On the Logos: Christian Koans Part I

In the Buddhist Tradition, three collections of Koans stand out, as compilations used by teachers with their students.  In English, they're called "The Gateless Gate," "The Blue Cliff Record" and the "Book of Equanimity."

As a way of assisting Christianity in flexing its more intuitive muscles, I am beginning work on a set of "Christian Koans."  If they succeed at pointing to truths, they arrive the way teenagers do during games of "Ding Dong Dash." That is to say, when we open the door to them, we learn their truths by what's implied, not explicit.

Today I'll offer two of them, without further commentary.  It might be helpful to review some of the "Steps in Solving Koans," of whose usefulness I'm still quite convinced.

In my attempt to create a collection of Christian Koans, I simply asked, as I went through the Zen collections, "what heavy lifting is this story trying to do, and what christian stories do the same work?"

As the three sets of Zen Koans do, each Christian Koan has the case itself, a commentary, and an "appreciatory verse" to unlock it a bit for the listener.

Case 1:  Vincent’s Logos  A monk asked brother Vincent:  Has a Vulture the Divine Nature?  Vincent answered “Logos.”

Br. Adam’s commentary: 

In order to master Catholicism, you must pass through the barrier of the Ancestors.  If you do not pass the barrier, and do not cut off the way of thinking, then you will be like the King of Vanities, forsaking the holy city to chase after the wind.  What is the gate of the ancestors?  Why, it is this single word “Logos.”  That is the front gate of Catholicism.  If you pass through it, you will not only see God face to face, but you will also become like his Son.  You will be crucified with him at the place of the skull, seeing with his same eyes, hearing with his same ears.  Is this not an intimate burden?  Wouldn’t you like to walk through this gate? 

Count all your bones.  Prophesy, first to the flesh and then the breath.  Carry logos continuously day and night.  Do not form a nihilistic conception of vacancy, or a relative conception of “has” or “has not.  Your silence will become a fire, shut up in your bones.  It will be just as if you swallow a red-hot iron ball, which you cannot spit out even if you try.  All the illusory ideas and delusive thoughts accumulated up to the present will be exterminated, and when the time comes, internal and external will be spontaneously united.  You will know this, but for yourself only.  Then all of a sudden, an explosive conversion will occur, and the words will be as true of you as they were of the Son of Man “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. They will say to you, “Look there!” or “Look here!” Do not go, do not set off in pursuit. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.”

It will be as if you snatch away the great sword of Solomon, and hold it in your hand. When you meet the Messiah, you kill him. When you meet the ancestors, you kill them.

Thus crucified with Christ, thus suspended between heaven and earth, you will neither possess the things of heaven nor understand the things of earth. This restriction is perfect freedom. Though you don’t realize it—and to realize it is to lose it—this suspension is divinization, an emptiness of forms in which you become what you seek, the “wholly other” who pervades everything.

Now I want to ask you again. How will you carry this out? Employ every ounce of your energy to work on this “logos.” If you work on the logos, it will work on you. If you are present to it, behold: The joyous light of glory, the eternal splendor of the Father, the burning seal that makes all things one—it sparks, it flames, it blazes within you.


Br. Adam’s Verse:

Divine Nature, a Vulture. A little has, a little has not. Where the corpse is, they gather.

Case 19: Fr. Chrysogonus’ Logos

Br. Benedict asked Fr. Chrysogonus “What is the Logos?” Fr. Chrysogonus replied “Ordinary Mind.” Br. Benedict said “Should I try to seek the Logos?” Chrysogonus said “If you try for it, you will become separate from it.” Br. Benedict was puzzled “How can I speak the Word unless I try to do so?” Chrysogonus replied “The Logos is not a matter of trying or not trying. Trying is a delusion. Not Trying is confusion. The ancient Rabbis said ‘You do not take the word of God into your mouth.’ When you have reached the Logos beyond all doubt, as the Rebbes said ‘You enter into the Word, because the Word is bigger than you are.’ How can we talk about it on the level of right and wrong?” With these words, Br. Benedict came to a sudden realization.

Br. Adam’s Comment:

Chrysogonus dissolved at Br. Benedict’s question, and could not offer a plausible explanation. Even though Benedict comes to a realization, he must delve into it for another 30 years before he can fully understand it.

Br. Adam’s Verse:


A stand of tall grass, a summer breeze
A winter night, a full December moon.
If useless things do not clutter your mind,
you will have the best days of your life.

