Sacramental Steps for Monastic Hearts
Bishop Elias Lorenzo, O.S.B.
INTRODUCTION
Captatio: I have entitled these reflections ‘Finding Grace: Sacramental Steps for Monastic Hearts.’ Originally given as conferences for monastic men and women, I share them with one and all who follow the Rule of St. Benedict as their guide to living the gospel. These are reflections about thoughts or demons in the writings of St. John Cassian (d. 435) and how the seven sacraments are channels of amazing grace for each and every one of us, which these thoughts or demons try to block.
Grace is a participation in the life of God, so what could be a better reality to explore? The se reflections invite us to step back from the works that rightly occupy our daily lives and concentrate on God alone. The word “grace” has a secular meaning that makes a good starting point for reflecting on sanctifying grace, a meaning symbolized by the three graces of classical antiquity and the three goddesses of beauty and charm. Grace is, firstly, beauty, a beauty to which the onlooker is compelled to respond. I have had the experience of a beautiful person directing a charming gaze in my direction and thinking such a charming gaze is surely not directed at me, looking over my shoulder to see who it might be directed at. Nine times out ten, it is directed at somebody else.
So, I offer as the aim of the reflection: that we might all stop looking over our shoulders, realize that God’s beautiful gaze is directed at us, and enjoy responding to that graceful gaze.
And yet, we find that so hard to do. Between us and grace, there lie demons. We all have our demons, and the description of monastic demons of St. John Cassian is, for me, a sure guide to recognizing and challenging them. So in these 8 talks, I will relate each sacrament to one of Cassian’s monastic thoughts on demons.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
BAPTISM
Grace is the power that transforms us, and this graceful transformation begins with baptism. The first grace we receive is to be born as human beings; that is, the grace of being born in the image and likeness of God. We then inherit sin, and we contribute to sin. God calls human beings to receive the sanctifying grace of baptism, which is the work of Christ to overcome sin in us. Because birth and baptism often come together, it’s easy to confuse them–easy to confuse the gift of life (which we cannot refuse) and the grace of baptism (which we can refuse).
Today the majority of children are born outside marriage, and only a small percentage are christened. So, as the number of unbaptized adults grows, so too does the number of candidates for OCIA. The number of candidates seeking baptism at Easter is growing exponentially year after year around the country and around the world.
The sanctifying grace of baptism is described well in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium: ‘The followers of Christ, called by God not for their achievements but in accordance with…his grace, have been truly made… sharers in the divine nature by their baptism and are therefore really made holy’ (LG V.4).
The first grace is to be born human, remembering that all humans have potential for good and bad. The second grace, sanctifying grace, is given to make us more humane, which has only one positive meaning. Some people use the ambivalence of the word human to give a positive meaning to bad actions: e.g. it’s human to be greedy; being angry is just human; vanity is human. But these deadly sins are more deadly if we canonize them. So, in order for humans to receive the grace of Christ and become more humane, we must recognize our faults and receive the sanctifying grace of Christ.
This is where Cassian’s insights about the thoughts or demons are so helpful. Which of the eight thoughts might we reflect on with baptism? The one that would deny that there is any sanctifying grace in the monastic way of life for monks, nuns and oblates (laymen and women living the Rule of St. Bendict as their guide to the gospel).
ACEDIA
Acedia is the forgotten Deadly Sin of our culture. The word is no longer used, not because the reality is obsolete, but because we have stopped noticing it. Contemporary people are too busy to be spiritually self-aware, and our children grow up in a culture that suffers from collective acedia. Acedia has so established itself that it is now part of modernity.
Monks and nuns and oblates are affected by the endemic acedia of our culture, but we have the example of the greatest monks and nuns and oblates to remind us of its power. In one collection of stories about the desert fathers and mothers, the very first story begins with a surprising statement about the most famous monk of all. ‘When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert, he was beset by acedia.’ Towards the end of that same collection, Amma Syncletica offers the insight that ‘acedia is full of mockery.’ Our society is ‘full of mockery’ towards those who insist on the reality of the soul and its essential disciplines, disciplines which have been preserved almost uniquely by the best of the world’s religious traditions, but which are scorned by increasingly strident atheist commentators.
It comes as quite a surprise to many lay people, but we know that monks and nuns really are haunted by the thought that this whole spiritual project is a waste of time. It is easy to see the whole monastic enterprise as ridiculous, especially if you live inside it. This is obviously not a temptation for keen new entrants to the monastery, but it is for those who have spent a good part of their life on the monastic path, the ones of whom you might least expect it. From my experience as abbot, I know that monks can be overwhelmed by spiritual exhaustion; is it worth persevering, they wonder. The thought grows that this way of life isn’t valid for me any longer, that my companions are not right, and that I should be doing something else, not wasting my life here. As the discipline of the monastic life becomes distasteful, so it is slowly worn away: less prayer, less self-awareness, and a growing rejection of the life of the community. Alongside this is often found the impulse to replace spiritual exercises with more and more good deeds. In my experience, it is particularly difficult to get monks to recognize that this is what is happening to them, since they too are affected by the cultural assumption that sees practical outcomes as overriding all other considerations. This is a subtle and persuasive demon, not only for modern society, but also for modern monks, nuns and oblates as well.
Unlike other thoughts, such as gluttony and lust, this thought is not easy to discern. According to Cassian, the first quality of this thought is that ‘it makes a person horrified at where he is…disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers as being careless and unspiritual.’ The monk then inevitably becomes slothful and ‘complains and sighs, lamenting that he is bereft and void of all spiritual gain in that place.’ In essence, this first quality of spiritual apathy is a deep sense of being in the wrong place surrounded by the wrong people doing the wrong things.
The second quality flows inevitably from the first. The monk decides that he will perish if he stays here any longer, so he must leave and go to far-off places, where everything is better. These two features of disdain for the familiar and a desire to give up are at the heart of acedia, and they appear to have some similarity to what modern psychoanalysis calls a mid-life crisis.
There are similarities with the experience of couples who have been married for a number of years. The all too common story of a long established marriage where a spouse leaves home for somebody else often has overtones of acedia. The husband or the wife becomes ‘disdainful’ of their spouse, who is seen as ‘careless and unspiritual,’ so they must leave for somebody better. The acedia of marriage can be a very real trial for the couple, and to name it as such may be a helpful starting point to enable the relationship to grow beyond it.
The monastic tradition identifies the demon of acedia not so much with a phase of life as with a time of day. The midday hour is the moment when acedia shows itself, leading to the nickname, ‘the noonday demon.’ In the middle of the day, the monk is exhausted and hungry, as if he had been working hard all day long when in fact he has been doing nothing of the sort. He looks at the midday sun and convinces himself that it isn’t moving.
Next, one starts complaining that none of the other monks ever come to visit him. He is so disengaged from the spiritual life that he craves either a visitor or sleep as the only things he wants. Since nobody is coming to visit him, he’d better go and visit them. ‘Those relatives should be looked after, and he should hasten to bring his greetings to them more often; it would be a great and pious work to make frequent visits to that religious woman…’ Cassian gets into quite a comic vein as he describes, in more and more detail, the reasons why the monk should leave the monastery and go elsewhere to do good to all sorts of needy people.
Cassian concludes this section by describing how the monk substitutes outward movement for inner perseverance. ‘And so the unhappy soul…gets in the habit of finding consolation in the face of this onslaught (of acedia) by visiting a brother, although the soul will be all the more painfully vulnerable not long after having used this remedy as a stopgap.’ Here too, there are parallels with family life. Many people immerse themselves in their work and are good at it, only to return home to personal situations that they find too painful to face. The danger is that hard work and even good works become painkillers that fix the symptoms but leave the sickness untreated. Recognizing this very modern acedia can be a liberation leading to a better way forward.
So, is Cassian against doing good to others? By no means, but he does want us to be careful about our motives. If the agitated visiting of others is a ‘remedy’ for being unhappy back at home, then he condemns it as an avoidance mechanism. ‘Experience proves that an onslaught of acedia must not be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.’ If we are going to be happy in the monastic life, we will need to learn to face up to acedia rather than just avoiding it.
MONASTIC VOWS
The link between baptism and acedia is the monastic vows. The monastic vows are our expression of baptismal vows. So, let’s conclude by reflecting on the nature of Christian vocation. It helps to view this under three aspects: the baptismal vocation, the vocation to a state of life, and the vocation to work. The same is true for us monks.
We monks rely on nothing but baptism, and hence, acedia tempts us into saying it’s a waste of time. At least lay people have children to justify their lives; while we monks, in secular terms, have nothing to show for all our life’s efforts. Our legacy is all the hope our lives give to others, even if sometimes acedia overwhelms our own personal sense of hope.
The traditional weapons in defeating acedia are firstly psalmody (and, by extension, mental prayer, if we see mental prayer as an extension of lectio). Secondly, sharing the thoughts of acedia with another monk. The two come together in a ‘word to live by.’ In that regard, I am happy to meet any of the brethren individually, and I hope I may offer you a few more weapons against acedia during the coming days.
These reflections can offer us time to cast off acedia and enjoy the grace of God, to enjoy the charming beauty of God’s gaze.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
CONFIRMATION
Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Confirmation, says the Catholic tradition, is then the completion of this baptismal grace. How does this work?
