Meg Funk

Seeking what has been found

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:48:42 EST

photo by Jim Funk

Jesus A Dialogue with the Saviour

Chapter III

Jesus is the truth. In Him all is truth. In so far as the truth which is in Jesus is discovered, all truth is discovered. This can be applied to the science, art and culture of men and women. We must see the world with the Saviour’s eyes.

The Saviour gives no direct answer, either affirmative or negative, to John’s disciples who questioned Him about His mission. He tells them to report to John what they have seen. Jesus charged Peter, who gave a sound answer and confessed the Messias, not to reveal the mystery publicly.

Every man (and woman) has to discover for him/herself the secret of Jesus. And even if we learn from others who Jesus is, and even if the others are commissioned to teach this to us, it is only by an intensely personal experience that we shall come to know what Jesus is.

In fact, of the many souls who believed all they must believe, and who led a just and pious life, we may wonder: did this soul know Him intimately, as one can know one’s closest friend, as a man and a woman who love each other can know each other, as alone He can be known who is more spiritual than ourselves?

A number of acquired notions (and also true ones) concerning the Saviour are often substituted for a personal and intense knowledge of the Saviour. It can be a hindrance just like a screen between Jesus and us. Lord, do I really know You, or do I only know what I have read about You, what I have heard about You?

Jesus does not want the soul to be fastened onto the vision granted momentarily and to be limited by it. Nathaniel saw Jesus and he believed. But Jesus said to him: “Greater things than these shalt thou see.”

The joy of the vision must not interrupt its drive. It must stimulate its continuance. We must keep on perpetually seeking Jesus. “Seek, and you shall find.” Yes. But also: because you have found, you will seek further. We shall cease to look for Jesus only at the end of time.

The discovery of Jesus will not exhaust our search for Him as long as we have not obtained the final vision. St. Augustine says it: Quaeramus inventum, let us search after Him who has been found.

Being Seen

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 05:25:45 EST

Very simple

a Dialogue with the Saviour

Chapter II Being seen by Jesus

“We would see Jesus,” certain Greeks said to the apostle Philip. And it is always just this prayer which I address to the Holy Spirit. O Lord Holy Spirit, make me see Jesus!

The pure of heart will see God. The sermon on the Mount makes it quite plain. And Jesus can be seen only by the pure of heart, who can move directly to the very heart of the Gospel. For them, it is very simple.

But it is difficult for those whose gaze is troubled by the passions or by the unbridled quest for purely human knowledge. They must re-learn purity of heart in order to regain the direct, immediate gaze of Jesus.

I learn to look at Jesus in so far as I learn to be looked at by Him, that is, to submit myself to His gaze.

Before speaking to Simon Peter at the time of his first call, Jesus looks at him, and the Greek word implies that He looks at him with insistence.

The same insistent gaze was again cast upon Simon Peter, when Jesus was coming out of Caiphas’ house and Peter denied Him.

The first of such looks from Jesus fills the disciple with joy and light. The second makes the disciple who has failed his Master weep bitterly. There are looks of the Saviour which cause weeping: without them, I shall not deserve to have the glance of light cast upon me.

The conditions for the vision are the same as those imposed by Jesus on the three disciples whom He made witnesses of His transfiguration. Jesus “took them with Him”; He “led” them; He led them “up a high mountain,” where they were “alone, apart.”

Let us consider being alone with Jesus, letting ourselves be led by Him. The ascent is painful – far above what is bad or mediocre in our life. Ordinarily all these conditions remain necessary. (I say “ordinarily” because there are exceptional cases: Saul on the road to Damascus.)

The theme is still purity of heart. The pure heart is unalloyed (as one speaks of gold which is pure), an undivided heart, an unshared heart, its integrity preserved – or recovered.

Impurity, in the sexual sense, is only one of the forms of disintegration. “My son, give me thy heart,” said Wisdom in the Old Testament. Only a heart that is “given” can grasp Jesus; but it must be given without turning back, complete, without fault.

The one is opposed to the many. “My name is Legion,” answered the man possessed, when Jesus asked his name.

My child, you have sought your own happiness. Instead of the happiness which you are seeking, I offer you My beatitudes. Your whole life has made it clear to you that your road was closed to you, outside of the complete giving of yourself. Blessed are you to whom I have barred the roads which are not Mine!

When I look at You, Lord Jesus, I no longer feel the need of questioning You, of receiving answers to specific questions. Your person, Your image are a sufficient and complete answer.

If I fix my eyes on You, in You everything is revealed to me, obscurely, indeed, but powerfully; and even this obscurity (which between us, cannot not be) is often a dazzling brightness. When it seems to me that I have obtained a clear vision of You, everything becomes clear to me.

Your word, Lord Jesus, is not a commentary on a relationship which should exist between You and me. Your word gives birth to that relationship. It does not inform me of Christ’s behavior; it establishes my vital contact with it. It is the very irruption of the divine behavior in my life.

Every one of the Saviour’s words is a declaration of His grace. In Jesus, even in His most everyday remarks, it is the Redeemer who speaks. The shadow of the cross falls on all things. No, the sunlight of the cross!

Birth of Jesus in me

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:41:19 EST

never the same after Bethlehem

Jesus A Dialogue with the Saviour
by a Monk of the Eastern Church (translated by a Monk of the Western church)

Chapter I

The Gospel begins with the Genealogy of Jesus Christ. What does this long list of Hebrew names mean?

For the Jews, they felt the necessity of underlining the descent of the Messias from David. Another meaning is that in this lineage there are murderers, adulterers and incestuous persons.

If Jesus is born in my soul, He is born there in spite of and through the accumulation of my sins. Jesus pierces, finds His way through my faults, climbing over them one after the other. It is His genealogy in me. In this break-through shines forth His mercy, His condescension, also His strength.

Mary, bearing the child in her womb, and Joseph, are on their way to be registered at Bethlehem. It is not at Rome, nor at Athens, nor at Jerusalem that Jesus wished to be born. So we can find the mystery of Jesus’ birth only in the poor Judean village. We must go up to Bethlehem, become citizens of Bethlehem, acquire – no, achieve – the humble spirit of Bethlehem.

The angels do not simply say to the shepherds that a Saviour is born. They say: “This day is born to you a Saviour.” Jesus is born for each one of the shepherds. His birth remains for each one of us a very personal event; Jesus is a gift offered to every man.

There is no room in the inn for Mary who is bearing Jesus, nor for Joseph. There is no place in the inn of this world for a disciple of the Master. What dangerous comfort, if I succeed in getting a place for myself there! What do the inn and the manger have in common?

The magi, divinely warned in a dream, return to their country by another road. They must avoid Herod.

In the spiritual sense, he whom God has led to the crib can certainly go back home, to his own country, to his house; but it will be by another road. That is to say, the motives, the attitudes, the manner of existing, the means used, can no longer be the same. When one has gone to Bethlehem, a radical change takes place.

It had been revealed to Simeon that he would not die without seeing the Saviour. Oh! how much I should like to have such a guarantee! Not to die without seeing Jesus – not to see Him with the eyes of the body, but to see Him (to really see Him) with the eyes of faith! After my death, I hope to see Him differently.

To Simeon was granted more than to see Jesus. He held the child in his arms. Lord, let me embrace spirituality the little child.

The angel orders Joseph to take the child and his mother and flee into Egypt. There are times when, because we are too weak, it is better to fly from danger, to draw apart from it. But we must take with us what is more precious: take Jesus, take the child in His smallness, in His own weakness, who will strengthen us in our own weakness. With Him we must take His mother, as the beloved disciple took her, after the ninth hour. The mystery of Mary is inseparable from the mystery of Jesus: a mystery of mercy and affection.

Introduction to 40 meditations

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:45:21 EST

Dialogue with Our Lord

Jesus A Dialogue with the Saviour

Meg: This is the second book by Lev Gilette, a monk of the eastern orthodox church, who once was a Benedictine. The first one was "A Day with Jesus".

Again, the profoundly prayerful text is posted here for an example. We learn this only by doing our own dialogue with Our Lord.

Introduction by Louis Bouyer. Then, the introduction by the Monk of the Eastern Church.

Among all the books which are published every day, we should consider as priceless those which renew for us our acquaintance with Jesus. Such books are rare. Not because a great deal is not written about Him. But because even the most scholarly research of the historian, the most profound speculations of the theologian, to say nothing of art and literature, often prove incapable of revealing Him.

The bulk of the commentaries is such that one is tempted to bow to them without even catching a glimpse of their content. And it must be avowed that when we approach them nevertheless, too often they burden us and bar our way to Him much more than they open it for us.

A book which does not confine itself to speaking about Jesus, which does not make us dizzy from a lot of tittle-tattle serving only to distract us from speaking to Him ourselves and all the more from hearing Him, is a very rare thing indeed. Yet it seems that such a book has just appeared.

It is a marvelous book originally published in French by the monks of Chevetogne, that dual-rite monastery in Belgium dedicated to the reunion of Christendom, and whose founder Dom Lambert Beauduin has only recently gone to his reward.

This little volume does not even bear the author’s name. We are only told that a monk of the Eastern Church wrote it.

But as soon as you open these pages, you will experience the same impression as you would on opening a vessel of sacred chrism in an Eastern Rite Church. You are surrounded by a heavenly fragrance whose freshness, purity and simplicity are retained in the most exquisite, indivisible mixture of countless flowers.

Some forty short meditations, without any apparent order, recapture the words and scenes of the Gospel. There is no eloquence, no dissertation, no evocation whatever to bog them down. Rather, we find always a direct contact with the soul of the Saviour who speaks to the soul of the reader. “Follow thou Me!” This statement, about which the anonymous writer of these pages has some very decisive words, pervades everything he says.

This contemplative monk has meditated and lived the Gospel (he himself intimates this to the reader) in the holy places of Judea, all along the roads of Galilee. But do not think that he is going to waste his time and ours in some romantic evocation! By simply following, as he does, the steps of Christ, he has been helped (and he helps us) to rediscover that very springing forth of the Word who touches hearts and pierces through them. From a stony heart which belongs to all ages of sinful humanity, He recreates that heart of flesh of which Ezechiel speaks.

We suspect at every page, almost at every line, a refined culture in the one who, though stripped of everything, though poor with Christ who made Himself poor, speaks in such a way (without ever raising his voice) – with such a discreet voice that Jesus Himself does not have to reject it in order to speak to us directly. The language which is so wonderfully dense and transparent is sufficient to prove it. Very quickly one becomes aware that this man has read every book. Yet these books could not hold him back, because through them, as through all things and beyond all things, he was only looking for the One whose call he had heard and which he makes us hear too.

Our pretentious and complicated apostolates create for us the false impression that the man of today cannot hear Christ without all kinds of explanations, rearrangements and especially without endless preparation. Here we have a solitary who is able to make every man hear Christ from the very first word, simply by taking His own words again, but taking them from lips where only the name of Jesus has succeeded in saying everything.

Cast aside all your ponderous, wordy books and read this one. As soon as you have opened it, your whole house, as the Gospel says, will be filled with the odor of sweetness.

Louis Bouyer, Cong. Or.

To You, Lord Jesus, I humbly dedicate these thoughts which have developed during the course of so many years, on the very roads which you have travelled in the days of Your earthly life and in the very city in which You suffered. They are the fruit of Jerusalem and of the Sea of Galilee and the fruit of almost a whole lifetime.

Why add a drop of water to that ocean of books which speak about You? I shall venture to say in all simplicity: it is because I felt that You were telling me, also, to speak about You. “Return to thy house and tell them . . .” And the possessed man whom You cured in the country of the Gerasenes went away and began to announce everything You did for him and how You had pity on him.

It was my hope that, by sharing with others what had been given to me, I would perhaps help a few souls. I have tried to say, in stuttering language, what becomes clear to me when I fixed my gaze on You and what I seemed to hear when I became silent in order to hear Your voice.

There are many things which one could expect to find here but of which I have not spoken. I only wanted to describe, O my Saviour, a few aspects of Your face, a few moments of personal conversation with You, a few phases of a very personal experience. I could not, I would not aspire to anything else. I sometimes had the impression – I ought to say it only with trepidation – that certain words, certain ideas came to me from a distance and from a height far beyond me. Lord, have pity on a poor sinner who has ventured to speak about You without having cleansed his lips with the flaming coal.

I know that my words are of no value, are nothing. The only result I wish for is to touch a few souls and to lead them to You. Lord, lead those who will read my words to the point where abandoning these pages, they will open again, or perhaps for the first time, Your Gospel, - to the point where in silence they will allow Your word to enter their hearts.

Teresa's Teachings

(Daniel Chowning) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:52:52 EST

Healed of broken affectivity

About Teresa's teachings on Jesus

Meg: It seems to me that Teresa taught the novices to practice imaging and noticing Jesus always in their field of consciousness. It eventually becomes a habit (first through strenuous effort and then with on-going praxis of the mind within the practice of faith). This training is to sustain the experience of the presence of Jesus that usually comes to novices but then fades as ordinary consciousness replaces the new experience.

We can abide in this experience of Presence with the habit of recollection through the humanity of Jesus, who is just like us.

From: "Djcocd@aol.com"

I've been reading A Day With Jesus and I find it a delight. It reminds very much of St. Teresa's way of prayer and of what she teaches her nuns and friars about walking in the presence of Jesus our Good
Friend.

As you may know, the discovery of the humanity of Jesus was the greatest discovery of her life. It healed her broken affectivity and integrated her.

Jesus became the Source and Center from which all
her relationships came together. Also, being such a practical and concrete woman, and aware of her body, she knew we needed Jesus because
life is hard and the journey difficult.

"We are not angels but we have a body. To desire to be angels while we are on earth - and as much on earth as I was - is foolishness.

Ordinarily, thought needs to have some support. If at times the soul goes out of itself or goes about so full of God that it has no need of any created things to become recollected, this isn't so usual.

When one is in the midst of business matters, and in times of persecution and trials, when one can't maintain so much quietude, and in times of dryness, Christ is a very good friend because we behold Him as man and see Him with weaknesses and trials - and He is company for us.

Once we have the habit, it is very easy to find Him at our side, although there will come times when
neither the one experience nor the other will be possible." (L.22.10)

A question that Teresa often asks us is: What more do we desire than to have such a good friend at our side. When she teaches her prayer of recollection in chapter 26 of The Way of Perfection, she teaches us to walk along the side of Jesus who is present. "Then, daughters, since you are alone, strive to find a companion. Well, what better companion than the Master Himself who taught you this prayer? (the Our Father)

Represent the Lord Himself as close to you and behold how lovingly and humbly He is teaching you. Believe me, you should remain with so good a friend as long as you can.

If you grow accustomed to having Him present at your side, and He sees that you do so with love and that you go about striving to please Him, you will not be able - as they say - to get away from Him; He will never leave you; He will help you in all your trials; you will find Him everywhere.

Do you think it is some small matter to have a friend like this at your side?" (Way, 26.1)

Then in chapter 22 of the Life, she poses the same challenge: "This Lord of ours is the one through whom all blessings come to us. He will teach us these things. In beholding His life we find that He is the best example.

What more do we desire than to have such a good friend at our side, who will not abandon us in our labors and tribulations, as friends in the world do?

Blessed are they who truly love Him and always keep Him at their side!" (L.22.7)

Those words, "Blessed are they who truly love Him and always keep Him
at their side." express in a nutshell the contemplative path according to Teresa of Jesus. For me, herein lies the great challenge: keeping
Jesus at my side. Well, he is always at my side; I'm the one who can live so distractedly and fail to nourish the intimate friendship Jesus and make Him a part of my daily life, just as the author of A Day with Jesus tries to do.

The author of this gem writes in the introduction that we need to pray for the grace of His Presence. I was touched by these words, because to grow in walking in the presence of our Good Friend who is
always there is a grace. This is the grace I'm asking for.

Fr. Daniel

------------------------------------

http://www.megfunk.com
"Uphold me, O God, according to your word,
and I shall live,
and do not fail me in my hope." Psalm 119

Feast of St. Benedict

(Meg Funk) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:50:22 EST

heart's desire

July 11, 2010 revised
For the Feast of St. Benedict*

by Sister Meg Funk

Introduction:

Our Rule is compelling and more than instructive. It is a transmission. We can become Benedictines by following the spirit and directives of the Rule.

We also know something of the 6th C. Benedict of Norcia thanks to St. Gregory the Great. We can imitate his saintly life. While we have no personal autobiographical writings from Benedict like we do of St. Augustine, we have the meaning and significance of Benedict like we have of Jesus, thanks to the New Testament communities and evangelists.

Many other orders east and west have an official biography of their founder so that they not only have a Rule, but a Life to imitate, such as The Life of Augustine, Basil, Francis, Teresa, John of the Cross, or even the Lives of the Desert Elders are handed down to us for our benefit.

Pope Gregory immortalizes St. Benedict in his book, Life and Miracles of St. Benedict. Even though this is a specific literary genre we can learn much from this hagiographical text.

