The Importance of Doing Nothing
We spoil everything by trying to get something out of it, by being so incurably, intractably utilitarian. I agree with Walter Kerr, that New York drama critic who, oh, 12 or 13 years ago wrote one of the best books I ever read, called The Decline of Pleasure, put his finger on the central American malaise when he said, “Our biggest problem is that we are neurotic workers. We feel compelled to work.”
The neurotic compulsion to work is, I think, one of our biggest problems. And it’s a philosophy of life. We inherited it from Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, who claimed that only those things were good that worked, that produced, that could be consumed. And we fell for it. And that utilitarian spirit is even spoiling the religious renewal. We end up using one another, and we call it love. We end up using God when we call it religious renewal. You know, we keep – we tidy up the church. We rearrange the furniture. We modernize, suburbanize, protestantize, update, streamline. And then we say, now, there’s a place for God in all this, too, because we like to be respectably religious.
The fact is that there is no place for God in our world or in our church or in our plans. God is the place. And we’ve got to fit the church and the world and our plans into Him. We have got to response to His sovereign claim and to his devastating demands of love. There is no other way. It is God who acts. It is God who loves, hounds, pursues, woos, consumes. And all we tiny, frightened, faltering, feeble little creatures can do is respond. But once we begin to respond, we become towering human beings. We become divinized. We become deified, to use the word that the fathers of the church did not hesitate to use. Or as St. Thomas Aquinas said, we become gods. Not like God, autonomously, that’s the affect of original sin. But we become God by participation in his godhood, a process that never ends. It’s an ongoing, unending, dynamic process.
That’s the marvelous thing about becoming human. It never ends. It goes on and on and on, into eternity. It doesn’t even become static, finished, completed, at the moment of death or at the entrance into heaven. It goes on and on and on. That’s the difference between a human being and an animal, I suppose. Say, for instance, a rhinoceros. A rhinoceros has already achieved the quintessence of rhinocerosity. But humanity is open-ended. Humanness goes on and on and on.
One day I was lecturing in San Antonio, and they put me up in a swanky hotel. And I went to bed and fell asleep. But at about 3:00 o’clock in the morning there was a knock at my door. And I jumped out of bed half-dressed, opened the door, and in came two black girls. And I stood there by the door. One of them was pulling me over toward the bed, and the other one was the spokesman. And she said, “We’ve come to make you happy.” And I said, “But I was happy. Especially when I was asleep.” And she said no, no, no. And she went on to propose all sorts of amazing, incredible sexual tidbits the likes of which I have never heard. And I’ve gone to my sexpert friends and asked them what they meant, and even they didn’t know. But anyway, I said, “No, no, no, I can’t do that. You see, I don’t know you, and therefore I don’t love you. And therefore, if I did that, I’d just be using you.” And one of them said, “No, no, no, you wouldn’t be using us. You’d be paying us.” And then I laughed so loud that they got scared and ran out.
And I went to bed, and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was trying to figure out two things. One is what the two of them were going to do, and secondly how much it was going to cost. But you see, they were so incurably utilitarian that they didn’t know what I was talking about. And that kind of utilitarianism runs right through our society. We are terribly utilitarian. The worst kind is when we end up using God. God is too good to be used. He is meant to be known, loved, adored, celebrated, but never, never used.
The purest, finest, highest human acts are useless. For instance, playing and praying. They are the two highest acts that human beings are capable of, and they are both useless. At least in their purest form. There are certain therapeutic forms of play. They are not the purest. But to play just to play, for no other reason. You see, those human acts are highest, purest, best that need no reason outside of themselves by which to be justified. Such as play. And this is certainly true of prayer. We should pray for no reason. We should pray for no purpose. We should pray for no gainful end. We should pray because God is God. And prayer is a cry of the heart. So that if we are at all alive, then we’ve got to pray.
And at its highest level, it is useless. It is the most useless act of all. Some of the most beautiful things in life are useless. I think, for instance, of my favorite kind of dog, a Saluki. You can’t use a Saluki. You know, a Saluki is the oldest breed of dog in the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful creatures God ever made. And you can’t use it. You can hardly train it. You can’t master it. They’re too smart. They’re too independent. They’re too intrinsically authentic. They will not be used. Another favorite example of mine of something non-utilitarian is that architectural splendor that hovers over St. Louis, that magnificent useless arch. Utterly useless. But magnificently beautiful and inspiring.
So we should not be afraid of doing nothing. We should not be afraid of useless acts and useless things. Be still and see that I am God. The most important thing to do is nothing. The most important thing to do is to be. And you see, we escape that primary privilege of being by doing too many good things. There’s the rub. I don’t worry about the bad things we do. I worry about the good things we do.
A Long and Loving Look
St. Thomas Aquinas says that no one can live without pleasure. Certainly no one can live a full, satisfying life without contemplation.
To engage in the natural art of contemplation is to look long and steadily, leisurely and lovingly at a thing — a tree, a child, a pear, a kitten, a hippopotamus; to really “see” it, the whole of it; and to know it, not to steal an idea of it, but to know it by experience, by love.
From time to time, we’ve got to stop, be still, and contemplate. Because we see things as they really are — existentially — contemplation restores our taste for things, gives us a taste for the right things.
There’s a single Latin word that is the equivalent of that phrase, “a taste for the right things.” The word is sapientia. The English word is wisdom. Is not this a key crisis of our society — the absence of a ruling wisdom? A real God escapes us too, as long as we refuse to take time, enter into positive leisure or holy repose and contemplate. We miss him in the busy hustle-bustle of a omplicated, unintelligible liturgy.
We miss him in our self-propelled, over-rationalized meditation. We miss him in sermons and books that are moralistic, legalistic, negative, and childish, where there is no splendor or glory; no epiphany — “a shining forth of the Godhead.” We miss him, above all, in our education, the goal of which is supposed to be contemplation, according to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the Fathers of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, and all other ancient and modern educators worth listening to. Our word “school” comes from the Greek word schola, which means “leisure.”
The Greek schools provided the opportunity and established the discipline necessary for contemplation. Today the schools have expelled leisure, and students, after sixteen to twenty years of schooling, have never learned to cultivate the attitudes and predispositions needed for contemplation.
The most important kind of contemplation is knowing God by experience: a pure intuition born of love. The only way toward this “religious experience” is prayer. Prayer, real mental prayer, is the most central and yet the least known area of awareness of Catholics today. And this is true of Protestants and Jews, too. We miss God in Catholic Action — busy, efficient, well-organized, but not all “aglow” with the Spirit (St. Paul).
Everything that we can bear witness to concerning the reality of God derives from contemplation
— the contemplation of Christ, of the Church and ourselves. But no one can proclaim the contemplation of Christ and the Church in an effective and lasting way unless he himself participates in it; unless, like Peter, he announces that he has seen and heard.
We have not by following artificial tales made known to you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his greatness. For he received from God the Father, honor and glory, this voice coming down to him from the excellent glory. This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him. And this voice we heard brought forth from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mount . . . whereunto you do well to attend. (2 Pt 1:16-19)
How much time have our modern apostles spent with him on the holy mount? Have we seen, heard,
touched Christ? How, then, can we be sent to witness him? How can we proclaim or spread abroad
activity, however zealous, what we have never known in a personal, experiential way? For all these reasons, and many more, I contend that, more than anything else, we need contemplation. Without contemplation we can only look back in anger or forward in fear,
cannot look around in awareness.
The Suffering God
Christ is present in all the pain and suffering of the world, not safely separated from it but immersed in it to the hilt. “In all our affliction, he was afflicted” (Is. 63:9).