Drawing from the Old Wells: Steps 7-12 of the Ladder of Humility

Brother Ed’s quote, the one I mentioned in “Drawing from the old Wells 4-6” is important.  His teacher, he said, was his cancer.  This showed me Ed had transitioned away from being a student. At some point, according to Benedict’s Rule, either the spiritual guide proves himself adept at dealing with the challenge that psychology and daily life issue to God, or the spiritual guide becomes a less important teacher than life and psychology themselves.  The remaining steps of humility (seven through 12) depict a man who has stopped looking to abbot and novice master for guidance. From the 7th “Step of Humility” onward, a monk’s journey moves inward and gets honest.

Brother Ed Shivell might be a good example of someone making that transition.  But it’s in the life of Brother John Corrigan that the last 5 steps of Humility stand out in sharpest relief.  

In steps 7 through 12, a monk’s focus shifts to things like “being truly convinced that he’s of less value than others. (Step 7)”   Benedict says a monk in these more interior stages “only does what’s endorsed by the rule and the common life. (step 8) ”  Somewhat naturally, the Rule’s author says, a monk who has followed the rule down the rabbit hole “isn’t given to ready laughter (step 10).”  Such a man “only speaks unless asked a question (Step 9),” and “speaks briefly and reasonably (Step 11).”

 I’ve been racking my brain for stories about brother John that might demonstrate these truths.  But, in keeping with the quiet humility that’s the Rule predicted result, those stories exist only in skeletal form. If anything can speak some flesh onto those bones, it’s the places from which John wasn’t seen or heard. 

For instance, if sometimes John didn't come to dinner,  I would often learn, later, that he’d been fixing the archaic grading machines that cleaned and packaged the eggs our chickens laid daily.  

John was a lay brother, a man who entered the monastery declaring that a life of work and quiet rather than clerical responsibility was what he wanted.  In the 1960s The Trappists abolished a man’s ability to declare himself permanently a brother.  Ostensibly this was to adjust the reality of the life to Benedict’s rule which never mentioned the distinction between clerical and lay states.  Practically it also dealt with a hubris that had cropped up among the brothers, that they ran the place while priests sat on their asses.  

While that was, perhaps, the case, belaboring the point divided communities.  It was better to simply say “everyone here’s gonna strap on their work boots” and move on to observing the Rule’s more important particulars. Many argued that the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.  The gentle diligence which shone through the lay brother, they feared, would be part of the luggage his Hubris departed the monastery with.  

On the whole this is accurate—something is lost, and will be, more so, when the oldest of those presently in monasteries die—but it was not so with John.  He was tapped to be the work boss, which meant he was the person who had to keep the understaffed monastery moving.  And he did it with gentleness, despite the occasional unrealistic expectation on the part of the Abbot, the occasional broken machine in the grading house, and the frequent discontent that the brothers all to predictably showed for their jobs.

At best, I made an attempt at manifesting step 7.  I was not above bitching about my jobs.  But I'd gotten my jobs from my Novice master and the Abbot--terrible dunces, both of them, I thought--not from Br. John.  I pride myself on recognizing the kindness with which John performed his duties, and being a person he could basically move around as he needed to.  I could never quite balance farm work with the additional jobs of de facto choirmaster and frequent infirmary assistant, but that wasn't John's fault.  Anyway I tried not to treat him like it was.

Br. John Corrigan

I bring up John because he quietly proves the point.  The rule  simply facilitates a transition: from looking for guidance from authorities, to looking for guidance from the communal life and chosen elders, to looking for guidance from within.  The monk transitioning through step 7 comes defeatedly to statements like “Alright!  I know I have issues with authority!  And some of them really are the bumbling idiots I take them for.  But, for Christsakes, so am I.  We’ve all taken jobs we’re not qualified for.”  I came eventually to see their authority as an unfortunate disadvantage.  My bumbling idiocy could be somewhat anonymous.  But bullshit flows uphill in hierarchical organizations.  Their bumbling idiocy, happening, as it did, in their positions of authority, gained them calumny and blame.

Eventually I learned how to stop bitching, and be a more prudent newbie.  To one who’s lived in a monastery, Step 8 (acting only on the rule and the communal example,) is actually not as limiting as it seems.  No aviary of rare birds could hold a candle to the monastery’s collection of very old, very odd ducks.  I eventually learned that, if I wanted to do something, I simply had to find an old guy who was doing the same—someone so cantankerous that the abbot had stopped challenging him.  When a young monk’s cries of “I want what I want” become “I only want to follow that guy’s example” the abbot’s a bit harder-pressed to deny the request.

Admittedly, following the most idiosyncratic of his elders’ examples is the most prudent, and least mature move a young monk can make.  Eventually, I set my sights on the old guys whose conduct was truly admirable, and strove to follow that as well.

