Amoris laetitia: Celibacy

Amoris laetitia is a document on the family, but it also has something to say about the celibate vocation in the Church. For example:

Whereas virginity is an “eschatological” sign of the risen Christ, marriage is a “historical” sign for us living in this world, a sign of the earthly Christ who chose to become one with us and gave himself up for us even to shedding his blood. (161)

This is true, so long as we don't push it too far. Christian married people, of course, like all Christians, participate in the eschatological character of the Church, and those consecrated to celibacy still have a foot in history.

Proper Procedures Having Not Been Observed

I'm always amused--and a little heartened, in some funny way--when I come across evidence of the continuity of religious life, of how little certain aspects of it seem to change over time. For example, adjusting the names and some of the particulars of place and lodging, it would be no surprise to encounter something very close to this letter of St. Bernard to the abbot of Trois-Fontaines even today:

By way of example, I will tell you about something similar that once happened to me. It was when my brother Bartholomew was still alive. One day he displeased me. Trembling with rage and using a threatening expression and tone of voice, I ordered him to leave the monastery. He immediately walked out, went to one of our barns, and stayed there. When I learned of this I wanted to call him back, but he stated his conditions: he would only return if he were received in his own rank; not in the last rank and as a fugitive, but as if he had been sent away lightly and without just cause. He maintained that he should not have to submit to due process of the Rule for his return, since proper procedures had not been observed in his dismissal. Distrusting my own judgment of this response and of my own actions, and because of the ties of blood between him and me, I entrusted the decision of this affair to the hands of all the brethren. Thus they judged, in my absence, that his return should not be subject to the letter of the Rule since it was certain that his dismissal had not been conducted in a regular fashion.

(Quoted from Jean Leclercq, Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Spirit, trans. Claire Lavoie (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 41-42.)

All Saints Ramble

Everywhere I've been to Sunday Mass in Italy, both inside and outside of religious houses (with the exception of Santa Susanna in Rome, where you can go if you just want to sing out of Gather Comprehensive and have that slightly-to-the-liberal-side-of-center standard American sort of worship-experience), they seem to use this little Sunday bulletin/worship aid published by San Paolo and called La Domenica. It's actually pretty good. It has the readings and proper prayers of the day, as well as the Gloria and Creed printed in it. There's a little reflection on the front and a formula for the Universal Prayer inside. I usually expect such things to be not very good, but these aren't bad.

Today, however, on this solemnity of All Saints, I was a little disappointed. The reflection was too much history and not enough eschatology. And on the front are the patron saints of Europe: Benedict, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein. Now I have nothing against these saints in their service as patrons of Europe (although, as I expressed in this post, I have worry that Italian devotion to St. Benedict risks giving new birth to the excesses of Joachim of Fiore); indeed patron saints of Europe must be very busy in this tempo di crisi, as the phrase goes here in Italy. Personally, I've been praying to St. Benedict recently. My first priest, the good Fr. Larry at Connecticut College, has always maintained that I am supposed to be a Benedictine rather than a Franciscan. I have always dismissed this, but lately I've started to wonder. Maybe it's just the temptation of living near Norcia. And of course I'm more or less in love with Edith Stein; probably the best homily I've given in Italian was just a quote from her Kreuzeswissenschaft for the feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis. When I think about her description of her famous conversion-prayer moment in Frankfurt, it touches my own experience so strongly. It's funny; for my mothers and fathers in religious life the iconic moment in this mold seems to be Merton on the corner of 4th and Walnut; for me it's a struggle between feeling like Edith Stein in Frankfurt or like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

But to get back to the patrons of Europe, all those saints have their proper days in the calendar; they don't need to be on the cover of the bulletin today. To me the feast of All Saints is about them, for sure, but also for all the saints who are unknown, who will never be canonized for the veneration and encouragement of the Church Militant. Indeed, we go through the cycles of the liturgical year celebrating the feast of this or that saint, we can read the Martyrology each day and meet even more. But to believe in the salvation we have in Christ, it seems to me, is to confess that all of these are but a small fraction of the members of the Church Triumphant. And because we who are still on the journey of this life hope to join the saints one day, but because few of us will ever be canonized, today is the day we look forward to as our own future feast day. Indeed, that is our hope as we pray through this day; that one day we will find ourselves on the other side of the praise and veneration that goes up from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant on All Saints Day.

