Strangers to the City

by Michael Casey

  a) Personal love for Jesus is fed by constant meditation on the Gospels.It is necessary that it be based on more than our own psychological needs. We have to keep meeting Christ in all the changing circumstances of our life, reading the text of the Gospels closely in order to discover there new facets of the mystery that will help us to become more Christlike today. We will be surprised at how often we find ourselves attracted to aspects of the person and message of Jesus that we had not noticed hitherto, and this is a sign that we are making progress. If we are to have in us the mind and heart of Christ, ongoing raw contact with the text of the Gospels is necessary, detaching us from false pictures and building up in our memories an image of Christ that is authentic, energizing, and suitable for our level of spiritual understanding.

  b) Personal love for Jesus goes hand in hand with the actualization of our deeper self.We all have the experience of friendship. What is so fulfilling about having good friends is not only that it is pleasing to be in the company of such wonderful people, but also the fact that their interaction awakens in us something that had been otherwise unrealized or dormant. In their presence we are more alive. When they are absent we go back to being “ourselves” again. If they die something in us dies also. One of the great insights of the spiritual life is the recognition that there is in us a double level of selfhood—one fashioned by the common events of our external history, the other hidden, the fruit of inner experience. What is described as “spiritual progress” is usually a matter of being somewhat free from the necessities imposed by the “outer self” and free for the flowering of the “inner self.”98 The impact that Jesus had on his immediate circle of acquaintance was to awaken in them a consciousness of their own spiritual potential: Fishermen were no longer constrained within the limits of their craft or social standing; they became disciples, apostles, missionaries, preachers, miracle-workers, and martyrs. Others of their ilk remained fishermen all their lives. What made the difference was that Jesus roused in the Twelve a boldness to be something more than they had been in the past. The deep self had been woken up and was ready for action. The same happens to us, though the contact is less immediate. When Jesus begins to emerge from the pages of the Gospel as a real person who engages us, then something begins to stir in our hearts that leads us in directions previously unconsidered. In the presence of Jesus the deeper, inner self comes to the surface and has a chance to refashion our lives.

  c) Personal love for Jesus demands an equal measure of self-disregard.John the Baptist proclaimed: “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30). So, as the inner self becomes more powerful, the outer self loses its total control over our lives. “The external self is fading away but our inner [self] is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). No one can exist in an affective void; the only force that can bring calm to the chaos of conflicting loves is a love that outclasses them all. It is a matter of fighting fire with the fieriest fire of all. When the love of Jesus draws forth the best in us the lower appetites go into recession. It is not that we conquer them; they simply lose their capacity to charm us. We lose interest in what hitherto enchanted us. Of course the conversion is never absolute; there is always plenty of scope for backsliding. But there is a discernible direction in life that leads away from selfcenteredness. A devotional life that coexists with an unchallenged concern for personal comfort and advancement is likely to be spurious. The measures of love’s authenticity are stern. They include the following:

  • detachment from material resources and advantages,

  • capacity to endure or embrace pain happily—patience (7:35–42),

  • ruthless self-honesty and a progressive openness to direction (7:44–48),

  • determination to hide its virtue from public sight (4:62),

  • generosity in serving others, and

  • conscious union with the Church.

  Such a heart is predisposed to experience the full intensity of love for Jesus. In most cases the behavioral patterns listed above are not the conditions or causes of that love, but its effects. “Love is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us” (Rom. 5:5); in those open to its influence such infused charity begins to reshape their lives.