Perhaps we can imitate Benedict in each of his three stages of life:

A student in Rome, awake and discerning
A student in solitude, awake and discerning
An Abbot in community, awake and discerning  First stage:  As a student in Rome this young man sent by his distinguished parents of Norcia came to Rome to do a classical liberal education (mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, literature). Most likely today we’d say he was being trained to become an attorney or political leader. Trade and crafts would have had a different curriculum, not liberal arts (training in being).

  Benedict was awake, he noticed his peer students were abandoning themselves to vice and worldliness. Benedict feared that what he was learning toward was eternal ruin. “He wanted to please God alone,” in the words of St. Gregory.  He discerned (sorted through and concluded) to turn his back on further studies, give up home and inheritance and resolve to embrace the religious life. “He took this step, fully aware of his ignorance; yet he was truly wise, uneducated though he may have been” (Ch.1 p.2).

Benedict abandoned his studies and went into solitude, accompanied only by his nurse, who loved him dearly.  Second stage:  Renouncing his former way of life as a student he went to Affile and stayed near the Church of St. Peter (35 miles east of Rome).  Awake to the sorrow of his maid who accidentally broke a valuable dish he prayed, even to the point of tears, and mended the dish.  He was given public praise beyond his humility so he discerned that he’d prefer to suffer ill treatment from the world rather than enjoy its praises. He wanted to spend himself laboring for God, not to be honored by the applause of men.

So he fled to Subiaco (equi-distant from Rome 35 miles) and was clothed by Romanus.  He lived in a narrow cave for three years tended by the monk Romanus who lived under the rule of Abbot Deodatus. During Easter of third year a priest came to break his fast. After several trials both internal and external Benedict passed the discerning period of solitude and trained into living a live toward God rather than self or evil.

  He was sought out to be abbot of Vicovaro 20 miles down the mountain. These wayward monks would not submit to obedience and tried to poison Benedict who said, “Did I not tell you at the outset that my way was not yours? Go and find yourselves an abbot to your liking. It is impossible for me to stay here any longer.”

Then he went back to the wilderness he loved, to live alone with himself in the presence of his heavenly Father.  Benedict sorted himself out from the Roman students, from the adulating town and now sorted himself out from the crowd of unfaithful monks. Awake and discerning was he! He came to himself!  Third stage:  Awake to his vocation Benedict established in Subicao a monastery system of twelve monks in each with a dean as head.

He gained a reputation for miracles, conversions and political influence for peace during very dark times in Italy. Like Moses finding running water (Exod 17.1-7; Num 20:1:11), or like Eliseus with the iron blade that rose from the bottom of the lake (4 Kings 6.4-7). The walking on the water recalls St. Peter (Matt 14:28-29), the obedience of the raven is like Elias (3Kings 17:6), and finally the grief at the death of an enemy is like David (2 Kings 1:11-12; 18:33).

Benedict was filled with the spirit of all the just.  After Subiaco he founded another system of coenobitic monasticism at Monte Cassino where the entire community lived in one structure that is the model written about in the Rule.  And he was known for his discernment:  Gregory wrote, “Holy men do know the Lord’s thoughts, Peter, in so far as they are one with Him. Benedict interpreted God for his monks and those who came to seek spiritual direction from him” (p. 40).   

The only one who bested Benedict was his twin sister who insisted Benedict stay in holy colloquy and what he would not do by grace he was forced to do by nature when a storm kept him into the night in holy conversation with Scholastica.

  To depart from the edifying stories and commentary of St. Gregory we know from our study of the Rule of Benedict that his discernment goes beyond him and his saintly life. The Rule is a transmission of that great gift from the Holy Spirit mediated by Benedict to us.  Conclusion:

  Three periods of Benedict’s life: 
*A student who renounced his former way of life
*A hermit who preferred solitude to premature notoriety
*An Abbot who renounced being led by wicked monks and founded a middle way for a community of monastics who seek God under an abbot and under a Rule.  

We have different times but the same story of phases in our life to renounce and follow, renounce and follow. The method requires that we are awake and discern God’s Call over and over again. It seems that leaders, especially those of Church and religious life, ought not jump from being an academic student to being an abbot without the school of solitude.

Nor should a student finish the original course work as there might be a more important degree for one’s life’s work. And finally being called by members to be a leader is a dangerous method of appointment. We must be in our own skin, yes and the take off our sandals before the burning bush.

When we rise we renounce and follow because we are awake and discerning.  Christ is our center, our only one, yet we do this seeking in common. Community is shared faith that God alone satisfies our heart's desire.

*Life and Miracles of St. Benedict. Book Two of the Dialogues by Pope Gregory the Great. Translated by odo J. Zimmermann and Benedict R. Avery. Liturgical Press: Collegeville MN  ISBN 0-8146-0321-1

On waking up

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:14:04 EST

Behold!

Chapter XIV
Easter morning
I say to thee, arise. Mark 5, 41.
I wake up and behold You are with me. On waking up, I feel Your Presence which enlivens me. I feel Your love enveloping me.

This evokes the many times Your disciples awoke in the days of Your earthly pilgrimage. I know these Galilean dawns, on the shore of the lake, between Tiberias and Capharnaum very well.

The birds sing so loudly that I cannot even hear. The sun has not yet appeared. But it already casts a silvery trail of light on the singing waves of the rippling sea.

Once your disciples are awake they anticipate the new day in the joy of knowing that they will walk behind You and that each hour spent with You will be a fascination and a discovery. Those same promises of mornings at Galilee are offered to me each time I wake up. “Again today, I shall follow Him . . .”

More than these wakings of Your disciples, Your own wakings should lend their substance to mine. Master, when You woke up, Your first movement could be only to the Father: “I will arise and will go to my Father.”

The statement which the parable attributes to the prodigal son assumed on Your lips a very special, a truly unique meaning. You went – although You were already and always with Him – to a Father from whom You had never been separated by any kind of failure.

I cannot utter this sentence as You alone could. I can go to the Father only as a guilty, repentant son, dying of starvation, shaken to the very depths of my being by a conscious-smitten shock – the realization that what I had forsaken was absolute Goodness, and that what I had been brought to envy was “the husks the swine did eat.”

It is not enough that this conscious-stricken state produce in me a vague frustration, a nostalgia. It must strike me like a whip whose sting reaches the very marrow of my being. Then I shall have experienced sorrow. Lord, from daybreak, invite me to repentance.

Breathe Your Spirit upon me. Take me by the hand. Lead me to the Father.

And behold the Father and the Spirit send You Yourself to me as the bearer of forgiveness, as the messenger of hope. The elder son, in the parable of the prodigal son, was jealous of his brother and angered against him.

But today, from the moment I awake, the elder Son, the only Son – who is also my elder Brother, - comes to look for me and welcomes me on behalf of the Father.

O my Saviour, even before I get up You are there. You want me. “O hear my Beloved, calling me and knocking at my door . . . My Beloved put His hand through the window and my heart beat for Him . . .” “Behold He standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices. My Beloved speaketh to me: Arise.”

Lord Jesus, each new day is a rendezvous which You give me. At this rendezvous, You always arrive first. May each day begin then for me by the longing for this meeting, by the longing for an increase in knowledge and love! May each waking hour bring me first of all the joy and promise of Your Presence!

Jesus, I know that You are there and that You take me in Your arms. But I cannot, I must not forget those who are not aware of You, those whose awakenings are not enlightened and rekindled by Your light – by the rising of the true Sun. The pale dawns of those who suffer, who are going to die.

The anguish of the condemned to death who are counting the hours, the anxieties of those who know not how they will eat today, how they will feed their children. The fatigue and bitterness of those who, in the darkness of the early morning, leave for their hard work.

The sinner awakening, with his bitter aftertaste. All that, O Lord, all those men and women whom You know and on whom You take pity. Unite my soul to the compassion which you have for them and to Your will not to allow this day to pass without some divine help being invisibly offered to them.

Master, You draw near to me and You say to me as to the daughter of Jairus: “Arise.” Taking her by the hand, You called her back to life. The child, whom they believed dead, at once got up and began to walk. And behold through the daily act of awakening I catch a glimpse of the mystery and power of the Resurrection.

You too arose. You left the sleep of the dead. You arose, living and glorious. And the glory of Your Resurrection remains established on each one of our mornings.

The first day of the week, Mary Magdalen and Mary, the mother of James and Salome, went to the tomb. It was “very early in the morning . . . the sun being now risen,” Lord, let no new morning come to enlighten my life without directing my thoughts towards Your Resurrection and without my going in spirit to the empty tomb in the garden!

It is the Risen Christ who comes to me each day at dawn. Whatever my perplexities or dangers may be, the beginning of all my days will be radiant if I recall – but with my whole soul, with my whole mind – that my Saviour has overcome the powers of evil and death. My first act of faith each morning will be an act of faith in Your final victory. “Love is strong as death . . . The lamps thereof are fire and flames . . . Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the floods drown it.”

Do you believe that, My child? – I do believe it, Lord. – Then, My child, there can be no room in your soul for any affliction, for any fear – unless it be the fear of losing Me who am Your life.

Lord Jesus, each day can thus be for me “the first day of the week,” the feast of the Resurrection. Therefore let each morning be for me Easter morning!

I am writing these lines in Jerusalem, on Easter Sunday morning, in that garden, where, for so many years, You have given me so much and which I imagine to be so like the one where You were placed in the new tomb.

Among the palms and flowers, near that stone which the sun makes very hot, I think I see the woman who wept, stooped over the tomb, and I look upon the scene described by the Gospel. Mary is looking for you. She speaks to the man whom she takes for the gardener. “She turned herself back.” She sees You: “and she knew not that it was Jesus.” And only when You say to her “Mary!” does she turn again and, recognizing You, she cries out: “Rabboni! Master!”

This episode illustrates the nature of the final conversion. Mary is seeking You. But she seeks You according to the ideas already formed in her. She clings to it. And that is why she is unable to recognize You as You now show Yourself to her. Twice she turned towards You – and “conversion” signifies precisely the act of “turning oneself” – and only the second time, when she hears her name, does she become conscious of Your Presence.

I do not know how many mornings You will delight in my waking up again. I do not know whether I shall hear again the Easter bells in Jerusalem.

Nevertheless I beg You to grant me that it might always be for me, secretly, the garden of Jerusalem and Easter morning. And may each day, each awakening which brings me the joy of Easter, bring me also the deepest conversion – the one by which I shall turn from Your image of yesterday towards Your image of today!

In each situation and in each person let me know how to recognize You, such as You want to be known this very day, not as You appeared to me yesterday, but as You show Yourself now! A conversion and uprooting which are not without violence, but which You demand.

These new persons and new situations through whom I shall turn again to you can be very diverse. May each one of my awakenings be an awakening in Your so diversified Presence – a “paschal” meeting with “Christ in the garden,” that Christ once so unexpected!

May each episode of the day be a moment in which I hear You call me by my name, as You called Mary! Give me then the grace to turn towards You. Give me too the grace to answer with one word, to say this one word to You (but with all my heart): “Master!”

Monk of the Eastern Church

(Michael Plekon) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 09:13:21 EST

Handing on Tradition

Meg: The Monk of the Eastern Church is Father Lev Gillet

Father Lev Gillet: The Monk in the City, a Pilgrim in many worlds

by Fr. Michael Plekon

[Spring-Summer, 2000]

The whole teaching of the Latin Fathers may be found in the East, just as the whole teaching of the Greek Fathers may be found in the West. Rome has given St. Jerome to Palestine.

The East has given Cassian to the West and holds in special veneration that Roman of the Romans, Pope Gregory the Great. St. Basil would have acknowledged St. Benedict of Nursia as his brother and heir. St. Macrina would have found her sister in St Scholastica. St. Alexis the "man of God," "the poor man under the stairs," has been succeeded by the wandering beggar, St. Benedict Labre.

St. Nicolas would have felt as very near to him the burning charity of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Vincent de Paul. St. Seraphim of Sarov would have seen the desert blooming under Father Charles de Foucauld's feet, and would have called St. Th�r�se of Lisieux "my joy."[1]

A complex man, a wandering monk: Father Lev Gillet. An introduction to his biography.

Among the truly extraordinary people of the Russian emigration was Sister Joanna Reitlinger, the nun-iconographer closely linked to her spiritual father, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and influential for others who would renew the tradition of iconography, such as the two masters who first studied with her, Leonid Ouspensky and Fr. Gregory Krug.

Sister Joanna left behind a moving account of the death of Fr. Bulgakov, the experience of the "unfading light" he himself wrote of being in fact, the impression of his passing.[2]

She also left behind some astonishing icons. In the chapel of the now closed St Basil's House in London, there are her two remarkable frescoes which in many ways bring to life the vision of the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church" alive in holy men and women, despite the centuries of schism and distance.[3]

(These and the rest of the iconography of St Basil's have been transferred to a monastery in Wales.) On one wall, assembled before the rounded dome of the Great Church of Holy Wisdom of Constantinople are Anthony the Great and Dorotheos, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Nicholas, Athanasius and Macrina.

On the opposite wall, in front of St. Peter's in Rome, are gathered Benedict, Genevieve of Paris, Leo the Great, Martin of Tours, Augustine, Monica and Irenaeus of Lyons. All are saints of the pre-schismatic era, to be sure, and rather heavily drawn from France in the latter case as well. Yet the two synaxoi or "assemblies" in the frescoes as well as that in Fr. Lev’s text above nevertheless are icons not only of what he taught and wrote but also of who he himself was and the Christian, churchly life he tried to live.

In a century in which the great schism and other divisions of the churches continued to separate people of faith, a century of wars and depressions and rapid social change, there also was the surprise of the ecumenical movement, the sometimes feeble, sometimes defiant urge to recover the original unity of the Church.

As with his friends who also figure importantly in this book, Paul Evdokimov, Fr. Bulgakov and Mother Maria Skobtsova, Fr. Lev became a kind of pilgrim between the churches, truly the citizen and inhabitant of various worlds.

Living in both Western and Eastern monasteries, then among the Russian �migr�s and the homeless of Paris and later in London, Beirut and Geneva, the little monk had a large soul, an amazingly expansive and diversified life. His life-long friend and biographer, herself part of the sweep of church history in this century, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, has captured something of the quixotic character and nonconformist life of Fr. Lev. In her biography she refers to him, as we have here, as the "monk in the city," an apparent contradiction, nevertheless pregnant with meaning, and as a "pilgrim" in many worlds.

This he most certainly was, truly a monk, both of the Western Church's Benedictine order and of the Eastern Church, but for relatively a brief time of his long life actually resident in a monastic community.

Fr. Lev had the soul of a pilgrim. In his long life he was never tied down to one occupation, position or place. Born on August 6, 1893, the feast of the Transfiguration in Saint-Marcellin, in Is�re, France, his early life saw service in combat in World War I, university studies in philosophy and psychology.

He produced the first French translation of Freud's On the Interpretation of Dreams, underwent psychoanalysis and acquired a life-long sensitivity to the complexity and the suffering of the soul, as Freud called it.

After the war he entered the Benedictine Order at Clervaux abbey in Luxembourg. His monastic profession took him to Farnborough abbey in England, where he served and worked under one of the leaders of the liturgical renewal movement, Dom Ferdinand Cabrol.

Singled out for further study, he was sent to San Anselmo in Rome, where he made deep friendships with two monks with whom he would be a co-founder, at least in spirit, of the mixed Eastern-Western church monastery of Chevetogne in Belgium.

Later in life, work as priest and scholar would take him across Europe and to the Near East. He would be a member, albeit briefly, of a fledgling monastic community in the Ukraine, also priest in a mission near Nice.

After entering the Orthodox Church, he was rector of the first French language Orthodox parish in Paris.

He served as chaplain in a number of locations: to Russians and others held in French prisons, at Mother Maria’s hostel, and at St. Basil's House in London.

In between and after, he was an itinerant preacher and retreat master, spiritual father and advisor to bishops, priests, monastics, church youth movements and many individuals. He supported himself at various points in his life, not so much by clerical appointments and stipends but by free-lance, independent writing, editing, translating and research.

And if nothing else, he was a go-between, a traveler between numerous "worlds," that of the past century and the present, that of the Western Christian churches and tradition and that of the East, between clergy and laity, intellectuals and artists and ordinary working people, and, most significantly, between an apparently secular, even Godless world and the reality of God and the Kingdom, one which he experienced in a most intense, even mystical manner.

Several of his most widely read books took the form of dialogues between the soul and the Lord, prayer "out loud."

So the, Lord, it is this? It is truly this? It is only this? This is the whole law and all the prophets? To love with one's whole heart...To love Him who first loved us, to love everything that He loves, all men, all women, all creatures...Yes, my child, that is it, and that is all.

Everything "else" has value only inasmuch as it is the expression, the carrying out-under so many various forms- of that initial impulse which is my limitless Love....The heart transplants, which in our day have become possible, are a wonderful sign of a spiritual reality. To give one's heart to another, to accept the heart of another...It is the parable of limitless Love's triumph...[4]

For years, many of Fr. Lev's writings were published under the pen name of "The Monk of the Eastern Church," a device first contrived to avoid controversy but later continued because of the anonymity and perhaps also the mystery it afforded.

