to understand because each section had its own way of being understood. I said that many observant Muslims believe that the Qur’an was dictated word for word by Allah directly to the Prophet (peace be upon him and his sons and daughters!), and there was no interpretation of levels of meaning to be discerned. This is why even the Sufis’ mystical interpretation is sometimes seen as suspicious if not outright heretical. Whereas it seems to me that few Hindus take the Bhagavad Gita literally as an historical record––that Arjuna and Krishna actually sat on a battlefield and discussed the entirety of the Gita––and so people can easily gather the milk from the coconuts. In other words, as MC pointed out, the Indian mind can sit in that beautiful place where rationality is still embedded in the mythical mind and not have to sort out what is what, just let it live together. He smiled and said, “That’s right!” and then left.

* * *

Wednesday, 15 march. I'm back at Shantivanam now, virtually being held under house arrest by the nuns at Ananda Ashram since the doctor said I am not supposed to do anything for anohter two weeks to fully effect the cure. This is a little hard because my hip and back feel great. So it is a continuation of a forced retreat, which is most welcome, and I'm delighted to be here looking over the River Cauvery again.

an ayurvedic retreat

(As you’ll read below I was indisposed for about a week and couldn’t get my writings from my computer to the internet so am putting a two-week backlog of blogs 14 March.)

So then, putting away falsehood,
let us all speak the truth to our neighbors,
for we are members for one another.
Ephesians 4:25

Saturday, 10 march, Kerala Ayurvedic Hospital, Trichy

No sooner had I gotten to Shantivanam than I left again. I’ve been having this ongoing issue with a torn ligament or something in my hip joint for some time now that flared up kind of bad before I left on this trip and has been bothering me the whole time. I kept hoping for a miracle cure and saw a couple of specialists along the way––a physiotherapist in Singapore, an orthopedic surgeon in Malaysia and an osteopath in Tiru. It was pretty clear that the only cure was gonna be some total down time. I was so sore by the time I got to Shantivanam that Fr. George and Sr. Mary Louise both suggested I go to the Ayurvedic Hospital here in Trichy to see Dr. Ajil. Again, I guess I was hoping to get a quick massage and be on my way, but he recommended 14 days in house treatment. I talked him down to one week, so he’s doubling up the treatments. I’m glad I did it.

This is an interesting little place. I was thinking “hospital” like CHOMP or Dominican by us in Santa Cruz. It’s more the equivalent of very inexpensive hotel room, very simple, not necessarily sanitary by our standards (though they do sweep and mop every day), and they provide no necessities at all except one sheet, not even soap. Now I know why Sr. ML packed me up a bag of towels, sheets, dinnerware, etc. I do have a private room (with a TV!). Tea is served twice a day, 7AM and 3:30 PM, there are three simple meals of good Ayurvedic healthy vegetarian cooking served in a tiffin kit, and you get lots of boiled, purified water––“The same water I myself drink,” said the doctor when I asked him. I’ve had three days’ of treatments so far, mostly consisting of getting slathered in hot oil, and then them pounding on my hips and thighs with tied up sacks of hot minerals for 40 minutes at a time. I had a mud paste of sorts added too now every afternoon. The main doctor, Ajil, is a sharp guy who has a great devotion to Shantivanam and Sr. Mary Louise, and three other young doctors look in on me three times a day. But the guys who do the actual treatments look to be in their late teens at the most. Outside of the doctors, none of them speak much English outside of “Good morning,” “thank you,” “Sir, treatment, sir!” and “Medicine!”

Actually at first I thought the room looked like a prison cell and I quickly converted it in my mind to a monastic cell and I’m trying to take this as a retreat time. I’ve got books and my computer, and I’m just here wrapped in my dhtoi all day. I haven’t left the room except for my treatments, which take place just down the hall, since Wednesday night.

Sunday

Fourth day of treatment now. I never know what’s coming next. Last night a new added treatment was getting my waist and belly wrapped in a pad that looked and felt like the texture of the insulation around a water heater and yards of bandage. I was to lie down with that on for six hours. I didn’t think that would be too bad. I wrapped myself in my dhoti and lay down on my bed, which had a plastic mat on it. Soon I realized that the medicine was oozing through the whole thing, and soaking my dhoti and the mat, so it was real slithery. And then the electricity kept going out, which meant no fan. The window is shut due to mosquitos and of course my door was closed for privacy, so it got really uncomfortable and itchy in the heat of the night. I could barely wait until midnight to rip that thing off and wash off. But I must admit, it did something magical. My hip feels more open today than it has in a long time.