  d) Personal love for Jesus, if it is genuine, opens the frontiers of the heart to other persons.Love is, of its nature, indivisible. Either we love whatever good we experience or we are indifferent to it. When authentic love enters our lives everyone is the beneficiary of it. Far from being an exclusive focusing on a single person, love, as distinct from infatuation, makes us appreciative of the qualities of all around us. That is why, in the musicals of the 1950s, when people fell in love, they went singing and dancing down the street, astonishing everyone with their unaccustomed benevolence. We cannot love Jesus unless we also are drawn to love his other friends. This means more than vague goodwill to a faceless multitude. It means recognizing the Christ in all whom we encounter in our daily lives. It is not a matter of forcing ourselves to be positive out of love for Jesus, but if our love is genuine we cannot help being struck by the goodness and lovableness of all around us. Beginners in the spiritual life often withdraw from others whose spirituality does not, they believe, match their own. Those in the higher reaches tend, as Benedict notes, to be highly conscious of their own defects (7:62–66) and be lost in admiration at the holiness of others. The implications of Matthew 25 are clear: We must see Christ even in the least worthy. Love of Christ confirms us in our appreciation of others and in our affective outreach toward them. It is no longer “us” and “them.” When we love, the defenses go down and the heart is more open to be captivated by those around us.

  e) Personal love for Jesus, if it is genuine, is able to withstand the vicissitudes inherent in every interpersonal relationship.Because the relationship with Jesus is dynamic, it involves us in the uncertainty that springs from not being in total control. Spiritual growth works through change, but we instinctively resist change when it involves sacrificing the known for the unknown. So we must endure storms—some of which may drive us to rebellion. There are mysterious passages in life in which we move away from that which is pleasantly familiar and are inescapably confronted with the dread of a future that escapes our control. For Bernard, this alternation of experience was the criterion by which the reality of spiritual life could be assessed. The sign of God’s active presence in the soul is an unpredictable mélange of positive and negative experience.99 Every human life is marked by times of suffering in which only endurance is possible. The surest indication of responsiveness to grace is an uncomplaining serenity in the face of such disempowering reversals. Real love is prepared to batten down the hatches and weather the storms, not regarding the present pain as typical, but reframing it within the context of a lifetime’s experience.100 Appreciation of the eschatological character of Christian life leads to a more mellow assessment of the importance of present difficulties. In the course of a lifelong dedication to the love of Christ, there will be many qualitatively different demands and experiences, the meaning of which will be apparent only in retrospect. The feeling of love flourishes when the object of love is present. When the loved one is absent, we experience not only the positive yearning of desire, but also its negative sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. Both presence and absence have something to contribute to our story; both are occasions for the exercise of love.

  f) Personal love for Jesus, if it is genuine, has the capacity to rebound after major betrayal. We do not go to God in a single leap. Notwithstanding the affective intensity that often surrounds the experience of conversion, it is easy enough to slide back into an empty indifference in which we are assailed with a new vigor by temptations that we thought we had outgrown. In fact the strength of the experience convinced us that we could not be moved. This false sense of security is “the mother of negligence and the generator of carelessness.”101 And so we are expelled from the easeful garden of delight and recommitted to spiritual warfare. This normalization
does not feel like an improvement, but it is. One of the most puzzling things in spiritual progress is that a point is reached when all that has been achieved must be abandoned. At a certain point, love for God can go no further, until it discovers the unconditional nature of the divine regard—and that means letting go of any notion of personal entitlement to love. We fail in what matters most to us, and we are close to losing our nerve and giving up the struggle. A mid-journey collapse is not uncommon.102 In fact, for Bernard, it is unavoidable: necesse est.103 Strangely enough, if we survive the period of our infidelity our response to God’s love is both stronger and deeper—and much more realistic.

  g) Personal love for Jesus, if it is genuine, matures with the person—emotionally and intellectually. Sentiment has a large role to play in the initial stages of love’s evolution. This principle was clearly enunciated by Bernard in his treatise On the Lovableness of God.104 This preliminary stage of sentimental devotion is a necessary point of departure for all spiritual development. It serves as a point of departure and, like all beginnings, it needs eventually to be left behind. One who does not rise to the challenges of self-forgetful love can easily be diverted into the byways of sentimentalism and kitsch. Phony pietism is not personal devotion to Christ, but a saccharine substitute that compensates for the absence of the real thing. Split off from the reality of everyday behavior, its lack of substance is frequently demonstrated by its easy cohabitation with the hard-nosed authoritarianism not uncommon among career churchmen. On the other hand, it is fatal to espouse a feelingless religion, so purified of sentiment that it becomes sterile. Post-Cartesian dualism, pietism (in its various forms), and the spurious commercialized piety of nineteenth-century prayer books have made us suspicious of any practice or formula that touches the feelings, but have offered us no alternatives. This has led to a “piety void” in which many, by losing faith in particular practices, have eventually lost interest in pursuing a spiritual life.