Fr. Lev was in many respects a wanderer. He took a path seldom pursued for a Western monk, far to the East, to a small and experimental Byzantine Catholic monastery in what was then Galicia, now Ukraine, Uniov, near Lvov. He made his permanent monastic profession to and was later ordained by that remarkable bridge figure, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky.

But Fr. Lev was a Westerner, a Frenchman, and it became apparent that his place in the effort to create contact between the churches of the East and the West was back in the West, not Uniov in Galicia.

From there he returned to France, first to a mission among Russian immigrants and then to Paris, where he attached himself to the Russian �migr� community there.

Eventually the singular bishop of that Western European diocese, then of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Evlogy, received him into the Orthodox Church and its priesthood, simply by concelebration in the Eucharistic liturgy in the Trubetskoy home-chapel in Clamart on May 25, 1928.

From that point onwards, Fr. Lev served within the Orthodox churches in Europe and in the Middle East. A Westerner always, he nevertheless was surely a priest and "monk of the Eastern Church."

In this he was a precursor, with Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, of many others from the Western churches who would become part of the Eastern Church in the 20th century, to some a curious, even suspect phenomenon.

Nevertheless, as Paul Evdokimov and Mother Maria and many of the Russian �migr�s came to understand it, the destructive Bolshevik revolution also had a very positive outcome, the return of eastern Orthodox Christians to the West, the opening of contacts of prayer, study and common work between them.

Perhaps surprisingly, there appeared pilgrims from The West to the Eastern Church, men and women whose love for the Church would repair and create bridges between the divided churches.

After a long life, just such a pilgrim, Fr. Lev, was buried from the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London by his friend and younger colleague, Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of the Russian Patriarchal diocese of Sourozh.

In addition to all the prayers of the Orthodox funeral service, one from the Roman Missal was also read by Metropolitan Anthony. Even in death, Fr. Lev kept trying to live in an undivided Church.

He understood himself to be a priest of the Orthodox Church, but this did not prevent him from ministering to Christians all across the spectrum, preaching in Hyde Park as well as Protestant churches in London and elsewhere, giving retreats to Orthodox, Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Protestants as well, in short serving all of the people of God like his friend Paul Evdokimov, as if there had never been schisms.

It is perfectly characteristic of the enigmatic chacter of Fr. Lev that after his death, a longtime colleague at St. Basil's House, Helle Giorgiadias would claim, in print, that he had never left the Catholic Church and had, as some detractors had thought much earlier, "infiltrated" the Orthodox Church almost as a spy.

This was her reading of an impassioned exchange when interviewed in his 80s about people and events in the effort to build bridges between East and West in the 1920s, efforts such as the establishment of a Benedictine monastery at Amay in Belgium, whose vocation was to be outreach to the East Fr. Lev was really one of the co-founders, along with Dom Lambert Beauduin and Dom Olivier Rousseau, although he never was to live in this community which still exists today, Chevetogne, internationally known for having both Eastern and Western monastic communities and churches.

Fr. Lev exclaimed, in this exchange, that he had always considered himself to be "a catholic priest in full communion with the Slavic Orthodox Church."[5] This was hardly the revelation of some deep, dark, secret of ecclesiastical espionage, although the actions of several in the 1920s, particularly Bishop Michel d'Herbigny, with special "faculties" for work in Russia and points East might suggest this.

In his singular personality, bordering at times on the eccentric, Fr. Lev's own statements could, with some effort, be stretched into almost this interpretation, for in letters to his family and former colleagues in the 1920s and even toward the end of his life, he spoke in the idealistic terms of one who recognized the schisms of the churches but believed that the consequent walls of separation could be overcome in many ways, in prayer, in holiness, in the living out of a fully ecclesial life.

It is important to note that such a vision of catholicity, of unity despite division, was hardly unique or for that matter peculiar to Fr. Lev. It clearly was the perspective of his longtime friends Paul Evdokimov and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, friends who dearly loved Fr. Lev but who differed profoundly among themselves in other important respects. It was a vision as well as goal for others being profiled here, others of the remarkable Russian "religious renaissance," such as Frs. Bulgakov, Afanasiev, Meyendorff, Schmemann and Men.[6]

Fr. Lev seems to shatter every typology of personality. He was intense and passionate, extremely private and revealing at the same time. He is described as child-like and open, most accessible and yet often difficult, brooding even cranky.

Though his thinking was straightforward, his friendships deep and lasting and his attitude warm and outgoing, he remained an enigma, a mystery, even to those who knew him well and over a lifetime. This is the sense left in Elisabeth Behr-Sigel's immense biography of Fr. Lev, based on almost 60 years of friendship and correspondence, now available in English translation.

Yet in this man of apparent contradictions, there was an amazing resolution or transcendence of conflicts that would destroy and divide. Just as Fr Lev was moved and transformed by the spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Church and its clinging to the "kenosis," the self-emptying of Christ, Bishop Kallistos Ware has described the monk of the Eastern Church as a most "kenotic" personality himself. Bishop Kallistos cites an early letter of Fr. Lev:

The more I examine myself, the more I see that a life devoted to constructing and organizing, a life which produces positive results and which succeeds, is not my vocation, even though, out of obedience, I could work in this direction and even obtain certain results. What attracts me is a vocation of loss--a life which would give itself freely without any apparent positive result, for the result would be known to God alone; in brief, to lose oneself in order to find oneself.[7]

With such a long life and voluminous literary output, Fr. Lev's person and work are difficult to capture succinctly. Olivier Cl�ment chose to examine what he considered the central themes in Fr. Lev's thinking, realities which not only shaped this extraordinary monk-priest but which he lived out: the life in Christ, a universality without relativism and God as One who suffers with us.[8]

In the presence of a suffering God who loves without limits

Incorporating these, and pressing deeper into them, we shall look first at Fr. Lev's intimate sense of intimate communion with a God who not only was "kenotic," the One who suffers with us, the Book of Revelation's ( Bukharev and Evdokimov's "Lamb immolated from the beginning of the world," but also "Love without limits," the One whom often Fr. Lev called "Lord Love."[9]

While Fr. Lev was trained as a scholar and published much in that vein, for example his studies on the "Jesus Prayer," on the concept of the Messiah and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, on the liturgical year, its lessons, texts and feasts, many of the books published under his pen-name, "A monk of the Eastern Church," stem from retreats and conferences he gave.

Whether focused on the Good Shepherd, the burning bush, the Holy Spirit or a dialogue with Jesus, the presence of God during a typical working day, all are, in a sense, the revelation of what prayer sounds like, a look into communion with God and, conversely, a glimpse of God’s attitude towards us.

I would say further, that not only do they reach out to actual listeners at a retreat; they also are a view into Fr. Lev’s own internal discourse and relationship with God and his pastoral way with people.

It is not so much the exegesis of the burning bush of Exodus 3 that concerns Fr. Lev. Rather it is God as fire which burns but does not consume.

God is fire. God is love. God is a self-propagating emotional power, a fire that shares itself. Centuries after Moses beheld the flames of the burning bush, this same fire merged with the tongues of flame at Pentecost, and with the fire that burned within the hearts of the disciples at Emmaus. In saying that God is a fire of love we are certainly stating a truth that plays havoc with many of our ideas, in fact almost all our ideas.[10]

Here we are at the root, not only of Fr. Lev’s intentions in a retreat in the late 1960s at Pleshy, but in much of his ministry, namely to counter worn-out, even wrong ideas of God which all sorts of religious teaching and experiences have planted in people with the startling truth found in the scriptures.

In addition, it seemed that from his earliest years working with refugees and particularly the Russian Christian Students’ Movement, Fr. Lev was particularly interested in those outside the Church, outside Christianity, outside conventional religious faith of any kind. Speaking to retreatants during the "death of God" era, he observes that perhaps the very word, "God," has become overburdened with false meanings.

"God" is also all too abstract, empty a term for many. Why not simply identify him with what is the supreme reality for us, love, and speak of and to the "lord of Love," or "Lord Love"? The Exodus text’s narrative is no mere coincidence here, for Moses asks the burning bush for a name, his name.

You ask what my name is. I am Being. I am the Being whom you see in being at this very moment. Look before you.

You see the bush that burns without being consumed. You see fire. The Being I am is a Being of fire. These flames proclaim my love. But look more carefully. My fire does not destroy. That which it burns it purifies and transforms into itself, makes part of itself. And my flame has no need to be fed. It imparts itself, gives itself. I am the Gift that never ceases to give itself�I am Limitless Love.[11]

Weaving in the Eastern Church’s vespers psalm 103 (104), Fr. Lev expands on the eternal, limitless nature of Love who is God, tracing the cosmic and communal linkages implied in creation. From the mountains and the rock badgers to the storms, the oceans, and every man and women, within them all God, limitless Love, lives.

And there should be no alarm that the Trinity and Jesus the Christ have not yet been mentioned, for in Moses’ time God had not yet revealed himself as Trinity nor become flesh, and yet there still was Lord Love. In the story of the prophet Hosea and his prostitute-wife, Fr. Lev suggests that the "spontaneous reaction, the first response to the discovery of Limitless Love" is hope, a door of hope opened to each of us, no matter who we are and what we may have made of our lives. Limitless Love calls us back as beloved, puts a ring on our finger, opens the door to communion with him, to the marriage feast.

In the text Fr. Lev admits that for him it was a major change, to start not with our love for God, our obeying the command to love him, but rather the other way around, that is with the overwhelming Love that God has, that God is, for us. "I have come to show you, for you are greatly loved," is the angel’s message to the prophet Daniel. (Dan. 9: 23) The letters of John affirm this. But Fr. Lev pushes even further to the passion, the suffering of God for us and to love us.

Divine Love is comparable to the atmospheric pressure surrounding us, which sustains each being and also exerts pressure from all sides. Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading into the heart, by means of which Love can permeate everywhere.

The difference between the sinner and the saint is that the sinner closes his heart to Love while the saint opens himself to this same Love. In both cases the Love is the same and the pressure is the same.[12]

Limitless Love is for all, both the devoted and the indifferent. Hosea woos back his unfaithful wife and again betroths her in love. Another prostitute, Rahab, saves the Israelite spies and is in turn saved from the destruction of Jericho. (Heb. 11: 30-31)

The scarlet thread she hangs out her window spares Jesus himself welcomed those cast off by the church of his time: tax collectors, the woman caught in adultery, possessed men, lepers, those considered punished by God with sickness and seizures. The tax collectors and prostitutes would be the first to enter the Kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 21: 31)

Fr. Lev reminds us that not only does Rahab become part of the line of David and therefore of the genealogy of Jesus, but included in the same are others who similarly lived and loved "outside the rules," Tamar and Bathsheba, not to mention King David himself!

A pattern emerges here, is intensified in Fr. Lev’s reflections of the "clean" versus "unclean" dilemma of the Apostle Peter, in his vision at Joppa. (Acts 10: 15) There is a different and we could say, far more radical ethic at Horeb, of the burning bush, of Limitless Love.

Our own view of what is right and just is in conflict with that of Limitless Love. Love abolishes the Law, the standard, the ethic by which we human beings insist on measuring things, seeking justice. What has replaced the Law is Christ.

We now do what is good, truthful, right not because the opposite are against the Law, but because Christ as died and rose for us. Such is not "situational ethics," but a parting of ways with legalism. And it is more. Here we begin to see the deeper radicalism of Fr. Lev, not unique to him by any means, in fact part of the mind of the Eastern Church, as expressed not only in liturgical texts and rites but in the reflections of writers such as Dostoevski.

In God’s eyes, what may seem "irregular" to us, even to the clergy, may in fact be "regular" that is right with God. And the opposite holds as well. The one so apparently within the community of the righteous, so careful in fulfilling ritual and other details may be in "inner truth," very much removed, "outside" the assembly. The greatest sin is, as Christ himself stressed, not the violation of a rule but the action against love or without love.

Fr. Lev pushes even further.

The ethic of Limitless Love demands that we should be able to recognize the presence of God in the very sin that the sinner commits�You must not think I mean that God approves of the sin or encourages the sinner.

I simply mean that even in an act of sin God is, to a certain extent, present�everything that happens—the bad act as well as the good—has its roots in the being of God. Only because God gives us our being (or rather lends it to us) are we in existence at the very moment when we commit a sin.

At that very moment God could withdraw our being from us, could destroy us. But he holds us in the existence we have received from him, even when that existence turns against him. Moreover the Lord Love, in his infinite mercy, allows sin to contain certain positive elements.[13]

Fr. Lev gets quite specific here. The illicit sexual relationship is not justified or redeemed by the bit of tenderness, the small moment of self-giving or of compassion. Yet this "spark" from the burning bush is the sign that Limitless Love has entered this relationship. God is present even in the connection between a prostitute and her client, between two lovers. God continually is "showing forth his compassion in ways that are so often unexpected and always new.

Even when one cannot stop, cannot escape from the limits of his or her behavior, there is room, there is openness on Love’s part. No one is excluded or thrown out. The Eastern Church, Fr. Lev argues, as does his friend Paul Evdokimov, and their common teacher, Fr. Bulgakov, knows the limitless compassion of God, and thus confession is more healing than punishment, more the joint commitment of confessor and penitent in prayer to find God’s way so that the sinner can hear Christ’s words: "Rise, pick up your bed and walk�Your sins are forgiven. Go, and sin no more."[14]

It is not fidelity to a code, conformity to a standard but the often difficult effort "to act as God acts in respect of this sinner and this sin; in other words, I try to love him, or her, out of it."[15]

This is threatening to many, disturbing, for it confronts us with a God who is quite unlike us, free to forgive, to love, to brush offenses away, without any shock or vengeance. It is the same insight that Paul Evdokimov brings back from the Fathers, namely the reality that God does compel anyone to love him but knocks at the door of our hearts, waits as a beggar in his "absurd love," even desiring to "share the bread of our suffering." To think with the mind of Christ, to see with the eyes of God is to transform the person and situation before us.

To love, with all one’s heart, as oneself; the Gospel transmutes all of the law and the prophets into that�It is a matter of offering our whole heart to Love, a heart which is pure as a wine is pure, a heart unadulterated and whole, a heart which is not divided or shared. And in the light of this it might perhaps be useful to revise our contemporary understanding of purity, or more precisely, of chastity. Too often we think of chastity in negative terms, as no more than a matter of abstaining.

But a chaste heart, a pure heart, is a whole heart, an integrated, total heart which offers itself to God or to men in its wholeness. The real sin against purity is to offer (or to seem to offer) to God, or to a man, or to a woman, a love which is falsified, a love that is not or cannot be integral, a heart that is not "whole."[16]

As in St. Peter’s vision, Fr. Lev suggests, we today see a great sheet unrolled before us with all sorts of creatures and things which, to our conventional religious and moral sensibilities, appear "unclean," ways of life and situations we think we should ourselves reject, while also distancing ourselves from those who are involved in them.

He specifically refers to drug addiction, homosexuality and abortion, which remain as real now over 30 years later. But Fr. Lev hears these words from the Lord Love:

There are, among these particular things, some I have already purified entirely. Others I am purifying at this moment. But I cannot purify or pardon without an inner change in the sinners.

I ask you to participate in my work of purification by your prayer, by your sympathy for the sinner (not the sin), by your adoring discovery of my absolute Purity acting secretly in the very midst of the visible impurity, so that it shall be consumed in my flame�.Separate the entirely negative element from the positive element existing in all faults�

Assimilate everything which in the sinner comes from me and continues to be mine, and unite yourself to me in my effort to transfigure that which is not of me. Enlarge your heart to the dimensions of my heart.[17]

Here is a hope that indeed, "all will be saved," an impulse both of faith and love which sees, like St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen and in our own time, in Fr. Lev’s contemporary, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the promise of an ultimate apokatastasis, a final resurrection of all into the Kingdom.[18]

How irritating this is, how maddening and how absolutely wrong in the minds of so many within the Church! How soft, messy, disorderly this approach, this attribution of attitudes to God. How much more awful a world it would be if such an ethos became widespread.

Perhaps already over a generation, actually more than a half-century ago, Fr. Lev was already deluded by the permissiveness of the culture around him, distorted by the psychological and psychoanalytic theory he studied in graduate school, confused by the complex, troubled people around him in Paris, Beirut, London, Geneva and so many other places.

Or better, could it not be that Fr. Lev, so much drawn to the Church of the East and her preservation of Tradition perceived here the living and open, creative and free movements of the Lord Love, transcending rules and stereotypes, always seeking the soul that is lost.

Fr. Lev concludes the retreat on the burning bush, which I have closely followed here with the incident toward the end of the Apostle Paul’s adventures during his journey as a prisoner to stand trial in Rome, this toward the ends of the Acts of the Apostles, 28.

The soaked, shivering survivors of the shipwreck are received with compassion, "great kindness," by the barbarian inhabitants of the island of Malta. A huge fire is made so that they can warm and dry themselves. Moreover, the Maltese them take the survivors back to their homes, after the emergency services are delivered, for food, rest and other care.

If we are truly servant of the Lord Love, Fr. Lev says by way of conclusion, then like the residents of Malta, we too will seek out the survivors wherever they may be, drenched and paralyzed by rain and cold, bringing them fire, the fire of our love, the fire of the burning bush, of Limitless Love.