In formation classes, there were other transitions to be made.  I must confess that, back when I monked-it-up, I didn’t rise to the occasion as I should have.  When I was in the monastery, I was still full of desire to receive authentic spiritual guidance from those in authority.  It was often frustrating when the level of "feeling, intuition and transformation" I felt called to was bypassed for the sake of conversations about smelly-old Bernard of Clairvaux.  I think, if I had it to do over again, I would be more adept at allowing myself to enter into miserably unsatisfying things like formation classes: sometimes, I’d tell myself, life is simply unsatisfying.  And it’s just permission to look for what is satisfying wherever it’s available.  I am grateful for the freedom departing-the-monastery afforded me: I’m not sure I would have discovered all of this otherwise. 

In a similar vein, in my early days as a monk, I was scandalized by what seemed like Benedict’s prohibition of laugher.  I see it differently now.  I’ve simply observed myself enough to know that sometimes, I laugh when I’m nervous or sad or afraid.  It’s a response entirely ill-suited emotionally, a felt-conspiracy of “governmental cover-up” proportions.  It’s hard to have the right reactions: to sleep when I’m tired, to voice anger and frustration without over-reacting, to excuse others when they drop the ball and laugh at my own inadequacies.   These days, though, having appropriate and measured emotional responses is one of my overt goals.  These days, I’m not sure Benedict was prohibiting laughter as much as saying “a time will come when you laugh at things that are funny.”  I chuckle a bit at how oblivious I was to this, grateful for how much simpler things are now.  I look forward to them becoming simpler still.

As often as Br. John was asked to speak, he never, in the true southern sense, “held court.”  For those of you who’ve never experienced life south of the Mason Dixon Line, “holding court” is being a pleasant windbag.  It’s treating my turn to talk like it’s a football I’ve been given to run with.  Old men in monasteries speak briefly, then return to quiet.  Brother John is an expert at this.  I aspire to say the same of myself eventually.  If I had to guess, I’d say the transition happens because of two things.  For one thing, as life starts being my teacher, it’s less useful to tell the bumbling idiot chosen as my spiritual guide what’s going through my own bumbling-idiot head.  If I can dial down the panic of not knowing, life will present me with as many answers as it does questions.  I just won’t get to determine when that happens.  

Also, however, monasteries are too much like the Navy.  In monasteries, the eager and talkative get jobs.  I asked to join the monastic choir because I wanted to get to know the brothers: I didn’t realize it would become my responsibility for as long as I was a monk.  In my latter monastic years, and ever after, I acquired a little voice in my head that says “Sailor, it is imperative that you shut the fuck up.  It’s spelled NAVY because, for Godsakes, you should never again volunteer yourself.”

To restate the point: life itself becomes the teacher: it speaks, and the implication’s that I become the listener.  It's Benedict's contention that a person who's  done this work ultimately demonstrates the gospel by how he lives.  I have long-since parted with the hope that the Rule will yield gospel-grade humility in every last brother, even as I’m convinced that I've known some whose humility is undoubtable.

And in the Rule's gradual yielding of authority--from Abbot and Novice Master, to Rule and community, and finally to life itself-- in this, even flunky monastics, filling the blogosphere with noise, can find hope of humility.  The aspiration voiced at my profession of temporary vows has lost its ecclesial robes (and perhaps the leg it had to stand on) but it remains an aspiration still.  “May the one who began this good work in you” it said, “carry it through to completion.”  

The 12th Step of Humility is that a monk always manifests the title-track virtue “in his bearing no less than in his heart.”  I won’t lie, I love that life uses both my girlfriend, and blessedly non-benedictine bacon double cheeseburgers to humble me these days.  But I still hope the completion mentioned at my first profession happens.  More than that: I hope, whatever my work in the process is, that I cooperate with it.   Those who came before me did this with gentleness and diligence.  In my own way, I hope I can do the same.

Drawing from the Old Wells: Steps 4-6 of Benedict's Ladder of Humility

In step 4 particularly, (and to a lesser extent steps 5 and 6) the Rule’s transformative rubber meets the road.  The text says "in this obedience under difficult, unfavorable or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering." There are a lot of different kinds of “difficult and unfavorable conditions," and it’s important to touch on each of them.

Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, referred to “noogenic neuroses.”  This is a helpful term.  Some neuroses, it claims, form in response to the frustrations of existence, rather than forming because of frustrated basic needs.  Frankl claims these may not be neuroses at all, and can even be resolved fairly immediately, by troubleshooting our response to them.  The Serenity Prayer asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change, and what I can’t.  The things that I can't change, the dynamics of life itself, are the things that do real transformative work in my life.

