Metaphor of the Peacock

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will begin to walk around him to givet a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible.  The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn.  When it suits him, the peacock will face you.  Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns.  This is the moment when most people are silent.  

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners

"An Unbelieving Age"

We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual.  

There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern.  He says with Swinburne, "Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of all things," or with Steinbeck, "In the end was the word and the word was with men."  For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage and dignity and pride and must consider it a point of honor to be satisfied with this.

There is another type of modern man who recognizes a divine being not himself, but who does not believe that this being can be known anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally. Spirit and matter are separated from him. Man wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can't identify, trying to reach a God he can't approach, a God powerless to approach him.

And there is another type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. 

Flannery O'Connor,  Mystery and Manners 

Boethius

Speak out and hide it not within.

~ Homer

If you want the doctor's help, you must reveal the wound.

It is always the unfortunate wo are first to be deserted by the goodwill of others.

However, it is not simply a case of you having been banished far from your home; you have wandered away yourself, or if you prefer to be thought of as having been banished, it is you yourself that have been the instrument of it.

You seem to have forgotten the oldest law of your community, that any man who has chosen to make his dwelling thre has the sacred right never to be banished.  So there can be no fear of exile for any man within its walls and moat.  On the other hand, if anyone stops wanting to live there, he authomatically stops deserving it.

.... the major cause of your illness; you have forgotten your true nature.

Commit your boat to the winds and you must sail whichever way they blow, not just where you want.

Shall man's insatiable greed bind me to a constancy which is aline to my ways?  

Rapacious greed soon swallows all

And opens other gaping mouths;

No reins will serve to hold in check

The headlong course of appetite

Once such largeness has fanned the flames

Of lust to have and hold;

No man is rich who shakes and groans

Convinced that he needs more ...

.... man towers above the rest of creation so long as he recognizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts.  for other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.

The friend that success brings you becomes your foe in time of misfortune. And there is no evil more able to do you injury than a friend turn foe.

The Consolation of Philosophy

Notions of Desire and Envy

Rene Girard

Desire is "the spirit that directs ..... toward the goal on which .... intention is fixed. .... It can even be said to constitute the person, for "If desire were not mimetic we would not be open to what is human or what is divine."  The idea that we desire autonomously is romantic myth.   Mimesis - the imitaion of another's desire is neither a conscious process nor a mere behavioral copying.  The unconscioius nature of mimesis is designed to relieve anxiety and promote security though an inflated sense of autonomy. This desire is misdirected and causes us to conform to an alien image, the image of another person.

Mimetic desire works in the following way:

An agent sense a lack and does not know what will supply it. He directs the aimless desire to an admirable other (model/mediator) to see waht might remedy the lack without compromising a sense of authonomy.  The agent, too, begins to desire that object.  The element that triggers the agent's desire, is not the object itself, but the prestige or value conferred on it by the model.  He identifies with and is attracted to the model.  The agent's will is not coerced; it is seduced.

As facination with the other increases, the other gradually moves from being a model to being an obstacle to the acqusition of the object.  Eventually the object is forgotten and the agent passionately desires to displace the model.  The model becomes a rival.

IN a relationship of conflict we are locked in a struggle for dominance, or we resort to violence.  Girard and the gospels refer to this experience as a stumbling block, scandal, or offense.  As the efforts to dominate escalate, and as the number of conflicts within a community increases, relief from the tension is sougth.  This is a key moment in the drama.  the enemies make an accusatory gesture toward another person who is outside of the conflict and upon whom the hostility is transferred.  .... Any kind of difference (good or bad) is dangerous when a mob is looking for a scapegoat.  This proces is called the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism (GMSM).  The victim is sacrificed, i.e. murdered or expeled.  The result of this event is that a great peace comes over the feuding parties.  The feuding parties, who are now molded into a community, unconciously replace their dangerous "war of all against all" (Hobbes) with a safer and less violent "war of all against one" (Girard). This paradox of scapegoat as culprit and as peacmaker is the result of a double transference.  The violently formed community transfers its hostiliteis onto the scapegoat and then its reverence.    Girard notes that the Hebrew Scriptures reveal God as being on the side of the oppressed and the unjustly accused.  

Girard does not consider all mimetic desire to be envy, but all envy is mimetic desire.  He notes that it begins with two eyes glancing in the same direction.  It is "love by another's eye."  "Envy covets the superior being that neither that someone nor something alone, but the conjunction of the two, seems to possess.  Envy involuntarily testifies to the lack of being that puts the envious to shame.  That is why envy is the hardest sin to acknowledge.

No one wants to admit a sense of lack or to acknowledge weak emotions like fear and self-pity.  To do so would involve the confusing admission that we hate someone to whom we are attracted!

Girard goes on to say that by truly facing our envy and hostility, we undermine their effectiveness.  

Pride, for Girard, is described as "a deceptive divinity" ... misdirected desire to be detrimental to our spiritual journey.  Carnal love (mimetic desire) - the love of the heart - cannot be denied or rejected, but must be accepted and redirected to the sensible and carnal love of Christ's humanity.  Mimetic desire is the starting point of the spiritual journey.

Girard notes that the ewill to dominate is unconscious.  

The Cross is the center of Girard's theory.  It is when faced with the Cross - literal or metaphysical - that the critical decision for forgiveness and nonretribution is made.  This decision is made deep in the heart where pride lurks.  This purification of the heart is the core of Christian conversion.  

Perceived equality and nearness increases opportunities for rivalry.  This rivalry is less likely if the other is regarded as being of higher status or as beng outside of one's sphere of reltions.