A God who is limitless love, who suffers with his creatures, who reaches down to help, forgive and save them but without threat or compulsion, a God "absurd" in his affection for us, violating apparently, not only our sense of fairness but his own law and its implications, such a God is the only God found in the writings of the monk of the eastern Church.

Repeatedly, the same themes surface throughout Fr. Lev’s retreat talks, later written down and published.[19] Two such small collections, printed together under the title, In Thy Presence, in particular exhibit Fr. Lev’s distinctive approach and insights. In the first of these, "Limitless Love," it is again the One in the burning bush who addresses us, who reveals a name other than that we usually and unthinkingly use, "God."

So "Lord Love," "Limitless Love" makes the first movement towards us and shows himself to be, at one and the same time, beyond our expectations and ideas of a God and yet closer to us than we are to ourselves.

This God is the Triune God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit revealed by Christ. However, as Elisabeth Behr-Sigel points out, it may well have been the cumulative effect of working and conversing with so many outside of Christianity, either because of membership in other traditions and communities of faith such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or because of estrangement from Christian faith by experiences of the past and the present, that Fr. Lev deliberately sought to take another, simpler and more basic path.

It is not so unusual a path in the modern era at that, choosing ordinary language, events and experiences of everyday life to communicate the same Truth of God and his love proclaimed in the scriptures, liturgy, icons and theology of the Church’s tradition.

Fr. Lev was looking for what Emil Brunner called a "point of contact," what Peter Berger refers to as "signals of transcendence," very basic, even "prototypical human gestures," in which the Holy One is present, encounters and is encountered by us.[20]

Much of what we heard in the talks on the burning bush is here again, but as well new and different reflections. Over and over, the personal character of Lord Love, his relentless seeking us out to share in his love, his constant suffering with us—these are keys upon which Fr. Lev plays, answering very likely to the hunger and frustrations he himself experienced and which he encountered in the people around him, religious and secular.

To those who would prefer God in his heaven and all else in place as a form of faith, he reminds us of the active work of God in seeking us and overturning our plans.

Limitless Love forces open doors. Perhaps I had not achieved some sort of peaceful coexistence with God. Perhaps I had succeeded in believing that, as far as my soul was concerned, I was more or less "in good order," and so had come to feel more or less at rest�And now all those presuppositions have been turned upside down by a divine intrusion.

God asks something from me that I am quite unprepared for. It is like the news of an unwanted child�To listen to this demand, to take the costly decision, ah, but why?

Everything seemed to be going so well! Must I have new uncertainties and anxieties?..And now limitless Love wants to erupt into my life. It comes to upset everything in it. It comes to break up what seemed stable and to open new horizons to which I had never given a thought.[21]

Here and there are the faces of men and women Fr. Lev listened to and consoled: a woman worried at only the loss she perceives in her aging, a lonely young �migr� fearful of the future in a new land, the very pious Christian with prayer books and Bible in hand, running to church, the beautiful girl with so many lovers, the convict he cared for as prison chaplain, the mother who lost her child, the victim of the concentration camp, (perhaps the memory here of his beloved Mother Maria Skobtsova?), the alcoholic, the drug addict.[22]

There are brilliant small reflections on the significance of a look, a smile, on prayer, on bearing within oneself the spark that kindles the fire of limitless Love in others, and a perceptive meditation on the gift of women to the rest of humanity.[23]

What is more, in these talks, without descending to the constricting level of "recipes," Fr. Lev suggests how one can live an authentic life in God in the very ordinary tasks of everyday life. Particularly in the second collection, "Thy Presence Today," the emphasis is as much on the "today," as on "presence."

There is a treasure of detail here: the beginning of waking up, the act of washing, dressing, reading and writing, leaving home for the workplace and those encountered there and on the trip, the simple gesture of the outstretched hand and the clasping and shaking of same, the meals shared or eaten by oneself, the cleanup, finally, the return home to the darkness of night, to the stillness of a house late in the evening, to sleep.

How closely this follows the quite mundane schedule of Fr. Lev during his many years at St. Basil’s House in London that Elisabeth Behr-Sigel describes.

Yet without giving it a name, and without laying it out in programmatic form as a technique (as in manuals of "spirituality" today) Fr. Lev here suggests the ways in which the life of any person can be "churched," made incarnate with the presence of Christ, be in St. Seraphim’s phrase, an acquiring of the Holy Spirit.

It is not without coincidence that the one who in so many of his writings used the pen-name of "the monk of the eastern Church," and who throughout his life, at least according to his friends and colleagues consistently understood himself precisely as a monk, in actual practice spent relatively few years within a monastic community. In a fairly long life, he resided in Benedictine and the Uniov Eastern Church monastic communities only from 1920-1927, concluding in a brief stay in Nice, in a mission house for care of Russian refugees. For the rest of his nomadic life, there would hardly be any permanent position, and no monastery to which he belonged.

One is tempted to conclude that it was principally Fr. Lev’s impatient spirit, the wandering impulse within him that kept him on the move. However, for the many Orthodox dispersed in the West by exile and emigration, permanent monasteries were for a long time impossible and more a dream than anything else. Archbishop Anthony (Bloom) recounts this in an interesting article about his own long monastic life without a monastery.[24]

Mother Maria Skobtsova did visit monastic communities which survived the revolution in Estonia and Latvia, but found these to be essentially museums of past practice. She was convinced that there could be a renewed monasticism in the world, her bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy remarking that indeed the streets and the city of Paris and her hostels had become her monastery.[25]

One can only speculate on the conversations and exchanges of ideas about the way to follow Christ, to live the Gospel life in the midst of so much turmoil and suffering in the modernity of the 20th century between Mother Maria and Fr. Lev who was chaplain at her hostel in Rue Lourmel from 1935-38.

In the chapter here on Mother Maria, I think the essence of those conversations can be found in many of the texts cited from Mother Maria, quite a few of them from essays precisely on the possibilities of a renewed monastic life today.[26]

The most remarkable essay of hers generously cited is "Types of religious Lives," in which the Gospel or "evangelical" way corresponds most closely with her other writings about a full spiritual life in the world. I would argue that the daily form of Christian living, in the presence of Christ that Fr. Lev lays out here as well as in other places, also is rooted in his own nomadic and worldly, primarily urban monasticism.

A third person profiled in this book was very close to Fr. Lev, and also knew Mother Maria through the Russian Christian Students Association. This is the lay theologian who worked for many years not unlike Mother Maria, directing hostels sponsored by the ecumenical CIMADE for the poor, homeless, suffering, later refugees and students.

And I find it once again not surprising that Paul Evdokimov would have devoted so much thought throughout his teaching and writing to this same matter of how to live out the Christian life, as one’s ancestors in the faith had for so many centuries of Christian history.

But it was impossible to simply recreate, repristinate the past, force 3rd or 13th or 18th century conditions and practices into the life of the 20th century. Borrowing from the insightful ideas of the 18th century monk and bishop, St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, Paul Evdokimov spoke of an "interiorized monasticism," what St. Tikhon had referred to as "untonsured monasticism."[27]

One can fuss about descriptions and labels and their implications, whether even the mention of monasticism is appropriate for a universal understanding of holiness or possibly a dilution of this singular vocation. Nevertheless, what Fr. Lev insisted on throughout his preaching and writing was not a "spirituality" of unusual practices and ‘mystical" experiences.

Rather, he appears to have assimilated what so many of his beloved Russians understood and urged as the "churching" of life, the elimination of cultural religiosity, and what Mother Maria would typify as esthetic, ritualitic or ascetical forms in favor of a "Gospel" way of life, a "lived-out" or "experiential" faith as Paul Evdokimov expressed it.

While his vision of the life in Christ is not without feeling, very much communal, with others and for them, Fr. Lev’s presentation of this pattern is within the tasks and details of ordinary living.

What Fr. Schmemann termed the "sacramental vision of the world," really an eschatological one, in which every encounter was a possibility for seeing Christ and following him. Fr. Lev too envisioned such a "paradise of the moment," in which all of everyday was the arena for holiness.

Living in the una sancta

Lastly, what stands out so strongly, particularly in a time of retrogression and revision is Fr Lev's astonishing openness, the incarnation in his thought and ministry of the absolute freedom of Orthodoxy of which Fr Elcheninov, Soloviev, Berdiaev and so many others of the Russian experience knew.

Many years later, in a journal entry that would find its way into his volume Conversations of Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton would write

If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians.

From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other.

But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ. (p. 21)

In a remarkable manner, Fr Lev accomplished just this union and communion. Such a realization was the fruit of Fr Lev's own "return to the sources" and his complex and painful pilgrimage, not only from the Western Church to the Eastern Church, but all of the many side trips, one might call them, he also pursued over the years:

* his exploration of the Judaic roots of Christianity, *his fascination with the traditions of the Orient,
*his willingness to listen to the voices of what Evdokimov called "principled atheists," those with serious criticism and questions of faith.

Critics note that Fr. Lev was himself a romantic, constantly disappointed however, with the realities of those people and communities with whom he easily became infatuated.

Above all there was his powerful attraction to the Russian �migr� community in France. He rhapsodized over the Eastern Church, loved her adherence to Tradition, the greater presence in her, at least as he saw it in the 1920s, of the faith of the undivided Church of the first millennium.

Not without reason did so deeply fall for the Paris Russians, for among them, in Metropolitan Evlogy, in Frs. Sergius Bulgakov, Alexander Elcheninov, in the spirit of Soloviev and the person of Nicolas Berdiaev, in Pierre and Evgraf Kovalesky, Nadia Gorodetsky and Paul Evdokimov and many others did he experience the tremendous creativity of a Tradition that knew itself in the suffering of persecution and exile and yet was able in great freedom to be open to the rest of Christendom and the world.

O strange Orthodox Church, so poor and weak, with neither the organization nor the culture of the West, staying afloat as if by a miracle in the face of so many trials, tribulations and struggles;
*a Church of contrasts, both so traditional and so free, so archaic and so alive, so ritualist and so personally involves,
* a Church where the priceless pearl of the Gospel is assiduously preserved, sometimes under a layer of dust;
*a Church which in shadows and silence maintains above all the eternal values of purity, poverty, asceticism, humility and forgiveness;
*a Church which has often not known how to act, but which can sing of the joy of Pascha (Easter) like no other.[28]

As Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s biography shows, the Eastern Church was big of heart and free enough to accept the complicated, emotionally vacillating and restless pilgrim monk of the West as one of her own. And in the Eastern Church, Fr. Lev was not spared any of the weaknesses or eccentricities he recognized her to possess.

The best of his intentions were often disregarded, not only by Russian but also by Greek bishops, in Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem and at the Phanar in Istanbul.

Even the Arabs, for whom he was to acquire a deep attachment, could be immensely disappointing to him. He was to find the hardening of canon law and Episcopal authority, and pure inertia wherever he went in the Orthodox world and even in where Orthodox had moved and settled in the West.

One can only wonder what he would have made of the chaotic and contradictory chacter of Orthodoxy here in the United States, with the curious blend of traditionalism and obsession with technology, the confusing overlapping of and conflict among jurisdictions allegedly in ecclesial and sacramental communion with each other.

Time after time, Fr. Lev’s ideals of the catholicity of the Church, her fullness and universality, her freedom and fidelity to the Lord and his Gospel were seriously challenged by the actual clergy and laity with whom he lived and worked.

Although Elisabeth Behr-Sigel does not conceal his discouragement and depression over the sad, sinful realities of the Christians who comprise the Church, her biographical sketch and Fr. Lev’s own writings do leave us with something more than dashed hopes and dreams of a reuniting Church.

In the end, Fr. Lev’s life and his preaching suggest an attitude of hope over against a very messy ecclesiastical landscape. Both Olivier Cl�ment and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel underscore his exceptional openness, a catholicity of heart, a universality and immense freedom without his ever being a relativist.

To a large degree, Fr. Lev’s life and ministry were on the margins of the institutional Church. Most of his efforts to obtain canonical recognition for groups wanting to enter Orthodoxy or utilize a Western rite for liturgical worship within an Orthodox jurisdiction proved unsuccessful.

In the cases of Charles Winnaert and Evgraph Kovalesky, the inability of Fr. Lev to gain canonical acceptance was hardly due just to his own ineptitude. In fact, he was rather astute ecclesiastically, as the voluminous correspondence he conducted, and employed by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel in her biography would indicate.

All too often as in these case of these individuals, personal idiosyncrasies and obstinate attitudes probably did more to prevent acceptance than anything else.

It is also likely the case that Fr. Lev consistently fell between the ecclesiastical cracks himself. Thoroughly a Westerner, a Frenchman, and formed in the Roman Catholic Church, though he became fluent in Russian, completely assimilated in Orthodox theology and liturgy and something of a cultural cosmopolitan, he really could not be taken as "one of our own" by any of the jurisdictions to which he was attached, whether that of the Lviv diocese and Uniov monastery of Metropolitan Andrei Szeptyky, the Western European Exarchate of Metropolitan Evlogy, the patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople to which he was later connected.

He was never formally excommunicated by Metropolitan Andrei and was never asked to formally renounce anything when received into the Orthodox church by concelebrating the liturgy and during it confessing the Creed.

Perhaps despite all the small details of his personality and disappointments of his ecclesiastical activity, Fr. Lev is nevertheless a kind of sign of both the schism and its healing. There is a well-known statement, attributed both to Metropolitan Platon of Kiev and Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, cited by none other than Fr Lev’s own bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy of Paris:

Men like St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. Francis of Assisi and many others have in their lives accomplished the union of the churches. Are they not citizens of the same holy and universal Church? At the level of their spiritual life they have gone beyond the walls which divide us, but which, in the fine expression of Metropolitan Platon of Kiev, do not reach up to heaven.[29]

At the beginning of a new millennium and century, many of the ecumenical hopes of Fr. Lev’s youth and mature years, of those now seemingly golden years of contact and cooperative work especially after World War II, are in tatters. At the best there appears well-intentioned but ineffective and unconnected gestures.

Pope John Paul II’s consistent appeals are for the most part ignored or fiercely rejected by many Orthodox bishops, theologians and clergy. Several Orthodox churches notably those of Georgia and Bulgaria, have left the WCC and participation of others such as that of Russia is suspended for the duration of negotiations and changes in the body’s make-up and structure.

The voice of the exclusivist or traditionalist perspective within Orthodoxy, that which recognizes nothing, no sacraments, priesthood, church, no grace whatsoever outside its own boundaries, is aggressive and loud, on Mt Athos, in other monastic centers such as Trinity-St Sergius and Valaam.

Any prayer with the non-Orthodox Christians is condemned by appeal to the canons’ prohibition against worship with heretics.

Rebaptism of converts is required, as well as a range of other divisive and isolationist strategies such as use of the old calendar, use of Greek and Slavonic in liturgical services, and a host of other practices many which are of relatively recent origin or are cultural rather than theological in nature. Sadly the response to such aggressive defining of what is authentic Orthodox belief and practice has recently been weak, overly cautious or non-existent.

Fr. Lev is not alone in witnessing otherwise. As noted, his closest friends and comrades, to a person, embodied the freedom of the Eastern Church, fidelity together with great love and openness to the world and the churches, speaking and acting as if the schism had never been or was by their very gestures being healed by the Holy Spirit.

Many have been mentioned in this chapter, some are the focus of other chapters in this book, still more fall outside our view here, gathered as those assemblies in so many icons such as the resurrection, "All of Creation Rejoices in You," and the Protection of the Mother of God: Vladimir Lossky, Frs. Bulgakov, Elchaninov, Zenkovsky, Kern, Afanasiev, Schmemann, Meyendorff, Knazieff, and those still with us, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Georges Khodre, and Anthony Bloom, Frs. Bobrinskoy, Breck, Evdokimov, theologians Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, John Erickson, Paul Meyendorff, Peter Bouteneff, and others.

However, we find in Fr. Lev’s deep faith, persistence and creativity, despite his own discouragement and counterproductive ecclesiastical functioning, a sign of hope for ourselves.

Despite all the personal weaknesses and his failures, despite even the grand chaos, what Paul Evdokimov termed "ecclesiastical anarchy," Fr. Lev (and his comrades) loved Christ and the Church and nurtured that love in whatever ways were possible. He remains a sign of what can be said and done, under the most trying of circumstances.

+

ENDNOTES

1. Orthodox Spirituality, 2nd. ed., (Crestwood NY: SVSP, 1978 ), pp. x-xi. Much of what follows is indebted to Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s masterful and extensive biography, Lev Gillet: " Un moine de l’�glise d’ Orient," (Paris: Cerf, 1993), now in English, Lev Gillet: ‘a monk of the Eastern Church,’ Helen Wright, trans., (Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999). I am also indebted to Dr. Behr-Sigel for her willingness to talk about Fr. Lev, Paul Evdokimov and many other of her contemporaries and friends of the Russian �migr� community in Paris. Her more than half a century of friendship and correspondence with Fr. Lev gave her the singular vantage point for writing his biography. Her own life and work as a lay theologian remain, at 93 years of age, a living witness to the legacy of this Russian "religious renaissance," a testimony to their creativity and openness while faithful to the Tradition of the Church. Such are the hallmarks of her many years of teaching and writing.