As St. Bernard reminds us in the Office of Readings today, this is, in fact, the function of All Saints Day. Not that the saints should gain anything from our venerating them, but that our recollection of their destiny should kindle in us the desire to share it.

resurgamus cum Christo, quaeramus quae sursum sunt, quae sursum sapiamus

says St. Bernard, riffing on the great Pauline Easter slogan, 'seek the things that are above,' sursum sunt quaerite. (Colossians 3:1)

"Let us rise again with Christ, may we seek the things that are above, may we taste what is above."

That's the spiritual life; seeking after a taste once tasted. Yearning for a God once glimpsed, but who seems to recede from our understanding and who seems to resist our comprehension. And indeed, it is supposed to be this way, because God refuses to be reduced to a 'thing' that can be possessed, that can be had like any other created good, much less any other consumer commodity. And this is why prayer is the first and best school of evangelical poverty, because what we seek can't be possessed in any way that our created bodies and minds can understand, and because as we settle into the 'uninteresting wilderness' of prayer, we find that our very desire for what we have tasted is itself the bread for our journey. It is the desire that turns out to be rest, and this is the way in which our prayer takes shape, as we journey to the Father, as the mirror image of the self-emptying God, of the immolated Christ.

non enim dispositus est aliquo modo ad contemplationes divinas, quae ad mentales ducunt excessus, nisi cum Daniele sit vir desideriorum.

"One is not ready in any way for the divine contemplations, which lead to interior ecstasy, unless he be like Daniel a man of desires." (St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, prologue, 3)

Bernard, Gyrovagues, and Acedia

Just one more post before I leave my little St. Bernard theme. In Jean Leclercq's classic The Love of Learning and the Desire for God I came across Bernard's commentary on the four kinds of monks from the Rule of St. Benedict.

Here's what Bernard says about one of the bad sorts, the gyrovagues:

Then come the spiritual gyrovagues: their inconstancy carries them from reading to prayer, from prayer to work, preventing them from obtaining the benefits of their undertakings: stability in effort and perseverance in devotion. Victims of acedia, they think it better at one moment to do one thing, and, at another, something else; they begin everything and finish nothing.

As I have continued to puzzle through the mysterious passion of acedia, this is another text that makes me think it might just be one of the primary spiritual dangers of our time when the dissipation of attention through hyper-stimulation, "multi-tasking" and constant connectivity is becoming the norm.

Praying for the Willingness

I'm still reading St. Bernard, and I was thinking about these lines in sermon 74 on the Song of Songs: "I have known many who were sadder for knowing the truth, for they did not have the excuse of ignorance when they knew what the Truth wanted them to do and did not do it." (trans. G.R. Evans in this edition)

More and more I become convinced that the primary virtue of the spiritual life is the willingness to consent to God. I suppose some would call this surrender or abandonment, but perhaps because my own prayer life grew up in the Centering Prayer tradition, I prefer the language of consent. Prayer is the consent to the presence of God, and the spiritual life is the daily willing to consent to where God leads.

As St. Bernard points out, the spiritual life thus becomes hazardous. Having spent a first fervor at any stage, finding the willingness to follow God can be an intense and searing struggle. This is especially true when we find--as we always will--that God calls us into dark places and commands us to be free of the forms of interior bondage with which we didn't even know we were suffering. This can be really hard stuff. After all, it is the violent who take hold of the Kingdom of God (Matthew 11:12), because God is a violent lover in the sense that he is relentless and forceful in his desire for our flourishing in this world and our salvation in the next. "God did not invite the children of Israel to leave the slavery of Egypt. He commanded them to do so." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 110)

But the spiritual life is dangerous because it becomes a sadness and frustration at the moments or during the spells when we have trouble finding the willingness to consent or surrender.

A very wise director once advised me to 'pray for the willingness.' It has become one of the most formative bits of spiritual doctrine I have ever received. I don't pray for particular graces. I pray for the willingness to consent to the grace that's already there.