The anointing by the Spirit received at Confirmation is the awakening of the Spirit received at baptism. In baptism, we receive the forgiveness of sin through our incorporation into the Body of Christ, and then, in infant baptism, the anointing with chrism follows, an anointing repeated later at confirmation. In adult baptism, baptism is followed by one anointing, the anointing of confirmation. In both infant and adult baptism, it is the anointing that is the moment of the outpouring of the Spirit. As a person only baptized, we are in Christ, but the Spirit of Christ is dormant in us, and confirmation completes baptism by awakening that Spirit. This Spirit is the one who teaches us: this is the Spirit of truth, says Our Lord, the Advocate, who will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you (Jn 14:26). This is lived out strongly in adult baptism, as the mystagogia follows during these weeks of Easter; in this period, neophytes deepen their understanding of faith no longer through being taught by catechesis but through living the life of faith. All the church’s liturgical prayers urge the neophytes to rejoice in the new life of Christ they have received: as the prayer for the Second Sunday of Easter says: “know in what waters you have been washed, with what Spirit you have been anointed and by what blood you have been redeemed.’ The Holy Spirit gives us our capacity to grow in Christ and, as we grow, to bear witness to Christ through word and deed.
But the demon of pride crosses our path. The most cunning of all the demons, it gets us just when we think we are winning the spiritual struggle. It is not only the root of all evil, the sin of Adam, it is also the most dangerous for those advanced along the monastic path. So we need a good understanding of pride and how it works to escape from it. St. John Cassian describes how there are two kinds of pride: the pride of placing ourselves above other people (carnal pride) and the pride of placing ourselves above God (spiritual pride).
Carnal pride is the most common and involves the monk in rejecting the ordinary life of the community. Specifically, he considers himself above the rest of the community and is sometimes unkind to other monks. He is not content with the poverty of the monastery and tries to keep some private property. Even if he succeeds in taming some of the demons, his life is built on pride, and so these virtuous efforts are all his own and will not endure. He is suspicious, loud and obstinate, is quick to anger and never apologizes. Above all, he claims to be seeking the spiritual life while actually pursuing his own desires.
The carnally proud monk sounds like a most unpleasant person to have around. But if we look carefully, we can see that in fact many of us have something of the carnal monk in us, especially when we get caught up in ‘being busy and being important’. We need consciously to remind ourselves not to seek to have everything our own way, to restrain our suspicion of others, and to distinguish our own desires from what is good for other people. In other words, we need to consciously pursue humility. At its worst, the busy culture is built on carnal pride, but we can combat its negative effects by acknowledging our need for greater humility. This has nothing to do with humiliation, which is a cruel imposition of an inferior status. Humility is an honest approach to the reality of our own lives and acknowledges that we are not more important than other people. Those of us who carry responsibility for making decisions about other people still need to keep this in mind, even when our job requires us to judge another person. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is a saying that reminds us of a profound truth—firstly about ourselves, and then an increasingly forgotten truth that all the virtues are a gift of God.
To illustrate this, let me offer an insight from Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead. In her novel Home, the leading character is Jack, a prodigal son who returns home to his preacher father, totally devoid of religious faith. Jack observes: ‘It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. That’s where the problem lies.’ And that’s where it lies for us monks: we know that we are baptized in Christ and confirmed in the Spirit, but acedia and pride lead away from feeling the truth of those truths. Come Holy Spirit should be our daily prayer to overcome these demons.
The workings of spiritual pride are equally unattractive. St. John Cassian tells the story of Lucifer as an example of somebody caught up in his own proud world to such an extent that he placed himself above God. Lucifer was the most beautiful and gifted of all the angels, but he thought that using those gifts at the service of his own wishes could make him happy. Classic theology says that God alone is self-sufficient, needing no will other than his own. Lucifer fell from grace because he started to believe that what is true of God alone was true of him. He thought that he didn’t need any point of reference beyond himself in order to be happy. So God gave him what he wanted and left him to his own devices. Lucifer started to live by his own will and then discovered that he had a freedom capable of achieving everything except goodness and happiness. He had become a prisoner of his own will.
Keeping Faith
The song of Mary, the Magnificat, contains important insights about how to move beyond this world of carnal and spiritual pride. Mary says:
‘God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted those of low degree.’
In this song, Mary puts her finger on the source of pride: the imagination.
We imagine that we are the centre of the universe and the problem is that each person is in one sense the centre of their world. A person cannot experience the world from any other angle. Yet to live out that angle as the only true representation of the world is to miss the joy of love, the joy of seeing the world through other people’s eyes and through God’s eyes. That way of seeing is ecstasy, standing outside my normal way of seeing. The monastic life is designed to facilitate such ecstasy, although in a non-ecstatic way! How does that work? Well, if the grace of Confirmation is at work in us, how does the monastic life facilitate that in overcoming pride?
If some of this sounds too heady and pious, then I offer you Evagrius on overcoming pride: just as nail drives out nail, one demon can drive out another. So Evagrius recommends that the demon of pride be driven out by any of the other demons: when pride appears, remember how angry or greedy or lustful you have been and that will surely make your pride disappear very quickly. The Fathers are nothing if not down to earth.
More profoundly, the monastic way of life is one of arranging life externally in order to facilitate the growth of the interior life of the spirit. Contrast this with Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which are independent of any exterior dispositions. They teach sensitivity to the interior world, to the movements of the spirit, the discernment of consolation and desolation. For St. Ignatius of Loyola, if a person wants to reorient their inner perspective on life, they need to open that world directly to a spiritual director and start reshaping it quite consciously. The monastic way has the same goal but is in some ways easier; let the monastic round reshape me.
The problem is that pride knows no limits. So we begin with high ideals, but then we find that, instead of allowing the rhythm of monastic life to recreate us, we start reshaping monastic life to protect my inner world. So, as Cassian described, everything has to go my way; if it doesn’t, that is because the rest of you are not spiritual. How can we spot this pride at work in ourselves? It is, of course, easy to spot in others.
Again, learning from the Ignatian tradition about consolation/desolation: how do we know the difference between consolation and desolation? It is not the same as feeling fine and feeling bad. Sometimes feeling fine is a sign of desolation and feeling bad is a sign of consolation. It can be that I feel good because I am avoiding looking at this dark side of my life that needs attending to: a relationship, an obsession, a laziness. It can be that I feel bad because I am facing up to such a difficulty. To be conflicted is not to be without consolation; it can be the recognition that I am a sinner loved by God.
If I know that I am a loved sinner, then I can have the courage to accept others as loved sinners. I will be less anxious to defend my interior world and keener to move it on. I will take the dura et aspera as grace to receive not as obstacle to avoid. The monastic life has a great capacity to be comfortable if we are not careful. As Fr. Michael Casey OCSO puts it: Mediocrity is the bane of historic Benedictinism. We have to keep imagining that I am not the center and imagining how to enable God and others to be the center.
The Christian story offers us imaginative alternatives to the self-importance that characterizes so much of secular society, which can easily grip a monk. Through Mary’s song, through the parables and through the challenge to our imagination that is the resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel invites us to imagine new ways to be free from destructive thoughts of self-importance. Some people simply refuse to allow themselves to imagine a world in which people do not get angry, a world in which people are not greedy, a world where the proud are scattered. They are addicted to the current picture of how things are.
To imagine in this Gospel way is not to daydream. It is to be fully engaged—body, heart and soul—in working out new ways to live locally and globally. To exercise the imagination is not to say ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’; it is to be involved with other people in addressing creatively the issues facing our families, our communities, and our countries. We can be inspired by Pope St. John Paul II imagining the collapse of Soviet Communism when it looked so strong, by William Wilberforce imagining a world without slaves. If the proud are scattered in the imagination of their hearts, the humble are inspired to great achievements in the imagination of their pure hearts. Mary’s humility does great things that the world’s pride cannot imagine.
The task of monks, nuns and oblates is to claim as our own the anointing that we have received and to allow the Spirit to teach us how to live a truly monastic way of life. We have, in recent years, discovered that conversatio morum is a vow not of conversion but a vow to live the monastic life as it is lived by a specific monastic community. The original and now obsolete meaning of the word “conversation” is to live with somebody and secondarily to speak with somebody. Our monastic conversation is a Spirit-filled living together. The Holy Spirit teaches us through the other members of the community, which is why St. Benedict wants us to vie with one another in mutual obedience. In the imagination of our hearts, we need to let the other monks teach us, and we need to vanquish the pride that says he has nothing to teach me. This is the expression of our anointing at Confirmation, the living out of our baptismal vows to the full.
The monastic tradition of mental prayer is an expression of the Spirit as our internal teacher. The essence of this tradition is that there is no system. The monk kneels or sits in silence before God and holds his gaze on God. With a simple repeated phrase or with simple expressions of holy longing, the monk sends his simple dart of love into the cloud of unknowing. The art lies in dealing with distractions that take our gaze away from God and in knowing when to move onto a further stage towards contemplation. Experience is the best teacher of this and when, as novices, we asked for guidance, we would be told to shut our eyes and look at the crucifix. Just being in silence for 30 minutes twice a day becomes deeply formative.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
EUCHARIST
The Eucharist completes the process of Christian Initiation and is the only part of that threefold rite that we can repeat. It reaffirms the grace of Baptism and Confirmation while focusing that sanctifying grace in new ways. The Mass always begins with the penitential or baptismal rite. Why? The Mass is the high point of sanctifying grace; we remember Christ’s actions that generate this grace, and we receive it. To receive he grace, we must first recognize sin, then recognize that we need sanctifying grace. The doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist requires from us a doctrine of real acceptance; Christ is always present but we can fail to welcome him. If we do welcome Christ, then the sacrifice of the Mass is the high point of our sanctification.
