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.

Renewal of the Spirit: The Blessing of covid?

Renewal of the Holy Spirit: The Blessing of Covid?

 

With what we have been through these last few months I never thought I would write the above title – but as before the clues were in Blake’s drawings. We now move some way forward to Job’s sacrifice. The plate illustrates the passage from The Book of Job 42: 8 when the Lord addresses the ‘comforters’:

 

‘Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up yourselves a burnt offering, and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.’

 

Job’s posture is now one of open acceptance to the will of the Lord and the open book below gives us the injunction from the sermon on the Mount:

 

‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those that hate you and pray for those that despiseth you and persecute you’

 

Throughout the series of prints of Job’s trial the heavenly forces have been represented figuratively: first Satan with his dancing, grinning gait and then the old bearded figure of God the Father ‘speaking from the whirlwind’. In this print no heavenly (or hellish) apparitions appear. Round the edges are our old friends the angels but now the movement is from earth to heaven as a great plume of smoke arises in Job’s heart and moves up to meet the great Sun of Creation. This is the first sun we have seen since the beginning of the series when Satan appeared as the sun set. His wife and the comforters adopt a suitably penitent pose at Job’s feet. Wheat begins to grow as new life emerges from its sleep.

          In the last plate we encountered the Trinitarian problem at the heart of Blake’s message – the absence of Jesus Christ can be troubling for many Christians. Yet here, to my eyes anyway, just as in the previous plate Christ was implied so the third ‘member’ of the Christian trinity is implied here – the Holy Spirit. According to Christian theology the ‘comforter’ comes to help convey our prayers to the Creator. After His dramatic appearance in the whirlwind the Creator has now returned to his inscrutable presence at the ground of all creation (‘unless I go He cannot come’). From Job’s breast, now renewed and upright, the Holy Spirit arises and, as Job decorates the margins of the plate, exhorts us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

          We began our covid vigil at the beginning of Lent and for many of us the lockdown now begins to an end as we approach Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the spirit of Blake’s plate let us pray for the renewing force of the Holy Spirit to help us rebuild our lives, cities, relationships and world as the ‘curse’ of covid reveals its ‘blessings’

 

Peter Tyler, Pentecost 2020

 

         

The Sons of Morning

Blake’s Job: The Sons of Morning

 

As the world begins to wake from its covid sleep we come to Plate 14 in our journey with Job and Blake through covid. The Plate illustrates the lines of renewal from the Book as God describes the creation of the world:

 

‘When the morning Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy’

 

As is fitting for the subject Blake produces one of his most beautiful and profound plates. Job, his wife and comforters all kneel in suitable astonishment as God for a brief moment unveils the mysteries of creation. The six days of creation from the Book of Genesis are depicted around the edges as within we see the morning stars and the ‘Sons of God’ dancing and singing together in what appears to be a rather stately 18^th Century galliard. More stars appear on the edges: the belt of Orion and the Pleiades, ‘the Seven Sisters’. And as these heavenly beings all rejoice in their renewal below we see the dark forces of chaos and creation, the leathery scales of Satan and his dragons, lying obediently and meekly tamed.

          Much has been made of Blake’s fourfold division of the central panel between earth, heaven, the moon and the sun and Jungian commentators point to the ‘mandala’ of this fourfold representation.

          For the purposes of these reflections two points come to mind. First is the sheer inevitable renewal of creation. As we slowly begin to throw off the shackles of covid who can deny that nature has been one of the great sources of comfort in these difficult times. Here in Northern Europe we have enjoyed one of the most beautiful springs we have had for years and our towns and cities, cleared of pollution, have sparkled with morning and midnight stars. A robin has been nesting in my garden and now daily brings food to the chicks while goldfinches have feasted on the forget-me-not seeds in the beds. One of the ‘blessings of covid’ has surely been our renewed appreciation for the natural world and God’s creation around us.