The Love of God

"To lose yourself as though you did not exist and to have no sense of yourself, to be emptied out of yourself (Phil 2:7) and almost annihilated, belongs to heavenly not to human love. And if indeed any mortal is rapt for a moment or is, so to speak, admitted for a moment to this union, at once the world presses itself on him (Gal 1:4), the day's wickedness troubles him, the mortal body weighs him down, bodily needs distract him, he fails because of the weakness of his corruption and--more powerfully than these--brotherly love calls him back." (Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, trans. G.R. Evans)

Most anyone who has tried to live a life of prayer knows what St. Bernard is talking about. The experience of God can seem to be fleeting. At one moment we feel an awareness of God's presence to us, but at the next we can't even seem to remember what it was we experienced the moment before. As we go forward in the spiritual life, the situation becomes more challenging, for two reasons. First, God himself becomes more mysterious. Of course God isn't changing, but as our concepts of God are purified of idolatry and superstition, the blessed and dazzling starkness of the Mystery himself comes more into focus. Second, as we become more free for the charity that is God dwelling within us, we will find that this charity calls us out of our recollection more and more often, and in greater ways.

We must not resent this experience. Yes, the experience of God is perfectly sweet and delightful. God is the best thing there is for us, by definition. But we must always be careful to run after God and not the experience of God. It is his will we seek, not the delight of his presence. God's presence feels fleeting for us not because God is sometimes here and sometimes not, but because his brilliance is so bright that we only see it as darkness. In the course of our prayer we are given little tastes of God, not so that we might chase after the savor in a kind of spiritual gluttony, but that we might follow God into the darkness and thus become savory ourselves, the salt of the earth.

What St. Bernard describes might seem like someone whose prayer life is a mess; even if his momentary experience of God isn't shattered by his own corruption and distraction, charity soon calls him out of his delightful recollection. And yet this is a description that belongs to Bernard's account of the highest degree of the love of God, in which we have passed beyond even loving God for his own sake to the place where we love ourselves and our neighbor only in God.

An Invitation to Holy Poverty

One must be grateful for the graces that serve to humiliate us by dismantling our pious illusions about ourselves. Humility is impossible without honesty about our spiritual condition.

This morning has been a fine example for me. Among the most challenging chores of my current transition are figuring out my health coverage, finding a new physician, and figuring out how I will get the prescriptions I need. I have asthma, and have had it for a long time. Over the years I have seen the drugs improve tremendously; at this point I hardly ever experience symptoms, but I know I need my daily doses of medicine. I am grateful to have had some kind of health coverage throughout my adult life thus far, but it has always been in some sketchy or incomplete way. I have always been able to see doctors, eventually, and to get what I need, but not without a lot of struggle and torturous explanations. This has been so both in and out of religious life. For the last few years I have had it pretty easy, both because my community has made some great improvements in how us younger brothers are covered, and because I live next to our retirement residence and thus have easy contact with doctors. But things change in the itinerant life, and now I have to figure out how things will work in my return to student life. Various people tell me entirely different things, and of course I get anxious about how I will be able to make sure I can keep breathing.

So I find myself this morning, already having lost an hour on account of trying to puzzle some of this out and fretting about it. That's a good hour of a Thursday morning, the time I usually try to use to draft my Sunday homily. But then, thanks be to God, I'm able to surrender to the grace of confessing my arrogance. Is this not one of the standard anxieties of the poor? This is what poverty is in this world; to have difficult access to those who control the resources that are life's necessities, or to be excluded from them altogether. I will never really know such poverty, but if I claim to be a poor man by my vows, should I not be grateful for this little taste?

Whatever part of me feels annoyed by all this, as if I--in my being a North American male from one of the privileged classes--resent having to deal with such things at all, it reveals that I am not entirely converted to the life of evangelical poverty. But I'm grateful for the grace this morning of being invited to surrender to this taste of the anxiety of the poor; may it make me compassionate and drive me to bring the good news of the Kingdom of God to the real poor of my neighborhood and world.

Our Capuchin Constitutions have a wonderful line on all this, which I think is derived from St. Bernard: "Let us not wish to be numbered among those who go by the fictitious name of 'poor' who love to be poor in such a way as to lack nothing." Amen.

Keys and Nails

Each time I read St. Bernard I appreciate him even more. Who knows? Perhaps if I had found him earlier in life I would be a Cistercian now instead of a Franciscan. My first priest, who patiently endured dealing with me extensively as a pre-catechumen and then again as a neophyte, has always said that I was really a Benedictine at heart. I don't believe it, but perhaps some of my confreres would agree.