Let’s look at the human actions that express this: eating and drinking, singing and speaking together, sharing peace. All are done with care and thought for others, friend and stranger alike; this is not only God at his best also humanity at our best. The Eucharist is God making holy in the sacrifice, sacrum facere, and that making holy is expressed through the ritual expression of humanity at its best.
Yet cutting across this celebration of humanity at its best is the reality of humanity, the opposites of the eating and sharing celebrated in the Eucharist, namely the demons of gluttony and greed. Never has so much food been as easily and quickly available as it is today, and yet western culture suffers from both too much eating and too little, from obesity and anorexia, or other eating disorders. Although food is physical, the use of it begins with a thought – my mind says ‘I ‘d like a cup of coffee’ – but we often do not notice that thought; we just set about making the coffee and drinking it. So eating is an activity that involves the mind, the will and the body, and the monastic tradition sees in it the starting point for learning how to live with spiritual attentiveness. This attentiveness is a person’s ability to be aware of what they are thinking, what they are choosing, and what they are doing, a complete awareness of their mind, their will and their body, an awareness which, after long years of monastic living, eventually becomes habitual and permanent. The monk must grow in consciousness of all aspects of life and must therefore begin with a new appreciation of thoughts and actions regarding food. If we can’t be aware of something as simple as food we have no chance of addressing the fiercer and more complex demons such as anger and pride.
The Bible itself reflects this in its very structure: food comes first. While the Genesis story of creation is an obvious starting point for the Bible, the first Bible story in which humans are the actors is built around eating. God tells Adam: ‘you may freely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Gen 2:16-17). The serpent leads Adam and Eve to ignore that command, and they eat the forbidden fruit. The serpent’s line of argument is to insist that God has misled them: ‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it…you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (Gen 3:4-5).
The structure of this episode is important: firstly, people are offered a right and a wrong way to eat; then, a demonic force suggests ignoring that injunction, on the grounds that the distinction is erroneous, and finally, somebody eats badly with dire consequences. While Adam and Eve’s basic sin is the sin of pride, nevertheless, the means by which they express their pride is eating. The process by which they come to eat badly is one that we can still see happening today, not only as it applies to food but also in a whole range of human activities where people are misled into thinking that their choices won’t have consequences: amassing consumer goods, seeking excitement to keep boredom at bay, the obsession with celebrity. All these apparently harmless activities stir up the demons of greed and acedia, and they are not good for the soul. Doubtless Adam and Eve said about the forbidden fruit what people say about these thoughts and actions; what harm is it doing? The serpent’s line of argument still has a powerful effect in people’s lives.
At the other end of the Bible, food issues mark the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. When Jesus heard a voice from heaven speaking to Him at his baptism and was led into the desert by the Spirit, it was there that He came to realize that he had a unique role in proclaiming the coming Kingdom of God. His self-awareness through fasting was an essential background to this prayer and discernment. His temptations in the desert came at the end of forty days of fasting, ‘after which he was hungry’ both Matthew and Luke tell us. So, the devil’s first temptation comes to Jesus via the food demon, who says: ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ St. John Cassian reflects that, having trapped the first Adam with food, the devil then tries the same trick on Jesus, the Second Adam. But this time the devil can make no headway. And so too with the temptation to greed in which the devil promises Jesus all the wealth of the nations and the temptation to pride in which he invites Jesus to throw himself from the Temple roof. Cassian notes that each of the demons that succeeded in Adam failed in Jesus.
Just as food plays a central role in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, so too it plays a central role in concluding his ministry among his disciples, when he eats the last supper with them. Yet this food is not only a conclusion but also a new beginning, as Jesus chooses food as the means by which his followers are to remember him in future. As St. Paul says: ‘as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:26). The Eucharist is the summation of Jesus’ victory over all the demons, especially the demons of greed and gluttony.
The happy medium
So how should we handle food thoughts as monks? According to Cassian ‘It is an old saying that extremes meet. For the extreme of fasting comes to the same end as overeating does.’ Overeating is the same today as it was then, and while excessive fasting is not the equivalent of having an eating disorder, nevertheless there is common ground. Cassian’s insight about extremes comes from a series of talks he gave on the subject of discretion, known traditionally as the mother of all the virtues. Discretion enables people to find the happy medium, that place of balance between extremes. This is particularly necessary with food, where our thoughts and demons are always tempting us to extremes.
Women sometimes have different experiences of food thoughts to men, so it is interesting to hear a desert mother’s opinion. Amma Syncletica notices that ‘there is a fasting that is determined by the devil and his disciples practice it.’ So how are we to distinguish between the divine asceticism and the demonic tyranny? Clearly, through its quality of balance. Always use a single rule of fasting. Do not fast four or five days and break it the following day with any amount of food. In truth, lack of proportion always corrupts.’
The monastic tradition values fasting as a key step towards spiritual fulfillment, but monastic fasting does not mean starving ourselves. Eating modestly and only at set times is the monastic way of fasting, and its aim is to prevent food thoughts from dominating our lives. Monastic fasting involves more intense periods of food reduction such as Lent but never to the point where the fasting leads to more rather than less thoughts about food. People can become obsessive about either gorging themselves or about starving themselves or about moving from one extreme to the other. As we reflect on our food thoughts, we might consider how to spend less time thinking about food and simply enjoying modest but regular eating.
To make this fasting sustainable over a lifetime, Cassian invites his monks to eat at the right time and to eat what is offered, whether they feel like it or not: ‘We should be on guard lest, out of a desire to coddle our bodies, we slip into harmful waywardness and presume to indulge in food before the prescribed time and to exceed the appointed measure; so we should accept the refreshment and sleep at the proper time, even if it is unpleasant.’
Greedy monks
We all have a spontaneous understanding of how gluttony works, but we need guidance to understand greed. Greed begins with apparently harmless thoughts, Cassian tells us, and he explains how this works in the life of a monk. The monk begins to think that ‘what is supplied in the monastery is inadequate and can hardly sustain a healthy and robust body.’ The thought develops: ‘the monk ponders how he can get hold of at least one penny.’ When he has achieved that ‘then he is distracted with the still more serious concern of what to buy with it and how he can double it.’ Even thinking about how to double a penny can be a sign of greed and can unsettle us. This in turn leads to disillusionment with the way things are in the monastery, and the monk cannot put up with things any longer. He complains that if he doesn’t leave where he is currently living, ‘he will perish on the spot.’ And so he seeks excuses to leave the monastery.
The monk who stores up money and possessions, even in small amounts, moves to the edge of the community, becoming an observer, ready to find an excuse to leave. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because he complains that others are given more than he is, and that he is treated like a stranger. He becomes more and more angry, demanding more and more, even what he never previously possessed. Cassian invokes the memory of Biblical villains who have exemplified this, and in particular Judas Iscariot, who stole from the funds for the poor and betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.
The picture then is of a monk being drawn away from his true setting by the magnets of money and possessions. Yet it is also true that the magnetic attraction of things is something that can be switched off inside us; unlike the magnetic attraction of food and sex, which are integral to our humanity, the attraction of money is not inevitable, and it can be refused. To a greater extent than the other two, it is a thought that begins in the mind; thus, it is the way that the monk builds up a story about his real needs not being met that is the prelude to seeking money. This story is the beginning of greed, not some natural impulse or urge, which the monk fails to resist. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is the origin of greed.
Similarly, the outcome of greed is not some passing overindulgence in an urge: not a surfeit or drunkenness, the effects of which wear off, or illicit sexual activity which has an end point. Rather, the outcome of greed is to leave the monastic life altogether, either to leave it psychologically by complaining the whole time from within, or to leave it physically by departing in search of something better.
It is no wonder then that St. Benedict calls private ownership ‘this evil practice’ and insists that it must be ‘uprooted and removed from the monastery’ (RB 33:1). Resisting the demon of money and possessions is very much a mental battle. The monk has to believe that what the monastery provides is adequate. So, St. Benedict follows his chapter on the evil of private ownership with a chapter on ‘The Distribution of Goods According to Need’ (RB 34). This is the mirror image of private ownership, in which the abbot must make sure that everybody’s legitimate needs are met. ‘In this way, all members will be at peace.’ He continues ‘First and foremost, there must be no word or sign of grumbling, no manifestation of it for any reason at all’ (RB 34: 5-6). Benedict is not saying a cheerful ‘oh well we mustn’t grumble’; he sees grumbling as the seed bed of vice, especially the vice of greed. So a balance is required in the monastery between the abbot ensuring that everybody has what they need and the tendency of monks to imagine that they need more.
What emerges from both these accounts is how deeply seriously greed was taken by the founders of the monastic tradition. The two basic insights that they offer can be readily applied to the lives of ordinary people today. Firstly, greed has its origins in the mental picture we have of our life and its needs. Secondly, if we get that mental picture wrong, it is a potential source of disintegration in the lives, not only of individuals, but also of communities.