          The second point is more theological. Christians may be troubled perhaps that Christ does not appear in Blake’s Book of Job. If Christ were to appear then this plate would be the point at which it would happen. The last plate depicted the awesome ‘otherness’ of God the Creator – speaking ‘out of the whirlwind’ as a great cosmic force. ‘The Sons of God’ depicted in this plate are therefore the natural response to the ‘abyss of the Father’ – the intimate touch of the divine in our own hearts as represented by Blake as the ‘sons’. Religion seems to evoke two responses – the awe of the transcendent and the intimate passion of devotion, what the Sanskrit tradition calls bhakti. For Christians there is but one ‘Son’ who mediates between the transcendent unknown ground of Being and ourselves and is the focus of this devotion. For the past six weeks after Easter, Christians have been enjoying the presence of the Risen Lord. Soon, on Ascension Thursday, we shall celebrate the ‘return of the Son to the Father’. However Christ states that ‘unless I go the Holy Spirit cannot come’. We shall explore this promised coming of the Holy Spirit in our next post.

 

Warm wishes

 

Peter

 

 

Divine Harmony: Zoom Conference on 23rd May 2020 - All Welcome!

A Journey through Covid with William Blake and Job

A Journey through Covid with William Blake and Job

Plate 13: Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind

 

 

 

Welcome back to the next instalment of our journey through the Book of Job with William Blake, genius illustrator, as our guide. We are now more than half-way through the plates when God finally makes an appearance. God had been in the earliest plates in the court of heaven but as yet has not manifested to Job himself – although as we saw earlier Lucifer certainly has by means of plague, pestilence etc.

It is worth spending some time pondering this first appearance which is why I include the close up of the central plate as well as the whole surrounding image. The relevant passage in the Book of Job (Chapter 38) is as follows:

 

          Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

          ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?...

          Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

          Tell me, if you have understanding.

 

Who has not felt a whirlwind of emotions these past few weeks? Have we not gone from denial to anger to frustration to loneliness to helplessness to depression? Yet out of this whirlwind something new, and yet very old, emerges. It is the ground-beat of creation. Throughout our cities, towns and villages nature has reasserted itself. Here in the Northern Latitudes the inevitable return of spring has brightened our dark covid days and each evening, over London anyway, Venus and the great spring stars of Regulus and Spica have shone through unusually clear skies. Nature has returned, and with it the renewing force of creation.

Blake depicts the Creator with a compassionate gaze as he blesses Job and his wife. Using medieval iconography which he was very aware of, Job and his wife are put on God’s right hand, the traditional side of the blessed – Those ‘accusers’ who used all sorts of sophistry to bend the truth go on the left-hand side with the unrighteous. They are even closer to blindness and not seeing – let’s hope they too will eventually see something of God’s wisdom and compassion. Job’s rough woollen ‘comfort blanket’ slips away to reveal his nakedness beneath – ‘naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I return, Blessed be the name of the Lord’. The Lord’s whirlwind has a placental shape and he points away to the distance. This is the moment of renewal and new directions – Job is being prepared for the next phase of his life. All masks have fallen now, we are faced with the truth – Satya in Sanskrit – a word that combines the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘being’.

          If nothing else the covid crisis has returned us to the fundamentals of life – what and who really matters. As much as Job we have had an encounter with the foundations of being, nature and creation. It is up to us now to grow wise from this encounter so that from now on we cease uttering ‘words without knowledge’.

 

Love

Peter

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Let Him Easter in us!'

 

 

 

Some thoughts for Holy Week in a time of covid:

 

‘Let Him Easter in Us!’

Easter 2020 will go down in history as the year the churches closed. In the 2,000 years of Christianity there have, of course, been other times when churches were closed in cases of war, famine and civil rebellion. Yet there must be few people living in Western Democratic countries today who have experienced this in their lifetimes. I certainly haven’t.

So how do we react to this? What do we do?

