Cistercian Founders 26 Jan 2012

Sent: Thursday, 26 January 2012
Subject: Founders' Sermon - Fr. Mark 

Sts Robert, Alberic and Stephen                                 Chapter Sermon, 2012

• What is it that makes us celebrate our founders?  They lived in a very different age and time from our own.  Much of their style of living seems worlds away from what we do today. 
• But if history is anything to go by, it is amazing how much those in the past can still teach us how to live and how to cope with the vagaries and problems of life, whatever the age we happen to be in.
• Robert, Alberic and Stephen were like any other monks who were seeking to answer their call to seek God in a monastery.  Monastic life has not changed all that much in the basics of community living, where there is a spirit of silence and a fair modicum of solitude even as they live together.  There was an obvious structure to their day, centred as it was on the common work of God in choir.  The day was designed for them by creating a balance between their prayer, reading and work.  Because of their practical personal needs, there had to be a common awareness of the requirements of each other so that they had sufficient time to pray, to read or study. It was important that everyone respected that time for personal silence and the space for prayer and silence.
• It is not always easy to find one’s own balance within the one set up for the whole community.  It is also difficult to continue keeping such balance with the passage of time.  That is why communities need from time to time to reassess how they live their monastic life.
• What led Robert, Alberic, Stephen and some of the members of their community to uproot themselves from Molesme and go to the wilderness of Citeaux was their dissatisfaction with their practice of the Rule of St Benedict. Recent historical studies show that there were human elements in our founders which showed a tendency ― perhaps an over-tendency ― to move on to new fields in their zeal to seek God.  Who is to be sure what is a genuine urging of the Spirit to make a radical move from their present circumstances and what may be, as is mostly the case, a temptation to be ignored.  Novices routinely seek something ‘higher’ or ‘more spiritual’, like going to join the Carthusian.  The same can be true of monks who have lived for a number of years in the monastery.  In a time of renewal there are many examples when experiments failed to achieve anything worthwhile.  That was the case in so many instances in the ‘60s. 
• But renewal within monasteries as well as attempting to set up new foundations somewhere else has been successful.  The 11^th century saw much new life in many monasteries right across the board.  This period was an era of renewal when fledgling attempts at setting up new religious communities where people could go to find God in a more radical way took root and flourished.  Citeaux was one of these.  Through the courageous efforts of Robert, Alberic and Stephen and their other companions the Cistercian form of monastic life was established and promoted.  There have of course been other renewals since then.  Each time the new reform has produced new growth and a more vibrant monastic life.
• Perhaps celebrating the feast of our founders is a good opportunity to take a long look at what we had embarked on when we first entered the monastery and how we have journeyed over the years since then.  Does the vision and willingness of Robert, Alberic and Stephen and the other Cistercians who later joined them in the Order still shine as clear for us today?  Would we benefit from going back to look at what they had achieved in their renewal?  Would some of their innovations still be of benefit to us in our own personal lives?  It is by such simple steps that we can go forward and grow in our vocation.  Such attempts help to find and put on Christ and help us to truly seek God. 

Levinas Emmanuel - Monks of Tibhirine

Precious photo Jan 1996

 Email from friend . . .

Dear Donald,  

I would like to thank you very much for your help.

The pages of the attachment are already very helpful.

They will become a part of the literature the students have to read.

. . .

Thanks for sending me the copy.

God bless you and your work.

Maarten

A Heritage Too Big
Volume 2
Scan of pages 91-95

per Fr. Donald, Nunraw Abbey

17. NOTE: Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas

in the Reading of Christian and Christophe

David Hodges, OCSO, Caldey

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), French philosopher, has exerted a considerable influence on a generation of continental philosophers and religious thinkers. Some of the concepts at the centre of his thought provided Fr. Christian and Fr. Christophe with a catalyst for the expression of their ideals and their understanding of the death at the hands of others which they felt to be approaching. Translations of Emmanuel Levinas and studies of his philosophy have become more widely available in the English speaking world in recent years. The following note indicates some of the references made to him in the writing of Christian and Christophe. (Ed.)

