Book Review: Ronald Rolheiser 'Domestic Monastery'

 

 

 

Domestic Monastery

Author: Ronald Rolheiser

Date: 2019

Publisher: Darton, Longman and Todd

ISBN: 978-0-232-53412-2

pp. 89 pbk

 

I must begin this review with a confession. I received this book just before Christmas, read it on a grey misty day, made some notes for review and then put it aside. The Christmas festivities and work demands took up my attention from there and then the covid crisis hit… In many ways this has proved providential. For if Fr Rolheiser’s new book was relevant BC (Before Covid), well it is essential reading PC (Post Covid). His premise is simple, but in writing on spirituality it is more often than not that simplicity hits the spot. Essentially he hopes to persuade us that ‘monasticism’, ‘silent retreat’ and ‘spiritual seclusion’ are not just for a cloistered elite but are not only accessible, but even essential for all, especially those engaged in busy family and work lives. To this end he weaves a short punchy text that is rather charmingly illustrated with old woodblock drawings and etchings (no credits or references given, alas). Those familiar with Fr Rolheiser’s style already – straightforward and honest spiritual reflections founded on good learning and often delivering a punch at the end – will not be disappointed. The text, though not long, has a clean symmetry and structure which make it something to return to again and again. Within are so many spiritual themes that it is invidious to pick out examples. However to illustrate Fr Rolheiser’s argument I shall do just that. The first of these, quoting St John of the Cross (one of his favourite inspirations), is that the contemplative life is not based on abnegation and denial but, rather, a mixture of withdrawal from the world and the cultivation of tenderness and mildness: ‘withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild’ (p.11). Giving us numerous examples he shows how this ‘milding’ is just as likely (if not more likely) to be achieved by a busy mother as a spartan recluse. His second point, that great spiritual progress can be achieved by ‘staying in our cell’ doesn’t need to be reiterated PC. If we have learnt one thing over the past few months it has been the need to live with, and face, our lives, warts and all, as we work out our own socially isolated covid seclusion. Which draws us to Fr Rolheiser’s third point: the need in the spiritual life for rhythm, routine and ritual. How many of us, I wonder, have resorted to routine and ritual these past few months to get us through the sheer mechanics of surviving the covid lock-down? As he reminds us: ‘monks sustain themselves in prayer not through feeling, variety or creativity, but through ritual, rhythm and routine’ (p.42). Prayer, for Fr Rolheiser is ‘a relationship, a long term one and lives by those rules’ (p.43). Pointing out the necessary tension that lies between contemplation and action (as well as that between ‘passion and purity, intellect and will, community and individuality’, p.55) Fr Rolheiser shows us the ‘creative tension’ that lies in the path of those who seek a ‘Domestic Monastery’. One last point. I particularly enjoyed Fr Rolheiser’s exposition of the spirituality at different stages of life as he clearly and unflinchingly stresses the need in our final years ‘to not so much struggle as to how to give our lives away but with how to give our deaths away’ (p.69). Strong stuff but, again, so appropriate to our mortality haunted times. So, in conclusion, I would not only recommend you buy a copy of this small spiritual classic but that you purchase one as a gift for those friends, colleagues, loved ones and family members who have struggled these past few months to make sense of the impact of the deadly covid virus. This charming little book will, I am sure, bring a lot of healing to a traumatised world. Thank you Fr Rolheiser.

 

 

 

Healing Anger with Thomas Merton and Fr Thomas Kochumuttom CMI

Dear Friends,

 

I was recently asked to celebrate the ministry of Fr Thomas Kochumuttom in India with a Festschrift. I was delighted to write a chapter on his approach to healing anger from a Buddhist and Christian perspective. I include here some of the last section of the chapter on how his writings relate to those of Thomas Merton. I hope the full chapter will be published later this year.

Best wishes

Peter

 

 

 

 

 

Having engaged in dialogue with both Buddhist and Western psychological views of the self I would like to return to the opening task set out in this chapter – namely, how can this dialogue help us when encountering the pastoral situation of healing anger in a Christian context? Once again we can return to Fr Thomas’s writings on the subject where he presents us with the Christian approach to the problem (CL: 117 – 118). This can be summarised thus:

1. We must first ‘delve deep into the unconscious and uncover the hidden and forgotten experiences and be reconciled with them’. Whether we are Buddhist, Christian or Western Atheist, we all have the same minds as human beings. What the dialogue of this chapter shows is that, to use the phrase of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), we all form our ‘pictures of the facts’ (Wir machen uns Bilder der Tatsachen, Wittgenstein 1993 1:14). Whether we call that picture ‘unconscious’ or ‘skandha’, in our reflection on our most shameful and negative acts we return to these ‘hidden and forgotten experiences’ as we seek to be reconciled with them. How is that done? Fr Thomas continues:

2. By ‘positive thinking, forgiveness, repentance, rationalization and self-acceptance’. A whole book could be written on this path and constraints of space do not permit me to explore them further here. Perhaps Fr Thomas may yet write another book that does that! For now, I refer the interested reader to my book Confession: The Healing of the Soul (Tyler 2017) which in like fashion explored many of these themes as manifest in the Christian sacrament of Reconciliation.