Well I suppose we can go online and watch services and liturgies enacted by solitary clergy in cavernous empty churches. I’m afraid this is a little too voyeuristic for me, and besides, I have a sneaking feeling that this is not where we are being called to now. Rather, in the words of The Wreck of the Deutschland by the great English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J., I believe we are being called towards the ‘granite of being’. Or, as he addresses it in the opening lines of the poem:

Thou mastering me

                   God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

                   Lord of living and dead;

The poem is about the terrible sea-wreck and death of the passengers of the German steamboat, The Deutschland, off the Kent coast in December 1875. Amongst the passengers were five Franciscan tertiaries, driven from Germany by the Falk laws, all of whom drowned: Mothers Barbara Hultenschmidt, Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura, Brigitta Damhorst and Henrica Fassbaender. One of the them, ‘the tall nun’, was heard to cry before she perished: ‘Mein Gott! Mach es schnell mit uns!’ (Philip Martin 1976). Poignantly, for Hopkins, they were finally laid to rest near his childhood home at St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone. Whilst discussing the incident with his rector Fr Jones at the Jesuit house of St Beuno’s, North Wales, where he was resident at the time, the priest opined that he ‘wished someone would write a poem on the subject’. This was all Hopkins needed to rekindle his writing career and within a few weeks he had produced the great ode of 35 verses.

          The genius of Hopkins’ work, a true Paschal drama, is how he turns this disaster into a witness of Christ’s loving work in the world. This I have recently argued is what we can call the ‘symbolic’ aspect of the Christian message. I am influenced heavily here by the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu O.P. who describes the symbolic element of Christian life as revealing: ‘the profound truth that lies hidden within the dense substance of things and is revealed by these means’ (Chenu 1957: 99). The Christian view is thus a way of seeing reality – a symbolic truth especially open to the discerning eyes and ears of poets, artists and creators.

          What then is the symbolic meaning of our present covid crisis? I have tried to explore this in other recent blogs using the symbolism of Blake’s Book of Job, and hopefully I will continue this in the coming weeks. However for today, this special Paschal day when we lay aside our everyday lives and enter for three days into the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ, I return to Hopkins and his exhortation at the end of the Deutschland: ‘Let Him Easter in us.’

For sure the next few weeks will see a great deal of suffering, tragedy and death, it has already begun. But as Christians I believe our role now is to see the ‘symbolic’ hand of God in this suffering as we are led down the Seven Steps into the Underworld of Holy Saturday.

The shorthand for this symbolic form is, of course, ‘the Cross’. The Cross, for the Christian, straddles the two realities of despair and fulfillment. The Christian, as Edith Stein suggested, thus becomes the symbol as they face the Cross in an act of faith, or as Chenu put it:

To join two realities within a single symbol was to put the mind into secret contact with transcendent reality… the result was a double resonance within the single grasp of a ‘dissimilar similitude’ (Chenu 1957: 131, c.f., Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy: 2

Therefore, rather, than sitting at home waiting for the churches to reopen we are called today to find Christ in our hearts, our homes, our families, our everyday lives. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’ says Hopkins, and why not in your living room or garden? Also, during this difficult time we are asked, I believe, to find Christ in each other and to pay particular attention to small acts of love and consideration. J.R.R. Tolkein famously said at the completion of his epic Lord of the Rings cycle that the world will be saved by small acts of kindness. Accordingly, during this special Paschal time let us each see 2020 as an invitation to enter the symbolic reality of the moment in small acts of kindness to those around us and in a deepening sense of the presence of Christ in our lives through prayer. Let us take time each day to perform these acts, and especially to contemplate Christ’s message for us through them. The covid crisis will then become an invitation to let Christ 'Easter in us' so that ultimately He becomes for us, as Hopkins concludes his epic poem:

 

'A dayspring to the dimness of us, be

 a crimson-cresseted east...

Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,

Our heart's charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's

Lord.'

 

 

Happy Easter when it comes! Love Peter