God is loved through the neighbor.

The story of Christianity is told from the perspective of the victim.

Our "I" is formed by our relationality with that which masterus us, be it God or the sinful order.  We have the sense that we are not enough and that there is something we must procure, correct, or conform to , in order to become "enough." that thing we will serve.  What competes us depends on what we are:  mimetic creatures made in the image of God. Humility as intellignece of the victim, restores that image.

When acquistive and conflictual mimesis are carred to their conclusion, the result is the scapegoating of an innocent victim and the attainment of communal - false - peace. The object of monastic life is true peace, which is received by pacific mimesis of the victim, Jesus Christ.  This mimesis requires self-sacrifice rather than the sacrifice of others. 

Bernard

We have been given desire, a yearning for completeness, a longing for our true identity vis-a-vis someone else.  He describes the experience of desire:  "Every rational being naturally desires always what satisfies more its mind and will.  It is never satisfied with something which lacks the qualiteis it thinks it should have."  This yearning is the result of bing made in the image and likeness of God.  At the heart of his teaching is the notion that God made us to desire him.  this is how love returns to its source.  

Sin corrupts the three powers of the soul.  The intellect, made to remember the truth of our creatureliness, is corrupted by pride; vainglory infects our concupiscible appetite, and envy exploits our capacity for anger.  Pride, vainglory, and envy diminish our capacity to give free conscent to the true, enduring good.  they leave us vulnerable to offense.

Bernard describles the human condition as having three phases:  formation, deformation, and reformation.  .... Our first nature is likenss to God consists in three elements:  simplicity (by virtue of which we love one thing), immortality ( by virtue of which the one thing, like the soul, is eternal), and free will (by virtue of which we can choose the object of our love.  .... the most basic way by which the soul recovers its lost likeness is teh imitation of the ordering of love exemplified by Christ.

Envy is the feeling of offense at the perceived superiority of another person.  It is distinguished from jealousy, which is distress at the possibility of another person getting one's possession.  

Bernard defines envy as "worry about possible failure, and the fear of being surpassed ... fear of a rival."  He identifies it with a drive for power .... "Let no one look with envious eyes upon the goods of anotehr.  For this is, as best one can, to inject toxin into someone and to somehow kill him."  He also describes envy as curiositas, the first step of pride.  He portrays the wandering of the eyes and the constant monitoring of the conduct of others rahter than one's own. Envious wandering of the eyes relaxes the guard of the heart.

Humility makes us content to be receivers and directs desire to its proper object.

There are two sources of offense that spur dominance: God and neighbor.  

Pride, for Bernard, is a passionate desire for our own superiority.  .... The will to dominate is the will never to be devastated; one cannot follow Christ with that intent.

The oprincipal source of dominance between human beings is mimetic rivarly.  

On the Steps of Humility and Pride (the first four steps that show contempt for the brethern):  curiosity, the ever-wandering eye of envy; light-mindedness and empty laughter, both of which discount the value of others and of the monastic way of life; and boasting. These last three behaviors are characteristic of secular culture's false transcendence of "following the crowd" or acting for the approval of others.

What is called for is a renunciation of our will to self-assertion.  In short, we have to quit playing God.  To renounce self-will is to shift one's attention from self to the other, as to make charitable or other-centered behavior easier and domination unnecessary.

A good model does not necessarily mean a good imitation. Bernard offers two models of imitating God.  One is the descending and ascending Christ; the other is Lucifer, "the Envious One," a personification of arrogance.   Those who are not offended by arrogance will imitate it.  ... the lure of self-exaltation can be so attractive as to easily provoke others to seek their own self-exaltation.    The essential difference between these two models of divinity is that one involves receptivity and the other acquisitiveness.  

Renouncing domination leaves one defenseless before experiences of offense and insult and feelings of inadequacy and resentment.  Such renunciation is an abrupt beginning for this program of recovery of the image and likeness.   

Christ is the model of trust and obedience.

To suffer means to let be; instead of attempting to gain the upper hand; it means submitting to negative experience as part of God's plan for oneself and others.  This is the mark of one who is following Christ.  Here we submit to a process we cannot control, rather than pray to be exempted from it.  What we are addressing is the fallen human condition, not merely a series of problems to be solved.

When Cain refused to submit to God, murdered Abel out of envy, and thus began civilization, the problem of domination spread to all humans.  

Bernard ... pride is the consequence of comparision with others. Comparison creates the setting for conflictual mimesis and all that follows from it.  Bernard is counseling us to accept our created condition without comparisons.

Pride ingnites envy.

The opposite of offense is faith, but such faith can only be reached through the possibility of offense.  Genuine surrender means allowing oneself to be drawn more deeply into what is most threatening.  Such surrender is difficult, given that the whole motive for becoming an adult was to avoid vlunerability.


To face one's contingency and to live as one who is totall dependent on God is a deep admission of the truth that prepares the monastic to continue the journey out of love. this transformation is not accomplished, it is suffered. 

"You would certainly desire, as far as in you lies, that the opinion of others about you, should correspond with what you know about yourself.  This self-disclosure, though, is to be regulated by love; it must not offend.  Concern about reputation is a craving for glory."

Those who receive their sense of self-worth from the imitation of Christ and thereby from the Father will discount the opinion of peers.

The pride of acquisitive desire has been broken by the experience of the Cross.  One can be comfortable as a receiver.

The link between humility and love is empathy.  In the steps of descent we encounter our limitations, we experience forgiveness and we are then able to see the truth of others.

