Benedictine Sisters of FL

Holy Name Monastery
Founded 1889

Joan Chittister

The Cave of the Heart

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The Cave of the Heart

The question is, then, what is the way to the beginning of peace?

The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “The unhappiness of a person resides in one thing, to be unable to remain peacefully in a room.” It is silence and solitude that bring us face to face with ourselves and the inner wars we must win if we are ever to become truly whole, truly at peace. Silence gives us the opportunity we need to raise our hearts and minds to something above ourselves, to be aware of a spiritual life in us that is being starved out by pollution, to still the raging of our limitless desires. It is a call to the Cave of the Heart where the vision is clear and the heart is centered on something worthy of it.

There are some things in life that need to be nourished simply for their own sake. Art is one, music is another, good reading is a third, but the power of the contemplative vision is the greatest of them all.  Only those who come to see the world as God sees the world, only those who see through the eyes of God, ever really see the glory of the world, ever really approach the peaceable kingdom, ever find peace in themselves.

Silence is the beginning of peace. It is in silence that we learn that there is more to life than life seems to offer. There is beauty and truth and vision wider than the present and deeper than the past that only silence can discover. Going into ourselves we see the whole world at war within us and begin to end the conflict. To understand ourselves, then, is to understand everyone else as well.

Because we have come to know ourselves better, we can only deal more gently with others. Knowing our own struggles, we reverence theirs. Knowing our own failures, we are in awe of their successes, less quick to condemn, less likely to boast, less intent on punishing, less certain of our certainties, less committed to our heady, vacuous, and untried convictions. Then silence becomes a social virtue.

Make no doubt about it, the ability to listen to another, to sit silently in the presence of God, to give sober heed and to ponder is the nucleus of the spirituality of peace.

—from For Everything a Season (Orbis) by Joan Chittister

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Two Lines

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Two Lines

 

Two lines jump out at me in this reading:

  1. What Jesus said to the young man – “You are lacking one thing.”
  2. The question the disciples ask Jesus – “Who can be saved?”

Jesus has already told them in this reading, four things they should NOT do: don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, don’t defraud.  I smile when I read how He sums up His list, it’s what my dad would say: “Do what your mother tells you.”  The only time I remember him raising his voice to me was one day when my mother asked, “Do you want to do some ironing now?”  I had said, “No, not now.”  Wrong answer!  Jesus offered the same directive to the wine servers at the wedding where he and his mother were guests – “Do whatever she tells you.”  And when dying on the Cross, what did he say to John (and all of us) – “Behold your mother.”

Jesus told the young man, “You are lacking one thing.”  That’s his challenge to us this week, figure out what’s the one thing we are lacking.  Benedict’s Tools of Good Works (RB 4) is a good examination of conscience or you might use Joan Chittister’s listing of Benedict’s counsels:

            • Don’t pamper yourself
            • Be transparent
            • Be gentle with each other
            • Don’t expect too much or consume too much
            • Live in the moment of God’s grace
            • Be willing to be formed
            • Have a holy attitude toward persons and all of creation, and
            • Remember the tools of the spiritual life are the work of a lifetime. …

Jesus said, “Do what your parents tell you.”  Benedict says the same thing in several places in the Rule, do what the superior tells you.  He gives a little wiggle room when he speaks of impossible tasks but in the end, he says obedience will save us.  I’ve saved my mother’s message to me when I wrote to tell her that we now had the option of using our baptismal names and were shortening our skirts.  In her own way she said, “I’ve tried to teach you the value of obedience.  Do what your superiors are telling you.”   RB 7 places tremendous responsibility on each of us to give good example when our founder says, “The eighth degree in humility is that a monk do nothing but what the common rule of the monastery and the example of the seniors suggest.”

Like many people, the young man in the Gospel knew something was missing in his life. There’s some of the young man in all of us … we know something is lacking. We are surrounded with media that tries to convince us what that the one thing is that will bring us joy and well-being.  Although we know full well that wealth is not a guarantee for happiness in this life, that spirit can slip through the walls, even through convent walls.  We can sense it when we doubt that the common goods available are not sufficient for us.  We can act like children who don’t want the crayons put into a pile in the middle of the table.  We each want our own box of crayons because we don’t like the broken ones or the ones that have the paper peeled off or the ones you can tell have touched another color or are just not the brand we prefer.  Like the young man we want our own possessions and we want them NOW, today.  And, we find it hard to part with any of them graciously even when we hear Benedict say (in RB 54) that the members should not presume to accept gifts sent by parents or friends without previously telling the superior who has the power to give the gift to whomever and the one for whom it was originally given will not be distressed.

Maybe instead of asking “What am I lacking?” we need to ask ourselves, “What do I have too much of?”  Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, no one who has given up house, brother, sisters or mother and father or children or lands for the sake of the Gospel will not receive 100 times more in the age to come.”  We may tick off all the items on that list one by one but the challenge keeps coming back to haunt us, “One thing is lacking.”

