+Chapter Talk on Jan. 28th, 2018
This morning I would like to share some recent reflections from various sources I have been reading and that may be of value to you. In his book Sacred Fire, Ronald Rolheiser begins one of his chapters with a story about a certain Powers Hapgood that runs like this:
Powers Hapgood, an American who lived during the early and mid-twentieth century, was Harvard educated and inherited a factory. But he gave the factory to the workers and was later, just after World War II, arrested for protesting for the poor. In court, the judge asked him: “Mr Hapgood, you are Harvard educated, why would anyone of your advantages choose to live as you do?” Hapgood replied: “Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”
When many of us started thinking of entering or decided on entering the monastic way of life, we too had relatives or friends who asked a similar question as to what would make us choose to live this way of life we were thinking of or had decided upon. Our life is not only a decision to live the Sermon on the Mount but to live it in the context of a relatively small community of like-minded men. We have felt the call to be “poor in spirit,” to be among those “who mourn’ “the meek,” those “who hunger and thirst for righteousness” because of some deep and often mysterious call of God. To stay with our call, to go wherever it may lead amid this simple way of life demands a great deal of faith precisely because it is mainly God’s work and not our own.
To let ourselves enter deeply into our monastic calling, the important thing is as Rolheiser has pointed out “that we continue always to grow in maturity and generosity.. Jesus defines this for us when he says: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect’” but then what does this really mean? Rolheiser goes on to clarify this saying:
“..Perfection, as it is commonly understood, is a human impossibility. Our commonsense notion of perfection comes from Greek thought, where something is thought to be perfect only if it is flawless, without any blemish whatsoever. A perfect complexion would have no flaws, as would a perfect moral life. But that is a human impossibility and is not, in fact, what Jesus is asking of us. Jesus’ framework of thought was more Hebrew than Greek, and inside that framework perfection does not have the commonsense connotation of flawlessness. Rather, Jesus’ concept of perfection is very much identified with compassion, so much so that sometimes the Gospels simply name it as compassion. Compassion is an attainable goal. Hence, Jesus challenges us: “be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate.”
Rolheiser goes on to ask rhetorical question what is meant when we say that God is compassionate? He says:
Jesus defines it this way: God, he says, lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God’s love does not discriminate; it simply embraces everything. Like the sun, it does not shine selectively, shedding its warmth on the vegetables because they are good and refusing warmth to the weeds because they are bad. It just shines, and everything irrespective of its condition receives its warmth.”
This all embracing love that Jesus has taught us , takes its best expression in our monastic life through our daily living together in community. Michael Casey reminds us of this as much in a recent article where he writes that in our monastic life today:
Person-to-person relationship is vital. It is important that community members make the effort to bridge the gap between the generations. [Quoting a writer, he says:] ‘The biggest threat to church survival is the failure to secure a means of transmission from one generation to the next.’ This spanning of the decades is achieved less by recycling ancient monologues about the past than by encouraging newcomers to speak and listening attentively, respecting their views and, perhaps, learning something from them. As far back as 1970 Margaret Mead wrote, ‘Nowhere in the world today are there elders who know more than the young about the world in which they live.’ Newcomers are native to the twenty-first-century; whereas we are outliers. Even when we speak about our own life we should do so in a way that assumes that the grace of monastic life is instrumental rather than coercive; we need to learn the wisdom of speaking in the subjunctive mood. To speak thus, according to the English sociologist Richard Sennett, is to pepper one’s discourse with such expressions as “perhaps,” “maybe,” and with a little less certainty than is our wont. Wisdom can be communicated only with utmost respect for those who receive it.”
Compassion has this ability, it seems to me, of being sensitive to one another, especially where there is a generational gap and being always ready to learn. Any growing or authentic relationship has this very sensitivity built into it. One may not be understood even by one’s brethren at times but it is enough to be true to one’s calling so as to live it to the full.