I inadvertently threw away the bandage with the used pad, which set up for an interesting encounter. My main doctor here on the floor is a young guy named Prakash, who speaks pretty good English but is very shy and hesitant. My main therapist is a rail thin young Keralese guy who is a bit of a coyote, named Jijo. He has warmed up more and more, started singing Indian film songs to me during the treatments, and imitating the way I say “thank you” and “nandri” (Tamil, for thank you). I was expecting my next treatment at 1 PM when suddenly at 11:30 Dr Prakash, Jijo and another tall thin guy came into my room. Prakash hesitantly asked me where the bandage was. That’s when I realized I had thrown it away, and the garbage man had already come and emptied my pail… I apologized and thought the discussion was over, but the three of them just stood there looking at me in that direct Indian way. Finally they started asking me questions through Prakash. I don’t think they get many Westerners at all in this hospital, and I think they are trying to figure out who the heck I am. I heard Prakash tell Jijo “Father” once the other day, and “Christian,” and they know I am a musician. Prakash said they wanted to hear me speak English. They made some jokes and Jijo sang again, and then they asked me to take their picture, and then they just left.

Then at the treatment session, while Jijo is singing and dancing, Prakash sets himself up near my head and says, “Sir, so you read the Bhagavad Gita?” He must have seen it in my room. And so we launched into a discussion about the lessons of the Gita, and the difference between it and the Upanishads. He knows the Gita well and says it is the “milk” of the Upanishads.” He also asked me what I thought about “the Hindus with all their idol worship.” That’s the way he said it, mind you. I still haven’t ascertained whether he is a Hindu or Christian; it’s one of my quirks that I don’t like to know so I usually don’t ask. I feel like that forces me to say what I really believe. Since he’s from Kerala, there’s a good chance he’s either. Of course I asked him back each time what he thought. He did say that we need a new spirituality for the new age––Kali Yuga––that focuses more on karma yoga, and I said that’s why I thought the marriage of East and West was so important, because at our best we in the West are brilliant at karma yoga, the yoga of action, but we needed more of the interiority of the East to balance us. At the end of the session the other guy came in the room too and presents himself in front of me wanting to know my name and what it means, and then asked if I had a family, was I married. I said, no, I was a monk. I looked to Prakash to translate and he said to them, “Brahmacharya.” “Oh, brahmacharya,” they both said and nodded. I told Prakash as I was going back to my room that we could talk some more later if he wanted.

the purpose of our yoga

(As you’ll read below I was indisposed for about a week and couldn’t get my writings from my computer to the internet so am putting a two-week backlog of blogs on 14 march.)

The first process of the yoga is to put yourself
with all your heart and all your strength into Gods hands.
The next process is to stand aside
and watch the working of the divine power in yourself.
(Sri Aurobindo)

9 march, 2012

Monday I headed out with JP to Pondicherry. He was to attend a Lutheran Pastors’ Conference there until Tuesday and had booked me to offer a musical presentation to the gathering as well. I’d met several of these guys before, both at Quo Vadis as well as at Gurukul Theological in Chennai and the seminary in Madurai where I have done other things for JP. They so reminded me of a gathering of priests, mostly guys (only a handful of women Lutheran pastors here in India), lots of boisterous joking and backslapping. After lunch with the group that first day, I was free. They offered me an AC room in a nearby hotel, quite near where we stayed at one of the Auroville guesthouses in 2007, and I accepted that offer, and I got to spend the day on my own here in the hometown of Sri Aurobindo once again.

JP’s noble driver Sam drove me out to Auroville itself in the afternoon. It was farther outside of town than I thought it would be. Actually we had caught a glimpse of it as we were driving in that morning; the recent cyclone through those parts had wiped out all the trees and so from a good distance we could see the golden discs attached to the dome of the Matri Mandir. (More about that later.) Auroville was a creation of the Mother, Mirra Alfissa, the French woman who moved to Pondicherry and dedicated her life to Aurobindo and carrying out his work for twenty some years after his death. He regarded her as the incarnation of the Divine feminine herself and trusted her completely with this after he withdrew into the retirement of the ashram the last thirty years of his life. Auroville was not begun until long after his death, started in the late ‘60s and opened in 1972. It is meant to be an international––or better yet, a non-national––community, a true village of the future, beyond nationality, beyond creed, (“Imagine…”), built around incarnating Aurobindo’s vision of what Yoga it would take to bring down the Supermental in to earthly life, and programs and principles based as if that were already to have happened. A utopian project–– thinking of it in the line of Buckminster Fuller’s thought from a few weeks back––the only requirement for belonging is that one would be committed to making the Divine manifest on earth in humanity. “The present community consists of more than 100 settlements spread over 20 square kilometers, and of around 1900 residents drawn from some 40 nations.” And its purpose: to realize human unity.

There is a quite a little ecosystem that has grown up around Auroville itself. We started passing by countless little shops, bakeries, health food stores, then more and more Westerners wearing their Asian pilgrim clothes, either on foot or, mostly, on scooters, tea shops and Internet spots. The “suburbs” seemed to go on for miles ‘til we finally got to the main visitors’ entrance. Sam led me in but let me go on by myself. At the visitors’ entrance there is a greeting hall with a display about the history of the place and its charter, lots of literature available and a video presentation.