Jesus counsels us: “How hard it is, it’s easier to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the needle gate.”  It’s hard, he says but not impossible, “For with God, all things are possible.”

Just don’t get caught in Peter’s trap – quickly retorting, “I’ve given up EVERYTHING, Lord!”  You’ll hear the echo, “One thing is lacking.  Go, give what you have to the poor, and THEN come follow Me.”

~Reflection by Sister Roberta Bailey, OSB

 

First Reading:   Wisdom 7:7-11            Second Reading:  Hebrews 4:12-13
Gospel:   Mark 10:17-30 (shorter form Mark 10:17-27)
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“Go into Your Heart…”

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The hard moments of life come when we feel ourselves overwhelmed by a sense of uselessness. We see people around us doing important things, public things, impressive things. Our lives, on the other hand, have been exercises in the ordinary. We know ourselves to be ordinary: ordinary secretaries, lawyers, nurses, teachers, office workers, and, yes, ordinary families. These are the moments when we look back down the years and begin to wonder if we’ve ever done anything that was worthwhile. Those are the days when we look ahead and see nothing but grey. Those are the “What’s-it-all-about, Alfie?” days.

They are painful periods in life, but they are not unusual periods, at all. Every culture carries within itself stories of quest. Seekers everywhere search for enlightenment about finding a direction in life, about making choices in life, about giving meaning to life beyond the daily and the humdrum. Every young person floats from thing to thing for a while trying to find a fit between talent and heart, between ability and commitment. Every middle-aged person comes to a point of decision about staying where they are or changing direction before it’s too late. Every old man and woman in the world looks back and wonders about what might have been. The questions bay at our heels day and night for whole periods in life: Am I doing the right thing? What am I really meant to be doing with my life? Is what I am doing worth anything?

The ancients tell of a Holy One who said to a businessman, “As the fish perishes on dry land, so you perish when you get entangled in the world. The fish must return to the water and you must return to the spiritual. The businessman was aghast. “Are you saying,” he cried, “that I must give up my business and go into a monastery?” And the Holy One said, “Oh no, no, never. I am saying, hold on to your business but go into your heart.”

Clearly, it is not so much what we do but the spirit with which we do it that counts. The only thing worth spending my life on is something that makes life richer, warmer, fuller, happier where I am.

We are each given only one life. The spirit we bring to it, the heart we put into it is the measure of its value. It isn’t difficult to be good at what we do. What is difficult is to be great about the way we do it. The purpose of my life is to spend myself in ways that bring holiness to the mundane. The problem is that only I can do it. How I am, the environment around me will be: full of arsenic or full of the warmth of the Spirit.

—from ­The Monastic Way (2002) by Joan Chittister

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Because of Beauty

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Confucius may have said it best: “Everything has beauty,” he taught, “but not everyone sees it.” Seeing it, the spiritual person knows, is the task of a lifetime. It is also the reward of a lifetime well-lived, lived in balance, lived from the inside out as well as from the outside in.

Unfortunately, this culture does not teach beauty in its schools nor require it in its programs. Most of all, it does not prescribe it for its healing value. The value of beauty in shaping the soul, let alone in curing the ills that a lack of beauty brings on, we ignore.

In a plastic world, frenzied by its pursuit of money or dried to the bone by the lack of it, the whole of life is cheapened, devalued. Then the collectibles of life take precedence over its joys. Striving trumps achievement. Nothing is ever enough. Only consumption brings a sense of success in life.

And so life goes by, a merry-go-round of toys gotten or yet to get. Just for the sake of having them. Whether they bring anything of internal value in return is seldom factored into the equation.

Without obeisance to the God of More, materialism says, how can we ever say that life has been worth it? How else will we come to know that life has value in itself? How will we ever learn that life lived in pursuit of beauty has been lived beautifully?

Too often, we miss the obvious: beauty is meant to enable us to transcend the mundane, to escape the frivolous, to save us from the toxicity of the cheap and tawdry. Because of beauty, we may begin to see that the purpose of life is to make beauty possible. Beauty brings peace to the soul and satisfaction to the heart. It saves us from the stress that cacophony brings.

To be enriched by beauty is to have within us the sight of life that will never go away, that will never leave us empty. It is the sight of one single sunset that brings layers of life to every sunset thereafter. When we begin to recognize beauty, to see it all around us, it has done its work on us. Steeped in beauty, we have become beautiful ourselves. We are calm now, uplifted, enriched by the world around us, deepened in our sensitivities, our vision of the world more finely honed. We become the beauty we have come to see everywhere.

—from Two Dogs and A Parrot (BlueBridge), by Joan Chittister  

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