2. See Sister Joanna Reitlinger, "The Final Days of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov. There is also a reproduction of her drawing of his face on his deathbed in the special number devoted to Fr. Bulgakov Le messager orthodoxe, no. 98, p.87.

3. Reproductions of these are in the Cerf, French language edition of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s biography, between pp. 312 and 313.

4. In Thy Presence, (Crestwood NY: SVSP, 1977), pp. 71-72).

5. See Helle Georgiadis, "The witness of Fr. Lev," Chrysostom, 8, 1980, pp. 235-238 and Behr-Sigel, Lev Gillet, pp. 9-12, 441-442.

6. See Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance, p. 196.

7. Letter of 9 March 1928, in Contacts, 49, no. 180, 1997, p. 309. This is one of a series of letters from Fr. Lev to his bishop, Metropolitan Andrei Szeptycky, recently discovered in archives in Lviv and here excerpted and translated by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. Also see Cyril Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky, Serge Keleher, ed. and trans., Fairfax VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 1997).

8. See his preface, "Le p�re Lev Gillet: grand th�ologien du Dieu souffrant et de l’Amour sans limites," in the anthology of Fr. Lev’s writings, Au c�ur de la fournaise, Maxim Egger, ed., (Paris/Pully: Cerf-le sel de la terre, 1998), pp. 9-23.

9. See Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Alexandre Boukharev: un th�ologien de l’�glise orthodoxe russe en dialogue avec le monde moderne, (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), Paul Evdokimov, Le Christ dans le pens�e russe, L’amour fou de Dieu, (Paris: Seuil, 1973) and my essay, "The God Whose Power is Weakness, Whose Love is Foolish: Divine Philanthropy in the Theology of Paul Evdokimov," Sourozh, 60, 1995, pp. 15-26.

10. The Burning Bush, (Springfield IL: Templegate, 1976), pp. 12-13.

11. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

12. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

13. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

14. See Paul Evdokimov, "L’eschatologie," in Le buisson ardent, "Paris: Lethellieux, 1981, pp. 135-167, also in In the World, Of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader, forthcoming.

15. Ibid., p. 51.

16. Ibid., p. 51.

17. Ibid., p. 52.

18. Sergius Bulgakov, L’�pouse de l’Agneau: La creation, l’homme, l’�glise et la fin, Constantin Andronikof, trans. (Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1984), pp.268-416.

19. Such as Jesus: Dialogue with the Savior, (NY: Descl�e, 1963).

20. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, and A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, 2nd ed. (NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967, 1990), pp. 59-85.

21. In Thy Presence, pp. 37-38.

22. Ibid., pp. 47-49, 54.

23. Ibid., pp. 56, 66-70.

24. "My Monastic Life," Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 8, 1973, pp. 187-197.

25. Sergei Hackel, Pearl of Great price, p. 20-27. See also the anthology of Mother Maria’s writings, Le sacrement du fr�re.

26. Excerpts from these essays, mostly cited passages, are to be found in Le sacrement du fr�re and Pearl of Great Price.

27. See Ages of the Spiritual Life, pp. 133-154, 227-239, and my essays, ""Monasticism in the Marketplace, the Monastery, the World and Within: An Eastern Church Perspective," Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 34, 3, 1999, pp. 339-367 and "Interiorized Monasticism: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life," The American Benedictine Review, 48, 3, 1997, pp. 227-253.

28. Lev Gillet, p. 129.

29. Quoted in M. Villain, L’Abb� Paul Couturier, Ap�tre de l’unit� chr�tienne, Paris, 1957) as cited in A.M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding, ( NY: Crossroad, 1982), p. 80.

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Night

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:55:41 EST

http://www.senanque.fr/

Chapter XIII

Asleep in the ship

And there arose a great storm of wind: and the waves beat into the ship, so that the ship was filled. And He was in the hinder part of the ship, sleeping upon a pillow. Mark 4, 37-38.

Lord Jesus, this day which I wanted to spend with You is drawing to a close. Behold the night is falling and the first stars appear. They reveal to me the immensity of the worlds.

Sometimes they give rise to a question in my soul. Is it possible that, in this universe whose order is measured by science, a lowly human creature benefits from the continuous attention and help of the creative power? Is this not anthropomorphism, the imagination of primitive man?

But I remember that the star “stood over where the child was.” The star which guided the Magi symbolized this physical universe whose limits we do not know. The standing of the star, over where the child of Bethlehem was, signified the subordination of this great universe to the humble incarnation of our God and to the salvation of men.

Likewise, O Lord, You showed Yourself to the visionary of Patmos with seven stars in Your right hand. Your face was as the sun and your voice as the sound of many waters.

And the frightened visionary fell at Your feet as if dead; but You laid on him that same right hand which held the stars and You said to him: “Fear not.” The Creator of the world is a personal Saviour. The salvation of a soul – and hence of my soul – is of more importance in Your eyes than the order of the entire, material universe.

The night is falling. Every nightfall evokes, in the spiritual realm too, the triumph of darkness.

Your Evangelist expresses in an accurate and moving way this collusion of night and of evil; when mentioning Judas’ departure after the Last Supper, he observes: “And it was night.”

For many men the night is the time of temptation and sin. And then the night falls in their soul even more than it exists physically. Lord, I entrust to Your mercy all those men and women who this very night will look for and commit what is evil in Your sight.

But nightfall is also the time of lights. The lamps are lit. In the midst of the darkness, they tell me that they cannot dim Your brightness.

In this night which is coming, I adore You, the joyous Light, the cheerful Light, who said: “I am the light of the world.”

Physical obscurity can increase. Moral darkness can also weigh upon me. Its depth can appear to swallow me up. But what I shall fear if I take You Yourself, if I possess You Yourself as my light, an interior light against which all outside powers remain ineffective. I repeat the psalmist’s words: “And in Thy light, we shall see light.”

Now is the time when the disciples from Emmaus constrained You to stop with them saying: “Stay with us . . .because the day is now far spent.” And not only did You stop with them, but You went into the house to share their meal and to open their eyes to Your Presence.

At the close of this day, I likewise beseech You: Stay with me this evening, this night. Do more than just stay with me. May these last hours of the day be privileged hours when I shall feel You close to me, when I shall feel You within me!

May these hours facilitate that personal conversation which I need so much! May they bring me one of those intimate words which fall from Your lips and give life!

The night is the time of sleep. Like the psalmist I shall comply with this necessity of human nature: “I will sleep, and I will rest.” I am going to sleep.

And yet You exhort Your disciples to watch. You said to Peter: “Simon, sleepest thou! Couldst thou not watch one hour?” Again You said to Your followers: “Watch ye: and pray that you enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

It is true that all our nights are not the night at Gethsemani. But can I not give You at least one hour in an intimate conversation at night?

Nocturnal prayer seems to have a special efficacy. One of Your parables concludes with the description and hearing of a prayer made “at midnight” : “Ask and it shall be given you: seek, and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

Lord, give me the desire and the strength to seek You, at least sometimes during the hours of the night, taking a certain time from my sleep, the length of which I beg You Yourself to determine.

You prayed during the nights. May my nocturnal prayer be a participation in those secret prayers and above all in those of the garden, the night before Your death!

Oh, it is certainly from a distance that I am able to associate myself with the Saviour imploring His Father before entering into His Passion! But, were it only for the duration of a lightning flash, grant that this redeeming emotion of Yours which is both striking and vivid might spread to my heart.

Even in sleep I do not wish to be separated from You. Before falling asleep I repeat secretly the great cry which You emitted from the Cross at the moment before You expired: “Father, into Thy hands, I commend My spirit.”

Here it is that my prayer is one with Yours. It is my soul together with Your soul which You commend and which I too commend to the Father. We commend our souls together, Yours and mine, to the uncreated, loving Father. I commend my soul by uniting it to Yours and in this way I am without fear.

I am asleep but I do not cease being with You. How is that possible? All our human situations are rooted in Your human situations.

Each night my sleep forms a part of Your own earthly slumbers. You slept in order to sanctify our sleep, to penetrate it with Yourself. The Gospel shows You sleeping once. Only once. But this single time blesses and transfigures what would remain a purely animal act without You.

One day You got into the ship and some of the disciples followed You. A storm arose. The waves assailed the ship. Already the waves had got in the ship, the disciples were afraid, but You were asleep with Your head on a cushion. The disciples who were frightened woke You , saying: “Lord, save us, we perish.” And then after You got up, You imposed silence on the wind and the sea, “and there came a great calm.”

This image of Jesus sleeping in the ship’s stern, while the storm broke, is, if I may say so, the icon of my sleep. I am sharing Jesus’ sleep. It could be that before falling asleep I was beset with great difficulties.

In sleep I lose consciousness of them. Yet these difficulties continue to exist. I will find them again tomorrow. Nevertheless they do not interfere with my sleep.

The winds and waves can rage. Jesus will not permit them to disturb that sleep which I take so close to Him. A great calm is brought about for me, and this is the very calm of Jesus Himself.

Perhaps, O Lord, you will give me tonight more than Your calm, more than trustful sleep and the serenity which were Yours and which through You are now mine.

Perhaps You will even approach me mysteriously in my sleep. In Sacred Scripture sleep is the time of dreams and signs. Beyond the poor symbols which the psychologists take into account, the night is sometimes rich in divine signs.

It was in a dream that Jacob saw a ladder standing on the ground, the top of which touched heaven; God’s angels went up and down this ladder. In alluding to this episode, you have told us that we shall see “the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” O Lord, would that at least some of my nights be like that night at Bethel!

When You appeared before Pilate’s tribunal, the Procurator’s wife sent word to him to say that he should have nothing to do with that just man, with You, for she explained: “I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of Him.”

Lord, I most willingly agree to suffer because of You, in a dream, if I can catch a glimpse, if not of Your face, at least of Your shadow and the trace of Your steps. We dream of what we desire, of what we love. Visit my dreams and penetrate them. You often showed Yourself to Your martyrs in the nights which preceded their witness.

I do not beg for the graces which were granted to them and of which I am so unworthy. Oh, that I might sometimes, I do not say “see” You, but, in a vague, though not uncertain way, “feel” Your Presence!

Perhaps tonight my soul will be asked of me. But I commend it to You before going to sleep. My body sleeps, but my soul is awake in you. As the Sulamitess says: “I sleep, and my heart watcheth.” If I fall asleep uniting my soul to Yours, casting myself entirely upon You, I shall not be afraid when the cry is heard: “Behold the Bridegroom cometh. Go ye forth to meet Him.” I shall get up with joy, saying: “My Saviour, how I have waited for You!”

Yet it seems that this night will not be my last and that still another day will be granted to me, so that I might adhere more closely to You.

Already the night which was black is becoming gray. The day will soon dawn. Do I not hear You coming? Is that not the sound of Your steps?

Is that not Your voice, still afar off? It is “the voice of my Beloved. Behold He cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills.” O Jesus, come to me in the new day!

It Is You I desire

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:52:10 EST

nourishment of the soul

Chapter XII
The bread which we break
We have eaten and drunk in Thy presence. Luke 13, 26.

Normally no day passes without our taking some nourishment. In this day which I am trying to spend with You, Master, I must also put all nourishment, both of soul and body, into relationship with Your person.

The act of taking food is perhaps, of all the acts which were Yours and which remain ours, the most complex and mysterious. The bread which we break and the cup which we drink are both realities and signs to an exceptional degree.

You, O Lord, have chosen these humble, necessary elements of daily life in order to make of them the supports and instruments of Your Presence, with a grace which confers on them a character that is unique among all the elements of matter.

Your disciples are called to eat and drink with You and through You. They are even called to eat and drink You. Food, for them, admits of very distinct and yet connected aspects. There are meals of each day when Your goodness and blessing demand our thanksgiving.

There is the generous gift which must be bestowed on those who have no bread. At another level, there is the participation in Your Last Supper, in the sacrifice of Your Body and Blood. There is the invisible and permanent Presence and Jesus’ efficacious power, the Bread of Life which, independently of every established form, serves as food for souls.

We must not confuse these aspects of our food. And yet we must be aware of their connection and what, in each of them, comes from You.

If we are unaware of these bonds between what is the most humble and what is the most excellent, if we admit separations and cuts between the “eucharists” which, diversely but really, make us communicate with Your Presence, we manifest in this way our lack of understanding of the “breaking of bread,” such as You conceived and willed it and as You practiced it.

To ourselves then is applied what the Gospel says of the disciples after the episode of the multiplication of the five loaves and two fishes: “For they understood not concerning the loaves.”

A man sits down at the table. He arranges a tasty and expensive menu. He gives no thought to those who, outside, are hungry. A rich man, a man filling an important post, takes part in the gathering of the faithful, in the mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ. He receives the sacrament.

Beside him (and the Lord’s Supper is one of the rare occasions when such a juxtaposition is possible), the same food of life is given to a poor man who perhaps does not know how he will eat today or tomorrow and who will leave the Church with the feeling of complete solitude.

The first of these two communicants and many of these who approached the Lord’s communion rail at the same time do not wonder who this poor man is and what his needs are.

Another man will receive Communion, but he will have no idea that this Communion must prolong its effects in the acts of his daily life and that now he cannot act as though he had not received Communion.

Truly, all those present do not understand the “miracle of the loaves.” To them and certainly to me is addressed that statement of Jesus: “Then you shall begin to say: We have eaten and drunk in thy presence . . . And the master of the house shall say to you: I know you not, whence you are.”

There is another statement which is even more formidable: “He that eateth bread with Me shall lift up his heel against Me.”

Behold I am going to take one of my daily meals. Is that a “profane” act, a purely human act? Certainly not. At that precise moment I sit down in the desert place, with the five thousand men whom you bade sit down “by companies upon the green grass.”

I see You taking the loaves and fishes. With You, I look up to heaven, giving thanks to Your Father, to our Father. And I give thanks to You who offer me food, whatever it might be. Not only do I eat in your Presence, but I eat with You. And I also go into that house at Emmaus where You entered to “remain” with Your two disciples.

I am now seated at table with them, with You: “Whilst He was at table with them, He took bread . . .” Lord, grant that I may never take my place at a meal without adoring Your invisible Presence in it, which is at one and the same time that of the host who receives me and that of the host whom I receive.

May Your Presence give inspiration and the tone to all my meals! (The tone? – Oh! preserve me from that table-talk which wounds and stifles the spirit!)

Lord, You could have had manna, more delicious than all earthly food, sent down from heaven to those five thousand men whose hunger You miraculously satisfied.

You could have obtained that bread which You gave them from the flower of the purest wheat. But, in order to perform the miracle, You chose the most simple, the most common matter: “five barley loaves.”

Lord, I do not ask You to lift me up to extraordinary feats of asceticism. I do not seek to regulate my diet in a meticulous way. But I ask You for at least this: every time I have the possibility of choosing, make me choose as my nourishment the poorest and simplest, so that I might eat as You did at Nazareth, as You ate with Your disciples.

Lord Jesus, You fed the five thousand men because You “had compassion on them.” You gave the loaves to Your disciples to distribute to the exhausted multitude.

In the same spirit, You said to us: “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind.” Have we invited the poor to our meals? If, for independent motives of my will, I could neither invite them nor give them some kind of help (and help is of value only when it really “costs” in some way or another), at least make my thoughts go out to the poor and sick at every meal.

May they implore Your compassion! May they be united to Your compassion! to that compassion which You felt when You multiplied the loaves.

You wanted every feature of the miracle of the loaves to announce and prefigure Your Last Supper.

On these two occasions, You gave thanks, You broke bread and You gave it. O Lord, establish a bond between each one of my “ordinary meals” and the “extraordinary” Supper of the upper room.

I sit down at the table, and I remember the Gospel verse: “When the hour was come, He sat down: and the twelve apostles with Him.” I hear Your other statement too: “With desire I have desired to eat this Pasch with You.”

The episodes of the mystery are living again in the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine, through which You signified and communicated to men your redeeming death. Jesus, may I never get up from the table without secretly recalling the Passion of my Saviour!

Your Church, O Lord, offers us, at its altar rails, a share in the sacrifice of the Cross. Until now I have not mentioned Your Cross. I do not want to separate the mystery of Golgotha from the mystery of the Last Supper.

May each participation in the Eucharist bring me still more than Your real Presence, more than an assurance of pardon! Without disturbing essences, may it make me become the One whom I receive!

Visibly I receive a broken piece of bread. “Jesus took bread . . .and broke it.” Invisibly I become united to the broken and crucified body of my God. Lord destroy the existence of concupiscence and pride in me. O blessed suicide!

The participation in the immolated body of the Saviour plunges a sword into the very depths of my being. The one I was dies. But this death is a new birth, the birth of the one I would like to be and which Jesus wants me to be. And this death makes me enter into the Resurrection of the Christ of glory.