"We look for truth in ourselves when we judge ourselves, in our neighbors when we have empathy with their sufferings, in itself when we contemplate it with a clean heart.  

A ransom is an act of freeing done by one already free.  LIke the child whom Jesus offered us as a model, the monastic is free to be vulnerable, free to receive without deserving, free to consent to imitate those who imitate the self-giving victim, Jesus Christ.

Jonah Wharff, OCSO,  Bernard of Clairvaux and Rene Girard on Desire and Envy, CSR, Volume 42/2, 2007

The Senses of Scripture

The medieval commentators of Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text:  one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called analogical, which had to do with the Divine Life and our participation in it ... a kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. 

~ Flannery O'Connor
Mystery and Manners

The four levels of listening to the same passage ....

Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, Robert Royal

Each sense opens up many avenues of thought, inviting us to explore more and more deeply the divine plan and the response to which we are called.  Thomas Aquinas:  “Where the mind leaves off, the heart goes beyond.”

The Literal Sense  —   The first duty is to discover the literal meaning of the Scriptures -- the historical message and example of Jesus.  This is the historical sense:  These writers were men of their time; they expressed themselves precisely as men of their time.  Hence, to understand them, we need to know the mores of those times and the meaning of words in that context.  We must remember that words are historically defined.  It is important that we seek to understand what literary form the inspired writer is using to convey the divine teaching:  Is it history, prose, poetry, myth, etc.

The Moral (tropological) Sense —  Augustine writes that we understand more by doing what it says than by how much of it we read:  when we begin to make the faith walk and talk the same and live by the Scriptures.  ... tells us what the Text calls us to do ....  The moral sense conveys how specifically some of the liberation from sin occurs.

The Allegorical  (spiritual) Sense —  It slowly dawns on us that the gospel is about us; that our own life is mirrored in its pages.  Able to identify our own personal spiritual journey with the events in the Old Testament.  We are now listening to the voice of Christ speaking through the readings we hear in the liturgy, savor in Lectio Divina, and recognize in the events of our own lives.  When you begin to experience this, you listen to the Scriptures in a very different way. They are not historical documents anymore, but stories about your own experience of the spiritual journey. The unloading of the unconscious or purification. Purification occurs when, because of the trust  and honesty that develops toward God as a result of a lively identification with the texts of Scripture.  We are able to confront the dark side of our personality.  We begin to experience the biblical desert.  The biblical desert is not a place, but a state in which we experience inwardly what the passage of the Isaelites through the desert and other similar texts symbolize outwardly.  It involves the emptying of the junk in the unconscious — the emotional damage that has been done to us from the moment we were conceived until now ... the spontaneous evacuation of all that emotional garbage.    In the allegorical sense, seeing in physical liberation a corresponding spiritual liberation.  Christ’s redemption of all human beings from the bondage of sin includes both the internal liberation from wrongs committed by others.

The Unitive Sense (anagogical) — takes place when you are so immersed in the word of God that the word is coming out of you as a kind of continuing revelation .... what lies ahead.   The most purely mystical meaning in that is shows how God leads our souls to eternal beatitude.

A simple example of all four senses:  We read for Jerusalem. Literally, Jerusalem is a city in the Holy Land. Allegorically, Jerusalem can be understood as the Church which gathers together all the People of God; Morally, this calls us to a certain allegiance to the Church, a certain way of acting as living stones placed upon the foundation of the apostles with Christ as our cornerstone. Anagogically, Jesus is the spotless bride descending from the heavens.  Each sense opens up many avenues of thought, inviting us to explore more and more deeply the divine plan and the response to which we are called.

On Aging

The aged are to be protected, honored, and respected for they possess wisdom.  Discovering the spiritual value of old age and growing older is becoming a priority.  It can be a time of grace and salvation.  

By teaching that service of the aged is service to Christ and that it can help the younger ones to grow spiritually, if they are not overburdened with the work and are listened to.  Serving the aged members of our communities is a problem that must not be shelved for consideration in the future.  Communities that abandon their old membes without a motive have no future.  However, there is an exception when there are serious mental or psychological troubles.  

This time of life means loss of identity, sacrifice, a test of free acceptance.  It is a reckoning of the value of the human person above any achievement or performance.  This attitude is no different from the way  we accept the whole of our monstic life.  

With aging, and the burden of age, there is risk of mature minds becoming set and predominating, that is, of leaving less and less room for new insights.  .... There is an over-attachment to certain ways of doing things.  When the average age of a community is rising, it tends to stagnate spiritually.  An aging community needs help to face up to stagnation and to renew itself.  The community must keep an open and creative mind.  Live joyfully and be able to accept death.  The eternal future of the people is much more important than the eternal future of a place!  We are traveling toward eternal life before anything else.   

Vladimir Gaudrat,  Aging and the Renewal of Communities, CSR Volume 36.4, 2001

Notion of "Seeking God"

The concern must be whether the novice truly seeks God and whether he shows eagerness for the Work of God, for obedience and for trials.  The novice should be clearly told all the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God.   RB 58:7-8

Truly seeking God is therefore the overall sign of a true vocation ... which is authenticated by three particular patterns of behavior:  zeal for the work of God, for obedience, for humiliations.

When we search for someone or something, it can be either because this person or thing is far from us or because, although close, it remains hidden.   A spatial metaphor - We have to cover the distance separating us from God; we have to reverse the steps by which sinful humanity, the prodigal son, has separated itself from God.  

Truly seeking God means, therefore, to consecrate to him not only all one's thoughts but also all one's actions.  After attentiveness to the presence of the Lord comes obedience to his will.   To seek God is to think of him and pray to him.   