The cross of Christ is the sign to us whenever nature is red in tooth and claw and whenever men have to endure their agonies of bloody sweat and lonely darkness or are the victims of oppression, injustice or violence. There God is. Our feeling of exile on earth, our longing for Heaven makes sense and nonsense simultaneously, because where God is, there is Heaven.
One of my favorite saints is Dostoevsky’s whore, Sonia. In response to Raskolnikov’s cynical question:
“And what does God do for you?” Sonia replies: “He does everything.” She can only imagine what he does in the mountains, woods, lakes, oceans and deserts, but she knows what he does through the hopeless and incomprehensible tragedy of human destiny. She sees God in all and all in God.
So Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it: in the face of ugliness, meanness and squalor, she sees him “in his most disreputable disguise.” No sentimentality here; no escape from the scabrously raw matter of the world or the dirty devices of a dehumanized society.
Karl Jaspers gives it a philosophical twist: “God’s infinity does not face finiteness as other — for then it would be finite also. God is the complete infinity which includes everything finite instead of confronting it” (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Collins, 1967, p. 260.).
That’s why I don’t understand the bewilderment of my philosophical friends when I say matter-of-factly, “God is the bear.” The more earthy stuff we uncover, the more heavenly glory we discover. The more distinctively and robustly human we become, the more divinely endowed we are.
With a soul-friend I passed through the pits of the purgative way, the lustral, lacerating sightings of the illuminative way and the bracing breakthroughs, that take forever, of the unitive way.
I saw the mysterious manifold presence of God in every light and dark aspect of that labyrinthine way. What might have seemed like a terrifying moment of divine absence was my own blindness in the face of Fire. Few make it to the unitive way, that is, to realized union with God.
It is with anxious misgiving that I mention “ways” — degrees of union — because if we concentrate on the ways, or become preoccupied with where we are along the passionate pilgrimage into the Absolute, we are bound to become priggishly or worrisomely self-conscious and so inevitably lose the Way — lose him: the Way, the Truth and the Life.
The main reason so few of us make much progress toward the perfection of charity is that we secretly know and are pathologically afraid of all the fierce and fiery refining required to Christen our deified hearts and minds. As I mentioned above, the final breakthrough takes forever. The other disconcerting thing is: the closer we come to Reality, the more obscure it is.
Clarity comes with metanoia — a radical change of heart and mind, a change so radical that our dominantly human mode of conception on the surface of things gives way to a dominantly divine mode of reception — wise passivity — at the heart of things. Then comes the pure and simple intuition of Reality — of God — born of love. This is contemplation. In the real world it’s “where the action is.”
No compulsions, fixations, addictions. No clichés, slogans, platitudes, disguised eroticism, narcissism or idolatry. Sheer action! Only the contemplative knows how stifi pure action and how active pure stillness is. After all, what is there to do or say when you suffer mindfully and joyfully the Divine Onslaught of Love!
Who is more involved and engaged, though leisurely and detached, than such a person? And who is more socially and politically relevant than such a person, silent and solitary presence at the Center, in communion with the Ultimate, committed to one thing, Christ, and frill of compassion for everything, interceding for all?
Apostolic hermits, the members of our community, are my favorite and most compelling examples of this kind of world-saving, joyful suffering and upbeat intercession based on coinherence enjoyed by all the members of the Mystical Body of Christ — a reference to the Church which is still, I think, unbeatable: especially when you think of what nonsense modem ministerial “mouths” have made of “the people of God” and brought to practical life by a carefree carrying the cross with such wild, wonderful gladness that it might seem to the dreary, driven crowd like a quixotic form of madness.
Among canonized saints, a recent good example is St. Thérèse. During a long siege of darkness she said:
I find only one joy, to suffer for Jesus .. . this unfelt joy is above every joy… I have hit upon the secret of suffering in peace. Peace does not mean felt joy. To suffer in peace it is enough to will whatever Jesus wills . . If you knew my joy, how great is my joy at having no joy, to give pleasure to Jesus! It is the essence of joy! The only happiness on earth is to train oneself to find delightful the lot Jesus gives us.
Don’t misinterpret. Thérèse wasn’t into real estate but into the state of being real. Von Balthasar says
of her: “it is not happiness which draws her. She longs not for happiness but for love. Eternal love, not eternal happiness, is the center of her being in God, and the laws of love are infinitely richer and deeper than the laws of happiness and repose” (St. Thérèse: The Story of a Mission).
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What is Christian Mysticism?
“Mysticism is awe and wonder at the sacredness of life and being and of the invisible, transcendent and infinite abundant source of being.”
The mystic is not a special kind of person, but everyone is, or ought to be, a special kind of mystic. Mysticism is nothing esoteric. It is not the privilege of a few but an experience every one of us should know first hand.
Mysticism is infinitely too subjective to teach. It is more readily caught than taught. The supreme purpose of all contemplative communities is to foster the spirit of mystical contemplation in contemporary culture so that our social, political, economic and domestic existence is inspired by it. And yet we wouldn’t dare try to teach mysticism. All we can do is set the stage as humanly as possible for the mystical experience.
In my earliest writings I used the term contemplation rather than mysticism. Now I prefer to use “mysticism,” although contemplation and mysticism are essentially the same. It is crucial, however, to eliminate many of the misunderstandings that surround the meaning of both these words. Though we cannot teach mysticism, explain it adequately, or superficially decide to achieve it, we must know as much about it as we can theoretically and do as much as we can practically, in order to become mystical. We especially need to know what mysticism is not.
What Mysticism Is Not
Mysticism is not a pain-killer. It provides no escape from the world but puts us in touch with the world. Mystics are not rigid, unbending, or unworldly. Because they are in love with God and with life, they are supple, tolerant and flexible. Mysticism is not a way out of anguish, conflict and doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the mystical experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart, like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.
Mystics often suffer more than anyone else because they are so sympathetic and compassionate. They may harbor the gravest doubts because their childish, puerile, and spurious faith explodes before them. A veritable bonfire burns to ashes their old, worn-out words, clichés and slogans. Even their most holy concepts and sacred ideas of God are consumed in the fire of this great holocaust.
Mystics discover through contemplation, a personal encounter with the living God, that they know nothing about God. They know not what but only that God is. They learn that God is no thing (nothing, nada), no what, but pure Who. God is the Thou before whom the mystics’ inmost “I” springs into awareness. God is the “I am” before whom the mystics echo their own “I am.” They stand defenselessly, helplessly, and humbled before God’s holy scrutiny.
Mysticism is not what drug enthusiasts call “tripping out” but more like “standing in,” alert and alive, with the highest possible focus of human attention on the present moment. It is standing willfully and deliberately in awe and wonder before the unveiled mystery of reality. Mysticism is not trance, an ecstasy or an enthusiasm. It is not the wild frenzy of religious exultation or the imagination of lights or the hearing of unutterable words. These do not emanate from the deep self but from the somatic unconscious and may happen in conjunction with religious experience but do not constitute mysticism.
Mysticism is not the affair of a quiet and passive temperament which naturally loves to sit and do nothing. Mystics are not spooky introverts or isolated thinkers who simply love to ruminate, prowling around in the sanctuary of their own psychs. Most of the mystics I know are strong, robust and vibrant, obsessed with a Zorba-like, or better, Christ-like madness.