Before I go further, I want to talk about Brother Edward.  He was the monastery’s cook—a work he did with tremendous selflessness, even during the final two years of his life, when he carted cancer around the kitchen.  He tried to get us not to grieve him too soon: he wasn’t gone yet, he said, and on the cold days, what mattered to him was to get comfort food on the table in time for the noon meal.  

I’m bringing this up because Ed was instrumental in my accepting one of the biggest helpings of “existential frustration” I’d ever been served.

It needs to be said that Eddie was Jesus: quite literally, in my early days as a monk, I once had an experience of contemplation in church, of the kind I supposed they’d had when the stranger had become Christ at Emmaus.  When all of the mental noise that differentiates people from Jesus and one another quieted—at least for the few seconds before I began analyzing the experience—the person in front of me was Ed.  But because I didn't see him as separate from myself, Ed was Jesus.  But he was also Jesus for reasons that didn't depend on the seldom-given gift of contemplation.

 Eddie was also the reason I know that monasteries can be places of great intimacy.  Around year three, (two years into my novitiate, the second stage of formation) two things began to happen: I began to take the prospect of lifelong celibacy seriously, and God began to appear absent.  

Both caused their own kind of pandemonium in my psyche.  I began systematically dreaming of every girl I’d ever had a crush on.  This happened so consistently I eventually made a list, and ticked off girls’ names when they’d danced across my dreamscape.  The most intense infatuations of my adolescent life were harder to get over.  Worse yet, the sparseness of the monastic life offered little reprieve.  In the case of one college girlfriend, I did the majority of my grieving while shoveling chicken shit out at the monastery’s compost pile.

In its own way, “the absence of God” made my prayer life maximally unrewarding.  That’s actually a slight misnomer.  In truth, what began happening to me was merely the ceasing of consolations in prayer.  Previously, though, pleasant feelings had been such a part of my prayer life that I’d committed the typical neophyte’s blunder of equating the feelings with God’s presence.  So when prayer stopped being fun, God seemed absent.  And God was why I’d come to the monastery.  I used to say “God called me to the monastery, then he, himself, went to live in the Bahamas.

These two things happened together.  On two fronts, my attachments were out of whack with reality.  Eddie was the one to help me through all this.  I had done all of the private crying I could, but my situation wasn’t improving.  So I pulled Eddie into a small dining room, asked him if he’d consent to step into the role of “spiritual elder” for a moment.  He made cracks about how few answers he had to give, but consented.

Dry-eyed and emotionally spent, I told Eddie all of this: the absence of God, the parade of former loves, and how it all welled up into a question: why the hell, I asked, had I come here?  

Ed didn’t produce solutions.  He simply began crying.  “I’ve dealt with both of those things since I was a novice.  It’s…so…hard” he said.  

I replied “With all due respect to the formation classes here, they don’t really help me deal with this stuff.”

Ed made a dismissive “pfft” sound and rolled his eyes. Through tears he said “I haven’t cracked the Rule since I was a novice.”  He pointed to his leg, which the cancer had swelled to twice its normal size: “Right now, this is my formation.”

That day, Ed woke me up to the kind of intimacy available in the monastery.  True, if I’d stayed, no spouse would ever make moon eyes at me, but I would have the same experience as the 20 men I lived with, and some of them would even be willing to talk with me about it.  By about two years later, I could articulate the fact that neither my positive feelings about God, nor the emotional crap of my grieving processes were indicators of God's presence or absence.

The fourth of the Rule’s “Steps of Humility” talks about continuing obedience under difficult conditions.  Some of that comes from nowhere else but life itself.  I carried around a lot of anger because I wanted the life to change:  It was only in realizing how unrealistic that was, and then shifting my own paradigm, that I could access some peace.    

We should talk about one other bit: Sometimes other people can change the frustrations but won’t, and sometimes I really need to self-adjust and don’t.  This was the case when I was made “choir master.”  I put it in quotes because it wasn’t always true.  The second abbot I served under had been choir master before me.  It became clear that he intended to part with the responsibility of accompanying 7 sung prayers per day, but not the authority of the choir master.  With someone else to “cover the responsibility,” the abbot began sleeping through Vigils regularly—this is the earliest prayer, at 3:20 in the morning.  So it became the case that an abbot was asking his tired novice to preside at a prayer he himself was sleeping through: This sort of thing SCANDALIZED. THE. FUCK. OUT. OF. THE. NOVICES.  

As the son of a somewhat-famous liturgical composer, I came at the responsibilities with some hard-and-fast presuppositions about what good music was, and a real-but-slight chip on my shoulder about it.  Generally the brothers received my work well.  Every once in a while I’d push for change too quickly, and both the Abbot, and my Father, would tell me to slow down.  Across the phone lines, Dad would remind me “Changing a community’s liturgical music is like changing the furniture in a blind person’s house.  You can do it, but they’ll trip all over themselves for a while.”  By and by, something became clear, across all the work fronts in the monastery: saddling the young with all of the responsibility and none of the authority—this was to be the rule, not the exception.