Purity of heart, which is synonymous with charity, leads to the heavenly vision of God and the possession of him already in this life.

To seek God is to seek the human perfection willed by God, and this is nothing but perfect harity poured out in us by his Spirit.  

As we seek God, God seeks us .....

Adalbert de Vogue, OSB,  The Search for God in Saint Benedict's Rule, CSR,  Volume 36.4, 2001

Notion of Leadership

Those who are preparing for leadership need immersion in some form of community: a group of people who both support and challenge us and invite the expression of our creativity, energy, and love, a place where we are stimulated intellectually and wehre we are personallly affirmed.  In such a group and environment, questions are welcomed, stories are shared, and knowledge of our spiritual traditions is freely given.   .... The important thing is connecting in depth with a supportive gorup, a vibrant community,  .... and thus opening up a larger reality, a "higher power" greater than oueself.

Everyone is called to such generative leadership, especially as a person grows older:  helping others name their talents, clarify their dreams, and fulfilling their potential.

All true leadership is intrinsically related to mentoring: leading people to new perspectives, faciliating personal and institutional growth, encouraging the discernment of vocational possibilities.  ..... Mentors should be chosen because of the wisdom they have acquired, the overall quality of their lives, and their willingness to share their struggles without pretention. 

Such a leader/mentor ... has the gift to truly in-spire: to infuse, animate, breathe into us enthusiasm for our gifts and our own sacred journey.  

Edward Sellner,  Cassian and the Elders:  Formation & Spiritual Direction in the Desert & Today, CSR, Volume 36.4,  2001

The Notion of Faults and Remedies

THE FAULTS

Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "I cannot teach what I have not learned. I have not thought it appropriate to describe the ascents, for I am one who knows more about descending than ascending."  .... Bernard was more interested in tracking down and identifying the sources of aberrant behavior, which he synthesized under the headings of 

curiositas - mental restlessness

cupiditas - acquistiveness

and  singularitas - individualism  / Singularity is not morally neutral; it implies a rejection of what is common, approved, and holy.  Inevitably it proclaims that the way followed by the majority is without value and invites others to find alternative routes to holiness.

Aelred of Rievaulx .... interprets the seven hostile tribes of Deuteronomy 7:1 as pointers to the inner incitements to infidelity and sin.

Negligentia - negligence - "How often does my soul fall asleep through boredom [tadium] Psalm 118:28] so that I consume nearly the whole day in inertia as if time were not irrevocable!   ... Inattention and a failure to take seriously the challenges of daily life are the root causes of negligence.  

Tepor - tepidity or lukewarmness and pigritia - laziness; languid - idle at the level of thoughts; dilatory (segnis); dull (socordia) Slackness ... can be qualitative or quantitative: we can be sloopy in our performance, careless because we consider what we do to be of slight importance, or reluctant to do more than the bare minimum, idle, dilatory, and ungenerous.  The effect of tepidity is the cessation of the desire for the wisdom and knowledge that nurture the experiential capacity to discern between virtue and vice and that must be cultivated by prayer and frequent reading.  The lazy man (piger) sits down on the raod and sleeps.

Sadness - The state of misery, miseria, a lack of peace, unquietness (inquietudo), a tendency to wobble (vacillatio).  To be unquiet is a dangerous state.

Stubbornness, a certain obstinacy, effectively resists and blocks out any external advice or correction and condemns (the monk) to repeating his mistakes and shutting himself in a prison of his own making. They are relunctant to receive direction.  This fault makes way toward the worst of vices:  superbia, pride.  

Dissipation - a monk who is locked into his own delusional self-perception and is resistant to feedback or correction will necessarily find it hard to remain stable.  The underlying cause of acedia is an inability to take anything seriously, to commit oneself to a line of thought or action to an ongoing lifestyle.  As a result there is no contentment in the present and a continual searching for gratification or entertainment that, once found, no longer satisfies.  .... Where there is levity and inconstancy of mind the soul is always restless and in motion, unable to concentrate even duirng psalmody.  Acedia is the opposite to mindfulness.  It is what Saint Benedict regarded as "death-dealing.  A constant state of forgetfulness and lack of concern generates idle thoughts and these soon give way to foolish conversation, loud laughter, foul talk and detraction.  Acedia dissipates the energy .... "they are continually moving among different life-giving dishes, and yet they are dying of hunger."   In its pursuit of entertainment and pleasure it not only opens the door to many aberrations in behavior but also leaves us defensless before demonic attack and our own foolishness.

Harshness - 

A rudis is someone who has not been through a process of education (erudito), not only in the sense of schooling but also in the cultivation of apprpriate manners of social behavior. "Now everyday you hear complaints and troublesome murmurings:  "This is bad, this is bad, this heavy."  .... those who are ungrateful are generally ungracious.  The opposite of gentlenss is violence - doing violence to others by our manner of acting.  .... Where humility and gentleness are lacking, relations become brittle, and rivalries and contentions easily emerge in the community.  The litigious are prepared to make an issue out of anything.  Driven by their inner demons and bolstered by their habitual obstinacy, they shatter the peace and harmony of the community without any concern for the labor involved in repairing the damage.  There is no reason for them, because they have stopped listening.  One who attempts to make a pastoral intervention will face the same difficulities as the preacher who finds himself blocked, first by those lacking in faith ... and others who are envious, who engage in destraction and mockery, .... and by the lukewarm, who fall asleep and yawn during his exposition.  