True mystics do not merely explore their own consciousness but savor the Real. They are not aloof from flesh and blood, the turmoil, chaos and pleasures of the world. Some of the most mystical people are deeply and profoundly immersed in the world, thoroughly engaged in political and social life, rearing dozens of children. They are mystical simply because they are basically and essentially great lovers of God and his whole creation. Some of my favorite mystics are prophets like John the Baptist and Elijah, saintly women like Joan of Arc and Elizabeth of Hungary, disciplined wild men like Zorba the Greek and Holden Caulfield. These mystics are not indifferent but deeply in love with the world. Their love of the world does not diminish but enhances their dynamic, irresistible and burning love of God. It is possible to become totally detached in everything and unattached to God. But then we become stuffed shirts, not mystics. We are not all aglow with the Spirit, consumed with the fire of God’s love, but simply “into” spirituality.
Mysticism is not inward torpor but a magnetic, mobilizing peace characterized by the wise passiveness of St. John of the Cross: “I abandoned and forgot myself. . . leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.” Mysticism is the highest form of action. But the mystics don’t always need to take a pole when they go fishing because they have no need to justify doing nothing. Being may compel them to do nothing. When God speaks, the mystics simply listen; when God appears, they simply behold; when God gives, they simply receive. Responding to God’s initiative this way distinguishes genuinely positive and gracious quiet from the error of quietism, the limp passivity of the sluggard often confused with the alert stillness of the spiritual athlete. English mystic and theologian Walter Hilton describes the paradoxical activity of such peace: “This restful travail is far from fleshly idleness and from blind security. It is full of ghostly work, but it is called rest… a holy idleness and a rest most busy.”
What Is Mysticism?
Having cleared away some of the outstanding debris, we are in a better position to say something more positive about mysticism. Mystical contemplation is the experiential grasp of reality as subjective. Not mine—that would pertain to the external, superficial self—but as myself in existential mystery. Mysticism does not meet reality through a process of deduction but through an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive in its own existential depths which open out into the mystery of God. If we can discover ourselves in depth, we discover God and simultaneously discover Christ. We can almost say there is an identity between self and the real Christ.
If I am a mystic, I have come into ownership of myself. I achieve through asceticism and discipline and the controlled wildness of love, mastery of my own human instrument. Only when I achieve ownership of myself may I give myself to the world and share the contemplation I enjoy, which is the only valid definition of apostolic outreach. If my apostolate is not simply a sharing of my mystical contemplation, my own experiential awareness of God, then it is phony, noisy, and absurd.
We cannot proclaim the contemplation of Christ in an effective and lasting way unless we ourselves participate in it. How can we proclaim or act, however zealously, what we do not know ourselves personally and experientially?
“The most important thing to do is to be,” said Lao-Tzu. Apostles are not self-appointed but sent by God, after he has touched and transformed them. Such people are rare. When they show up, they always seem to be men and women of prayer; silent and solitary, God-filled and God-intoxicated, not saying or doing much, but keeping God’s love alive and his presence felt in a half-hearted, talkative, busy society where people live frightened, fragmented “lives of quiet desperation.”
To engage in the natural art of contemplation is to look long and steadily, leisurely and lovingly at any thing—a tree, a child, a pear, a kitten, a hippopotamus—and really “see” the whole of it; not to steal an idea of it, but to know it by experience, a pure intuition born of love. This is not an aggressive act but gratuitous. Being discloses its hidden secrets as we look, wait, wonder, and stand in awe, not inquisitively but receptively. Mystics and contemplatives are never utilitarian, greedily trying to get something out of everything. They simply stand before being, before the universe, before another human being, a plant, an animal. They enjoy it and leave themselves wide open to its revelation, to its disclosures of mystery, truth, and love.
Mystical contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more than meditation on what we believe. Mysticism is an awakening enlightenment, an intuition born of love which leaves us sure of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our concrete daily life. The mystics do not simply find a clear idea of God and confine him within the limits of that idea and hold him prisoner there. The mystics are carried away by God into the divine realm of mystery and freedom. Mysticism is pure and virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able by its very poverty and purity to follow the Word wherever it may lead.
Mysticism is a long, loving look at the Real to which we are united by love. It is the highest expression of our intellectual and spiritual life. Its activity is its own end. Mysticism has no utilitarian purpose but is simply looking, loving, being utterly, magnificently, wildly useless. It is life itself fully awake and active and aware that it is alive. Mysticism is awe and wonder at the sacredness of life and being and of the invisible, transcendent and infinite abundant source of being. It knows the source obscurely, but with a certitude beyond reason. It is a veritable vision of the Godhead in the human, earthy context. This act by which we see who we are, not in isolation but against the background of eternity, and so simultaneously and experientially see who God is—this is genuine mysticism.
Mystical life is both the most normal and the highest expression of the spiritual life. It involves the highest levels of participation in the intimate, trinitarian lovelife of the Godhead. This loving Being issues in our divinization. God is the primary source and active agent of this divine transformation. We are the recipients of divine disclosures and become mystics by being drawn by grace into Ineffable Mystery.
Transparent and Opaque
Whether mystical union is experienced depends partly our environment, particularly our beliefs, but preeminently on our psychophysical constitution. This accounts for the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that mystical experience, like artistic creation or scientific intelligence, is often shared by members of the same family: for example, St. John of the Cross and his brother.
Not everyone is mystical to the same degree. Some individuals are more easily recognizable as mystics.
psychological factor identifies and distinguishes them from other spiritual individuals who are not usually considered mystical. The felicity and frequency with which mystics consciously experience divine union depends upon their particular temperaments.
E. I. Watkin, my favorite religious philosopher who died in 1981, has explained this in terms of the transparent or opaque personality. The opaque personality sees the same comedy as the transparent but never laughs; hears the same music but never moves a muscle; suffers the same embarrassment but never turns red. The inner experiences of the transparent personality, however, always register on his countenance or external behavior. What happens in the spiritual depths, at the center of the soul, rises easily to the conscious surface. What occurs in the deep recesses of the opaque personality will seldom, if ever, become apparent. Transparent personalities are much more likely to translate inner experience into a painting, a song, or a poem.
Both the transparent and the opaque person are in union with God, but only the transparent one becomes conscious of it. Both are drawn by God into the deepest dimensions of the human adventure, the mystical depths of the spiritual life, but only the transparent personality exhibits mystical experiences. Opaque personalities, though raised by God into mystical existence, do not show it or even know it. Despite this, they may be as holy as their transparent counterparts. Theologically speaking, both types are mystics; but phenomenally speaking, only the transparent are, because they experience God’s active presence within them and are obviously and recognizably mystical.
Unfortunately, because of our “monkey business,” phony mysticism abounds. Like monkeys, people copy the outer behavior of genuine mystics without understanding their inner Godward dispositions. It’s what’s inside that counts. I remember Alan Watts comparing a mystic to a musical genius. Strictly speaking, a composer like Mozart is inspired when melody emerges from the depths of his mind. To convey that melody to others he writes it down on paper, employing a technical knowledge which enables him to name the notes he heard in his mind.
This fact is important: his technical knowledge does not create the tune in his mind; it simply provides him with a complicated alphabet and is no more the source of music than the literary alphabet and the rules of grammar are the source of our ideas. What music teachers call “rules” of harmony are simply observations on the harmonies most usually used by such people as Mozart. Mozart did not use them because they were the rules but because he liked their sound. A composer needs to study harmony in order to identify the chords which he hears in his mind, but he does not use his knowledge to construct chords unless he is a mere imitator of other people. In the same way, language is used not to create thoughts but to express them, and mastery of prose does not make a great thinker.
The mystics are spiritual geniuses who work the same way as musical geniuses. They have a wider scope because their technique of expression, their alphabet, is every possible human activity. In all mystics, some more than others, the presence of God is felt. The mystic expresses this feeling two ways: first, by living a certain kind of life; and secondly, by translating this feeling into thoughts and words.
