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.
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