When the spiritual life seems to have gone sour, the monk tends to search for alternative gratifications.  The first means of compensation is to seek comfort in food.  the connection between acedia and gluttony is well attested in monastic tradition.    ....  A monk who is a "lover of pleasure" lives under the thrall of concupiscence and finds himself in unending pursuits of pleasure and vanity.  Progressively he puts himself in danger of having his vocation nibbled away by the onslaught of sexual sin .... Chastity is essential for monks .... for it serves as a receptacle for other virtues and graces.  It is a dynamic element in the transformation of the whole person.  Infidelity in the small actions of daily life progressively closes the avenues of spiritual renewal and leaves us open to the worst vices. 

THE REMEDIES

"I don't know if there is more efficacious and more pleasant means of improving morals ... than the faithful and loving consideration of this mystery of the Word become flesh ... "

All spiritual progress is predicated on a person's taking life serioiusly and, in particular, paying attention to the quality of the thoughts that are allowed access to the mind and heart.

As with all the 12th cnetury Cistercians, self-knowledge is a priority.  We must return to the heart.  First of all we must know what we are lacking, just as, according to Cicero, the first step of knowledge is to knowwhat we do not know.  The first effect of the inpouring of the Holy Spirit is to make the madman (phreneticus) experience himself and know himself and return to the heart. 

The dangers of mindless conversation is averted by the interior embrace of monastic obsrvance of silence.  Silence is necessary to welcome the Word and it is a source of strength and healing.  

In order to overcome the vice of gluttony, a person needs to develop the virtue of discretion:  not commanding oneself to "stop eating," since that frequently makes "the forbidden" even more attactive, but rather beginning the practice of discerning what food is appropriate to eat, in what moderate proportion, and when.  

The opposite of forgnication ... is selflessness; the opposite of avarice (jealousy aobut someone else's good fortune or possessions) is patience with one's own life; anger's opposite is detachment; dejection's is hope or equanimity; accidie's is persistence; vainglory's is practicing genuine care; pride's opposite ... humility. <Edward Sellner, Cassian and the Elders: Formation & Spiritual Direction in the Desert & Today, CSR, Volume 36.4, 2001>

Michael Casey, OCSO,  The Failings of Monks in Guerric's Sermons, CSR,  Volume 43-44, 2008

Monastic Bestiary

The Eagle is known for his far-seeing eye.  Far up in his eyrie he sees the fishes in the sea, dives down, and captures them in his claws.  When an eagle grows old his eye becomes dim, and his feathers wither. He ten goes to a cool fountain in the forest and soars aloft straight into the sun.  His feathers are singed and his eyes burned.  Then he dives into the fountain, and his eyes and feathers made new and his youth regained.  The chief characteristic of the eagle is its ability to look directly at the sun without being dazed by its brightness.  

The crowing of the cock makes him a timekeeper. The cock represents the preachers, whose mission it is to proclaim the coming light in the darkness of the present life by sining.  Real preaching for Saint Gregory is a "Cock-a-doodle-doo!"  (Saint Gregory the Great) ..... The preachers must lead the listeners on to what lies hidden beyond the appearances.

A lioness is trapped, not hunted.  The lioness is in search of food for her cubs ... takes the initiative in the search of prey and then the close-knit group in which lions and lionesses join themselves is called a pride.  This lioness is apparently alone.  She travels in a straight line, because she is following a scent.  The scent is part of a trap. A pit has been dug in which a heifer is tied.  The pit is both deep and narrow in order that the stalking lioness might easily fall into it but be unable to spring out.  Yet apparently she willingly springs into it, inhianter, with desire, because she is hungry.    

A second pit is dug adjacent to the first and that the two pits are joined by a small opening, just wide enough to admit the lioness.  The second pit holds a cage into which the lioness willingly enters, because she is beset by fear of what is happening outside the pit(s).  (Gregory) has to hav the lioness enter the cage through dread.  Her dread is apparently assuged by the bars of teh cage that surround her.

Gregory compares the lioness with the human mind captured. She was created with free will, but like a lioness going in search of food for her cubs, she wanted to feed the desires of the flesh. ... the problem of the fall of the human race from intimacy with God.  Like the lioness roaming free in the wilderness, the human was created free by God.  He considers the hman in the aspect of mens, which can be freely translated "inner man" or "true self". Unsatisfied with being himself, a human must go outside himself to seek food.  Like the lioness deceived by the scent of flesh, the human is deceived by the ancient enemy and by his own desire.  Stetching out his hand for the forbidden fruit, he falls into the pit, the pit of death and decay.

As soon as the lioness enters the cage, the bait of the heifer is forgotten.  So too with the human.  She is not deprived of her free will.  As the lioness is led back to the free air in the cage, so by the intervention of grace is the human led back to company with God.  The human is still unable to do many things, because his nature is wounded.  Like the bars of a cage, human nature confines us to a relatively limited number of options.  Although the human has escaped the trap of condemnation and the penalty of death by the helping hand of redemption and forgiveness, he is confined by heavenly teaching.

The lioness wanted the heifer, so she entered the pit .... In the same way the human feel into sin through freedom of the will, and through redemption he restrains his emotions, captured by the Creator's grace. .... The human was captured for his pride, like a lioness, because he boldly transgressed the commandment ....

(Now) we realize how pride daily trips us up.  Under the guise of virtuous action we fall into the pit.  Our sinful desires cause us to grasp the bait.  We cannot get out by our own power.  God's mercy intervenes in the form of a cage.  The cage is realization of our weakness and humilty.  We become exiles and prisoners, but thereby we become free again and in God's company.  