People who have not had this feeling observe the actions and words and from them formulate the “rules” of religious morality and theology. There are bound to be distortions. It is strange how foreign any unique religious feeling is to the average human being, even to the professional religious personality. The essential quality in the mystics is their feeling, not their ideas and actions, for these are only reflections of the feeling, and a reflection existing without light is a sham. Therefore just as great technical proficiency will not make a creative genius in music, so morality, theology, and discipline will not make a genius in religion, for these are the result of religious experience, not the cause, and by themselves can no more produce it than the tail can be made to wag the dog.
When we speak of feeling, we imply an element of rational appreciation of what we feel. Affectivity and rationality are not opposed. Genuine affective responses are rational. Genuine feeling is partly cognitive, but it is also much more than that. According to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “We only believe those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.” A merely intellectual response to reality is not enough because it is restricted and doesn’t engage the total self. Genuine feeling refers to a total response, actuating what we are as persons.
According to Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence: “The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onward, the sources of all mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.” A civilization that denies the place of mysticism or shuts out the possibility of it sets us inevitably on the road toward a philosophy that is not so much a “love of wisdom” as a hatred of wisdom.
We will never enjoy mystical union as long as we refuse to stop, take time, enter into holy leisure and contemplate. We will miss God in the busy hustle and bustle of our loquacious liturgies. We will miss God in our hurried, routinized, self- centered prayer. We will miss him in our frenzied activities. We will miss him above all in our education, whose goal is supposed to be contemplation, according to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the Fathers of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, and any ancient or modern educator worthy of our attention. Without mystical vision, our education is a farce, our civilization a sham, religion an opium, liturgy a corpse, theology a fad, and apostolic outreach the most popular and pietistic escape from the God who said, “Be still and see that I am God” (Ps 46:11).
This article has been published in various forms in other publications. It is being reprinted here with the permission of the author. If it speaks to you, please share it with others by clicking on the “Share It” symbol and sending it to others via email or your favorite social networking sites.
The Prophetic Role of Monasticism
The monk is not a special kind of person; everyone is a special kind of monk, because the central and deepest human impulse is monastic. Monos means one, and the wayfaring human person finds oneness only by tracking Christ through deserts and dark nights into Glory. Nevertheless, a culture needs a sacred center, and the monastery provides an entry to that center, from which society derives essential clues to the mystery of its destiny.
I would like to establish as deeply, clearly and existentially as possible, the relationship between the desert and the city, the relationship of monasticism to society. It is terribly important to understand and embody that relationship.
One of the outstanding Christian writers of the twentieth century was Ignazio Silone who died in 1978. He believed, with the main character of his most famous novel, Bread and Wine, that one person saying no to injustice and oppression breaks the unanimity on which all dictatorships — proletarian or otherwise — count for their power. The hero of the novel, a revolutionary disguised as a priest, tells a young peasant woman; “Just one man, even any little man at all, who continues to think with his own head, puts the whole public order in danger.” This marvelous statement by Silone expresses superbly and succinctly the meaning, purpose and vocation of monasticism, as it was in the beginning, as it expressed itself down through the centuries, and as it ought to be now,. and the effect it ought to have on the world.
The Role of the Tracker
Vatican II teaches clearly and trenchantly that the Church is a Pilgrim Church. St. Augustine used the image of the wayfarer, the peregrinator, to express mature Christian existence. If the Church is indeed a Pilgrim Church we need good trackers. Augustine was a good tracker. John of the Cross was a superb tracker. In his poetry he is always tracking the Beloved, finding footprints, vestiges, and scents of him everywhere. He said that Christ passed through the thicket of the world and left his imprint on everything.
A good tracker is infallible. When I think of the importance of trackers, the infallibility of the Pope does not seem so outrageous. In both novels and historical accounts, trackers are taken very seriously and regarded as infallible. Even when there are no tracks, a tracker looks up at the sky, sniffs the air, and says, “That way.” And everyone goes that way! It’s a kind of infallibility. A Pilgrim Church needs infallibility because it needs good trackers, especially when it stands as it does today, at this difficult juncture, on the brink of the dark night, where instinctively it does not want to take another step forward; it is repelled, frightened, and paralyzed. All of that must be overcome by inner grace and the infallible authority of the tracker.
We must, as the people of God, and as individuals, pass over: participate fully in Christ’s own Passover. The passover is the full experience of death and resurrection: self-transcendence. It is what the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is about; it is the essence of the gospel.
Monasticism must be a sign for the Pilgrim Church in the world today. It saved civilization in the dark ages. It has introduced whole new eras into the world and uplifted the Church when everything else was going down. So the question is: how significant, how good, how clear, how meaningful, how plangent a sign is monasticism today?
The history and social function of religious orders needs to be recast and re-understood in a fresh way. Our hagiography is improving but is still not good enough. Unfortunately even some of the most recent hagiography is terrible. Take the case of that recently canonized Lebanese hermit Sharbal. A saint can live for thirty years in the desert in an exciting confrontation with the living God, and once in the twenty-fifth year people hear him swear at the devil and that takes up one chapter! Then in the fortieth year he goes into his hermitage and finds a roasted lamb, a bunch of grapes, and wine poured into marvelous crystal and that takes up another chapter! These are two isolated, extraordinary and probably legendary events in his life. The real sinew of his life, the flesh and blood of daily existence, we know nothing about. Today we need a socio-political and psychological analysis of how these famous, extraordinary figures and their movements dissented from and in a strange way blessed their times, and were never co-opted by the powers that be.
There is an intimate relationship between real, live monasticism and the socio-political world. Seen in historical context, the vows of obedience and poverty originally represented ways of transcending and criticizing a conventional loyalty to status quo power arrangements and the reification of people in servitude to an unjust economic system. In the past the monastic vows exemplified a quality of relationship and communal equity undreamt of by either, the oppressed victims or their masters.
Politics is, after all, the science of the possible. Monasticism should be a real alternative, and thus make an enormous contribution to the future direction of political and economic organization.
Chastity is the capacity to honor committedly the face of God in another. Historically chastity was a dissent from the dominant styles of Roman and feudal culture which treated women as chattels, and from procreation as a way of building a personal dynasty. The purpose of chastity, and the concomitant lifestyle of celibacy was a more complete and human eroticism. The monk should be liberated by his or her vows of chastity to be more erotic, not less.
What does celibacy convey today? We do not take the vow of chastity for exactly the same reason as the monks of old. The sign value of contemporary celibacy is unfortunately very weak — it is hardly a sign at all. Celibacy repels most young people in America today, and those whom it beckons, it beckons half-heartedly. People want religious life and grudgingly put up with celibacy. Celibacy should be dynamic in itself, a sign so strong and meaningful that the world is changed by it.
St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross knew a kind of eroticism of which even today’s most “liberated” people remain ignorant. Teresa’s and John’s sexuality was neither repressed nor sublimated. In their relationship to God and their relationship to one another they were downright erotic!
The passage from eros into agape is another way of discussing the passover of birth, death, and resurrection. Most people never get as far as eros. They are so undeveloped, dehumanized, and disorientated that there is no eros. We’ve got to begin with eros. We must become highly refined in our eroticism so that it culminates in agape. Agapraction is our goal: a state of non-utilitarian love that unites contemplation with a critical role in society. It is not enough today for the contemplative to contemplate. Hp must become a critical sign for the whole of society.