Sam got me a ticket to go to the Matri Mandir viewing spot, and I headed out. It was a good kilometer or two walk to get there, built on a spot that the Mother had chosen either at random or by some kind of supernatural premonition. I don’t have the literature with me so I am trying to piece together all that I saw. The centerpiece is the dome of the Matri Mandir itself, (that literally translates as “Mother Temple”) as I mentioned earlier, all gold and covered with dozens of gold plated discs. (I believe I read that there are 42 of them.) Inside is a great meditation hall. Next to it, sort of semi-encircling, it is an outdoor amphitheatre, with terraced seating, where the community gathers a few times a year to celebrate. Around are also a series of twelve gardens, each set up around a certain flower that the Mother chose, named for the attribute that the flower represents.

I headed back and lounged a bit in the various shops that were set up. Auroville, like no other place I’ve seen in India has set up quite a boutique industry, aimed very much at Western tastes: lots of handmade paper, various flavors of incense and candles with flowers in the wax. There were also a few clothing stores with what looked like pretty high end merchandise, and of course the book store, where I spend a few rupees on things I might not be able to find at home. I was kind of underwhelmed by the whole place––of course I never did get any taste at all of what community life is actually like there––because, as much as I am fascinated with Aurobindo’s writings, I find the whole ambiance that it has spawned kind of sterile, almost cold––the architecture, the symbols (or lack of which), the calculated formulae that the Mother lays out as a plan for incarnating her Lord’s vision. As much I loved staying at the Aurbindo ashram in Delhi, I had the same impression there. Aurobindo himself has little time for image worship, and he and the Mother both wanted to surpass religion, though both were ardent believers in God. But they either set themselves up or allowed themselves to be set up, or set each other up as the Lord and the Divine Mother. I feel in my guts that they went too far with the whole thing and hubris ruins it.

Still it’s hard for me to fault this vision. In some way it’s what all of our lives are about: Sri Aurobindo points out that “the only way we can move toward unity is to realize that ‘there is a secret Spirit, a divine reality in which we are all one.’” This is the vision of the perennial philosophy and certainly the hope of Fr Bede. “Only when we live from our essential being, which is identical with this Reality [we could trip over that vocabulary a little, but let’s go on…] and not from our ego, will a real unity become possible.” This is what Sri Arubindo thought was the radical shift that had to take place, the next step in the evolution of humanity, the emergence of a new consciousness higher than that of our present consciousness. And it is only this that will ultimately result in the “integral transformation of humanity.”

Later that night, back in town, I treated myself to a nice meal at a French-Italian restaurant just down the street from my hotel––a real Greek salad and a pretty good facsimile of penne with a pesto sauce, just the kind of thing I crave after I’ve had stomach troubles––and a great night’s sleep in my hotel room.

The next morning I was on to sing for the pastors. I was feeling pretty confident about it––JP had asked me to do for them the Lenten program that I had prepared for Malaysia, all Christian stuff, with a lot of Lenten homiletic exhortations mixed in––but everything was just off. Before I went up there was first an elderly retired venerated Lutheran pastor who led the group in a couple of bhajans in a pleasant but shaky voice. And then a Catholic priest led the “morning devotion” by playing various very loud pre-recorded tracks for them over which he sometimes sang and during which he also preached and prayed. It was all in Tamil, so my best guess was that this was something he does for parish missions and retreats, etc. It went on a long time, maybe 45 minutes or so. Then, without a break from all that, JP introduced me to do pretty much the same thing for an hour, though a lot quieter. I wanted to blame it on the sound system––though JP said it was good––and the sound of traffic whirling all around us in the open air pavilion, the fact that probably for no one there was English their first, nor for many primary, language (and a few didn’t speak much at all), and (so I was told) the difficulty of the melodies that I was asking them to sing along with me (“They’re too classical,” one man yelled to me), in addition to having been a captive audience for more than an hour before I began… Within a half an hour, some were sleeping, some were talking a cell phones, the bishop was having a conversation with two guys in the back row, some left. I tried to stay focused on the two or three guys who were paying attention, but I was so relieved to be done, and I said to JP afterward, “I’m sorry, that was a disaster.” He said not a disaster, but it was a bad setting and said that he had wanted to tell me to throw in a few bhajans to get their attention. Anyway, they can’t all go well. But I did note the difference between Malaysia and Tamil Nadu. The same program went over very well indeed with lay people in Malaysia, but hardly worked at all with clergy in South India. There was also certainly a difference from a mixed crowd such as at Quo Vadis (or Auroville) and a purely Indian, even if all India Christian, one. I do chalk it up to the greater familiarity in the former with both English and Western music. South India is still much more enclosed. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but a good shot across the bow of any would-be missionary.

Aurobindo stresses over and over again, per the Gita, the importance of being released from the fruit of your work and then being released from the work itself. “The first process of the yoga is to put yourself with all our heart and all our strength into God’s hands. The next process is to stand aside and watch the working of the divine power in yourself.” I was really trying to keep that in mind, but I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Who knows? Maybe the divine power did something in spite of me!

Then we piled into the car for a long afternoon’s journey to Shantivanam. I was so relieved to finally see the place. We arrived just as the evening samdhya was starting. JP and I sat under the thatched roof of the tea circle and talked until we heard the happy sound of George and young George and Raniero come walking up for dinner.