Note to Self:  The therapy room - the place where the client is held, like a caste,
until healing comes.

The lioness is a symbol of the fall of the human under the aspect of mens.  A symbol is something that stands for or is put aside something else, normally an abstract or spiritual reality.

Brian Kerns, OCSO,  Gregory the Great and The Beastiary,  CSR, Volume 46, 2011

The Meaning of "Exempla"

Exempla, ways of telling each other and the world around them who they were and what they believed.  These stories seek to entertain in order to exhort.

Brian Patrick McGuire,  Cistercian Storytelling - A Living Tradition: Surprises in the World of Research, CSR, Volume 39.3, 2004

The Notion of "Babylon"

According to AELRED

The name Babylon, which is translated 'confusion' signifies the world .... everything is confused, where the good live with the evil and the elect with the reprobate, whre teh grain is mixed with the chaff, the oil withthe dregs, and the wine with the residue, where the just and unjust are on an equal footing in temporal matters, and where human beings are no better off than beasts.  For here one who lives reasonably as a human gets no reward, and one who becomes a beast through carnal vices gets no suitable punishment for wrongs done.

Elias Dietz, OCSO, Amivalence well considered in

Cistercian Studies Quarterly,  Volume 47.1, 2012

Notion of Personality Types

Melancholy

Chilled, withdrawn, internalized, sad

Sadness

The precondition to the restlessness or lethargy of acedia.  It is the inner hollowness that forces an individual outward in quest of the joy that cannot be found within.  It is the consequence of repressed anger or frustrated desire.  A wave of gloom can come over a person apparently for no reason at all (John Cassian).  Everything simply seems too much. Afflicted individuals pull into themselves, shun their friends, and avoid the regular routine of life.  The black bile of bitterness fills every nook and cranny of a depressed indivual's heart.  It will be important for him to set his sights on the eternal horizon in order to transcend the darkness of the present.  Sadness is deadly because the depressed cannot live the life to which they have been called. Cassian compares the victims of tristitia to useless, moth-eaten garments and to worm-infested beams unsuitable for the construction of the temple of God.  A wholesome, happy person is one who stands in proper relationship to God and neighbor.  Solomon Schimmel speaks of the "melancholy of modernity."  Sadness is not only still with us; it seems, become a major contaminant in the polluted air we breathe.   <Kenneth C. Russell, John Cassian on Sadness, CSR, Volume 38.1, 2003>

Choleric

Hot, dry, closed, unsympathetic, impatient, quick to judge, no patience for concepts or ideas.

Phlegmatic

Cold and damp, his pique never turns into anger but drips covertly from the edges of his speech;  for all his pleasures and sensory focus, his affections never seem to move him to the sort of excitement and fervor.

J. Stephens Russell, Dialogics in AELRED's Spiritual Friendship

Cistercian Studies Quartlerly, Volume 47.1 2012

The Grace of Giving and Receiving

... true and real giving and taking is a grace; it is God in us, for God is an interchange among Persons.  This is a grace, however, that does not simply take effect over our heads, as it were: it makes us active participants as real givers and takers: "Life has taught me that no one is consoled in this world who has not first consoled and that we receive nothing we have not first given.  Among us we an speak nly of an exchange, God alone gives, only he. "Between one man's hand and another's there intervenes, I firmly believe, more than just a density of this world.  It may well be that, from so far away, all we are capable of is the gesture of giving.  It is God who actually gives."  The great skill of the Christian consequently, is that he can give infinitely more than what he has:  "O marvel, that we should be able to make a gift of what we do not ourselves possess.  O sweet miracle of our empty hands!  The hope that was dying in my heart blossomed again in hers. 

"Since I am coming to you with empty hands, it may well be that he will put ther what you desire to find in them.  It may also well be that I will find in yours what I am not looking for in them and what you have not put there."

"Whoever cannot give more than he receives begins to decompose.  The law ruling a poor Christian is precisely to give what he does not have.  Otherwise, where would charity be?  Where would be the sweet miracle of charity?  We are always unworthy of what we receive, my child, because we never receive anything except from God.

Hans Urs von Balthasar,  Bernanos:  An Ecclesial Existence. 1988

My parish is bored stiff ....

My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. Like so many others!  We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can't do anything about it.

... the world is eaten up by boredom.  To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can't see it all at once.  It is like dust.  You go about and never notice it, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine it doesn't even grit on your teeth.  But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and your hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go.  And so people are "always on the go."  Perhaps the answer would be that the world has long been familiar with boredom, that such is the true condition of man.  No doubt the seed was scattered all over life, and here and there found fertile soil to take root; but I wonder if man has ever before him experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair,  a shameful form of despair in some ways like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay.

The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old.

It is hard to be alone, and harder still to share your solitude with indifferent or ungrateful people.  ... Well, I've had my troubles like everyone else.  The worst of it is nobody understands you. To the outside world you are just a little democratic parson, vain, and pretentious.  ... How hard it is to avoid offending somebody!  And however hard you try, people seem less inclined to use goodwill to their advantage than unconsciously eager to set one goodwill against another.  Inconceivable sterility of souls - what is the cause of it?  "Truly, man is always at enmity with himself - a secret sly kind of hostility.  Tares, scattered no matter where, will almost certainly take root.  Whereas the smallest seed of good needs more than ordinary good fortune, needs prodigious luck, not to be stifled.

The modern world may deny its Master, but it's been redeemed just the same; present-day society is no longer content merely to administer our common patrimony, so whether it wants to or doesn't, it's got to set out and seek the Kingdom.  And that Kingdom is not of this world. Which means they'll never find it. Yet they'll never be able to give up the search.  "Save yourself or die," there's no getting way from it.