In our celebration of the Eucharist, we are asking that our life be made holy by the sacrifice of Christ. We are asking that our material life is made holy, and how beautifully the abbey church represents that. Art is one of the ways that the material world is made a vehicle for holiness rather than greed. The Eucharist is holy food for holy people as the Oriental Rites put it. We are made holy by this action if we join ourselves with Christ’s offering. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church n.1368 puts it: ‘The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering and so acquire a new value…In the catacombs, the Church is often portrayed as a woman in prayer, arms outstretched in the praying position. Like Christ who stretched out his arms on the Cross, through him, with him and in him, she offers herself and intercedes for all men.’
For me, this was more poignantly expressed visiting Benedictine monasteries and schools in East Africa and South America. Saying Mass there, you were with very poor people, babes at the breast, and dogs. Parishes of 10,000 people with local chapels. Late for final Mass of my round: people had begun without me. At Offertory, rice and food for the very poorest, earth that carries the blood and tears of our labors. Not liturgically pure but this procession of gifts was the defeat of the demons of greed and gluttony; it was the triumph of Christ’s redemption. This was the most perfect sacrifice of Christ alive in our midst, and there I not only knew that great truth about the Mass, I could feel the truth of it. These poor members of the Church really did offer themselves and the whole substance of their lives in the Eucharist. As St. Augustine says: ‘The Church continues to reproduce this sacrifice in the sacrament of the altar so well-known to believers; it is evident to them that in what she offers she herself is offered.’
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
RECONCILIATION
So, after the three sacraments of Christian initiation, now we come to the two sacraments of healing: the sacrament of penance and the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Firstly, penance.
PENANCE
This sacrament is particularly meaningful for monks and nuns because among the origins of its present practice are the traditions of the desert fathers and mothers as mediated by Irish monks.
Penance as reconciliation:
This sacrament is famously neglected today. The origins of it are, of course, connected with the reconciliation of major public sinners, especially apostates, baptized Christians who denied their faith in the face of persecution. Going back to our first sacrament, how could the baptized be admitted to communion if they committed mortal sin? They publicly confessed their public sin and then did public penance. Then they were readmitted to communion. This is the first meaning: reconciliation.
Penance as confession:
The practice of speaking out one’s thoughts and actions to another monk lies at the origin of penance as confession. This, in time, brought with it not simply listening but the imposition of a penance as in the tradition of reconciliation. At the hands of Irish monks, a quasi-tax system was developed with a set tariff for certain sins. This then became the norm for the sacrament of penance.
Penance as therapy:
The practice of viewing the sacrament as a variant of psychotherapy has grown in the last 50 years. The British actor Sir Alec Guinness said that, as a Catholic, he preferred confession to the psychoanalysis used by his Hollywood friends, and he added mischievously that it was so much cheaper too: a few Hail Marys instead of several hundred dollars.
All these three uses of the sacrament have some validity. Even the therapeutic model gets a passing affirmation in the Catechism of the Catholic Church when it says: ‘The confession or disclosure of sins, even from a simply human point of view, frees us and facilitates our reconciliation with others’ (1455). What I’d like to do is to take up that last phrase, ‘facilitates our reconciliation with others,’ and look at how we can be truly reconciled with others. Community life is a constant call to reconciliation; it is not as if something is wrong with the monastery when monks fall out. The monastic life is there to help restore the conversation/conversatio morum when it fails in individual cases. Not for nothing does Benedict have a chapter on why monks should not hit each other. In particular, I’ll consider how monks deal with anger, which is the demon that we’ll consider with the sacrament of penance.
Is there any point in getting angry?
The desert tradition insists that anger is a thought always to be avoided, a demon to whom we should never give in. St. John Cassian calls it a ‘deadly poison…that must be totally uprooted.’ He quotes scripture at length to show the harm that can come to one who is angry, destroying right judgment, wisdom, and the interior light of contemplation. He insists that ‘man’s anger does not work God’s righteousness’ and then goes on to challenge those who seek to justify anger directed towards those who do wrong. He is disdainful of those who quote passages of scripture that say, ‘God was angry with Israel,’ saying that such passages are figurative and notes stingingly that if people take that metaphor literally, how will they cope with other passages that suggest God was ‘asleep like a man drunk with wine?’ To use scripture as a source for justifying anger, he says, is to derive death from the very place where the medicine of salvation is found.
Cassian is particularly critical of a monk who gets angry with the wrongdoing of another brother, which he sees as an example of taking the speck of wrongdoing out of the other person’s eye before removing the plank of wrath in our own. What Cassian calls ‘the function for anger placed quite appropriately within us’ is only beneficial for one purpose: when we become angry with our own faults and failings. He cites approvingly St Paul’s’ injunction that we must not let the sun go down on our anger, emphasizing the verse that follows ‘or else you will give the devil a foothold.’ His conviction that anger against others should not be given the slightest hold over us is so intense that he even worries about whether ‘do not let the sun go down on your anger’ could be read as allowing anger for a short time. So, he interprets this phrase as meaning firstly that our anger must be directed against our own faults including our raging at others and secondly that Christ is the sun. So, before the darkness of our evil thoughts eclipses Christ in our hearts, we must direct our anger against those thoughts and drive them away.
He then goes on to reveal a remarkably wide knowledge of how those who claim that they are not angry can manifest the deepest anger by their actions. ‘They maintain a rancorous spirit against those with whom they are upset…They neither approach them with an appropriate word nor speak to them with ordinary civility, and in this regard, they do not consider themselves in the wrong because they do not demand vengeance for their annoyance.’ Rather than bring it out into the open ‘they turn the poison of their wrath back to their own destruction, brooding over it in their hearts and in glum silence digesting it within themselves.’ Simply controlling the symptoms does not root it out from the heart and the darkness of rage can still blind us even when it is not made manifest; worse still, the radiance of God’s Spirit is excluded from our hearts by the presence of the demon of rage.
Not content with removing anger from our own hearts, Cassian goes on to ask that we try to remove anger from the hearts of those who are angry with us, even if we think that we have done nothing to justify their anger. He notes the saying of Jesus that ‘If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift’ (Mt 5:23-4). It is easy to misread this passage, to assume it says ‘you have something against your brother,’ but a careful reading shows that it applies to the brother being angry with you. Cassian takes ‘offering your gift at the altar’ to mean prayer offered to God, and he reminds monks that their principal task is to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1Thes5:17), a quotation from St. Paul that he cites frequently and to which he now adds another: ‘In every place, lift up pure hands in prayer without anger or dissension’ (1Tim 2:8). He points out that if we dare to pray when a brother is angry, ignoring all these scriptural injunctions, we are offering only ‘stubborn and rebellious hearts’ to God. If we want to have a pure heart in prayer, we must seek out any aggrieved brother who, rightly or wrongly, has something against us. The Lord wants all to be saved, and so we cannot pray if somebody is experiencing anger because of us. We have a responsibility to help that person lose their anger, so that they, too, can once again find tranquility and pray with a pure heart.
Cassian then explains why he is so rigid in his total prohibition of anger. He offers a very rational explanation; he wants each of us to be wholly responsible for our own virtue and to approach life in such a way that we do not depend upon the perfection of other people for our own well-being. He writes: ‘The sum total of our improvement and tranquility, then, must not be made to depend on someone else’s willing, which will never be subject to our sway; it comes, rather, under our own power. And so our not getting angry must derive not from someone else’s perfection but from our own virtue, which is achieved not by another person’s patience but by our own forbearance.’
Cassian turns finally to examine how some people choose to walk away from other people as a way of handling anger. So, he looks at people who live as hermits – and those who live as monks – and notices that they can still find anger in their hearts even though there is nobody against whom to direct it. Instead, they direct it against objects. He lists the meagre objects that a monk possesses and then enumerates the imperfections that can provoke anger: the pen is thick, the pen knife is blunt, and the flint no longer sparks. The monk must root out even this anger if he is to find purity of heart, the ultimate goal of the monastic life and the only way to true peace of mind.
Cassian concludes his teaching on anger with an extraordinary discussion about manuscripts, which again shows him cutting off all possible roots to justifying anger. In the Sermon on the Mount, just before the section quoted above about ‘offering your gift at the altar,’ there is the verse ‘whoever is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgement’ (Mt 5:22). Cassian informs us that some gospel manuscripts circulating among the desert fathers and mothers have the phrase ‘without cause’ added in and read ‘whoever is angry with his brother without cause.’ He insists that ‘without cause’ is an addition to the text made by people who think that it is sometimes acceptable to be angry. He says the phrase is superfluous since no one, however irrationally upset, would say that he had no cause for anger. ‘For patience does not achieve its goal in righteous anger but in not getting angry at all.’
A later generation of Christian authors will allow ‘rational anger’ by which they mean zeal for justice, a passionate rejection of evil rather than a response to personal sleight. Yet all the monastic writers, those involved in community living, retain their outright condemnation of anger. As a monk, I find it better to be clearly against anger of all kinds and to support zeal for justice as something quite distinct. Nelson Mandela is a good example of somebody who combined zeal for justice with a lack of personal anger. He was zealous in bringing apartheid to an end in South Africa but still has friendly relations with his white former jailer. Getting angry about a problem rarely improves the situation; what is needed is zealous determination to overcome it.