This was an enormous struggle for me: I thought, by performing my responsibilities as best I could, that I was acting as a choirmaster should act.  But my performance was something my sleepy abbot routinely took exception to.  By and by, the struggle was an entrance point into the fifth and sixth steps.  I came to some grief by my own failure to accept that I’d have responsibility, but no authority.  I came to grief by my own inability to accept that Abbots (who don’t live the Rule) will correct novices (who need to live the Rule,) and that will simply be how it goes.  When I self-adjusted, my situation improved.

The genius of step 5, not concealing one’s thoughts from the abbot, is twofold.  For one thing, it is good for me to take responsibility for a fault without blaming the situation or people that showed me I’ve got it.  When I realized I needed to slow down and let the brothers’ needs—not my aspirations—determine the pace of my work as choirmaster, my serenity increased.  When I realized that my living of the rule was my responsibility, just as the abbot’s living of the rule was his, my life got more peaceful.  Talks with the abbot became easier as I realized, more and more, that we were simply two people who regularly fuck up an ideal.  As the abbot, he could call me out for it.  That’s just the reality of power dynamics.  But delightfully, I could occasionally miss vigils, even as the accompanist for the service, without drawing the abbot’s criticism.  I suppose it’s nothing more than an impish pleasure, but if you’re gonna make a mistake in the full sight of your superior: for God’s sake, make the mistakes he himself made yesterday.

Hypocrisy aside, when I learned to take responsibility on the one hand and selectively dodge it on the other—it opened my eyes to another dimension of the monastic life.  In the monastery’s different industries, a lot of the older monks worked three jobs each.  Because of their Trappist vow of obedience, very few of them had too much choice in the matter.  And very few of them were qualified beforehand for the jobs they assumed.  I came to see the abbot—and his underlings, like the monk who assigned the work—as men who had a certain number of jobs to fill.  To them, the monastery’s various efforts at being self supporting were an understaffed chess board.  All of us (from novices to ninety year olds) were pieces they moved about in irregular ways, trying to keep the industries afloat.

A quick aside: Ram Dass tells a story about a time he and Timothy Leary were having a disagreement.  (It must be remembered that Ram Dass was named "Richard Alpert" at birth.) Timothy turned to to his own children, in a moment of anger, and said to them "I need to tell you that Uncle Richard is evil."  This really got under Ram Dass's  skin.  A few months later, under the influence of LSD, Ram Dass had the courage to face the possibility that Tim Leary had been telling the truth.  Under the influence of psychedelics, Ram Dass took a square look at, and accepted, his own capacity for evil.  

Later Tim Leary called him up and asked him to stop by for a visit.  Ram Dass obliged.  During the course of the visit, Timothy said "You know, Dick, you're not evil."

Ram Dass responded with the calm of a man who'd accepted his own darkness.  "If you hadn't laid that trip on me, I wouldn't have done that work."  

I bring up this story about Ram Dass because it's how the imperfections of others act in relationships of obedience.  When a disobedient person told me I was disobedient, I had to face myself.  In the end, I could accept both options: perhaps I was disobedient, but no more than everyone else.  And again, perhaps I can forgive myself for it, and I should forgive others without expecting to be excused from the ideal myself.

When a person has had an opportunity to get to know his own faults, and when he’s learned to take some power back, defending himself against those of others, step 6 comes in to play.  This is when a monk “is content with the lowest and most menial treatment.”   Certainly this can look like “taking a crap job without complaining.”  But the clearest example I have of step six is Eddie.

As I said, Ed had cancer.  His step six was not in taking abuse while he worked as the cook, and not in working a terrible job no one else wanted. Ed’s step six was to do what he’d been asked while he was slowly dying of cancer.  I suppose, if Mepkin hadn’t had a farm, he wouldn’t have been so plugged into this.  Ed, as I’ve said, had a radar for comfort food like no other.  When it was rainy, or he knew the brothers had been working the various farm fronts in the cold, he’d simply beef up the “comfort food” factor, making sure the monastery’s main meal (the one in the middle of the day) stuck to our ribs.