  h) Personal love for Jesus is wholesome. First, it is not a respectable avenue for radical self-rejection. In such an unhealthy situation, Christ is loved, not because he is “like us in all things” but because he is utterly different. The ideals projected onto Christ, and governing our iconography, can be a subterfuge for a non-acceptance of our own humanity. We punish ourselves for being what we are by conjuring up a “perfect human being” who is more like an angel than a man. The heresy of Docetism is never far away from us. In striving to conform ourselves to this impossible ideal of super-humanity, we sink further into desperation and compound our selfrejection.105 So painful is this situation that such devotion is marginalized and has no impact on how we live. Second, and less common, it can happen that love of Jesus may need to be protected from sexual pathologies. The focus in contemplation is not the imagined body of the man Jesus, but the ascended and glorified Christ, spiritually present at all points of space and time, but especially present in the deepest caverns of the human spirit. It is the forever-incarnate Word who is the “bridegroom” of the soul—anima being considered female. Mystical writers use the language not only of courtship, but also of sexual intercourse to describe the union realized in the contemplative act, although translators often water this down to prevent offense to pious ears. The point about such language is that it is metaphorical, because what is being described is meta-experiential.

  Why so many cautionary remarks? The following of Jesus that love for him inspires is never without hardship. The Gospels leave us in no doubt about this. Therefore, those of us who are a bit slack may look for an easier way that provides us with comfort without challenge. A sentimental, feel-good devotion, full of verbal effusions but not impacting on our blind spots or hidden vices is not merely useless, it is positively harmful. It insulates us against the need for ongoing conversion and so convinces us of our own rightness that we become very hard on others. And all the while we think we are on the right track. Genuine love for Jesus is an austere, battle-ready reality that constantly summons us to self-transcendence and postpones until eternity the full enjoyment of what God’s love promises us.

  11 Contemplation

  With hearts expanded by love’s

  sweetness which is beyond words

  RB PROL. 49

  Most of us need to be careful that the Christocentric character of our spiritual life, so evident in its early phases, is not lost through inattention on our part. Friendship with Christ needs to be maintained and strengthened through time given to prayer. Without regular prayer interpersonal kindness and service decline into routine civility, intentionality becomes diffuse, and moral behavior loses its vertical component. Goodness becomes a matter of mere ethics and, thus, is not sustainable for long. We are Christians, and the badge we wear is Christlike behavior. Such a way of life, however, loses its hold over us if it ceases to be Christ-centered and becomes mere role-playing or philanthropy. Prayer, by which we maintain contact with the invisible realities of spiritual life, is essential.

  The dogged grind of regular prayer sets the stage for occasional moments in which we experience intimate communion with God. It is not that there are techniques that guarantee that this will happen whenever we feel like it. The dynamics of prayer are different. Seemingly earthbound prayer has the capacity to grind away at our delusions until we are free of them, so that sometimes, to use John Cassian’s image, we lift off, like a feather caught by a sudden gust of wind. These moments of meta-experience make worthwhile all the labor of virtue and the struggle against temptations. They are signposts that point us toward the goal and assure us that, despite our sense of being lost, we are still moving in the right direction.

  1. Mystical Monks?

  The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner suggested that the Christian of the future must be a mystic.106 Perhaps the time has come to emphasize more blatantly the mystical and contemplative dimension of Benedictine life, to cherish the theory and practice of our tradition and to communicate it more boldly to those who come to us for formation. It is certainly an integral part of our charism but, at times, it tends to be overlarded by less important emphases. Without an explicit contemplative orientation, monastic asceticism makes little sense, and the demands of low-impact living seem unreasonable. Robbed of their finality, monastic observances are either watered down or become the source of anger, sadness, and escapist behavior on the part of disgruntled monks and nuns who claim not to understand why they cannot be allowed to live “normal” lives.