Mental health
It is estimated that over a third of Americans received some kind of psychotherapy. (I use psychotherapy to mean all those practices that involve working with a trained mental health professional: for example, counselling, psychoanalysis, psychiatry). In addition, Americans spend $13.5 billion on antidepressant drugs annually. Figures such as these are sometimes quoted to show that people have become overly dependent on psychotherapeutic activity of all kinds. While that may be so, I think they can also be seen as evidence of a healthy concern about mental well-being. Given that 100 years previously neither psychotherapy nor psychotherapeutic drug treatments existed, attitudes to mental health have clearly undergone a revolution in the 21st century. So, can the advice of the desert fathers and mothers still be relevant after this revolution? And where does the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation fit into this new interior worldview?
A rational alternative
Alongside the development of the psychoanalysis that has its origins in Freud, there arose in the second half of the twentieth century another approach to psychotherapy. This approach is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), where the emphasis is on behavior rather than the subconscious. The process sets out to change conscious behavior rather than to explore the unconscious past.
This gives people full leeway to feel strong negative emotions, such as sorrow, regret, displeasure, annoyance, rebellion, and determination to change social conditions. It believes, however, that when they experience certain self-defeating and unhealthy emotions (such as panic, depression, worthless-ness, or rage), they are usually adding an unrealistic and illogical hypothesis to their empirically-based view that their own acts or those of others are reprehensible.’ So, although failing a history test at school may be ‘reprehensible,’ there is no need for the student to add ‘the unrealistic or illogical hypothesis’ that failing a history test means that they are useless at history. They simply need to revise harder or differently.
Here is a simple example:
- A friend passed me in the street without speaking to me.
- He’s ignoring me because he doesn’t like me.
- For me to value myself, people must like me.
- So, he’s telling me that I’m worthless as a person.
Feeling: anger and depression
Behavior: avoid the former friend
- A friend passed me in the street without speaking to me.
- He probably has something on his mind and didn’t notice me.
- He is a friend no matter what state of mind he’s in.
- I’d like to help him.
Feeling: concern
Behavior: call round to see the friend
So, our own belief system and not the other person’s behavior is the key factor in determining our emotional and behavioral reactions. Thoughts precede feelings, and so we can reshape our feelings by approaching life with a new frame of mind.
CBT is about reshaping the interior world of thoughts. Here is where this process overlaps with the desert tradition and the sacrament of penance. CBT, Cassian, and penance are all about recognizing that I have choices to make that are my responsibility, that I do consciously make wrong choices, and that I can do something about putting that right.
The insight that thoughts precede feelings is unacceptable to some people, but this modern insight has a strong resonance with the desert tradition of the eight thoughts. And the sacrament of penance as we have today draws on that desert tradition. The sacrament of penance is about conversion, forgiveness and reconciliation; all of these are the grace of Christ at work in me. The sacrament is a great grace if I accept something of the way CBT works, if I accept something of the way Cassian works. But this is a tough transaction. Here, we meet a lot of our resistance to grace; if I can take responsibility for myself, then God takes responsibility for grace.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
ANOINTING OF THE SICK
The anointing of the sick is a sacrament of healing, healing of body and mind. In this conference, I will concentrate on mental illness rather than physical. We readily offer sympathy and support to the physically ill; we’ve all been there. But mental illness continues to challenge our ability to sympathize let alone to empathize. So, I will concentrate now on that most difficult of St. John Cassian’s thoughts: sadness.
Cassian was well aware of the possibilities of truly devastating depression and recognized that even monks are occasionally overwhelmed by ‘deadly despair’ to such an extent that they take their own lives. His insights can support those who experience sadness of all kinds, but they are no substitutes for the medical treatment of depression. Those who experience ‘deadly despair’ need professional help as well as spiritual support.
From a physiological perspective, mood swings are explained as alterations in the body’s chemistry. As a former teacher, I know that sitting in an airless room for a long period causes a downturn in class mood, with yawns and glum looks all round; at first, I thought the cause was my lackluster teaching, but as a five minute break in the open air transformed the mood, I soon learned that a lack of oxygen causes pupil gloom as much as poor teaching. Here, we can clearly see the physical origin of mood swings, and at one level, sadness is simply a severe downturn in mood caused by a chemical change. When the causes of the physical downturn in mood are themselves physical, then we can deal with sadness relatively easily: take some exercise or open a window. When the causes are psychological, the situation is much harder to manage, and it is these psychological causes that we will consider.
What causes sadness?
The causes of sadness and depression are not always clear and sometimes ‘the blues’ or severe depression come upon us for no apparent reason. In his remarkable account of his own chronic depression entitled ‘Darkness Visible,’ the American novelist William Styron offers the opinion that the root cause of depression is an unresolved loss. In his case, the death of his mother when he was aged 13, which involved an ‘incomplete mourning’ that probably sowed the seed of his later depression.
Loss seems to be the principal trigger for the onset of many kinds of sadness, and Cassian lists various losses that have this effect. Firstly, losing your temper; we nowadays forget that anger involves losing something, namely our balanced state of mind, so that sadness follows ‘losing’ our equilibrium. Anger as a major cause of sadness was already acknowledged by the desert fathers even before modern psychology identified unacknowledged anger as a source of depression. Then there is loss of money, loss of acquiring things that the mind was set on, loss of self-respect when some injury has been inflicted upon us. These losses are not the loss of a loved one; they are not the emotion of grief in death. The cliché ‘nobody died’ contains the important insight that if we are sad at the loss of some thing, then we have the possibility of facing and overcoming the loss in ways that are so much harder when dealing with death.
Seeing sadness as a response to the loss of something can be the first step to overcoming it. But as with anger so with sadness, Cassian is adamant that events themselves do not cause depression. Sadness is not aroused in us by other people’s faults, says Cassian. ‘Rather, we are to blame.’ Once again, the desert tradition and cognitive behavior therapy coincide in asking us to take responsibility for our own feelings. The monastic tradition offers a very specific remedy.
Hope
Hope is the surest remedy against sadness, and so we have to take conscious steps to sustain hope. While we recognize the need to foster a loving attitude in children, nowadays people tend not to foster hope with the same self-conscious energy. Cassian invites us to exercise a discipline of hope. This means not placing our hope where it is subject to change and decay, avoiding reliance for our interior well-being on wealth and position. We are heading back to the primitive definition of happiness as luck if we have placed our hope in financial markets or promotion. The disappointments and successes of our daily lives should both be treated with balance and not be the source alternately of sadness and elation. Hope is bigger than these, on a par with love, so that just as we do not determine our love for somebody just by my mood today, so my hope should not be subject to passing events.
It’s worth taking a moment to do an audit of hope in our lives. What gets us out of bed in the morning? What do we most dread losing? What absorbs our spare time? The responses to these questions are the answer to the question: in what do I place my hope?
Sustaining hope is one of the surest ways of keeping sadness at bay and is an important aspect of both mental and spiritual health. As part of that, Cassian invites us to meditate on the promises of God about death and resurrection. Christians have in the last fifty years concentrated on building the kingdom of God on earth, but to follow Christ’s teaching and example involves ‘both now and forever’ as the Christian tradition of prayer so clearly expresses it. People find it hard in our culture to express their thoughts and feelings about death as the ultimate challenge to hope. And even Christians these days are confused about the meaning of that hope filled phrase in the creed: ‘we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’
The first time I can recall experiencing ‘the blues’ as an adult, I didn’t even realize what was happening to me. It was a very minor and short lived experience, but the shape of it is instructive. I’d been at an important meeting that morning where what seemed to me to be some very poor decisions were made, and the points that I made had been ignored. After lunch, I found I couldn’t function properly, and I had no energy to try. So I talked to another monk, and he helped me to see that I was experiencing the demon of sadness. I am an innately upbeat person, and so sadness didn’t really feature in my repertoire as far as I was concerned. But I had to admit that I was now sad. At this distance, I can still remember the feeling, but I can’t remember the content of the discussions and decisions that caused it. The emotion is still strong, but the thought is weak. It was a discussion that had caused the gloom to descend on me, a series of thoughts, some expressed and some unexpressed, so it was thoughts that had triggered the feeling. My arguments had been ignored. My belief was that my point of view is always correct, and that it is unbearable when I do not win the argument. That is a pretty common but irrational belief. Cassian describes among the causes of sadness ‘that which proceeds from an irrational turn of mind’ (Institutes 9:13). When loss meets an irrational frame of mind, then sadness and depression are liable to follow. The way out is to notice that we have placed our hope in unhelpful beliefs (‘I am always right’ or ‘I will never lose an argument’), and, having noticed them, choose to leave them aside. Then we can place our hope in beliefs worthy of our trust and regain our perspective.
Loss of perspective
One of the most disturbing things that we can lose in life is perspective. To lose perspective is to experience everything as negative and not to know how to get out of it. This is a very serious loss of hope, although it is still short of the ‘deadly despair’ discussed earlier. A real difficulty here is that a loss of perspective is almost impossible to perceive in ourselves, and it needs somebody else to lead us gently to regain our perspective. Once regained, we might look back and see what we had lost; but at the time, there was no way we could see that we had lost it.