Both dying as monks and in their home monastery—as opposed to, say, in a hospital or random old-folks-home—this is an enormous goal for the brothers.  The Trappist vow of Stability—to die in the monastery where one made final vows—wrote this into each brother’s psycho-spiritual DNA: only under extreme circumstances could a monk “transfer his stability” to another monastery, and it actually involved legal paperwork.  Ed’s cancer made his care a constant question.  Would the brothers be able to give him the quality attention he needed?  Please understand that there were very few signs of Eddie deteriorating.  Ed took very few pain meds.  He had a period of about 3 weeks where he needed care, but the day before that period began, he was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

There was a chapter—a gathering of the brothers for community meetings or spiritual instruction—when Ed stepped away from the kitchen.  It was announced that he’d be handing over the culinary reigns to someone else.  Briefly, the topic of our ability to care for Ed was brought up.  Would we be able to care for him here?  Would he be able to die at home.  

At one point—I’d become an old hand at this—I interrupted the abbot.  “Y’all just need to realize,” I said, “that if Eddie gets sent elsewhere, I’m switching my stability.”  I’d shot from the hip, then promptly felt bad for interrupting, returning quickly to listening-mode…

Later, and in quiet conversation, I spoke with the community’s nurse, George David.  George said “Ed might be a medical miracle.  All of his doctors are saying he shouldn’t be physically capable of bearing with the amount of pain he’s in.”  

Ed died about three weeks later.  But before lucidity departed from him, he unceremoniously presented me with a hand-written note.  He’d written it on the day of the chapter meeting.  He referred to me by my monastic name, getting right to the point:

Br. Dismas, 

You really touched a deep chord in my heart by what you said at Chapter this morning, saying you would change your stability to be with me if I were to be sent elsewhere.  Absolutely beautiful.  Truly this is what makes community life so wonderful and joyful.  

Thanks, Dismas, for your love and all that you are.

Ed

In my home, I am the chief-cook and bottle-washer.   I have a gargantuan stack of the school week's dishes waiting for me as I write this.  I’ve mentioned this before, in Under the Influence’s June 1st post of this year: the framed note now hangs on one wall of my kitchen, opposite the goofiest picture of Ed ever taken: we called it the “gift wrapped for heaven” picture.

Ultimately, I can claim only to have made a beginning.  I can claim only to have had hit-and-run incidences of steps 4-6, in my monastic life and otherwise.  I am certain I know more of what I’m capable of, and the ways other people, when left to themselves, tend to act.  But every time the feelings of defeat arise, about the apparent failure of my life as a monk, I take my hands out of the dishwater and read Eddie’s words: this is what makes life so wonderful and joyful.  Even if I don’t understand much of my own life, I made a dying monk feel accompanied when it mattered most.  When I’m being realistic about myself, and when I’m remembering Eddie, that’s enough.

Drawing from the old wells: Steps 1-3 of Benedict's Ladder of Humility

In October 26th’s “Christ, Christians, and the Body Language of Transformation”, Under the Influence lamented that there are no criteria by which to judge orthomorphosis, or “right transformation.”  The post described a transformation in things like body language, identity and our basic human needs for affirmation, security, and control.  It argued that, as transformation progresses, body language and speech become less impulsive. identification with a self less hard-and-fast, and our expression of our needs, more moderate.

While I stand by that post, I’m realizing it isn’t necessarily true that there are no criteria for orthomorphosis out there.  It’s a case of an underdeveloped, not an undeveloped tradition.  I’m convinced that some of the different incarnations of religious life begin to put an account of transformation together.  In fact, I realized that I, myself, had seen one of those sets of criteria at work, and shared life with men whose transformations it described.

As  a former Trappist monk, I’m referring, of course, to the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s the document that, in broad strokes, describes and regulates the lives of those who, as it says, “desire to see good days.”  While that's true of each monk, it's also fairly clear it'll be a challenge. The “Steps of Humility” found in its seventh chapter describe what comes when a brother lives cheek by jowl with those he would otherwise not even socialize with.

So I want to spend a few posts reflecting on those steps.  Make no mistake, though: I reflect as a former Trappist, and that means two things.  It means my own transformation is both incomplete, and in some significant ways markedly different than those the Rule describes.  At most, having assisted with palliative care in an old monastic “senior wing,” I can claim to have witnessed the final earthly transformation of at least 7 lifelong monks.  I will, however, be drawing from other traditions as well—specifically Alcoholics Anonymous, and what little I know of Hinduism and Buddhism.  

Before I get into the Steps themselves, I want to tell you about Brother Vincent.  At full height, Vince is at least 6 feet, 5 inches of lanky tallness.  He has trouble finding shoes that fit his feet, and looks at the world from behind impressive greying eyebrows.  Vince is a consummate historian, the curator of a collection of lifetimes, to say nothing of odds and ends.  Vince was the brother to whom “Crucified and Risen: A Theory of Christian Reincarnation” referred.  Certain of at least one past existence as a Civil-War-Era Union Soldier,  Vince is also the guy you go to for practical knickknacks.  Never certain of when he’ll need them, Vince keeps a veritable hardware store in his cell, with shelves upon shelves of nails, hinges and screws, all neatly classified in baby food jars.