“He gave it to His disciples . . .” I receive, under the species of bread which is given, the body which Jesus gives so that we might eat it. I receive blood which is poured forth for men. Lord, in receiving the “gift,” I “give” myself. Make of my life henceforth a life which is given.

O Jesus, it is not enough for me to be in You, broken and given. I must be distributed and shared. “Jesus took the loaves . . . He distributed to them that were set down.”

Likewise: “And having taken the chalice, He gave thanks and said: Take and divide it among you.” In the multiplication of loaves as in the upper room, O Lord, You want Your gift to be divided. That is to say, there is no room in Your gift for any exclusivism. I do not belong – any more than You do – only to certain ones.

It is possible for me to say to every man and woman (safeguarding the sovereign right of my God): “You are mine. You belong to me. You are for me. You are my servant.” And, to each one, it is my mission to communicate this bread which I have taken. “Take and divide it among you,” “it” being not only the Eucharistic presence and grace but also every presence and every grace received, and finally myself.

“The bread of God is that which cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world . . . I am the bread of life. He that cometh to Me shall not hunger: and he that believeth in Me shall never thirst.”

The bread of our daily meals, the bread which Jesus multiplied for the crowd, the bread which He gave to His disciples the night before His death, and which His Eucharist perpetuates: all these aspects of the bread which we break are unified and surpassed in the Person who is the eternal and invisible bread of life.

For our earthly meals do not last, and our Eucharists themselves will end, but You, O Jesus, the living bread come down from heaven, remain forever. And at each instant of our existence here below as in the future life, it is possible to be fed invisibly by You.

Now already, I ask you if I might taste You without end. Drive my thoughts and emotions into captivity; banish from me not only what is against You, but what is not You.

Be the one and continual food of my soul, across all the visible aspects of the bread which we break every day, several times a day. You who stand at the door and knock, come in. “If any man . . . open to Me the door, I will come in to him and sup with him: and he with Me.”

It is You whom I desire, saying with your disciples: “Lord, give us always this bread.”

Passing by

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:18:23 EST

was passing by

Chapter XI
In the highways and byways

A certain blind man sat by the wayside, begging. And when he heard the multitude passing by, he asked what this meant. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. Luke 18, 35-37.

There are some men and women who have the privilege of living a cloistered life, a life hidden in You, O Lord. And only those who do not know can consider such a life as useless or inhuman.

But most men and woman are called to “go out,” to come in contact with the “outside.” This day which I should like to spend with You, O Jesus, requires comings and goings in what they call the “world.”

This contact with the outside world can, and indeed must, be a contact with You, a divine meeting as real as the one which I succeed in obtaining in an oratory, in a monk’s cell, or in a bedroom.

To the question asked by the blind man who was begging in the outskirts of Jericho, they answered that “Jesus of Nazareth was passing by.”

Every time I go out, the experience should be that of the passage of Jesus. And that in a twofold way. Wherever others pass by, I should feel, O Lord, that it is You who are passing by. Wherever I Pass by, I should be such that others sense that it is You who are passing by.

“Thou has taught in our streets.” Lord, You put these words on the lips of many who “seek to enter and shall not be able.”

They are related in Your preaching in the cities and small towns of Palestine. But, Lord, are You still present in our streets? Yes, Master, You are still preaching today amidst the multitude. “After that He appeared in another shape.” It is only a question of recognizing that, in that shape, in so many other shapes, it is still, it is always, Jesus of Nazareth who passes by.

Why go out of the house? To meet Jesus. To give Jesus. To receive Jesus. By means of men and woman who cross my path and who will be, consciously or not, either receivers or givers of Christ.

I will go out into the street. I walk, and behold, O Lord, You are walking beside me.

Or rather You are walking in front of me and I follow You, as Your disciples followed You.

You remain invisible to the eyes of my body, but the eyes of my faith perceive Your Presence. It seems to me to advance in the light. I experience joy and strength at feeling that You are there, very near.

I know where I am going and I have the impression that it is You who are leading me. You speak to me I answer You. Or often both of us go on in silence; and speech at this moment is useless because what flows from Your heart fills up my heart.

We are not alone. In this street there are men and women; there is all the activity of modern life. I pass these beings in whom you are. I do not know them and yet I recognize them. It is You whom I recognize in them.

The child Elizabeth bore in her womb leapt for joy at the coming of Mary who herself was invisibly bearing Jesus. “What is of God” in every being, leaps when it feels “what is of God” in another being.

And the man who has fallen the lowest is not without the divine spark. That man or woman whom I meet probably does not know that You are with them and in them (without the difference between the Creator and His creature ever being obliterated).

But I adore You in them, O Saviour, You who are passing by at this very moment on our roads. Whether with me and in me, or with them and in them, it is Jesus of Nazareth who is passing by.

I get into a train or a bus. Everyone there appears to be stranger or indifferent to me. Lord, knock down this wall of separation.

Let me give them this Presence which is with me. Allow me to receive this Presence of which they too are the bearers. How do we establish rapport?

Sometimes a word will be the instrument of contact. It is not the apparent contents of the words which matter then. It is their hidden contents, the intention, the intonation, the facial expression, the smile, the secret fervor of the soul.

If I speak to these other people, no matter what I say to them, it is You whom I address. If they speak to me, no matter what they say to me, it is You whom I hear.

It is You who are found beyond the spoken word, often in spite of this word. Most of the time these strangers and I will never speak to each other. A glance can then establish the contact, if this glance is sincere, pure and deep.

Then that glance, which I either receive or direct, takes possession of my being or of the being I should like to approach. If the glance is lacking, the movement of the Spirit in us produces the same effect. We communicate in You. We participate in Jesus.

There are beings through whom I see You pass as through a transparent being. I remember that unknown woman whose face expressed such peace, such a radiant transfiguration, that I could not prevent myself from going toward her and saying to her: “Where does that peace which you seem to possess come from?” She answered me: “It is the joy of the Gospel.” It was then that I felt You passing by . . .

But those others from whom no radiance seems to emanate, and those suffering faces, the hardened and bitter faces, the troubled faces choked with sensuality . . . it is especially on these faces that I silently call for Your blessing, Your help and Your Presence.

And also upon little children whose faces reflect Your clarity. On the other hand, I sense You in them as the guest whom they love or as the prisoner whom they ill-treat, and I call to myself, I draw to myself that other aspect of Your Presence which is manifested in them. O wonderful exchange through which – without our hearing You – “You teach in our streets!”

And it is also in the streets of Your country that man’s grief was laid at Your feet. “They began to carry about in beds those that were sick, where they heard He was.

And whithersoever He entered, into towns or into villages or cities, they laid the sick in the streets and besought Him that they might touch but the hem of His garment.”

Lord, You want me to bring You the dying, the sick, unbelievers and sinners, the afflicted and the desolate, all those who are in special need of Your help. I cannot do so in a material way. That becomes possible in me, in my thoughts and prayers.

Lord, I measure with sadness how much my prayers of intercession are superficial, and I shall even say unreal. I mention rapidly a few names and this is what I call “interceding,” “praying for . . .!”

To pray for another is “carrying” him to You, carrying him on my shoulders or in my arms, by means of unremitting attention and an unflinching sympathy. “Do not try to carry me if you cannot carry me right to the end,” a sinful man said to me one day (and I did not know how to carry him right to the end).

Praying for another is putting him in Your Presence. To do that, first of all, I must myself draw near You until I feel “Jesus passing by.” Praying for another is establishing personal contact – touching him from the hem of the garment – between You and the one in question.

Were it only in my soul, it is a question of discovering the unique and intimate rapport, the junction-point which makes You say to each one “No one is dearer to Me than you,” or at least: “You are dear to Me in a way which is different from any other man.” Mary and Martha said to You: “He whom Thou lovest is sick.”

By an intuition of grace, I must perceive in what sense I can consider each one as “the one whom Thou lovest,” with a love which is not met again anywhere else.

And it is this love, unique in every case, responding in each case to a unique need, of which I must make the point of departure and the base of operations for all intercession that does not come about without effort.

Lord, may none of my “goings out” into the street – or, if I don’t go out physically, may no exodus of my thoughts to the world around me – be accomplished without my “really” bringing to You and placing at Your feet all the sufferings and infirmities of body and soul which my physical senses or my mind will have come upon!

I go out not only “in the streets,” in the places where I come upon men. I also go into the fields and gardens. No day passes without my having some direct contact with “nature.” I find You also in the fields.

“It came to pass again, as the Lord walked through the corn fields . . .” Every time I walk through the fields, I see You clearing a way with Your disciples through the ears of corn.

And I follow You . . . You said to the Eleven: “Go ye into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature.”

The Greek work ktisis goes beyond the meaning of “rational creature”: it evokes the general idea of “creation,” of all that has been created. I have no doubt that when You passed through the corn fields, You evangelized nature.

How so? By giving their meaning to the inarticulate aspirations of the plants and animals, of the earth and other worlds. Your Apostle Paul in particular knew how to explain the sighs and groans of this nature which sin has subjected to the Prince of this world and which awaits deliverance. You yourself have expressed by preference the reflection of the beauty and goodness of the Father in the work of His hands.

At those times when the awareness of Your Presence is not granted to me, I see especially in nature, as Paul did, a slavery and a waiting. But when I pass “through the corn” with You, I also announce with You the good news to all creation.

I proclaim to creation, in song rather than in speech, that at this very moment it is meeting that Jesus toward whom it tends with all its strength and who crowns its whole being. For creation is only an immense parable of the kingdom of God.

Lord, I do not know how to speak as I should to men and to nature. In the streets as well as in the fields, I am, if not deaf and dumb, then at least hard of hearing and a stammerer.

I don’t know how to hear or what to say. Put Your hand upon me as You did on the sick man of the Decapolis.
Put Your fingers in my ears.
Touch my tongue with Your saliva.
Pronounce Your Ephpheta, “which is, be thou opened.”
Grant that not only my ears may hear, not only that my tongue may be loosed, but that my heart and my whole being may be opened to Your Spirit and to men, so that Jesus of Nazareth may pass among us, pass from one to the other and be communicated to each one by each one.

Your saliva touched a human tongue. This saliva which was on Your tongue loosed another tongue. A divine and transforming contact. An extraordinary contact.

Yet by what humble means – a little saliva! When Jesus of Nazareth passes, when He loosens my ears and my tongue, I do not see Him as the glorious Messias, as the triumphant risen Saviour. He uses only the poorest means.

The multitude calls Him who is passing by Jesus “of Nazareth,” and this designation of His origin evokes the years of His hidden and laborious life. Later You will show Yourself as the King of glory.

Now, in the streets and through the fields I shall recognize You and shall be able to follow You only if I seek You in Your true place – in the last place.

Already very often Jesus of Nazareth has passed in my life. Oh that He might never cease to pass! Above all in my hours of cowardice and weakness, pass, Jesus, pass again!

Wherever Your Presence is not generally noticed, grant that I may feel it and announce to others that it is You who are there.

When my soul leaves the earth, may the luminous vision come again to me and one last time may I hear – as the best of the good news – the words of the Gospel: “that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.”

Then with the blind man from Jericho I shall cry out: “Jesus, have mercy on me.” And the blind man saw You.

End of Fiscal Year 2010

(Meg Funk) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:30:14 EST

Beech Grove Benedictines

2010

Many institutions use the June 30th as end of year. Here at Our Lady of Grace it is our official end of the budget year.

I am grateful for all who have contributed to my work this year. Was full of travel and many, many conversations, shared silence and rituals.

May the peace of Christ be yours,
Sister Meg

Outstretched hand

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:28:37 EST

a hand of grace

Chapter X
The outstretched hand
And immediately Jesus stretching forth His hand took hold of him. Matthew 14, 31.

Lord Jesus, physical attitudes are not unimportant for our contemplation. Each one of Your corporeal acts described by the Gospels has a meaning according to the Spirit. Can Your customary actions inspire mine?

In point of fact, if I exclude Your Passion, which remains unique, the actions which you performed are no different from those of most men. Your actions have been those which we perform daily, hourly.

Your attitudes and ours have been the same, insofar as they involved identical, exterior movements. And that, even when You were performing a miracle. A difference does not exist however. It consists in the disposition of soul whence the actions proceed.

Did I say “Your actions can inspire mine?” It is not a question of continually wondering: “What action would Jesus perform?”

The question is not to imagine extraordinary actions which I would attribute to You in my own circumstances, but rather to ask myself in what spirit You accomplished the actions which I am in the process of performing or which I am going to have to perform.

There is not one of my attitudes which I cannot render new and inspired – but, of course, God alone truly inspires – if I try to make them conform with Yours or, rather, allow You to give them a share in Your own.

Your silence, for example.

* Just as silence arising from sloth, cowardice, anger, wrath, spite, is sterile and bad, so also silence is sacred which constitutes the entrance into Your own silence, - Your silence with the Father, Your silence before Pilate (“But Jesus gave him no answer”), Your silence of recollection and maturation which prepares the word and makes it fruitful.

Another very simple example:
* Your people were accustomed to pray standing. Only once does the Gospel show You kneeling in prayer. It was the time of Your agony in the garden. So often my kneeling seems routine and meaningless! (And how different from those impassioned prostrations which Peter, Mary Magdalen and several sick people made before You!) O Lord, inspire my genuflections. Make of each of them not only a prostration before you but a union with Your own genuflection before the Father at Gethsemani.

There is one of my attitudes, and one of the most frequent, which I should like particularly to incorporate with the attitude which corresponded to it in Your earthly life. It is what I shall call the attitude of the outstretched hand.

The statement from the Gospel which I wrote down at the beginning of this meditation shows You stretching forth Your hand and taking hold of Peter, at the very moment when he was sinking in the sea.

Very often Your hand makes a saving gesture, the meaning of which was expressed by Your words. You “took by the hand” the daughter of the synagogue leader who had just died, and she arose.

You “took by the hand” a blind man, and You put Your hand on his eyes, and he was cured.

You “put Your fingers” into the ears of a sick man and You “touched his tongue” and he too was cured.

At the time of Your Ascension, You blessed Your disciples “lifting up” Your hands.

Your custom was to lay Your hands on the sick and on little children.

And in this way the contact of Your body with the bodies of men brought to these human bodies deliverance and strength.

The gesture of holding out my hand to another person or of taking in my own the hand which is held out, or of shaking the hand which mine meets, is one which happens to me very often. It is one of the most ancient gestures which human tradition has handed down to us, and it possesses a precious value as a sign of peace and confidence. This is the “small change” of friendship.

But handshaking is too often degraded. It has become a sort of commonplace rite, a conventional form of politeness in which every real pledge of the person is lacking.

The sign of a vague welcome . . . In certain cases, this gesture even brings to the other person an evil suggestion or invitation. How far we are here, O my Saviour, from Your generous, helpful hand, from that hand which cures and strengthens!

In the Gospels we see You stretch it forth to those who are suffering or who have sinned.

Lord, from now on I consecrate to You this gesture of the outstretched or accepted hand whenever it involves me personally.

Of what was a sign of politeness, make every time a sign of charity, one of Your saving acts. Make of it, each time, a participation in the analogous gestures of Your life among us.

In the Gospel episode about Peter being saved from the water, I see You first of all “stretching forth Your hand” and then taking hold of Peter.

Every time I offer my hand to someone, may it be You Yourself who stretches forth Your hand toward him or her! When my hand clasps another’s let it be You who takes hold of it so as to save it in its secret trials, to make it strong, to bring it to You!

And by the way of reciprocation, each time I accept a hand stretched forth, grant that it may be Your own hand that I clasp with faith and love. By means of the hand which takes hold of mine, take hold of me, make me Yours. May I then hear Your voice which says to me: “Put Me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm.”

Only a very pure, human hand, made supple and pliant to the movements of Your Spirit, could, if I may venture to say so, be of service to You. A hand which has become foolish, inert and dead could not transmit or receive Your grace.

One day, You met in a synagogue a man who had a withered hand. You told him to stand up and stretch forth his hand. “And he stretched it forth. And his hand was restored unto him.”

Lord, my selfish passions have withered my hand. I stand before You, and I present it to You. Make it sound. Make it new and sensitive to Your action, and submissive.

If it is clasped by another hand, whatever the one to whom this hand belongs may be, say to me at that moment: “I place My hand upon you so that you may be Mine.” If I clasp another hand, say to me: “I place My hand upon this other, for behold from your hand I have made Mine.”

The Parable of Everyday signs

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:27:12 EST

Everyday parables

Chapter IX
Explanation of the parable
And when He was come into the house from the multitude, His disciples asked Him the parable. Mark 7, 17.

Master, You speak to us in two ways. You speak to us in the midst of the community of those who believe in You.

You speak to us in and through Your Church to whom You have entrusted the dispensation of Your Gospel.

I certainly do not pretend to have access to any secret teaching. I am Your listener, among Your most humble listeners. The Gospel which is presented to all is the only Gospel which appeals to me.

I know of no other Gospel than the one which was announce to Peter, James, John and the others of the company of the Twelve, and to the whole throng which followed You. Let me find a place in that throng and sit down at Your feet, with and as “the man out of whom the devils were departed sitting at His feet.”