Mystical eroticism culminating in agape is impracticable unless we sharpen our critical appraisal of those structural alliances between business, government, media, and education which deny the possibility of union with God. We are whistling in the dark if we think that we can be contemplative in this day and age without sharpening our wits and expressing some critical appraisal of those institutions and conventions that make it impossible for people to reach the heights of realized union with God.
St. Augustine believed that there were few great lovers in the world, not because of bad will but because of the deformation of what today we call the subconscious. He did not realize that the uncivil socio-economic order of things has a deep, distorting effect on our psyches that only mystical experience can heal. Only the experience of God can cure us of our distortions. Nothing else can. Contemplatives who are steeped in mystical experience are therefore responsible for eliminating a certain degree of socioeconomic disorder.
A Rite of Passage
The power base of monasticism is other-worldliness. This is the distinctive function of monasticism in society: to know firsthand the passage between this world and that other beyond the imagining of ordinary consciousness and to give the secret away freely. We need first-hand knowledge of the passage. We’ve got to follow the trackers carefully: the popes, the mystics, the magisterium and all the great spiritual leaders down through the ages. We’ve got to follow carefully, get over there and return to share the secret. We need a discipline for communion with God, and a discipline for communicating the secret. If we neglect either the spirituality or the communication we have failed as contemplatives.
If the secularization process that has occurred since Vatican II forces us to get to the bottom of things and see them as they really are, we have redeemed the calculated risk of the Vatican Council. But if secularization means merely a lessening of our aspiration, an abandonment of that other world and a contraction of spirit to the pathology of everydayness, the gamble will not have been worth the price. And good Pope John will be in a big, heavenly bad fix.
Monks are involved in a rite of passage: a structured way of redefining and integrating the transit from one mode of being in the world to another, higher mode of being. Our rite of passage maps out an antidote for the anti-heroic spirit of the modern age. Psychologist Ernest Becker maintains that the purpose of society and social institutions is to set the stage and create the optimal conditions for heroism. The Church has lapsed into the spirit of the times; it no longer sets the stage for heroism. In the face of a society that has come to frustrate human growth rather than foster it, the Church must cling to its own vision and restructure life radically, to create the optimal conditions for death and resurrection, the passover into self-transcendence.
A rite of passage involves a descent into our own hell (the purgative way), an ascent into heaven here and now, to the extent that we consciously come into the presence of God (the illuminative way), and a renewal of our cosmic connection, that is, living in harmony with the whole universe (the unitive way). Finally, a rite of passage reintegrates us into society at a new psychic and social level.
I once attended a bizarre conference in California on drugs and mysticism with a group of doctors, psychiatrists, and religious experts who claimed that the mystic was one who went over and never came back. The truth is exactly the opposite. The mystic is one who goes over to the other side, participates in the passover, and then returns to be reintegrated into society. His fulgence and his lambent personality can light up the world and change the socio-political atmosphere.
Anthropologist Victor Turner divides the spiritual journey into three phases. The first is a separation from normal structured social existence. The second is a transitional or liminal phase where symbolic death and rebirth occur, The third phase is the re-incorporation of the person into society with innumerable new responsibilities. Monasticism is an attempt to create the optimum environment for people to pass over readily, quickly and surely. The monastic situation keeps us continually in transit, in via, on the move, so that we will not get stuck or regress. And it does this within and yet somehow outside the norms and routines of society.
The end result, according to Turner, is community in the deepest, full, and pregnant sense of that word. Only people who are whole in themselves, rooted and anchored and integrated enough to have something to give can create community. Here again we return to the relationship of solitude to community. The first commandment is to love God; the second, to love our neighbor. The first commandment is lived out primarily in solitude but is tested and fostered by the second commandment, loving one another in community.
Although creating community and loving the enemy is not the end, it is the finest, surest, and final test of the end, the sign that you are in the end, that you have passed over. The New Testament asks: How do you know when you have passed over? When you have love for one another. That is the final proof that in your solitude you have touched God (or that God has touched you at the core of your being), and you are enjoying what St. John of the Cross calls espousals or transforming union with God.
The monastic vows set us free. Only out of that freedom can we learn to define and identify ourselves. We cannot define and identify ourselves by our work, a terrible tendency in our post-Vatican II Church. Since the Council, religious orders have changed their work and tried to define themselves in terms of their new ministries to no avail. Religious orders have become more and more frustrated, downcast, and discouraged. The remedy is to remember:’we become defined and identified by who we are, and that beingfulness overflows into effective doing. In the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience we renounce the tyranny of “normal social differentiation” over the determination of human identity and worth, the attitude that teaches: “Without my job I am nobody.” We take vows to overcome the slavery of modern utilitarianism. Most of us are enslaved: we are workers instead of men and women.
Monastic life ought to be the most dangerous, the most difficult and the most wonderful, exciting adventure in the world. What’s wrong with monastic life today? In great monastic orders there is no creative subversion, no counterculture. Monastic orders are, for the most part, locked into serving the petrified conventions and institutions of contemporary society that cause the disease and frustration that are sickening so many people and rendering them impotent. We cannot survive on banality; we need firsthand experience of primordial truth.
We must be courageous enough to let go of the old accidentals and continue to do the creative act of God in Christ which is to make all thing new. It is an attachment to lament the passing of old aspects, features, and customs of the Church which were good and beautiful but not of its essence. This necessarily involves some fear and some grief: fear of the unknown and grief over losing some precious heritage. But fear and grief are part of the passage into the unknown.
The first phase of the rite of passage is the community formed from sharing a common adversity. And there is no going home again. We should not need to go home again once we have found our own center, live out of our own heart, and establish within ourselves our own home. Then we are always at home because we are in Christ. There is no stopping either. Otherwise there would be terrible congestion and untold damage and death. There is enormous energy involved at this liminal phase of human development, breaking through everywhere. If it does not find creative outlets it becomes self-destructive. St. John of the Cross says that it is precisely at this point, facing the unknown and moving deliberately into the darkness, that real faith begins.
What is most needed today are men and women who are monkish enough — set on the one thing necessary — God-centered and passionate enough to go over and come back. To be good pilgrims, good trackers, and pull off the passover, we need three basic attitudes: poverty, chastity, and obedience as well as the arsenal of consciousness-raising devices known as meditation, recitation of the divine office, spiritual reading, physical and spiritual exercises of all kinds (the practice of yoga, Zen, etc). These exercises do not cause the experience of the supernatural but they reduce psychic defenses against supernatural experience. Most people do not know who they are. Only those who plunge into the dark journey beyond all structure discover their true identity in their naked being. No one else does. And that is why monkishness is an indispensable and ineluctable dimension of every human being.
Note: If you like this article, please click on the “Share This” link below and send it to your friends or favorite social media sites. It was previously published in an issue of a monastic magazine. Reprinted with permission of the author.
A Rule of Life for Everyone
The raison d’etre of the Spiritual Life Institute is to create ecological situations — wilderness areas — in which people can live so vivaciously and mindfully that, in a loving kind of relatedness, Christ-like and Trinitarian, they embody and anticipate the Kingdom of God.
Consequently, thirty-eight years after its founding, the Spiritual Life Institute has a community of solitaries in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. In each community the measured mix of solitary silence and community compassion issues in the unmeasured joy of holy worldliness. Each community is a colony of Apostolic Hermits.
This way of life is inspired and based on the life and teaching of Jesus; the Desert Fathers, for instance, Sts. Anthony, Basil and Pachomius; and the original spirit and rule given by St. Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to the Apostolic Hermits living on Mt. Carmel in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and traditionally long before that. (It took us thirty years to write a rule based on the existential experience of eremitical monastic life. It should be noted here we are definitely “monks”— men and women — not “friars.” Our moral founder is Elijah, the Prophet.)