Following the transmission of the TV series ‘The Monastery,’ a lot of people contacted us to share their problems and ask for help. In general, these were written communications, so we offered whatever comfort is possible in writing and suggested that they contact a local priest or professional for further help. We could not offer to see them all personally as the number ran into thousands. As an exception, a friend asked me if I would personally see one particular person, a psychiatrist.
A married man with grown up children, he had clearly had a successful career, but as he approached retirement, he felt overwhelmed by emotions that he did not understand. Watching the TV series, he said, had brought him a glimmer of hope, and that was why he wanted to speak to me. As we spoke, his depression was palpable, but there was more to it than that. He said that he didn’t want to see a psychiatrist because he thought he knew exactly what they would do and say, and he didn’t want that. So what did he need? He had no idea, and that was his problem. He agreed to see his doctor for anti-depressant medication to provide a window through which we could explore matters further. He did not entertain thoughts of suicide, but life held no joy; there was no crisis in his family relationships, but family life seemed empty, and he went to church only occasionally. His life seemed to be pointless, and the future seemed equally bleak. Yet coming to the monastery to sit in the abbey church and talking to me brought him great solace. We came to realize that beyond the depression there lay the wider issue of hope: he lacked the virtue of hope, and the only place where he found it again was in the physical setting of our church. This was not so much finding religion, but rather finding a visceral experience of hope; hope had ceased to be an abstraction and was now a core need that was only met in a monastic context.
He came on two retreats with us and found them profoundly affecting. From hope started to flow a renewed sense of love, love of family and love of life itself. Gradually, very gradually, a renewed sense of life began to flow, and with it came an engagement with church as personal not formal. He has regained a sense of perspective. Hope has proved to be the existential foundation of faith and love.
Remorse
Cassian adds two insights about sadness that are surprising to modern readers. He explains why sadness can be a source of joy and why sadness makes us unhappy; the first seems contradictory and the latter a statement of the obvious, but remember: the monastic tradition has a very particular view of happiness.
Cassian recommends one kind of sadness as good for us, namely, sadness at our own faults. So, there is a good and a bad sadness, and the good sadness is grief at my own wrongdoing. ‘With a kind of joy, and quickened by the hope of its own progress, the sadness at my sins retains all its gracious courtesy and forbearance.’ Recognizing my own faults, while truly a sadness, can be a source of joy since it leads me to change for the better and helps me to be patient with other people.
Contrast this with sadness directed at others, which is ‘very harsh, impatient, rough, full of rancor and barren grief and punishing despair…since it is irrational.’ Allowing myself to get upset at other people’s faults has three bad effects. Firstly, I become impatient with other people and can become overwhelmed with despair at their faults. Then this leads me away from the one sadness that might rationally help me, namely, sadness at my own faults. Finally, it affects my prayer, and while it does not destroy the monk’s ability to pray, it nevertheless ‘removes the efficacy of prayer’ (Institutes 9:11). In other words, the effect of prayer should be to foster in the one praying the fruits of the Spirit such as love, joy and patience, but sadness directed towards others’ faults destroys these qualities. Cassian implies that somebody at prayer who is gripped by negative sadness is wasting their time until they have stepped away from their anger and depression. This sounds harsh but in fact this is provable in practice: no matter how much I pray, if I am continuously getting upset with other people, I will not be growing in joy and peace, which are the fruits of true prayer. So, Cassian’s particularly creative insight about depression is his distinction between the sadness at self, which is a source of joy, and the sadness at others, which is an obstacle to spiritual living.
Cassian’s remedy for this as for so much is to pray the psalms. The sacraments surely have a role too. I have never heard of anybody being given the anointing of the sick for depression, but surely that is something to consider. The sacrament of the sick is primarily a grace in the soul giving peace and courage in the face of illness. It unites the sick person with the passion of Christ, and it brings them closer to the communion of the church, especially the communion of saints. In fact, this sacrament of the sick deals mainly with this interior world than with physical healing. This is a sacrament above all for healing the soul. The Lord tells us to heal the sick, but that means to heal body, mind, and soul.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
MARRIAGE
Previous reflections were on the three sacraments of initiation and the two sacraments of healing. The last two will be on the two sacraments at the service of communion: marriage and holy orders.
Marriage is going out of fashion in the U.S.A. The majority of children are born outside marriage, and so not even parenthood drives people to wedlock. Now, I could give a very fine presentation on the sacrament of marriage, but that wouldn’t be much help to a community of celibate monks or nuns. So I’ll improvise a little here. My theme will be how celibates live out their sexuality and how St. John Cassian proposes that we deal with lust, what the desert tradition called the demon of fornication. For Cassian, the pursuit of chastity is the key to his ascetical practice. For the desert fathers and mothers, sexuality is a special meeting place of body and soul that offers the monk privileged insights into the heart. Cassian is an optimist that this special dimension of life can be a source of love. He sees this occurring in two stages: first, continence, and then, chastity. The first stage of continence is the absence of genital activity, and it is achieved through the physical disciplines of the monastic way of life. He sees this as an uneasy peace where the monk has constantly to patrol the body/soul frontier. He noticed that there are three kinds of sexual activity that need to be addressed in achieving continence: sexual intercourse with another person, sexual self-stimulation, and sexual thoughts. Any of these three can dominate somebody, and the desert fathers were unsurprised by their powerful influence.
Their methods to achieve freedom from this domination are based on a science of the human body that we do not share, but their psychological and spiritual insights are still valuable. The desert fathers and mothers, in line with the understanding of their era, thought that the proximity of the sexual organs to the stomach meant that overeating stimulated sexual activity. Hence, they connected fasting and sexual abstinence. While the physiology may be wrong, the psychology is still helpful. Contemporary experience bears out the monastic insight that there is a connection between uncontrolled eating and drinking and loss of sexual control. We only have to think of the embarrassments caused by the annual office party.
From this starting point, the next step involves being aware of the choices that we can make as regards sexual activity. In a world of unparalleled sexual freedom, why would any sane person choose to be celibate for life? The force of this question is of course strengthened by the terrible abuse of minors by clergy that has come to light in recent years. These men had singularly failed to be mindful about their sexual thoughts, and a scandalously inadequate system of management and accountability failed to recognize the terrible damage they were doing to young people. The failure of these men as celibates does not, in my opinion, invalidate celibacy nor does it invalidate the monastic insights about sexuality. Rather, this appalling chapter of recent church history reinforces my wish to understand how the desert fathers and mothers as pioneers of Christian celibacy understood and lived out this demanding vocation in a way that won awestruck approval from their contemporaries, both from ordinary people and political leaders. Indeed, it was precisely this admiration that led to diocesan priests being asked to adopt celibacy.
So, returning to the question as to why anybody would want to be celibate: the reason is out of love. Only love is strong enough to carry somebody through the celibate life. Love of God’s call to be a monk or nun, love of God’s call to serve people as a celibate, and the love of God which we experience when we respond to this vocation. I have experienced a real love for the monastic way of life; I love being a monk, its prayer and its community life, and I love the opportunities for service to others that it constantly offers me. Being celibate is an integral part of that; while all that I do could be done by married people, nevertheless, being celibate adds a distinctive quality to the way I do them. Put simply, they are all that I have, and I depend on them, not on family or sexual intimacy. In the end, being celibate is not simply a reminder of my dependence on God, but the actual living out of that total dependence. And that is why monks and nuns have constantly to check that they are not seeking their fulfilment outside this celibate life and hence compromising that radical love of God which sustains them. This love inspires us as celibates to meet the very real challenges of sexual thoughts, and in doing so to find delight within the monastic tradition.
Facing the Demon
At the start of his discussion on chastity, Cassian asks whether sexual desire can be completely extinguished. That question would not occur to most people today; they may want sexual desire to be contained, but they would not suggest that it should be eliminated altogether. Cassian states that the curtailment of sexual desire is possible—that is, continence is possible—yet no matter what steps a person takes, in the end, perfect chastity is the gift of God. Chastity is real peace in which sexuality no longer threatens the monk but is an authentic and integrated part of the monk’s life. The monk is transparent by day and night. Cassian describes the threshold between continence and chastity with great attention to detail and with great insight. For him, this frontier is found in the world of sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions, where fantasy and body meet. The seriousness with which he enters this area and the detailed analysis are a striking feature of Cassian’s insights; it is noteworthy that the chapters where Cassian deals with this were considered too indelicate to translate. They were only translated into English in 1990.
Cassian asks if a sexual dream and nocturnal emission is the fault of the monk and whether he may receive communion following these experiences. He even discusses the effects of a full bladder and of past memories on such arousal. He concludes that the monk may take communion because he is not directly responsible for the arousal. He does, however, recognize that this arousal may be purposely stimulated and suggest that is a more serious concern. But the main point he makes here is that such sexual activity, whether voluntary or involuntary, is an insight into the body and soul of the monk, showing that the body is unredeemed and in need of grace. He concludes that monks should recognize that such things are not obstacles to prayer but rather encouragements to more fervent prayer. He says that this is why sexual desire is good for us; it makes us realize that we are dependent on God and so encourages us to be more faithful to Christ’s teaching in our lives and in our prayer. So, there is a double effect from this realization that we cannot become chaste other than as a gift of God: we are both more zealous in living virtuously, and we are more faithful in our devotion to God. In a comparison that shocks us today, he says that eunuchs are lukewarm in the pursuit of virtue because they believe themselves to be free from threats to their chastity. He quotes Proverbs: ‘a person in sorrow labors for himself and forcibly prevents his own ruin’ (Prov. 16:26). So, our sorrow at our lack of chastity is a good spur to greater virtue and faith. While the desert tradition says that sexual desire needs to be contained or even extinguished, it also says that sexual desire is good for us. A short saying about a desert mother illustrates the point. It was related about Amma Sarah that for thirteen years she waged war against the demon of fornication. She never prayed that the warfare should cease, but she said: ‘O God, give me strength.’