Bernard comes to us today in the Office of Readings, from a sermon on the Song of Songs:

"But the piercing nail has become a key to unlock the door, that I may see the good will of the Lord. And what can I see as I through the hole? Both the nail and the wound cry out that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."

In Bernard's Latin the play of clavis, "key," clavus, "nail," and clamat, "cry" is striking:

At clavis reserans, clavus penetrans factus est mihi, ut videam voluntatem Domini. Quidni videam per foramen? Clamat clavus, clamat vulnus, quod vere Deus sit in Christo mundum reconcilians sibi.


The cry is the expression of God's Passion, the passionate desire for the salvation and reconciliation of the world. It is the sound of the incarnate Word of God being broken open so that the saving bath of his Precious Blood will pour out over the world.

Bernard on the Dangers of Celibacy

For his feast day today, here's one of my favorite challenging quotes from St. Bernard's On Conversion, a Sermon to Clerics (trans. Bernard Saïd, OSB) against all of us who put forth an external image of renunciation but are really willing victims of all manner of luxury within and without.

If only those who are incapable of remaining continent would fear to profess perfection rashly and to assume the title of celibacy...it would without doubt have been better to marry than to burn (1 Cor 7:9), to be saved in the humble ranks of the faithful than to live less worthily in the lofty ranks of the clergy and be more severely judged...They abstain from from the remedy afforded by marriage and give themselves up to all forms of vice.

This can be a hard thing to hear, because in the clergy and religious life you rejoice to encounter those for whom celibate chastity seems to have worked as advertised, leaving them more open, more completely giving of time and self, utterly non-exclusive with their attention and affection, etc. But for others it seems to have hardened them into their private eccentricity or provided a consequence-free setting for their affective disorderliness, sexual and otherwise.

So for celibates who are young in the spiritual order, it is critical to choose our spiritual mothers and fathers carefully!

Deep Conversion/Deep Prayer

Someone looking after my soul lent me Thomas Dubay's Deep Conversion/Deep Prayer, and I read it last week when I wasn't feeling well. It's an inspiring little book, and worth the time for anyone who has become complacent and needs a little kick in the spiritual pants.

Dubay sets the tone for the book with this quote from St. Bernard: "There are more people converted from mortal sin to grace, than there are religious converted from good to better." He then develops this thought in an effort to deliver the reader from complacency and to convince us that we ought to drive ourselves on to become saints. To replace serious sins with regular spiritual practice is just the beginning; we should spur ourselves on to total devotion and complete sanctity.

To this end Dubay provides us with a "surefire program" under the following headings:

Be concerned.
Be determined.
Be committed to meditative and contemplative prayer.
Be motivated.
Be humble.
Be specific.
Be persevering.

I know that he is a popular spiritual writer, but this is the first book by Dubay that I have read. It was enough to get me intrigued, though, so I'll be looking for more.

We're Not Monks

Today is the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the greatest lights in the history of religious life in the western Church. Whenever one of these great monastic saints comes around, I get to thinking about religious life. One of the great dissonances of my own religious life is that I have always seen my own Franciscan vocation within the context of the whole tradition of religious life, while many other friars seem to see our particular vocation as unrelated to the earlier, more monastic forms. How often I have heard the protest, "We're not monks."

It's true, there are critical differences between the monastic and the mendicant forms of religious life. Stability and place have always been constitutive of monastic life in the Benedictine traditions, while the mendicant life is based on homelessness and itinerancy. The concept of religious poverty is very different as well. Monastic religious typically follow the vision of poverty found in Acts 2:45-46, in which all who believed held all things in common and gave to each according to need. Franciscans, on the other hand, are inspired by the vision of poverty associated with Gospel passages like Matthew 10:9-10, "Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic, or sandals, or walking stick." The first is the vision of a stable community which supports the individual renunciation of its members, while the second is a vision of an itinerant life without stable or reliable support.

In practice, most Franciscans actually follow the monastic model of individual poverty within corporate security.

What gets me about us is that the suggestion that we ought to follow a more strict or regular pattern of common prayer (up to and including what we have promised in our own Rule and Constitutions) is often met with the objection, "We're not monks." But if you then suggest that by that same logic we ought to reject the monastic model of religious poverty as well, along with the comfort and security it affords us, well then the real motives of the "We're not monks" brethren will come through.