Yet, You speak, O Master, in still another way. Allow me, once the crowd has dispersed, to go “into the house,” in peace and solitude, and to question You about what has been said.

For You have also spoken in this manner. Your disciples questioned You about Your parables. What You answered them added nothing to the message of the parable, but it helped them to “understand,” to go more deeply into the message, and above all to apply it to their own present condition.

Master, it was too late when I began to appreciate the wealth contained in Your parables. I grew so accustomed to them, and they were so simple, so popular, that I did not know how to see in them a complete treatise of things about Your kingdom and of life according to Your Spirit.

When I read them, I did not know how to make them coincide with Your personal experience of these episodes (for You had seen all that since You were a child):
* the sower who cast his seed,
* and the woman who swept her room in order to recover the lost drachma,
* and the housekeeper who mixed the leaven with the dough,
*and the vinedressers hired for the day,
* and so many other images drawn from everyday life.

Today I should like to reread the parables by acquiring a little of the human “vision” through which You Yourself saw these things. And then, in the past, I did not feel clearly that behind the universal truths which were veiled by these similitudes, each parable constituted a “sign,” the sign of a given situation, of a concrete, living, actual situation implicating Your very own person and that of every listener.

Master, You no longer speak to us today in parables. Or rather the parables that You put before us are no longer verbal parables, spoken or written. They are no longer texts which are fixed once and for all, as the parables of Your Gospel.

They are “existential” parables, no longer expressed by words, but by facts and events. The “sign” is replacing the old parable, because You continue to speak to us by means of signs which are constantly changing.

I call “signs” everything that happens to me in a visible way during the course of the day. Each day is woven together with episodes, slight or serious happenings, meetings, contradictions, difficulties, successes, and conversations – all of which are as so many “signs.”

For in each of these situations I find Your Presence and Your will concerning the orientation of my life. If my eyes were opened enough, I would notice, behind material events, the “sign” which You are addressing to me.

“Signs” therefore are Your parables of today. It is a matter of understanding the meaning of the sign, just as in Galilee and in Judea it was a question of understanding the meaning of the parables.

I now see the confusing, reverse side of the tapestry. It remains for me to see the right side, the real design, namely the accumulation of the graces and acts of salvation of which my days are full.

Seeing that would also mean awakening to a clearer consciousness of the ministry which the angels and saints exercise before men, promoting Your intentions, Your works with love.

Each sign is a messenger repeating to me Martha’s words to Mary: “The Master is come and calleth for thee.” And “when Mary therefore was come where Jesus was, seeing Him, she fell down at His feet.”

Every human situation is, at a given moment, the “right side” where Jesus is to be found. As soon as I have understood the situation which each one of Your signs expresses, I want to overtake this situation in a conscious way, run toward You, find You in it and cast myself at Your feet.

The Pharisees and Saducees approached You in order to put You to the test. they asked You to show them a “sign,” namely a miracle, since the Greek word has these two meanings.

(The depth of this double meaning is: each one of Your miracles, even before it is a wonderful event, is a natural sign.)

You answered them that every evening, according to the bright red or overcast sky, they could predict that the morning would be sunny or stormy. And You concluded: “You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?”

Master, teach me to discern the “signs of the times,” concerning my own existence. Teach me how to interpret the parables of my life.

Show me Your divine interventions and goodness. Why, for example was I not run over by that automobile which brushed against me today? For what ends have You again granted me a delay?

In the evening of each day I should like to draw close to you “in the house,” in a personal conversation, and hear from Your mouth what was the deep meaning of the events which befell me since morning. I am capable of interpreting myself the parables and signs of my life.

Let my eyes behold You, through the light veil which envelops You! Master, explain the parable to me.

Rest

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 06:13:41 EST

Sabbath

Chapter VIII
In Your rest

Come apart . . . and rest a little. Mark 6, 31.
I should like to meet You, O Lord, just as much in my rest as in my day’s work. But is it my rest? No, it would be more accurate, more in keeping with the intention and with the general line of these thoughts to say: in Your rest.

Master, in Your Gospel, I scarcely find any words which could refer to what we would call rest, recreation or vacation.

You seem to ask a constant attention of Your disciples, an almost continuous labor.

It is with a sort of ironical trembling that You denounce rest which is taken at an unsuitable time – at a time which is least fitting, as was the case when Your disciples fell asleep in the garden of Olives: “Sleep ye now and take your rest. Behold the hour is at hand: and the Son of Man shall be betrayed into the hands of sinners.” O Lord, how often I have remained idle, when You had need of me at Your side . . .

And yet, once, only once does the Gospel show You inviting Your apostles to rest. They have returned from a mission and they gave You an account of what they had done.

Now there is so much hustling and bustling around them that they do not even have time to eat. Then You say to them: “Come apart into a desert place and rest a little.”

What could be, what should be the disciple’s rest – my rest? Our rest, like all other actions, must find its basis, its transfiguration and its blessing in Your own acts. Our rest must be a participation in Your rest.

What then was the nature of Your rest?
In all things, O Lord, You imitate the Father. If we look for what could be Your rest, we must ask ourselves: Is there such a thing as God’s rest? In what does it consist?

Now Scripture describes for us this rest which is God’s. “And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good . . . And on the seventh day God ended His work which he had made: and He rested on the seventh day . . .

And He blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because in it He had rested from all His work.”
This text indicates very clearly what God’s rest is, what the Son of God’s rest is and the Son of Man’s, and also on what conditions God blessed the rest of His people. “For he that is entered into his rest, the same also hath rested from his works, as God did from his. Let us hasten therefore to enter into that rest.”

The Creator’s rest is bound up with the awareness that His work is now completed and done according to his will. God rests because all has been done and done well.

You, O Lord, likewise had the right to take rest because You saw that Your work had been accomplished and was successful. Through You salvation came to souls, in the world.

Your disciples also had the right to take rest. For they had just finished their first mission. They had preached repentance, they had driven out demons and cured the sick. They had come back joyfully. You showed Your appreciation for their work by saying to them: “I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven.”

Just as the Creator and You Yourself, they too could take rest by seeing that their work was good.
But I, Lord? I, whose life is sin? If I cast a glance on what I have done since my birth, can I continue to exist in Your Presence?

You called me to walk with You, but even though my existence has been traversed by flashes of Your pardon and tenderness, has it been anything but a long infidelity?

It seems to me I read my own condemnation in the statement with which You first inspired the psalmist, and which another sacred writer then repeated: “And I said: they always err in heart. And they have not known My ways . . . As I have sworn in My wrath: If they shall enter into My rest.”
Your rest seems then to be forbidden to me, just as the garden of Eden was closed to Adam and Eve after the fall. I bow down before You and I humbly confess: “Lord, I am not worthy to enter into Your rest.”

And yet if I continue reading the same sacred author, I read: “Seeing then it remaineth that some are to enter into it, and they to whom it was first preached did not enter because of unbelief: Again He limiteth a certain day saying . . . Today . . .”

This day can become “today,” for me, right now. If, yesterday, my unbelief (manifested in actions) prevented me from entering into Your rest, today, rejecting what I was yesterday, coming to You once more, and offering myself once again to Your yoke, I shall find this rest of which You speak: “Come to me . . . Take up My yoke upon you . . . and you shall find rest to your souls.”

Lord, if my work has been bad or worthless, I can at least participate in the Creator’s rest, in the Saviour’s rest, by seeing how good, how very good, Their work has been. “And singing the canticle of Moses . . . and the canticle of the Lamb, saying: Great and wonderful are Thy works, O Lord.”
Alas! is this the way I spend my hours of rest, my days of rest and the days which are especially consecrated to You? What do I do with them? Oh, my wretched leisure time . . . !

Lord, the problems of the sanctification of leisure time is solved close beside You and by You alone. My rest will sing, If You Yourself are my rest. I shall meet You in my rest, if I enter into Your rest. You are the fullness and the joy of the seventh day.

Increase my gratitude so that I might make of all rest, of all recreation, of all vacation time an entrance into the rest of the Creator who has formed me and conserves me, an entrance into the rest of the Lamb who saves me and forgives me. In them I shall find the greatest rest, because Their work of goodness has been of the greatest.

Master, make my rest a participation in that rest which You wanted to take with Your apostles on the shore of the lake. “For we, who have believed, shall enter into rest; as He said.”

Ministry audit

(Meg Funk) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:24:36 EST

Change ourselves

Twelve Practices that guide us in ministry:

1. We must strive to be free from afflictions that diminish our effectiveness. Our right effort is to change ourselves. This will change others.

2. We must guard against vainglory and ascribe all good done to the glory of God and not to oneself. We must refrain from daydreaming, making ourselves the hero, the object of glory.

We must speak truth without embellishment or boasting. We must check our motivations about the work and refrain from seeking self-gain, promotions, higher callings, more recognition, or inflated standing among peers or superiors.

3. We are to accept our limitations without dejection. Limits prompt us to ask for help and to try again with God’s mercy. We must refrain from thoughts of “unworthiness” or down thoughts.

They are actually a form of pride because you really think you are better than you are. Therefore, we must refrain from self-talk that puts others down or up. Humility is truth.

4. Our call requires us to submit in obedience to the authorizing officials of the church or the institution that designates where, when, and with whom we are to be of service.

5. The heart of the work is to serve selflessly, wholeheartedly, not counting the cost and without seeking results. We must replace self with faith.

6. To do this we accept the grace of the moment and facilitate the self-determination of others. We put others’ good ahead of our own. We sacrifice. If there are side effects to this sacrifice we surrender the resentment that may rise when our needs are not met.

7. When it’s time to move on, we do. Though usually in ministry the work is never done, often our little part of it is completed. We must remember that our ministry is an appointment. So there is a time for “dis” appointment as well.

Termination of services is to be expected when the authorizer matches the needs of the community with the gifts of the minister. We must respect the gifts of others and pray for those with whom we differ.

8. We wisely refrain from using any form of domination or oppression which distances us as minister from the needs of those being served. Regularly we must check our use of entitlements, of time, dress, gait, and patterns of communication. We strive to be attentive listeners, to be in service to the other and not to the self.

9. We accept no gifts and give no gifts in exchange for spiritual work. This sets up too many opportunities for ulterior motives. If we are a “professional,” the institution must provide the exchange, not the individual “customer.” Ministry is a delicate work that can ill afford to appropriate risky business practices.

10. There is however, a return to the minister from the “flock.” We participate in ministry in such a way that we ennoble others. In that way, we receive the others’ gifts intended by the Holy Spirit for our salvation.

11. We accept mistakes we make as part of everyday life. We forgive, forget, and move on. We are not surprised at our weaknesses.

This awareness makes us more reliant on God rather than ourselves.

12. Finally, we hold in prayer each and very one we serve. Sometimes this takes the form of praying literally in the stead of the person who can not pray at his or her time of need.

Tools Matter, Meg Funk,OSB
Social Tools-Ministry-Pg. 88-89

Daily Work

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:52:14 EST

same call everyday

Chapter VII
The laborers in the vineyard
Son, go work today in my vineyard. Matthew 21, 28.

Lord, by Your own life and in Your own life You have sanctified work and fatigue, effort and the result of work.

One could see in work the perfection of man or the meeting of man and nature. But for Your disciple, it is from You, from Your example that daily work receives its meaning.

In the old dispensation work found a sacred place in virtue of the Creator’s word to Adam: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”

But our daily work is henceforth blessed in You because it is a participation in the physical pain which You assumed on earth and in the continual, eternal work which You pursued. For You said: “My Father worketh until now; and I work.” And it was in terms of work that You spoke of Your mission as Redeemer: “I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.”

Several times in Your parables You compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the vineyard to which the father of a family sent workers – those whom he hires at daybreak, and those whom he hires at the third, the sixth and the ninth hours and even at the eleventh hour.

A father of a family sends his two sons into the vineyard. One answers his father’s order: “I go, Sir!,” but he does not go. The other son replies: “I will not,” but later on he goes. There are also the wicked vinedressers who beat a father’s servant, kill another, stone another and still others they ill-treat in like manner, and finally they kill the rightful heir, his very own son.

Thus is symbolically expressed the relationship between the work which men do and the history of salvation. In our human work, in the work of our hands or of our spirit, we receive God’s call. We answer it either by a sign of adherence or of refusal. We obey at once or with delay.

We welcome or we ill-treat the Father’s representatives. We kill the Son Himself or we receive Him with love. It is in the vineyard as well as in the temple or at home that we accomplish these things.

When the Gospel speaks of the “vineyard,” a long habit pattern of ideas and language makes us think before all else of apostolic work. But all work, whatever it may be, constitutes this “vineyard” and makes it sterile or fruitful. Every authentic vocation to human work is a consignment to the “vineyard.”

Every profession, from that of a street cleaner to that of a teacher, to the apostle’s ministry, is a service in the vineyard where the servant’s master “gave authority to his servants over every work.”

O Lord, each morning You can send me to many different kinds of works or limit me to doing the same work all the time. You can assign me to undertakings full of new interest or to humble and monotonous occupations.

If I have enough faith and love I shall hear the same call every day: “Son, go work today in My vineyard.” And I know that this vineyard, in its ultimate reality, under whatever form it is presented, is Yourself, upon whom I am grafted: “I am the vine: you are the branches.” During my work it is always You whom I find. My work expresses You in a mysterious way.

Lord, in the first place, You have sanctified manual work. You devoted the greatest part of Your earthly life to it. Already a striking anthropomorphism in the holy Books had attributed to God the manual production of the two tables of the Law. “And made by the work of God.

The writing also of God was graven in the tables.” Of Yourself the crowd said: “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” And again more precisely: “Is not this the carpenter?” You did not “undergo,” You did not accept this work of the workshop as the condition in which it had pleased the Father to place You. But You chose it and willed it and preferred it to every other. During the long years at Nazareth, You worked hard with Your hands.

You gave only a very short time to Your missionary activity. The problems of workers today cannot be stated to Your disciples above all in terms of social status, politics or economy. Their alpha and omega is the person, the example of the God-Man as worker who has divinized all the work of human hands.

O Lord, teach me to love better, and in accordance with Your example, to prefer manual work. Teach me to make of all physical labor a participation in your work at Nazareth. Perhaps the opportunities of fulfilling such work will not often present themselves to me.

At least let this lack of frequency be compensated by the memory of the Lord, by union with the Lord, through respect, through intention and attention, through the charitable desires with which I shall perform these works! Perhaps it (I mean the work itself) would be a mere trifle.

But, were it only a matter of washing or wiping the dishes, or of putting some order into a room, let me be aware that You are working there with me and through me, - for me, namely – for Your brethren and mine! Let me feel as though I were “at Nazareth!”

O Lord, give me the spirit of Nazareth. Make me grow in this humble, silent and laborious atmosphere where You Yourself advanced in age and in wisdom, in stature and in grace “with God and men.” For at Nazareth one can grow and be “adolescent” par excellence. Your apprenticeship as a worker and Your adolescence went together. It is a beautiful thing and quite correct that a statue of the adolescent Jesus should dominate today the little town where You grew up.

O Lord, through manual work, make me “grow up at Nazareth.” In this way I shall enter into that intimacy which was Your family, Your home. I shall feel them as real and present within me.

Your fellow citizens at Nazareth united the memory of Your manual labor and the memory of Your most holy Mother, by calling You “the carpenter, the son of Mary.” By sharing as much as possible in the hidden life of the carpenter – oh! that I might know better, by virtue of humility, the woman You worked so close to, so that I might catch a glimpse of her tenderness and so that Mary might inspire me and whisper to me the only precept she ever gave to men (it was in Cana of Galilee): “Whatsoever He shall say to You, do ye.”

Master, You blessed the work of the spirit as You blessed the work of hands. You compared “every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven” to a father “who bringeth forth out of his treasure new things and old.” And were You not Yourself the perfect scribe who, through the written words of the Book, revealed the living Word sent to men by the Father?

Master, all intellectual work is a part of Your treasure. You learned how to read and count. You used the most common, most elementary forms of human logic applied to the things of everyday life. From all the old truths, You brought new truths – those which are related to the Father. You put all truth in touch with the absolute Truth.

In this way, O Lord, in all work of the mind which I may undertake, show me that the operations of my own intelligence participate in the intellectual operations of Your human nature, and also of Your divine nature. For all my poor reasoning, owing to the fact that it is reasoning, has a share in the incandescent light of the Logos.

So show me that all truth – whether it be religious or mathematical, historical or technical – is Your truth coming from God and going on its way to the knowledge of God. To whatever order my quest belongs, send me the Spirit of whom you said: “But when He, the Spirit of truth is come, He will teach You all truth.” Again you said, O Lord: “The truth shall make you free.”

Make me courageous and free so that I might never wound or suppress the smallest fragment of the truth in order to please somebody.

It came about that You, O Lord, snatched with some violence a new disciple from his usual work. This was Levi – for it was not suitable that one of Your apostles should be a tax collector, when this task implied unjust exactions.

But most often You made use of Your apostles’ daily labor in order to reveal to them, through this work, their specific vocation. It was by living with them the life of fisherman from the lake of Genesareth that You taught Your followers little by little to become “fishers of men.”