Cassian did offer some suggestions for a technique that would help to achieve perfect chastity: if we put aside useless conversation, anger and material concerns, if we eat simply and sleep for four hours (remember the desert heat usually meant early rising and a siesta), and if we believe that not our efforts but God alone can grant us the gift of chastity, then within six months we will know that chastity is not impossible for us. Note that he does not say that after six months we will be completely chaste, but that we will know that it is a possibility for us.
Central to handling this area of life is the desert tradition of revealing thoughts, not just sexual thoughts but all the thoughts and demons that trouble him. A monk simply tells another monk, usually older and wiser, all the thoughts that are going through his mind. The older monk’s function is to listen but not to offer advice. In other words, the act of speaking out the thoughts is the purpose of the exercise; it is not psychoanalysis. It was a favorite saying of the desert fathers that the demons love nothing so much as a thought that has not been revealed. This desert practice of sharing thoughts would later evolve into the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. This reminds me of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: Step 4 is to conduct a fearless moral inventory, and Step 5 is to admit the exact nature of our wrongs not only to ourselves and God, but also to another person. In the area of sexual thoughts and actions, this is particularly demanding.
There is a story that tells of a desert father who crossed the line of listening and gave bad advice. One day, a young monk came to an elder to confess his thoughts: ‘I am obsessed with sexual thoughts’ said the young man and proceeded to describe them. The older monk was horrified and told him so, adding that anybody with such terrible thoughts was unfit to be monk. So the younger monk went away sad, having determined to leave the monastery. Another monk came across the dejected young monk and asked him what the matter was. ‘I am leaving the monastery’ said the young monk and proceeded to explain why. His companion was horrified by the reaction of the old monk and prayed that the Lord would that night send the demon of lust to the old monk. And the Lord did so, and the old monk was overwhelmed by sexual desire. Realizing that he was being punished for his hasty judgement on a brother, next morning the old monk rushed to ask the brother’s forgiveness and begged him to stay.
As well as listening, the father with whom the monk shared his thoughts might also offer a word or text from the Bible: this is the origin of the saying ‘a word to live by.’ The text was offered just as a doctor offers a prescription today: having listened to the symptoms, the doctor of the soul offers a medicine for healing, a word from God that the monk can use day by day to help his spiritual health. This is a part of living with mind and heart alert so that self-awareness does not desert us; the sacred phrase is repeated to keep the mind focused on the choices we want to make.
Another part of the way to make progress towards chastity is to notice the thought coming and to take evasive action. This is often described as dashing the thought on the rock of Christ. One of the more unsavory parts of the Psalms comes in Ps 130 when, by the rivers of Babylon, the Jews in exile sat and wept, remembering Zion. In their anger at their plight, they wished that their captors’ children would be dashed against the rocks. That violent text had to have a Christian meaning for the desert fathers because of their belief that the whole Bible is of value. So they saw in this a metaphor in which the children are the beginnings of bad thoughts and Christ is the rock against which to hurl them to their death—not an appealing modern image, but one that shows a shocking seriousness about our freedom to entertain or to destroy the thoughts that come to us. We can learn a mental discipline to walk away from them by saying a prayer, by taking a walk, or by simply doing something practical. The most favored practical activity for monks to defeat the demons is hospitality: in other words, an act of love towards somebody else.
Love Chastity
For many people today, perfect chastity can seem unattractively daunting rather than inspiringly desirable. And this highlights an interesting point: do we really want to be completely chaste? In his Rule, St Benedict mentions chastity on only one occasion; he simply says ‘love chastity.’ I once participated in a workshop for Abbots in North America, and the monk leading the workshop dealing with this issue simply said: ‘please will all those who love chastity raise their hand?’ If he had said all those who love food or art or beauty raise their hand, we would all have done so like a shot, but when he unexpectedly asked us did we love chastity, we all hesitated. I suspect we rarely think of chastity as something to love and we instead see it as a burden. If we can rediscover chastity as a privilege to aspire to and a gift to seek, then the context of our struggle for chastity changes completely.
Whereas sex may be about love but may also be about selfishness, by contrast, chastity is always about love: a living out of one’s marriage vows for love of one’s spouse; a faithful observance of celibacy out of love of Christ’s call to be a monk or nun. All this contributes to that most fundamental desire of the monastic tradition, the desire for purity of heart. The pure in heart see God, and the most persistent attacks on purity of heart come from sexual thoughts; but no matter how persistent, these thoughts are not as deadly as the demons of the soul, pride, and vanity. The first three material thoughts all originate in emotional upsurges that we call gluttony, lust and greed. The desert tradition offers ways of sustaining our freedom of spirit during those surging moments when our bodies are tempted to let go of our awareness and our integrity.
Celibacy and marriage can both be sacraments of chastity. In both cases, there are two dangers, the demons make us despair of being chaste (I can’t cope with this) or the demons make us overconfident about lapses in chastity (this is no big deal). We need in our own day to be as honest and open as Cassian. We need to be clear what monastic life can provide and what it can’t in the area of personal relationships. Three core facts: The monk begins and ends the day alone. His emotional center is the community. The central feature of monastic life itself is personal intimacy with the Lord in prayer. When those three facts are really integrated into a monk’s life, friendship inside and outside the community can support the monk.
The most commented book of the Bible among medieval monks was the Song of Songs. St. John of The Cross takes this tradition and uses the image of the bride, the soul, and the bridegroom, Christ. In his dialogue poem The Spiritual Canticle, the bridegroom, Christ, wounds the loved one, the soul, by loving her. The poem begins (prose translation):
‘The Bride: Where have you hidden yourself, my love. You have left me grieving. You wounded me and fled like a deer.’
Is this celibate love, a wounding love? The poem concludes with the encounter of bride and groom:
‘The Bride: Let us celebrate and let us go to see in your beauty the mountain and the heights…the singing of the sweet nightingale, the woodland and its scent, the serene night with the flame that consumes and gives no pain.’
No longer the dark night and the flame does not burn. The pain is transformed.
Yet strangely, St. John does not end the poem there, he continues with a final stanza that turns to an image of battle with demons, as if John knows that the purity of heart needed for this spiritual union is the fruit of a great struggle. Like Cassian, he is a realist and an optimist. The chaste marriage of the soul with God is possible, but it is the grace that comes after much struggle.
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
HOLY ORDERS
There are many holy orders in the Church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself reminds us that an “order” in classical antiquity meant originally a body of people with a special place in civil society. In the early Church, not only bishops, presbyters, and deacons were designated orders; catechumens, widows and virgins were also called orders. So Holy Orders has an overlap with religious orders: all are about special groups among the people of God, called to serve the Lord in distinct ways.
This reminds us of two things about the holy orders of bishop, priest, and deacon: they are privileged, unique orders because they alone receive a sacred power through the sacramental act of ordination; secondly, this sacred power is to be exercised in the midst of the people, not separated from the people. The Church teaches that there are two ways of participating in the one priesthood of Christ, as a lay person and as an ordained minister. Each needs the other.
Perhaps the most important insight for a priest to hold on to is this: Christ is the priest, and it is his priesthood that works through me. St. Thomas Aquinas puts it: ‘only Christ is the true priest, the others being only his ministers.’ There is a sense in which Christ has abolished priesthood forever by establishing himself as the one eternal high priest. This theology of the one priesthood of Christ expressed through different ministries is the heart of Catholic theology of orders. The social history of holy orders tells a different story, however. Priesthood attracts social status and power, usually to the detriment of priestly ministry. As a result, the demon of vanity stalks the priest wherever he goes.
St. John Cassian’s insights are profoundly relevant here. He identifies the vanity of priesthood as a danger to the soul of the monk. Cassian sees preaching as a moment when vanity is particularly likely to strike. For this reason, he wants monks to avoid becoming priests. He tells the amusing story of a monk, not a priest, who is overheard pretending to say Mass and preach on his own in his cell, the ultimate example of loving the sound of your own voice. What to do when asked to become a priest by their abbot or by the local bishop? Cassian tells monks to avoid this, and at the same time, to avoid the flattering comments of lay women who will say how wonderful they are (things don’t change much). He sums this up in a memorable phrase: ‘a monk must by all means flee from women and bishops.’
The Latin for vanity is vanagloria from vanus meaning “empty” and gloria here denoting reputation, so vanagloria has the literal meaning ‘empty reputation.’ Vanity is the admiration of one’s own achievements and skills as well as of one’s looks and qualities. Cassian considers vanity to be the most subtle of all the demons because ‘where virtue abounds vanity is always a danger.’ In other words, when we have mastered a virtuous skill, especially the spiritual skill of containing the demons of the body and the mind, just when we think we’ve got the spiritual life cracked, this is when vanity strikes.