It is our conviction that this very contemplative life with a very specific and limited “active” overflow into preaching, teaching and counseling will be the endurable and attractive form of religious life in the future: men and women living alone together, attentive to the essential aspects of reality — those aspects so real that they provide, as directly and immediately as possible, ultimate communion with the Absolute or the Holy One. Here at the heart of reality, the ultimate question is asked: What does God require of you? Our prayerful response to this numinous summons is metanoia, i.e., a life full of ongoing repentance, conversion, destiny, and, finally, of course, gratitude, peace and joy.
St. Thomas refers to this passionate response to the Numinous as “holy leisure,” and St. Anselm, as “faith seeking understanding.” The Holy Tradition calls it “doing the one thing necessary.”
This life of contemplation with its seasonal overflow into apostolic endeavors will always be carefully done in communion with the local bishop. Such ecclesial communion has been a blessing from the beginning.
The Evangelical Counsels
The practice of the evangelical counsels is an exercise one skips at his or her own peril. Anyone who wants to become distinctively human needs to become creatively and joyfully obedient, poor, and chaste. These are not nugatory or negative virtues but plangently positive. Their monastic meaning in our own lives may be expressed as follows.
Obedience is a learning process whereby all endeavor to “put on the mind of Christ” and enjoy a common unifying conviction without a stultifying conformity, a bland sameness or a silly side-by-sideness versus a tough and implacable togetherness.
Poverty is a lifestyle remarkably free of fuss. Simplicity, beauty, and a robust loveliness should be cultivated. But no fuss: suffering deprivations and inconveniences gladly, taking God so seriously that everything else is taken lightly — but treated reverently: animals, vegetables and minerals, the works of God and human hands.
Three great Doctors of the Church, all Carmelites, John of the Cross, Teresa, and Thérése explicate this divine-human drama, this normal way of life with a depth psychology that is incomparable. It is worth noting here the remarkable similarity between Carmelite ad Celtic spirituality. I would sum up both in terms of refined ferocity.
After all, God is the only truly wild thing in the world — no limitations, boundless, the Terrible Good! So real wildness has something crucial to do with Him! When the unbearable weight of His glory is borne through subjective decision and objective perseverance, there you have a wild man or a ferociously attractive woman.
A brassy kind of bravado, a deliberately noticeable or blatant poverty or a self-conscious imitation of a fourth or thirteenth-century saint is spurious. For instance, building a shack instead of a beautiful, simple hermitage, conducive to work and prayer, is lunatic; refusing a free ride in a limousine is ridiculus; spurning ice cream is idiotic! Ignoring the influence of Rumi the Persian, the Baal Shem Tov or Josephine Baker is ludicrous.
Just as obedience means no mental rust, so chastity means no lust. Purity is undiminished energy. The monk is God’s man, God’s woman. Mary; Jesus’ mother, is the best example of a monk, of poverty, chastity, and obedience. She is consumed by God — mothering His Son and fostering His destiny. One eros governed her life, so there was no room for distractions and diversions or sexual activities or attachments that would diminish the erotic thrust of her being toward the embodiment of the Kingdom: divine union.
In the life of the monk there is no energy for connubial capers or sexual sallies. God is a consuming fire. The living flame of love burns and purifies the disciplined (intellectually, emotionally and bodily chaste) monk. Cupid’s arrows have struck: that is why the monk needs to be silent, solitary and celibate — without being a cold fish. The vows are evangelical imperatives. Any perceptive mind will see the awful urgency of such a gospel commitment, a lavish and lively imitation of Christ in the twenty-first century. A religious or even a spiritual existence is no longer conveyed by society or inherited from ancestors. It must come from within, be chosen, and lived out deliberately. Non-decisions and routine practices have left us with empty monasteries and marriages, and have shattered our social order.
A Personal Response
Becoming a Christian from within is a daunting task. We need to respond personally to an extremely personal demand. We need to withstand the techno-barbaric juggernaut. Inculturation is not always possible or even advisable in the Western world. A more trenchantly pertinent act here and now would be creative subversion — for sanctity or even survival as a human in a dehumanized world. What dehumanizes is the specious world — the Empire: that network of randy rapacity — mediocrity, manipulation, and mendacity. The media thrives on this Empire, on false powers, while humans wither. What to do?
Everyone — all lay people, students, workers, homemakers, even beach bums — needs a Rule. Try this:
1. Wake up and fall on your knees — ten minutes of prayer. Put your stamp on the day with God’s help. Read a gospel or a psalm.
2. Live mindfully all day. No compulsions. No frenzy. No trivialities. Joy in everything. Make something, love, especially.
3. Angelus at noon. Stop!
4. On the way home — stop in church, in a park, a favorite spot. Do something wild every day, i.e., break the moribund daily pattern and imitate Christ - the Wildman.
5. Glad, loving entry at home — share something you noticed that day; then music, laughter, and good food.
6. Visit the sick, the poor, aged, children and animals. Play. Walk. Run.
7. One half hour of meditative reading leading to quiet prayer. Go out or to bed peacefully.
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The Disciplined Wildman
Editorial note: This original, recent article by William McNamara was received by the editors of this website in late June 2009. It represents a return to one of McNamara’s longstanding themes, dating all the way back to The Human Adventure, that of the mystic as a “disciplined wildman” who follows the dangerous path blazed by Christ.
Who was this man who strode like a giant across the land we call “holy”? Up and down mountains, hunkering down in desert places for simple nourishment – natural and supernatural, for conversation with his small band of followers, telling stories, jokes, parables, and making plans on how to live fully and love deeply in a society half-dead from the stifling burdens of legalism and moralism. These sessions with his chosen friends always crackled with humor, crucial insights and refreshing laughter.
No one ever spoke like this man. And no one could penetrate your hidden self with such piercing eyes as this monumental master of primordial words and the terrible truth.
Who was this man who went in and out of cities, in and out of crowds, in and out of trouble, of danger, of traps set by men of fear, power and prestige? With what seemed like a perfect combination of ferocity and jocosity, he dismissed his enemies while he fascinated and charmed everyone else. With a cavalier sang-froid he broke worn-out laws and worn-down hearts. Stillness and stuckness seemed to repel him so he strove quietly and lovingly to make all things new. If massive means did not achieve desirable goals, why clutter your life with them? Fanatics multiply means peremptorily without ever reaching the end. The Scribes and Pharisees multiplied trivial laws and mindless ritual with no right or religious experience, with no resonance of deity and therefore nothing to express.
Extremes of piety, on the one hand, whatever is showy and phony on the other, all that is bland and boring. Because every creature, in its awesome particularity, enchanted him, he was exquisitely sensitive to earthly conditions and human situations. Though there was something wild and raw about him – scary at times – he was sensitive about his own cosmic, theandric personality – about his call, his destiny and his Father’s will. Psychologists, today, would call him narcissistic. How absurd! When therefore he was exposed to excruciating pain and shame what he suffered from most of all was not the wounds from whips and nails but from the betrayal of his friends. Because he was a colossal lover they were stunned and in shocking, shameful cowardice, whispered to one another “maybe he is sick.” In the face of his heroic deeds they felt keenly their own solipsistic sissiness and could do nothing but slink away.
His donkey did not abandon him. He kicked away the tombstone, entered the death chamber, licked and wormed the body of his loving master who rose up and rode the donkey out of the deadly darkness into the light of day and into the incandescent presence of Mary Magdalene, the woman he loved. The newness he longed for, the fire he was determined to ignite, would begin here, as the Kingdom, the resurrected order of being, erupted between them. Were there ever greater lovers than this? This was the inception of the I-Thou philosophy. I-It would no longer be tolerable. Individuals can still survive on an I-It relationship but not persons – not authentic human beings. From now on dialogue will prevail. We will be erotic or robots. Saints or sanctimonious studs.