It was in speaking to the Galilean farmers about their fields and vineyards that You made them catch sight of what the kingdom of God is.

Teach us then, Master, to examine closely and to discover the divine meaning of our respective professions. Transfigure our work into a service, into a “charism.”

The mason, the plumber, the mechanic probably do not know how (and it is not their fault) to perceive the spiritual signs hidden in the acts of constructing, repairing, combining, adjusting or smelting.

They know very well that, in doing these things for other men, they serve them.

But they do not know that by thus serving men, they share in the activity of the Master who said: “I am in the midst of you, as he that serveth.” They do not know that the One who pronounced this statement was Himself a tekton. This Greek term which the Gospel applies to You goes beyond the narrow meaning of “carpenter” to include also the work of the blacksmith and the builder. You were a worker in the highest degree and You were the most excellent servant.

Still, we do know these things. And so it is the task of us who know to make ourselves “substitutes” for those who know less. It is for us to interpret each profession in regard to Your person. It is our duty to think about and to pray for the particular work of each man so that Your Presence might be expressed in this work.

Master, You wanted to use the instruments of Your disciples’ daily work to make them instruments of the kingdom of God.

One day when You had gone out of the house, You sat down by the sea shore. A great crowd gathered around You. You got into one of the boats. You sat down and from there You taught the multitude that “stood on the shore.” In this way You transformed the fishing boat into a pulpit of truth.

Lord, if I perform for You and with You the manual or intellectual work which You have entrusted to me, then it is that You will begin to make use of my action. Through it You touch souls. You speak to them.

One will probably not notice it. And yet my work will be a way through which Your love will reach those men and women whom You will have chosen and set apart for this hour. Lord, make of my “boat” a place from which You will speak.

Hearing You reading

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:45:39 EST

you write

Chapter VI
He wrote on the ground
But Jesus bowing Himself down wrote with His finger on the ground. John 8, 6.

O Jesus, whatever be the subject matter of each one of my readings – even a scientific or technical text or a purely literary one – it should be “animated” by You. By no matter what detours, it ought to communicate You to me. Or rather, each time I read, I ought to hear You reading.

But what about Your handwriting? Do Your life and Your Gospel have something to teach me about the expression of Your mind by means of written signs?

Only once, O Lord, throughout the Gospels, are You represented in the act of writing. It is during the episode of the woman who was taken in adultery.

I am aware of certain difficulties of a textual nature which the passage has raised. But I see in this page, O Lord, one of the most touching manifestations of Your attitude toward the sinner.

Your refusal to give an opinion, the silence which You oppose to the insidious questions of the scribes and Pharisees, the defiance which You hurled at the accusers: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” and that other word addressed to the guilty woman: “Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more.”

In all that I see Your merciful compassion and the integrity of Your justice shine forth at one and the same time.

Among other aspects of this episode there is a gesture in which I should like now to look for an inspiration. When the scribes interrogate You, they do so not only to accuse the woman but also to put You to the test. You give them no answer, but you stoop down and write with Your finger on the ground. And after pronouncing the sentence relative to the first stone, again You stoop down and write.

What were You writing?

Those for whom each one of these gestures is full of a spiritual meaning, which must be deepened, have wondered about it.

Perhaps Your gesture was intended simply to express indifference or detachment, or perhaps it was a refusal to give any sign of interest in the accusation.

Perhaps it was meant to evoke the memory of the two stone tablets “written with the finger of God,” which Moses had received; and the allusion to the law could become an allusion to all transgression.

Finally, perhaps the signs which Your finger traced on the ground reminded the accusers, in a very pointed way, of this or that personal sin.

When the accusers heard Your word about the first stone, “they went out one by one, beginning at the eldest.” The Gospel establishes no direct rapport between their going out and the sentence which You pronounced. But Your writing on the ground would certainly not be mentioned in two verses if in some way or other it did not have a connection between the accusation and the accusers.

We do not know what You were writing. We shall never know until the last day. Yet there are two things of which we can be certain.

First of all, Your gesture was mysteriously orientated toward the truth. While You were writing, the accusers and the woman herself were at grips with their conscience.

A silent appeal was thus made to their deepest inner “ego.” And then Your gesture was directed toward mercy and justice, with respect to the adulterous woman. What she felt and thought on seeing You write remains unknown to us. But Your gesture was a prelude to their withdrawal of the accusation, then to the pardon, and finally to the warning which was the conclusion of the episode.

“Jesus, bowing Himself down, wrote . . .” And a little further on: “And again stooping down, He wrote . . . .”

The Gospel, O Master, underlines the fact that You stooped down. You did not want to assume the attitude of a judge who, standing or seated, stares at the accused. You tactfully avoided looking at the adulterous woman as long as her accusers were present. It was only after their departure that You rose to Your feet again, and then seeing the woman alone, You spoke to her.

Lord Jesus, I dedicate to You all my writings. I dedicate to You not only my written texts, but the very act of writing. Make this act of my hand always be a participation in Your handwriting on the ground at the time of Your encounter with the adulterous woman.

Whether it be a question of an original work, or of a simple list to copy over again, or still – and above all – letters which make up my ordinary correspondence, grant that I may not write without entering into Your intention.

May whatever I write, O Lord, serve truth. For all truth is Your truth. May what I write (especially if it be a question of a personal letter) help the other party to retire within himself, to see what is true.

May what I write serve Your compassion and Your mercy and always be directed, even very indirectly, toward this end which is goodness.

Every time I write, may I see You writing on the ground! and may I feel in myself what the scribes and Pharisees felt and what the accused woman felt, and in some measure, what You Yourself felt.

Because my condition resembles that of the pharisaic accusers and transgressors and also that of the adulterous woman, but also Your own life which You communicate to men.

Lord, every time I write, make me stoop down as You stooped down while tracing the letters on the ground. May I never enter into a feeling of superiority toward those to whom my written work goes! May I never stand up with a gaze of an accuser or a lover of justice!

Through the mouth of Your Prophet Jeremias, You said: “I will give My law in their bowels and I will write it in their hearts,” O Master, write in my heart, so that all I will ever put on paper may be the tracing of what You have put in me.

While I write, place Your hand on mine and guide it. Make of me an accurate, solid and flexible instrument, through which You will write in hearts.

Reading in a Certain Way

(Monk of the Eastern Church) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 07:37:42 EST

A meeting you prepared

Chapter V
He rose up to read
And He rose up to read. And the book was delivered unto Him. Luke 4, 16-17.

Lord Jesus, if one day slipped away, through my fault, without my opening the Book, that day would be empty of meaning. I would have neglected a meeting with You, a meeting which You have prepared and willed.

Let us consider the Book: that is to say, Your Book, the Word of God which Your prophets, Your evangelists and apostles wrote down and which You entrusted to Your Church.

When a doctor of the law asked You: “What must I do to possess eternal life?,” You referred him to the Book, to the Book by which each one of Your followers should be nourished each day. You said to this doctor: “What is written in the law?” Your will is that I should know, as far as I am able, what Your Scriptures contain.

But behold how immediately after asking the doctor the question: “ What is written in the law?,” You add another question: “How readest thou?” (Greek: pos anaginoskeis; Latin: quomodo legis ). You examine the doctor not only on the objective contents of the Book.

What is more – and above all – You examine him on his personal reception of Your word. One would have expected the question: “What do you read in it?” But no. What is especially important is the way in which the reader understands and “receives” these exalted truths.

Likewise in the Temple when You were seated opposite the treasury You “beheld how the people cast money into it,” and noticed even the two mites of a poor widow. While “many that were rich cast in much,” these two mites were of much greater value in Your eyes than all the other gifts.

You want me to read, but You want me to read in a certain way. That statement of the Gospel whose text I have used in this chapter could lead one to believe that I am going to consider here “my” own reading of the Book.

And certainly this statement would rightly apply to it. “He rose up to read” : at the very moment when I wake up, my first task should be to open the holy Books and to seek You in them. “And the Book of Isaias the prophet was delivered unto Him”: the Church is unceasingly offering the Sacred Scriptures to me – for my attention, for my meditation. I receive the Book from her with faith and respect.

However I shall try to fix my mind not on “my” reading, but rather on “Your” reading of the Book. By seeing You read, by hearing You read, I shall try to learn “how” to read. The roles are reversed. It is now of You that Your servant asks the question: “How readest Thou?”

Master, allow me to live with You one page of the Gospel, together with Your disciples. You come to Nazareth.
It is the Sabbath.
According to Your custom, You enter the synagogue.
I am going in with You.
Scripture, read and commented, constitutes the center of worship in the synagogue.
You intend to read the Book there, Yourself.
Next You wish to explain the Word of God.

It is in the synagogue that You desire to read the Book.
I shall translate the Jewish expression into Christian language.

You entrusted to Your Holy Church, to the community which You called and assembled, the deposit of the inspired Scriptures.

I do not want to read the Word without Your Church or in a way contrary to Your Church.

For the Church of Jesus Christ or – what comes to the same thing – Jesus Christ in His Church is the supreme and infallible interpreter of what was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Yet You expect from me, in the privacy of my room as well as in the “synagogue,” an intensely personal welcome of the Word. The question is not only: What am I going to hear?, but also: How am I going to hear?

“He went into the synagogue . . .” and the Gospel adds: “. . . and He rose up to read.” You rise up and this gesture signifies a spiritual initiative, a will which exists in You concerning the Word of God.

You get up: by this You indicate that You are a reader and an authorized, authentic commentator of this Word, and You offer to communicate it to the faithful.

Master, every time I take up the Bible, make me see You rise up at that very moment, prepared to teach me to “read.”

“And the Book of Isaias the prophet was delivered unto Him. And as He unfolded the Book, He found the place . . .”

The passage from Isaias which St. Luke is going to quote is relative to the Anointed One who will preach the good news to the poor, to the captives, to the oppressed, to the blind. A moving passage, certainly, and remarkably well adapted to the Saviour’s mission.

But what I should like to remember here are these two actions: first, “the Book was delivered unto Him,”; then, :as He unfolded the Book, He found the place.”

Lord Jesus, I deliver the Book to You. Rather than read myself, I want to hear You read. That is to say that, by reading, I renounce every personal preoccupation, every prejudice, and every interpretation which would come only from myself.

I keep silence within me so that Your voice alone may pronounce for me, within me, the Word of God.

Lord, open the Book and find the “place.” In the synagogue the passage to be read was fixed. But, whatever the passage might be, it is written today for me.

Whether I hear Sacred Scripture read in the assembly of the faithful or whether my reading be private, I know that, if it is You who read, there will always be a text, were it only a single sentence, or only a single word – which, at this moment applies to my present state.

I can open the Book at random and I know that if my eyes settle on the first sentence I can read, on the adjacent phrases or those which follow – and if my heart is filled with You – I shall quickly discover the word from which I shall receive a shock or a beneficial stimulus.

This will be the “place,” the place where I shall find You. It will be the countersign, the marching orders which I shall carry with me for the day’s task and by which I shall live while this day goes by. It will be the well-provided word which will guide and strengthen me on my journey.

“And when He had folded the book, He restored it to the minister and sat down.” You finished reading, Master.

Now return the Book, no longer to the servant of the synagogue, but to me, Your poor servant. May I thus receive from Your hand the Book which You have read to me, the Book which we have read together.

Your Scripture will always be more dear and precious to me if Your hand places it in my hand. This handing down (Latin: traditio) will really take place, insofar as I see in each sentence of Scripture a gift which You give me.

You are seated. “And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them . . .” The moment has come, no longer the moment of the solemn reading, but of friendly conversation.

It is not enough, O Lord, that I hear within me Your voice and not mine reading the sacrd text. I should like You to explain this text to me now.

My eyes are fixed on You, on You alone. Speak to me – of Yourself above all. “He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things that were concerning Him.”

Speak to me as You spoke to Your two disciples on the road to Emmaus. May Your Word be for me as much a flame as a light. “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst He spoke in the way and opened to us the Scriptures?”

Speak to me of myself too. Show me how the scriptural Word which I have heard can be applied to the ordinary actions of this day. In the synagogue at Nazareth, after reading, You said to the hearers: “This day is fulfilled this Scripture in Your ears.”

Today, in my simplest steps, I can give a body to the sacred words which I heard and received. I can, if I may venture to say so, bring about this exchange, this barter. If Sacred Scripture were to remain cut off from my work, my rest, my meals and my conversation, what good would this be to me?

When the two disciples to whom You had explained the Scriptures on the road were near the town toward which they were heading, you seemed to want to go further. But they detained You saying: “Stay with us.” In like manner, Lord, do not withdraw from me after reading and explaining the Word.

Do not send me off alone to my daily tasks. Do not allow Your Word to be in my life as a sanctuary isolated from the house and street by a grill. In everything I am about to do, Lord, stay with me.

The Book which I have presented to You and which You returned to me, the Book which You have read and explained is the inspired Book whose deposit is in the hands of Your Church.

But make me, O Lord, consider all my readings in the light of that Nazareth episode: Jesus reading in the synagogue. Make me strong enough to read only the books which I can “present” to You.

You cannot open and read “to me” a bad book or even a worthless book. I should like to seek You and find You in all my readings.

Many books in which You are not mentioned can nevertheless speak to me about You. I present to You such books and those too which are sincerely dedicated to You, so that You may open them, read them Yourself to me, and enlighten them with Your light.

Inside the Psalms

(Maureen McCabe, OCSO) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:05:40 EST

inside psalms

Book Review:

Maureen McCabe, OCSO Inside the Psalms, Reflections for Novices.
Monastic Wisdom Series Number Three. Forward by Bernardo Bonowitz, OCSO. Cistercian Publications Kalamazoo, Michigan. 2005 ISBN-13: 978-0-87907-009-0 Available:sales@litpress.org

I was packing for some travels and put this little book (135 pp.) on my suitcase. As I had a little extra time sat down to skim it for a moment. Read the intro and first two chapters. The Preface: The Formative Power of the Psalms and Psalm 1: Meditatio Day and Night and Psalm 2: Communion in Christ.

I put the book back on my desk and did not take it along. This book was deep and steep. It deserved a systematic and careful read. Don’t open if you think it is one more devout testimonial to the psalms.

Abbess Maureen has put together a lifetime of lectio on the psalms. This book is tightly edited to provide almost 30 psalms and a teaching. Each chapter has a theme taken from the psalm then served richly with other sources, mostly from the Cistercian tradition, The Rule of Benedict, or St. Gertrud.

These themes come out of lived monastic life: total sacrifice of the ego for the sake of communion with God and others. To manifest thoughts to a wise elder as Benedict directs in step five of the 12 steps toward Humility has a rich context in Psalm 32.

Like myself the author memorized most of the psalms while herself a novice. Then, she prayed them for almost 40 years. Finally, for at least ten years taught the psalms to novices.

In America this is as saturated as it gets into the very same prayers that Our Lord prayed and still prays today through the likes of Maureen McCabe. “For one who is struggling against evil thoughts while they are still young, these prayers of Christ, these precious distillations of all Scripture, are an incomparable strength and source of healing. Be it acedia or anxiety or whatever, I know that my mind cannot long withstand the force of a psalm verse repeated faithfully and earnestly. These tiny, secret, divine words cause an inner sun to rise and rivers of peace to flow. (p.4).

Some of those words, like visit, gaze, rest, lift up my soul, glory, overshadowing, and Benedict’s use of the word “run” are carefully taught to those who, like myself, might miss the significance because we are dulled by the routine recitations of the psalms and of the Rule of Benedict.

She quotes John Cassian at length to underscore the centrality of Christ in Scripture:

Thriving on the pasturage that they always offer and taking into himself all the dispositions of the psalms, he will begin to repeat them and to treat them in is profound compunction of heart not as if they were composed by the prophet but as if they were his own utterances and his own prayer.

Certainly he will consider that they are directed to his own person, and he will recognize that their words were not only achieved by and in the prophet in times past, but that they are daily borne out and fulfilled in him.

For divine Scripture is clearer and its inmost organs, so to speak, are revealed to us when our experience not only perceives but also even anticipates its thought, and the meanings of the words are disclosed to us not by exegesis but by proof.

When we have the same disposition in our heart with which each psalm was sung or written down, then we shall become like its author, grasping its significance beforehand rather than afterward�Having been instructed in this way, with our dispositions for our teachers, we shall grasp this as something seen rather than heard, and from the inner disposition of the heart we shall bring forth not what has been committed to memory but what is inborn in the very nature of things.

Thus we shall penetrate its meaning not through the written text but with experience leading the way. So it is that our mind will arrive at the incorruptible prayer�that is not only not laid hold of by the sight of some image, but it cannot even be grasped by any word or phrase.

Rather, once the mind’s attentiveness has been set ablaze, it is called forth in an unspeakable ecstasy of heart and with an insatiable gladness of spirit. (John Cassian Conferences, translated by Boniface Ramsey New York: Paulist Press, 1997) pp. 384-385)

This is a serious book and deserves total attention to read from cover to cover. She gives us an example, those of us who pick up our office books hour after hour, day after day. We need to note what she says, but more than that, do what she does.

Meg Funk
Beech Grove, Indiana