Vanity becomes evident through attitudes such as complacency about our skills and qualities, sometimes combined with narcissism and self-admiration. It differs from pride because pride does not necessarily involve the desire for praise. Pride involves placing ourselves above others and ultimately placing ourselves above God, usurping a rank that is not ours. Vanity is self-satisfaction.
The beatitudes provide a remedy for vanity
The first three beatitudes are:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Poverty of spirit, meekness, grief: these are qualities of people without vanity. Visibly, they appear to have lost something: wealth or assertiveness or a loved one, but, out of this absence, God draws another invisible reality: the kingdom of God. The kingdom is not a place but the power of God at work in life, and this power works best when people admit that there is something missing. The vain cannot know this power because they are operating under their own steam and fill life with their own stuff, so the power of the other cannot find a way in.
The truth that we find hard to accept about life is that to be human is to be vulnerable. We would rather believe that to be human is to be secure. So we spend our energy on looking secure and convincing ourselves that we are secure. That is vanity. We should instead work at accepting our vulnerability as a gift, a gift that enables us to receive other people’s love and help. In turn, other people’s vulnerability is the gap into which we can pour our love and support. Vanity blocks that whole process; the emptiness of self-love stops the natural flow of love from one person to another.
Yet, people still need to be assertive in standing against injustice. The remaining five beatitudes deal with this:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
While the first three describe those whose state of life makes them especially open to God, these last five beatitudes deal with the moral challenges of life. They make it clear that people seeking justice and peace is another context in which God’s kingdom is at work. But this hunger for righteousness has to be combined with the vulnerable attitude described in the first three beatitudes. This is the Christian challenge: to seek justice with poverty of spirit, without anger and without vanity. God’s power hungers and thirsts for peace and justice, but without rancour. It is unbelievably hard for human beings to keep faith with this way of living. But it can work. For example, in 1955, Rosa Parks simply refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, a meek act of justice that ignited the civil rights movement and changed the face of America. This is purity of heart in action, a hard-won quality that delights in doing the right thing. This is a happiness that knowingly ignores feeling good in order to follow the path of justice.
‘You’re disrespecting me’
In order to avoid right action becoming self-righteousness, we need to distinguish self-respect from vanity. The use of the word respect has become so broad in its application that it now describes everything from government policy (the respect agenda) to an intense emotion (respect as part of love). Respect is now self-consciously fostered by communities as an antidote to vandalism and by companies as an essential ingredient in successful business leadership, while respect for human rights is a lynchpin of political activity. If respect is now seen as necessary in so many areas of life, then the possibility of disrespect has also become more frequent. For example, a teenager was convicted of assault and sent to jail for violently attacking a fellow train passenger as they got off a crowded train. The teenager claimed that the other man ‘disrespected me.’ In cross examination, it emerged that this consisted of the other man pushing into him. Respect is now a highly charged word and people readily accuse other people of not showing it in many personal, social, and political contexts.
To help us regain some balance in the use of this word, we can look at its original meaning. In Latin, respicere means to look at something with great intensity. But in the dictionary, ‘to respect persons’ is a corrupt act. It means to look closely at people’s circumstances and then to show unfair partiality to somebody who is wealthy or influential. That is why the statue outside a law court has a blindfolded figure holding the scales of justice precisely to show that justice is not a respecter of persons. This means that the justice system must perform the following subtle task: it must promote respect for persons but not respect of persons. It must look closely at somebody’s legal rights but not at their position in society.
If we apply that conclusion to self-respect, then we will want to promote respect for self but not respect of self. In practice, this means knowing that I am entitled to justice but not to special treatment. Take the teenager who was shoved getting off the train: if the shove was intentional, then it was unjust; if it was simply the crush of the crowd, then he had no right to expect special treatment. In that situation, the man with a pure heart will give the benefit of the doubt to the crush of the crowd theory and will not allow his anger to attack another passenger in the name of justice. He will undoubtedly be happier for it. So self-respect is a variation on self-awareness; we must be attentive to our inner world as well as to the actions of the people around us. A vain person takes every misunderstanding and every human error as a personal affront, as an attack upon their self-respect: ‘you’re disrespecting me’ may simply be a vain way of saying ‘I am angry that you made a mistake.’ False self-respect attacks a fellow passenger who accidentally pushes us in the crowd. True self-respect is a black woman who refuses to give up her seat to a white man. The self-awareness of a pure heart enables us to tell the difference between the two.
The deceit of vanity
The greatest difference between vanity and the other demons, Cassian tells us, is that vanity redoubles its attacks when it is repulsed. So, for example, if we manage to restrain our eating, the thought of gluttony recedes. But when vanity is resisted it rushes back twice as strongly. This is because it accompanies the exercise of the virtues. When I stand up for justice, it makes think how impressive I am. When I am sober and chaste, it makes me complacent. ‘Mingled with the virtues…it deceives the unthinking and the incautious’ says Cassian. Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector illustrates this. In his prayer to God, the Pharisee lists all his virtues (and it’s important that they are real virtues) and then thanks God that he is unlike ordinary people; he is special. The tax collector simply asks God to have mercy on him, a sinner.
Cassian also describes a subtle form of vanity that we might call inverted vanity. This is when somebody describes how he could easily have acquired wealth and rank if he had persevered in his worldly ambitions, so now he boasts about what he has given up. This ‘inflates him with a vain hope about uncertainties and fills him with boastful vanity about things he never possessed.’ This is a monastic temptation but one that I have also come across among other people who have given themselves to the service of others. Once again, the demon of vanity clings to virtue and won’t let go.
The remedy is to remember to do nothing simply for fame; if we do something virtuous out of love of fame, we lose the merit of the virtue. In particular, he urges people to persevere steadily in what they have begun so that they may not find vanity creeping in; persevere because it is right not because it looks good. We must do what is right in the sight of God, not in the sight of human beings.
So, when vanity is defeated, what virtue will replace it? The opposite virtue of most of the demons is fairly obvious: temperance is the opposite of gluttony, chastity the opposite of lust, and so on. Humility is the opposite of pride, not of vanity. Magnanimity is the virtue that defeats vanity. The word comes from the Latin magnus animus, meaning literally “a large mind,” or more colloquially “a big heart.” Big-heartedness is the opposite of vanity. The vain are rarely generous in the true sense; for example, they love in order to be loved back, or they give a gift in order to be thanked. To experience genuine delight at giving something of ourselves to another person, we need to have a pure heart. The most common use of the word magnanimous nowadays is in sport where an athlete is described as ‘magnanimous in defeat’ if they praise the skill of the victor.
So, if we return to our starting point, the antidote to empty glory is a generous heart. This, of course, does not depend on having material wealth to give away; it depends on the interior attitude of love. The opposite of greed is liberality, as in giving away material goods. Vanity is a demon of the soul, however, and so is overcome by generosity in the soul not in the body. A magnanimous soul is one that can affirm the true worth of self and of other people without needing to make special claims for oneself. I illustrate this by the story of a bishop who, in the week he was appointed Archbishop, wrote a personal note and sent a gift to a woman friend of his with disabilities just diagnosed with cancer. That struck me as an act of Christ the High Priest understood as Christ the Good Shepherd. If the shepherd is not combined with the priest, then the priest labors in vain; there it is again, that word: vain. To labor in vain is to work in a way that is vanus, empty. The danger of ex opera operato theology of priesthood is that it can legitimize empty gestures. This theology rightly guarantees that the faithful still receive sanctifying grace from a careless priest, but it is minimalist theology, not the high maximalist theology that is sometimes claimed. Shepherds are magnanimous, the opposite of vain.
In the Christian tradition, the Virgin Mary is seen as an icon of this quality of magnanimity, which is the opposite of vanity. She is a real inspiration for priests as we combat our vanity. The Magnificat magnanimously affirms God’s greatness and her own insignificance in the first two sentences:
‘My soul magnifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.
For he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.’
Mary then goes on to make a startling claim:
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me
and holy is his name’
This surely is the model prayer of the ordained minister. This sentence could be read as terrible vanity, but it is, in fact, the opposite. Mary affirms that future generations will congratulate her on God’s work in her life. This is a magnanimous affirmation of God’s work, not of her own efforts. This too is what the ordained affirm: God has done great things through my priesthood. The song goes on to say that, through her, ‘God has helped his servant, Israel.’ Mary affirms that God is giving special treatment to all God’s people. Earlier, we saw that special treatment is the aim of somebody who is vain. And yet it is special treatment that God is offering his people. So, what’s the difference? The special treatment of vanity is this: a vain person demands to be considered special in order to hide their emptiness. The priest who stands on his dignity is hiding his emptiness; that is clericalism. By contrast, God’s special treatment is a free gift that fills with love those who do not consider themselves special. The sacred character imparted at ordination is just such a special treatment imparted to the minister. Christian faith calls this special treatment God’s grace. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’ said the angel and generations of Christians have repeated those words as an expression of what they too hope to receive. May this prayer of Mary inspire us all, ordained and nonordained ministers alike, as well all of us baptized in the amazing grace and life of Christ the Lord!
Bishop Elias Lorenzo Finding Grace PDF Download