If we follow this path, says Fr Thomas, ‘that is indeed liberation and enlightenment’. Yet, running like a golden thread through his teachings, FrThomas reminds us that for Christians this healing forgiveness has one mediation – in the person of Jesus Christ, the living Lord and Guru. For whereas ‘Adam’ in the Christian tradition holds all the sufferings and duḥkha described by the Buddhists, Christ, the ‘new man’, the ‘new Adam’ holds the liberation , the suḥkha, of all beings. And this perhaps marks the strongest divergence between the Buddhist path presented above and the Christian path followed by a Christian contemplative such as Fr Thomas. For as Fr Thomas explained in his earlier Comparative Theology:

 

The Buddhist way is for the most part a psychotherapy. This is quite understandable, indeed, for according to the Buddhist diagnosis the basic illness of man is mental, namely that his mind is badly determined and controlled  by the unhealthy factors generating in him restlessness, tension, anxiety etc., as a result of which he is unable himself as a mature man. (Kochumuttom 1985:136)[1]

 

Writing on this same point shortly before his death, the 20^th Century American Cistercian, Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) in the Preface to his book The New Man in 1967, mused on how we can ‘convert’ emotions and states of mind from the destructive to the constructive.

First, he suggests, there is psychoanalysis: ‘if you have a great deal of money and can afford a long analysis – and can find an especially good psychoanalyst’. Yet, even with this, psychoanalysis can, at the best he suggests, only lead to ‘workable compromises which enable us to function... we are not born again, we simply learnt to put up with ourselves’ (Merton 1989: 145). Freud himself held up no great hope for ultimate liberation or enlightenment arising from therapy, rather he often expressed the aim as one of reaching ‘normal neurosis’ or ‘common unhappiness’ (see Tyler 2014: 98).

A second means to transformation, according to Merton, is through mass movements ‘sometimes of extremist character, sometimes messianic and political quasi-religious’ (Merton 1989: 145). Yet this is an ideology or a political ‘cause’ rather than a metaphysical transformation. Merton wrote perceptively of the movements he had witnessed in the 20^th Century – Nazism and Communism. Yet, as we now move into the post-pandemic phase are we not seeing the rise of new political and ideological movements, often based on nationalist or narrow racial bases? Can these liberate? Will these provide the answers our times desperately seek? Our analysis here suggests not. Rather, as Fr Thomas suggested earlier, we are to seek that spiritual transformation of the whole person. Like him, Merton acknowledges a psychological ‘unconscious’ dimension to this work:

 

It is a deep spiritual consciousness which takes man beyond the level of his individual ego. This deep consciousness, to which we are initiated by spiritual rebirth, is an awareness that we are not merely our everyday selves but we are also One who is beyond all human and individual self-limitation. (Merton 1989: 146)

 

And as with Fr Thomas, so Merton sees this ‘rebirth’ for Christians as the adoption of the persona Christi: ‘to be born again is to be born beyond egoism, beyond selfishness, beyond individuality in Christ’ (1989: 146/7). This ‘rebirth in Christ’ is as much a ‘rebirth of the passions in Christ’. With regards to anger this must be immersed constantly into the Jordan of the unconscious so that Christ may absorb and transform it. This is not a one-off process but something that recurs throughout life:

 

Birth in the Spirit happens many times in a man’s life, as he passes through successive stages of spiritual development... True Christianity is growth in the life of the Spirit, a deepening of the new life, a continuous rebirth, in which the exterior and superficial life of the ego-self is discarded like an old snake skin and the mysterious invisible self of the Spirit becomes more present and more active. (Merton 1989: 147)

 

So then, to conclude our dialogue and this chapter, Fr Thomas suggests in his essay that when we deal with particular pastoral situations, such as the dealing with anger, we do so on two levels. On one level there is our individual story reflected in the conscious levels of the ‘ego’. But on the other there is a metaphysical, or what he calls a ‘collective consciousness’. Our individuality is thus a sharing in the mystical body of Christ:

 

As each individual should become enlightened with regard to his personal unconscious, so, in and through the same process of personal enlightenment, the whole humanity becomes and should become enlightened with regard to the collective unconscious, eventually resulting in the emergence of the new creation – the new earth and the new heaven (Rev 21:1) with God becoming all in all (I Cor 15:29). (CL: 119)

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[1] Gay Watson develops this theme in her ‘Resonance of Emptiness’ from which I have drawn liberally in this chapter. She concludes by suggesting the ‘next turning of the wheel of Dharma’ in the West will inevitably be connected with its involvement with the evolving practices of psychology and psychotherapy. This ‘prediction’ made in 1998 has partly been realised with the mass ‘mindfulness’ movement that has become so prevalent in the West in the past decade. When I researched my ‘Christian Mindfulness’ in 2017-8 I had an interesting conversation with the noted Buddhist scholar, Rupert Gethin, who also suggested that what might be happening in the West today is the development of  mindfulness as a new phenomenon in the West that ‘eschews traditional Buddhist practices (such as devotional rituals) and the traditional framework of karma and rebirth... and replaces these with a more therapeutic framework’ (Tyler 2018: 15). Thus, Fr Thomas’s identification of the samskara skandha with the Western unconscious, as explored in this chapter,  looks set to remain important as Buddhism evolves and develops in the West in tandem with psychology and psychotherapeutic practices.