I say it began here. Yes, with a high tide of passion to be sustained forever by the inflowing power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, this most manly man, was moved by the Spirit to become the most erotic man in the history of the world. After all, his father, whose will be came to do, was Eros. He embodied and transmitted that infinite, boundless love. Every “other” was a “thou” to him. Jesus himself was, as St. Francis de Sales said, “God in his most attractive form.”
A spectacular instance of all this is found in the Gospel of John. As Martin Buber insists, “all real living is meeting.” Meeting in depth. A profound act of mindful communion. One time Jesus had to leave Judea and go to Galilee. This meant that he had to go through Samaria. So he took a deep breath and, all alone, departed for Samaria. Jacob’s well was there so he headed for that. Tired when he arrived, he sat on the well and rested. This happened at six o’clock. Whenever John wants to emphasize the importance of an event he mentions the specific time.
And though he was thirsty after his journeying Jesus did not draw any water. This is very interesting. Obviously, he anticipated an encounter and so did not want to spoil it by a premature and impetuous act. Meeting is far more urgent than drinking. And, sure enough, in a few minutes the Samaritan woman arrived eager to draw water. Jesus addressed her simply and straightforwardly, “Will you give me a drink?” It’s almost a typical pub scene in Sligo, Boston, Los Angeles or Milwaukee. An erosphere suffuses the whole contextual situation. The moral splendor and spiritual audacity that Jesus brings to the meeting is incomparable. Otherwise the scene in Sligo is very similar to the one in Samaria. Boundaries are broken, interior depths are revealed. Desires are heightened.
The woman raises the question about the traditional hostility between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus simply ignored the problem as if too petty to be recognized. He is concerned about one thing only, and that is that she recognize living water when she sees it and longs for nothing more than it and the fullness of life it represents.
The Samaritan woman is on the verge of belief now but still wonders: You seem like a prophet but certainly not greater than our father, Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself. Jesus’ answer is shockingly wonderful. Usually reticent about his divine nature he becomes, in loving dialogue with this strange but alluring woman, generously revealing. Jacob’s water is fine, he said, but it won’t slake your thirst forever. Mine will. I have come to give you everlasting life. He wasn’t saying, as he often did, take it or leave it. He felt erotically compelled to enrich and enliven this attractive woman’s life. How relieved he was when she gushed, “Give me this water.” He cut to the chase by revealing to her her own life. She was embarrassed but extremely impressed. So relaxed did she become in his centering presence she decided to ask him another burning question. Where does true worship takes place—in Jerusalem or Samaria? Neither place is an authentic criterion. Jesus pointed out that as humanity evolves all worship is true in so far as it is worshiped in spirit and truth. Is it a cry of a heart, a penetrating insight that sees things as they really are? Is it a direct and immediate experience of Christ himself and not just notions about him? Is it the presence of God felt?
Jesus answered all of these questions for the Samaritan woman. She felt his love and knew he cared. What a sexy man, she thought, who is obviously a prophet, in fact, the Messiah! She ran back home and told everyone that she met a pure, erotic lover. She knew he was the Son of God.
John shows in his first epistle how the whole Christian apostolate began with a mystical experience. He sees the passion and the resurrection as the inevitable outcome of a mystical life. Since John, Christianity has become hideously subverted. It is, in fact, almost the opposite of what was initiated by Jesus, the Christ.
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El Camino de Santiago Grafitto by Abba Willie
A pilgrim on El Camino de Santiago, the thousand-year old pilgrimage route in northern Spain, found this graffito written years ago by William McNamara. It is a tradition to write spiritual messages at various locations along the Camino.
William McNamara Today, Age 83
This is a photo of the mystic and spiritual writer William McNamara taken by the editors of this website on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, near the beach in Orange County, California. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, frail and using a cane, he is nevertheless remarkably bright-eyed and full of plans.
Carmelite Pioneer: William McNamara
Until you’ve kept your eyes
And your wanting still for fifty years,
You don ‘t begin to cross over from confusion.
– Rumi
Reflecting recently on the future of Carmel, Superior General Camilo Maccise, O.C.D called for “risk,” “daring,” and “structural changes” in “an ever-valid charism and identity.” He challenged Carmelites to adopt a “creative fidelity” to the Teresian charism: “New wineskins are needed to express (our spirituality) in intelligible, relevant and existential language.” Carmel needs the “establishment of centers and institutes of spirituality,” “small praying communities” living “close to real life,” sharing their spirit with the larger lay community.
After an audience with Pope John XXIII in 1960, Abba William McNamara, received permission to risk founding such an institute of spirituality, a “new wineskin” that is at once a return to primitive Carmelite eremitical life and a creative contemporary response to the needs of what he calls a “waist- high culture” whose contemplative vision has atrophied. “Without vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18). Throughout his priestly life, this provocative thinker and playful man has quietly initiated deep visionary changes in Western spirituality. A review of these creative initiatives reveals that many of the Father General’s hopes for future may be found in the Spiritual Life Institute community. Such a review also confirms French Jesuit Louis Lallemant’s contention that a man of prayer accomplishes more in a year than most accomplish in a lifetime.
Renowned preacher and author of The Art of Being Human (1962), The Human Adventure (1974) Mystical Passion (1977) and Earthy Mysticism (1982), Fr. William celebrated 50 years of priesthood at his Holy Hill Hermitage in Skreen, Co. Sligo, Ireland in July 2001. A second Jubilee was celebrated at Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado October 5-7.
Spiritual Life Magazine
Once described by Walter Burghardt, S.J. as a man of ”Isaian Woe and Irish wit,” Father William (Willie) founded Spiritual Life magazine in 1955, and served as its first editor. As subsequent editor Stephen Payne, O.C.D. once wrote, “If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be any magazine for us to edit. Every day I thank God for those who have gone before me, and remind myself that I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Willie not only published groundbreaking authors, but also befriended them. He introduced British philosopher of mysticism E.I Watkin to America readers and hosted Christian humanist Gerald Vann, O.P. during a lecture tour. Fr. William fondly recalls the absent- minded Dominican packing a half- empty open Coke bottle into his suitcase, along with his white habit! When the University Chaplain prevented Jacques Maritain from presenting his paper “Truth and Human Fellowship” at Princeton, Willie had the courage to print it.
At this stage, Fr. William was also deeply involved in the movement for liturgical renewal. But he grew dissatisfied with its direction and outlined his concern for Maritain, who subsequently articulated them in his Liturgy and Contemplation. Important as liturgy is for the health of the Christian community, these astute mystics both realized that the fundamental issue was not a crisis of ritual, but of contemplation.
Willie joined the Discalced Carmelites in 1939 at age thirteen. He traveled by train from Providence, Rhode Island to Holy Hill in Hubertus, Wisconsin. As confrere Richard Madden put it, young “Willie” was “usually in some kind of pain, somewhere or other in his body, but never complained about it. Rather, he continued to be a source of merriment that penetrated the deep cloak of monastic silence.” Ordained in 1951, Fr. William began giving retreats and parish missions immediately, traveling eventually to every state except Alaska, to Ireland, England, France, and Canada.
He changed the structure of parish missions by forming teams of priest, nuns, and lay people, and by shortening the missions to five days, making it easier to for busy families to participate. He also led retreats for extended families in their own homes, beginning in Arizona and Minnesota.