Blessed be he who has saved a child's heart from despair.

The Word of God is a red-hot iron.  And you who preach it 'ud go picking it us with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren't get hold of it with both hands.

I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.

Keep marching to the end, and try to land up quietly at the road-side without shedding your equipment.

The poor you have always with you, just because there will always be rich,  that is to say there will always be hard and grasping men out for power more than possession. ....  Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. .... If some of these business men wee ever to take it into their heads to follow strict theological precepts on the subject of lawful profit,  they would certainly end up in the bankruptcy court.  ... The rich man wants to be well thought of, and the richer he is the more he wants it. ....  If a poor man really is the living image of Jesus - Jesus Himself - it's awkward to have him sitting there in the front row,  displaying his obscene misery, his face from which in two thousand years you haven't yet been able to wipe the spittle. Because first and foremost the social problem is a matter of honor; it is the unjust humiliation of poor men that make you pauper. ... The poor man lives by charity.

How little we know what a human life really is - even our own.  To judge us by what we call our actions is probably as futile as to judge us by our dreams.  God's justice chooses from this dark conglomeration of thoughts and act, and that which is raised towards the Father shines with a sudden burst of light, displayed in glory like the sun.

You can't go offering the truth to human beings as though it were a sort of insurance policy, or a dose of salts.  It's the Way and the Life.  God's truth is the Life.  We only look as though we wre brining it to mankind; really it bring us, my lad.

I know of course, that the wish to pray is a prayer in itself, that God can ask no more than that of us. ... I needed prayer as much as I needed air to draw my breath or oxygen to fill my blood. 

I wanted to have God to myself.  He did not come to me.

... many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth.  They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.

The sin against hope - the deadliest sin and perhaps also the most cherished, the most indulged.

I have lost neither Faith, Hope, nor Charity ... But in this life, what use to mortal man are eternal goods?  What counts is the longing to possess them.  I feel I have ceased to long for them.

There are always saints.  And by saints I mean those who have been given more than others. Rich men!  I've always had a secret kind of notion that if we could take a god's-eye view of human societies, we'd have the key to a good many things we can't understand.  After all, God made man in His image; when man tries to build a social order to suit himself he's bound to make a clumsy copy of the other, the true society ..... Our division into rich and poor must be based on some great law of the universe.  In the eyes of the church the rich man is here to shield the poor, like his elder brother.  Well, of course, he often does it without even wanting to, by the sheer action of economic force, as they say.  A millionaire goes smash and thousands are chucked out into the streets.  So you can just imagine what happens in the invisible world when one of those rich men I've been talking about, a steward of divine grace, turns tail!  The solvency of the mediocre is nothing.  Whereas the solvency of a saint!  What a scandal if he should happen to fail!  You've got to be crazy to refuse to see that the sole justification of inequality in the supernatural order is its risk.  Our risk!  Both yours and mine.

No, I have not lost my faith.  The expression "to lose one's faith," as one might a purse or a ring of keys, have always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked too much.  Faith is not a thing which one "loses," we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather at teh very source of its life!

I no longer believe, because I have no wish to believe.  You no longer wish to know yourself.   This profound truth, has ceased to interest you.  .... You no longer want to possess yourself. You no longer desire your own joy.  You can only love yourself through God. You no longer love yourself, and you will never love yourself again either in this world or hereafter - through all eternity.

In my soul nothing.  god is silent.  Silence.

The world of sin confronts the world of grace like the reflected picture of a landscape in the blackness of very still, deep waters.  There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners.  In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; one day in the eyes of Eternal God they will be no more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.  Who are you to condemn another's sin?  He who condemns sin becomes apart of it, espouses it. You hate this woman and feel yourself far removed from her, when you hate and her sin are as two branches of the same tree.

That supreme grace has got to be earned like any other, and I no doubt had ceased to merit it. And so at last God has withdrawn himself from me - of this at any rate I am sure.

I am no longer fit to guide a parish.  I have neither prudence, nor judgment, nor common sense, nor real humility.  God has punished me.  Send me back to my seminary, I am a danger to souls.

The world of evil is so far beyond our understanding!  Nor can I really succeed in picturing hell as a world, a universe. It is nothing, never will be anything but a half-formed shape, the hideous shape of an abortion, a stunted thing on the very verge of all existence.  I think of sullen, translucent patches on the sea.

Yet historians, moralists, even philosophers refuse to see anything but the criminal; they re-create evil in the image and likeness of humanity. They form no idea of essential evil, that vast yearning for the void, for emptiness, since if ever our species is to perish it will die of boredom, of stale disgust.  Humanity will have been slowly eaten up as a beam by invisible fungi.  

All the wounds of the soul give out pus, madame.

I have had the impression that my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice ....

You may bid Christ welcome but what do you do to Him when He comes?  He was also welcomed by Caiaphas.

Blessed would be the sins that left any shame in you.  God grant you may despise yourself.

There's no greater danger in the world than rich men's hypocrisy.

Power is built on nothing except the illusions of poor men - 

Nothing, either in this world or the next, can separate us from what we've love more than ourselves, more than life, more than getting into heaven.

God is love itself .... If you want to love don't place yourself beyond love's reach.

Hate is indifference and contempt.

But at least I can assure you of this:  there are not two separate kingdoms, one for the living, and one for the dead. There is only God's kingdom and, living and dead, we are all therein.

I seem to be standing there alone between God and this tortured human being.