Life, for Vince, was a hootenanny whose volume had simply been turned down.  Though the monastery appealed to his longing for God, pubs were more apt to suffice his longing for people.  St. Benedict, in the prologue of his rule, quotes scripture in asking “is there anyone here who longs for life, and desires to see good days?”  Vincent was one whose answer was “MEEEEE” and who felt it so deeply that no particular thing in this life left him satisfied.  It makes sense that Vince would have remembered previous incarnations: I’m sure, at the end of his last lifetime, he called to the heavenly bartender “Let’s have another round of the same, please!”

It’s perhaps because of his innate insatiability that Vince never learned to use the internet.  For him, having the whole world at his fingertips was an overwhelming prospect.  Once, when he asked me to google something for him, I offered to teach him to do it himself.   His response was kind, but immediate and firm: “Oh no, I’d just get lost down that rabbit hole and never come back up.”

There are types of monks for whom the monastery’s austerities serve as protection from themselves.  Quite famous among these was Fr. Louis Merton, known for his best-selling autobiography Seven Story Mountain, which he published under his baptismal name.  One story, that came to me from Fr. Chrysogonus Wadell, tells how Merton had a scar. It was listed as an identifying characteristic on his passport.  Prone to wild, drunken parties in his old life, Merton had played the part of Christ in a mock crucifixion.  Too drunk to resist, he’d been laid on a cross: the partygoers drove a nail halfway through his wrist before they stopped.  Those who knew Merton well could easily see what an important role the cloister had in Merton’s safe interaction with the world.

It’s particularly in light of these types of monks that the Rule’s first three steps of humility makes sense.  They’re the first steps in a process by which, by remembering God, we act as christ acted.  By and by both God and Christ “disappear” only to re-emerge in our own process of internalization.  The result’s that we come out of denial about ourselves.  Markedly dualistic, steps 1-3 are “Spiritual Materialism” at its best, and worth engaging in so long as the practitioner is ready to let the ego go in the end.  

The First Step is that a person constantly keeps the fear of God before his eyes.  Admittedly, t’s the “Santa God” who’s out to get you if you’re naughty and reward you if you’re good, but it succeeds, at least, in dislodging the identification with our worst selves.  The text says “God searches hearts and minds…the Lord knows the thoughts of men…while [they] guard [themselves] at every moment from sins and vices of thought or tongue, of self-will or bodily desire, let them recall that they are always seen by God in heaven, that their actions everywhere are in God’s sight and are reported by angels at every hour.”

That’s a pretty Gestapo-esque trip to lay on a person.  It’s dualistic thinking at its spiritual best. Benedict knows that the steps of humility are a process, and that God-concepts are there for our use when they make sense, just as they’re to be parted with when we outgrow them.  Under the Influence has been developing this thought, in one form or another, since the beginning: the problem isn’t thoughts or constructs, but our attachment to them.  Undiagnosed attachment to immature spiritual paradigms is a difficult thing in monasteries.  An Abbot, the head of any monastery, ends up with eighty year old monks who still believe that heaven only happens after death, that God’s remote and keeping track of acts that are either good and bad, letting the math decide whether we’re bound for heaven and hell.  It hard to see eighty year olds laying in their deathbeds, still tormented by a fear of hell.  But it’s a thing that happens.  Back when I was “Brother M. Dismas Warner, OCSO,” it probably would have happened with me, had the falseness of my “religious identity,” not been laid bare.

The rule says God watches “while [monks] guard themselves” from sin.  In the end, that’s one of those statements that monks learn to be true only with qualification.  Being liberated from the “eight evil thoughts” is something that mature monks hope for, but don’t count on.  Gluttony, greed, lust, pride—these are all perpetual struggles.  The old guys in a monastery, if they still find themselves acting on their more base thoughts, simply find less time elapses between getting caught in them, realizing they're doing it, and stopping.  Potentially, they can recognize their thoughts as just thoughts, and leave them alone before they become actions.

So certainly, monks want to avoid making things worse by willfully cooperating with their worse selves.  In that sense, the words of the Rule are accurate, full stop.  But the struggles are perpetual.  The monastic tradition is full of stories of old monks being subjected, by God, to the very vices they berated others for struggling with.  God’s purpose was twofold: to make clear that those monks are just like everyone else, and to form, by sheer dint of vicious struggle, the opposite virtues in a monk.