Earthy Mysticism
Shifting the emphasis of the parish mission from “hell-fire and brimstone” to a more positive, and always humorous, focus on Christian humanism, he preached the infinitely attractive beauty of Christ and called for conversion fundamentally motivated not by fear of hell but by worship and wonder. He insisted that the supernatural life is rooted in a healthy natural life. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, grace perfects nature with out destroying it. The young Carmelite encouraged listeners and readers to seek Christ not only in Roman Catholic Christianity, but in Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism; and not merely in religion, but the novels of Dostoyevsky and Kazantzakis, in movies such as “Becket” and “Dr. Zhivago,” music as diverse as Cesar Franck’s “Symphony in D Minor” and the folk songs of the Kingston Trio, as well as in painting, poetry, and nature. “Our peak religious experiences are not always pious,” he insists, “but they may be our holiest acts.” Therefore we must be “earthly mystics” and find both human and Divine in ordinary earthy acts, in “the secret surprises of customary objects and the regular, repetitive commonplaces of life: cleaning the house, baking bread, weeding the garden, romping with the dogs, lying in the sun, running in the rain.”
Willie’s prophetic critiques of Western culture are not rooted in puritanical world denial; rather he bemoans the apathy of the majority, the vapidity of mass media, the pollution of language, and an unmystical Christianity that turns the drama of Jesus’ story into a pharisaical power structure. In short, he insists that we are not erotic enough. His notion of eros has nothing to do with pornography. It has to do with Plato and the Hebrew prophets. Accordingly, he describes eros as a “reaching and stretching of the whole-body person for the fullness of life and love.” Its end is not self-gratification but a free and ecstatic self-sacrifice for the sake of Christ, the divine Beloved.
Contemplation for Everyone
Contemplation, the highest human act, is not for an elite, but for everyone, and so for Willie, “The mystic is not a special kind of person; everyone is, or ought to be, a special kind of mystic.” Mysticism is not a peripheral anomaly, but the heart of Christianity. But after the great flowering of mystical life in the 16th century, the West lost its mystical moorings and caved in to an Empire driven more and more relentlessly by a “techno-barbaric juggernaut” that demands ever-larger profits and Machiavellian “rational bulldozer” that sweeps away the vestiges of mystical wisdom only to replace it with “mendacity, mediocrity, and manipulation.” Although this Empire may change its name and rearrange its priorities in various ages, it remains the same respectable conspiracy, the “pretty poison” that killed Christ.
Our desert monk developed the theme of contemplation for everyone by expanding the understanding of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night. He coined the terms “dark night of the Church” and the “desert experience” and demonstrated that this threshold experiences applies not only to an individual’s prayer life, but to life in the family, the workplace, marriage, the priesthood, the church and society. For example, the sense of the loss of God, of nothingness (nada), the desert that John described, happens to married couples: the romance fades; we become acutely aware of our own brokenness and our spouse’s; natural means of communion and renewal no longer work; we may drift toward addictions or extramarital affairs; we are tempted to give up and divorce. Placed in this new context, people who may have been baffled by John’s exotic descriptions of what happens to the cloistered Carmelites begin to see that he describes something very familiar. Fully acknowledging the terror and disorienting loneliness of this night, both Fr. William and St. John nevertheless insist that it is a happy night, “more beautiful than the dawn” because in it lover and beloved are transformed into a higher communion that turns “death” into new life.
The Spiritual Life Institute
Always attracted to a rugged hermit life, Willie asked permission in 1959 to enter the Carmelites’ desert house in France. Permission was denied at the last second. Ever resourceful and resilient, this passionate pilgrim soon arranged, with the help of Boston’s Cardinal Cushing, to visit Pope John XXIII at Castelgandolfo. Practically penniless, he persuaded the captain of the SS United States to let him hitch a ride from New York. A friend in Germany loaned him a beat up VW that limped its way to Italy. By eating every three days, the young pilgrim managed not to run out of money. The fateful papal audience in 1960 sent Fr. William on a new trajectory that brought him to found the Spiritual Life Institute, the Roman Catholic Church’s first American hermit community, in the incomparable red rock country of Arizona’s Oak Creek Canyon. His innovative work continued with the Institute’s sponsoring some of this country’s first post-Vatican II ecumenical conferences.
The community gradually became more and more monastic and eremitical and, following the spirit of the first Carmelite Rule of St. Albert, developed a simple rhythm of solitude, communal prayer, and occasional apostolic work. During stimulating correspondence with Fr. William about the history and renewal of Carmel, and the need for a creatively subversive, contemplative counter-culture, Thomas Merton wrote, “The Primitive Carmelite Ideal” which appeared in his Disputed Questions. Because it so clearly reflects Willie’s authentic Carmelite spirit, this chapter is included in the Institute’s formation.
Mixed Community
Still committed to the publishing apostolate, the Institute began Desert Call, issued quarterly since 1963. Tessa Bielecki joined the order in 1967 and soon took over Desert Call’s editorial duties while the abbot devoted much of his time to retreats, missions and writing. Having discerned that Tessa indeed had a religious vocation, Willie once again initiated a quiet but profound shift. Although Jesus and his disciples’ community included women (Luke 8:2) and double monasteries sometimes formed in Europe’s Middle Ages, mixed monastic communities of men and women were certainly a small minority. But great bursts of sanctity in the Church often found their source in friendships between men and women: Francis and Clare, John and Teresa, and Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, to name a few. With firm commitments to celibacy and solitary life in separate hermitages, the Institute began to attract both men and women. As the community spread to Nova Scotia in 1972, Colorado in 1983, and Ireland in 1995, the witness of celibate men and women with deep bonds of love has been a hopeful witness to a society embarked on a painful, convulsive search for whole, healthy, mutually affirming relationships between men and women.
Finally, the most recent “first” for Abba Willie and his community of apostolic hermits took place during the celebration of his 50th anniversary in Ireland: the ordination of Eric Haarer to the priesthood in July 2001. Although the community has ordained priests in Nova Scotia, this first ordination in the “land of saints and scholars” marks a monumental shift from a North American movement to a transatlantic once. The Spiritual Life’s Institute’s Carmelite roots look very much like the roots of Celtic monasticism dating back to the days of Patrick, Columcille, and Brigid.
A Terrible Toll
All bodies, including the Mystical Body, know seasons of health and seasons of illness. When we are tempted to think that the Church is just another “it,” a merely mortal human institution, God sends reformers and founders to breathe new mystical life into the threatened Body. History shows that founding a new way of religious life is a difficult and dangerous vocation that takes a terrible toll. Two days after the ordination, Willie was admitted to Sligo General Hospital with massive internal bleeding. He was resuscitated, but bled again within days as doctors strove to discover the source of the hemorrhage. Having received eight pints of blood a second time, Fr. William stabilized and traveled to the United States in August to undergo surgery that promises to keep him alive so that he can complete his major literary work, Wild and Robust.
As he enters a prolonged period of retreat and prepares for the fmal Ascent of Mt. Cannel, his community and friends promise this lively eighty three year old monk a special gift: silence and solitude. In the words of Chinese sage Meng-te which is posted by the door of his hermitage:
When a man has reached old age
And has fulfilled his mission,
He has a right to confront
The idea of death in peace.
He has no need of other men;
He knows them and knows enough about them.
What he needs is peace.
It isn’t good to visit this man or talk to him,
To make him suffer banalities,
One must give a wide berth
To the door of his house,
As if no one lived there.
Nevertheless, he remains a soul-friend to those in need. He feels strongly that the personal apostolate, an intimate ministry, is the most important thing to do. (Ed. Note)