But you known that our God came to be among us.  Shake your fist at Him, spit on His face, scourage Him, and finally, crucify Him: what does it matter?  My daughter, it's already been done to Him.

Hell is - not to love any more.

Hell is not to love anymore. As long as we remain in this life we can still deceive ourselves, think that we love by our own will, that we love independently of God.  But we're like madmen stretching our hands to clasp tthe moon reflected in water.  I'm sorry: I express it so clumsily.

Do you take God for an executioner?  God wants us to be merciful with ourselves.  And besides, our sorrows are not our own.  He takes them on Himself, into His heart.

Our Lord has need of a witness, and I was chosen, doubtless for lack of anyone better, as one calls in a passer-by.  I should be crazy indeed to imagine that I had a part, a real part in it.  Already it is too much that God should have given me the grace to be present when a soul became reconciled to hope again - those solemn nuptials.

Oh, miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!

Lord, I am stripped bare of all things, as You alone can strip us bare. Whose fearful care nothing escapes, nor Your terrible love!

... the first duty of the church is to preserve the family and society, to condemn indulgence, to stand for order and moderation in all things.

A priest's like a lawyer - 'e's there if you be needin' 'I'm. E don't ned to go meddlin' with folk. But look here ... a lawyer works for himself, I work for the Lord.  People don't often come to God all on their own.

More and more firmly am I convinced that what we call sadness, anguish, despair, as though to persuade ourselves that these are only states of the Spirit, are the Spirit itself. I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him nor within him can he perceive anything except in the form of agony.

The question of vocation.  We're all called to the priesthood.  I agree, but not always in the same way.  So to get things straight I start off by taking each one of us back where he belongs in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o' thousand years younger, but what of it?  Time doesn't worry our Lord. He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born - from a 'human' point of view - Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee - anywhere.  And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me and so we were called, each in his own particular way, according to the time, place, and circumstances.  This isn't theology, I'm preaching ... It's simply my own imagination, what I think, what I dream. It amounts to this:  If the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers eternally, could yank its wretched body back across the centuries up this huge slope of two thousand years, we should be taken back to that very spot where - Now, what's wrong?  What on earth's the matter? I hadn't realized there were tears on my face, I wasn't even thinking of it. 

Our Lady knew neither triumph nor miracle.  Her Son preserved her from the least tip-touch of the savage wing of human glory.

You don't know what loneliness is ... No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

I'm sad ... because God isn't loved enough.

One day you'll see that prayer is just that way of crying, the only tears that aren't soft.

My prayer, like the village, has no more weight to it, flies away ...

I was never young,  because I never dared to be young.  .... I was never young because no one want to be young with me.

Joy!  A kind of pride, a gaiety, an absurd hope, entirely carnal, the carnal form of hope.

The habit of prayer, as I see it, would mean a continual anxiety with regard to prayer, a fight, a struggle.  It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.  Your face - you don't mind if I tell you? looks worn by prayer; it reminds me of a very old missal or even one of those half-rubbed-away engravings on ancient tombstones.

My heart is with those on the front lines, with those who throw away their lives.  Soldiers, missionaries.

I think you are always waving your arms to prevent other people from seeing the reality of you, or perhaps to hide it from yourself.

... the mission of the Church is to rediscover the source of lost joy.

I was crying without a sob .... it was life, again, passing out of me.

At my age, death seems so far away that the daily experience of our own mediocrity does not as yet convince us.

My death is here, a death like any other, and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man.

Yet I would have wished to be once, just once, magnificently generous to you!

I have always know that I possessed the spirit of poverty. The spirit of childhood is much akin.

I believe in one thing only:  complete honesty toward oneself and towards otehrs.

She finished it for me in a voice which many would not have understood, but I know it well, and it awakens in me so many memories: the ageless voice, the voice both brave and resigned, which soothes drunkards, scolds naughty brats, lulls naked babes, argues with relentless tradesmen, beseeches bailiffs, comforts the dying - the voice of the working-woman which goes on through time probably never changing, the voice which holds out against all the miseries of the world ....

I know now that youth is a gift of God, and like all His gifts, carries no regret.  They alone shall be young, really young, whom he has chosen never to survive their youth, I belong to such a race of men. ... There is no old man in me. 

... for human agony is beyond all an act of love.

How easy it is to hate oneself!  True grace is to forget.  Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity - as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.

Georges Bernanos,  The Diary of a Country Priest, 1937

Notion of "Sin" in Dante's Inferno

The answer lies in the nature of sin.  As I understand the Thomist and Augustinian notion, evil is not a positive force but an absence, a nonbeing, as cold as the absence of heat energy or dark as the absence of light energy.  In this theological idea of privation, a practicular sin or evil is a place wehre the moral energy of God's creation is withdrawn, or shriveled away, or destroyed.  The sin is a dead place in the soul, a hole or area of absolute zero, just as Hell is a place of dark and cold.

The sin is a wound that hurts, and it is, moreover, a self-inflicted wound.  The idea of privation, with its corollary that sin is a place where the soul has torn part of itself away, reminds me of a saying I have heard quoted in the Talmud, to the effect that the evils of others do to us are as nothing compared to teh evils we do to ourselves.  The remarkable fact is that for most people (excepting, for example, victims of oppression, torture, famine, disease), this is true.  We wound ourselves, and that fact is one of the great moral mysteries.

.... the idea of wanhope or despair: the fatal sin that keeps the soul from praying sincerely for grace.  Though mercy is infinite, the soul succumbs to fear: it believes it is too fallen or corrupt to be saved.

Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (ed), The Poets' Dante