  It is a pity that in common ecclesiastical parlance “contemplative” is used in a quasi-juridical sense, to describe groups with no external apostolate. Communities of the Benedictine tradition have often been slow to appropriate the term “contemplative” because they do not recognize themselves adequately described in such Vatican texts as Sponsa Christi and Venite Seorsum, particularly in the matter of enclosure. In addition, some of the early writings of Thomas Merton and others have tended to make “contemplation” seem like an alien and elitist notion that pays too little honor to the monastic insistence that prayer is embedded in the commonplace realities of community work, worship, and interaction. Yes, many communities that follow Benedict’s Rule have a sound tradition of dedication to works of various kinds, but the best of them also insist on the priority of prayer.

  Consciously accepting the contemplative finality of monastic life is undoubtedly good for morale, but it also assists in public relations. Those considering monastic life today seem less interested in fuzzy goals and multiple options—they have grown up in such conditions and have experienced for themselves how limited is their value. It seems to me that many inquirers are seeking clear and attractive priorities, appropriate communal structures that express these values, plus an abundance of good example. It is like the old lady who remarked after hearing the bishop read an eloquent sermon verbatim, “If he can’t remember it himself, how can he expect us to?” If we do not know where we are going, how can we help others to go to the same destination?

  We have to b
e aware that some of the language of our tradition has been debased in recent centuries. The traditional insistence on humility and obedience seems oppressive to many modern readers until they receive some assistance in interpreting the Rule. And we are all aware that giving too much centrality to institutional obedience has often led to an abuse of power that brings nobody closer to God. In visiting a Buddhist monastery some time ago, it struck me powerfully that today the ideal of self-realization is a much more attractive foundation on which to build the image of monastic life than the narrower way of obedience to a superior, seen as a means of being conformed to the will of God. Self-realization is patently a way of growth; obedience seems only a way of diminishment that takes considerable spiritual maturity to appreciate. Needless to say, both aspects of monastic life are essential. Nobody can escape the mystery of the Cross. We can, however, follow the example of Jesus in the Gospel and reveal this aspect of discipleship further down the track. Without weakening Benedict’s injunction that novices be forewarned of hard times ahead, we may get better results from a more heuristic approach to diminishment in general and obedience in particular. Meanwhile we insist that monastic life is a road that leads to union with God. Over the years those who follow this path will enter more experientially into the Mystery communicated in Baptism—they will become mystics.

  The word “mysticism” rings alarm bells. For many it conjures up images of parapsychological or pathological phenomena. Most monastic guest houses are occasionally burdened with self-styled mystics; some are harmless, some are mad, others are dangerous because they attempt to make disciples of the gullible. A few become nuisances because they do not respect appropriate boundaries and start interfering in the community itself. All this is a pity because such aberrations give mysticism a bad name, and monastic life does not make a great deal of sense unless mystical contemplation is seen as its goal. It is not a matter of cause and effect: if you do certain things then you will experience mystical union with God. The contrary is true. We already have found what we seek, but do not know it. Through baptism we have been invited into communion with God at the level of being. The life of grace is nothing more than living out that filial relationship with God. Mostly, however, this dynamism operates at a non-conscious level. What monastic life offers is a slow process of purifying the heart so that it can perceive the deep mystery in which we have been immersed. The negative aspects of monastic observance and spiritual growth are the pangs that accompany this necessary transformation. Returning to the “three renunciations” of Paphnutius, we recall that the motivation to give up family and possessions and engage in the ascetical life is the assurance that, with God’s grace, this is the way by which we enter into full awareness of the mystery of God. Such meta experience is less unusual than we might expect, even though many lack the vocabulary to describe what has transpired.107