The Second Step of Humility is that a monk doesn’t take pleasure in the satisfaction of his desires.  All eight evil thoughts, remember, are rooted in pride.  They’re ways that a monk separates himself from others.  In that way, they’re like the “brain chemicals” that Adult Children of Alcoholics acknowledge administering to themselves when they indulge in care-taking or codependence.  Monks get a little hit of serotonin when they think themselves more pious than others.    When a monk is awakened to how sick this tendency is, he has an opportunity to stop doing it.  

Again, in a stunning parallel to 12 step traditions, Benedict’s use of the term “self will” is instructive.  I can’t remember which abbot it was—it might have been Dom Peter of Guadalupe—who gave a chapter talk to the monks of Mepkin.  He said “we must will not to will.”  This is useful. From the point of view of our relationship with God, he was talking about the second step of humility.  It says “[monks] shall imitate by [their] actions that saying of the Lord: ‘I have come, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.’”  There’s another level on which to consider it, though: the level of attention.  July 20th’s Under the Influence post (“Biff, Kapow, Thwap: A Study in Contemplative Attention”) talks about “passive volition.”  That is, simply “being present to what’s being done in me.”  It might be God’s will, it might be I’m working out my purgatorial predicament, caught up in my attachments till i decide not to identify with them.  But the point is, I am present to something happening in me.  A perspective—quite different from “taking pleasure in the satisfaction of their desire” is possible for monks.  With apologies to Ram Dass, it might take the form of “Hey, this is happening,” or “Hey that’s happening.  I’m not the action—it’s all an expression of my purgatorial predicament.  Look at that…Far out…”  If we attribute to God the good we want to do, and we attribute to purgatorial predicament and growing detachment the bad we’d prefer not to do, then we spend less time thinking that we ourselves are our actions, and that we are good or bad.  This uses dualistic thinking to grow non-attachment, and (by all accounts) a healthy thing.

Benedict doesn’t mince words.  He doesn’t hide what the steps of humility ultimately involve.  In step three he says baldly that our game is “[imitating] the Lord of whom the apostle says ‘he became obedient even to death.”  My entry point into this is egoic death.  I’ve certainly learned, at least a little, not to identify myself with my ego.  And that’s an important death.  Again, as Ram Dass says “The person who dies before he dies doesn’t die when he dies.”  But Benedict knew parting with our egoic trip was only half the game.  The fact is, we’re also not our physical bodies.  And by dying we are reborn in Christ (potentially “literally and on earth,” as I’ve said before, but at least metaphorically, in heaven.)  

Remember that I flunked out of what Benedict calls “the school of charity.”  As monks are fond of saying, the monastery’s only “graduates” (the only ones who’ve “succeeded” at Trappist life) are “planted in the back yard” of the community cemetery.  So I can kind of speak to egoic death a little, sort of.  After that, it’s all stuff I’ve witnessed: the final, rattling witness of the 7 men who died while I lived as a monk.

This is important.  Benedict’s “Steps of Humility,” (and theoretically the life of every monastery, monk, nun, oblate and gloriously failed blogger who follows them) are not about imitation of Christ.  They’re about intimacy with Christ.  Not Spousal intimacy—although a certain number of medieval mystics saw themselves as very much “married to Jesus.”—but the communal intimacy that comes from taking up one’s cross, and knowing how weighty Jesus’ own burden must have been.

And then, of course, we do what we do “in remembrance of him” and the whole of life becomes a Eucharist.  When I told Vince I intended to leave the monastery, he hugged me and whispered into my ear “we didn’t get enough time.”  He was right.  I knew that my promise to hold him as he died would go unkept.  I’m not comfortable with that, but I’ve become comfortable with the discomfort.  Right before I left, Vince gave me some Scottish money he’d kept from a trip he’d taken there once.  He said to me “when you’re out there, you’re going to have a bunch of experiences that you and I know I would have loved.  I want you trade in this money and take some gorgeous brunette out for drinks.  You’re like the prodigal son, who’s been given his inheritance early. Go and blow the whole thing.  And drink in every minute of it.”

Vince was right.  I blew that money a long time ago, on a girl who ended up “not being the right one.”  But in that very predicament, there’s a lesson in prayer.  It’s a dual mind that divides things into good and bad, right and wrong, present and past.  I am, indeed, the prodigal son.  But my return isn’t to the monastery.  It isn’t to imposed senses of right and wrong or good or bad.  It’s to the present moment, to the cup of coffee, grown cold for neglect as I’ve written this.  It’s to my sweet girl, dainty-snoring the morning away in the next room.

I want to wake up.  And I want to rise every morning as Jacob did, fresh from dreams of angelic ladders that angels ascended.  As Benedict says, “We descend through [self] exaltation and descend by humility.  Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts the Lord will raise it to heaven.”  May it be so, for all of us.