Dom Christian de Cherge, Superior of the monastery of Atlas in Algeria, who was martyred along with six other brothers of the community in 1996, wrote an extraordinary Testament before he died in which he envisaged meeting his death at the hand of a Muslim terrorist and forgave him in advance. He wrote of seeing God in the face of the other, even the assassin, drawing on the categories of the philosopher, Emmanuei Levinas, whom he had studied. He addresses his 'envisaged' assassin: "Qui, pour toi aussi je le veux ce merci et cet 'A-DIEU' en-visage de toi". "En-visage de toi", in whom I see the face of the Absolute Other, and in whom I go to God. God is seen in the face of the assassin, and death and the assassin are seen in the face of God. This could only be seen from the perspective of one who is himself a face of God's love for all. Here was a life totally given to God and to the other, - a vocation that can be seen with some assimilating of Levinas' categories and ideas, and christianising them: the face of the other; responsibility for the Other, even up to substitution and expiation for the other; responsibility for the actions of the other; a deep interiority allowing one to transcend self and to reach to exteriority; being-for-death as being-for-beyond-my death; death as but an opening to the Absolute other. Dom Christian goes further than seeing the face as an encounter with the Absolute other. He is bold enough to contemplate that after his death he will be able to: "immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ."    

COMMENT

Panorama of the Clyde  

---- Forwarded Message -----
From: Anne Marie. . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 22:40
Subject: Pic of the day

We had a day out on Sunday to do some photography.  Here is my favourite.  A panorama of the Clyde.

    Anne Marie 

COMMENT

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: William

Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 22:20
Subject: Re: [Blog] "Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina." Thomas Merton

Dear Father Donald,

Unsleeping, your blog post delights me so much!

With my copy of the book by my bedside, and the window of my mind open to the night sky:

"The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep Night embraces the silent half of the earth."

And "everything depends on our laying ourselves down "under the sweet stars of the world" and giving ourselves over to the hidden Wisdom of God."

With quiet inner joy,

. . .in Our Lord,

William

'Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, who crowns Christ' Merton

She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with
what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than
glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.

She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth
as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible
mercy, to die for us on the Cross. (Merton)

«Wisdom will honour you if you embrace her   she will place on your head a fair garland   she will bestow on you a crown on of glory.» (Proverbs 4:8-9)

HAGIA SOPHIA

§..  One day Father Louis (Thomas Merton) our friend came from his monastery at Trappist Kentucky to bring an ill novice to the hospital in Lexington. (I had known Father Louis since 1955 when I visited him for the first time. Later we printed several of his books.) We had prepared a simple luncheon and I welcomed him to sit with us at table. From when we be sat he had a good view of the triptych on. the chest and he often looked at it. After a while he asked quite abruptly «And who is the woman behind Christ?  said «I do not know;:yet.» Without further question he gave his own answer. «She is Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, who crowns Christ.» And that she was - and is.

— Victor Hammer

"Hagia Sophia Crowning the Young Christ." A line-cut of Victor Hammer's triptych painting of the same title. Courtesy of the Estate of Victor and Carolyn Hammer, and the King Library Press, University of Kentucky.

"Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina." Thomas Merton

Hagia Sophia page 205-208

Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton

Christopher Pramuk (Author)

"Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina."

"The Hour of Compline" invokes Hammer's image of the woman crowning the boy Christ. "It is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness of what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown which is His Human Nature. Thus her consent opens the door of created nature, of time, of history, to the Word of God.” As Michael Mott observes, "Where Merton expects us to see the image from the painting" in these lines, "he also expects us to hear music.”¹²⁸ When the Salve Regina is sung by the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani, all lights in the abbey church are extinguished except for one, directed at the image of Mary in a window over the altar. ¹²⁹

Yet Mary crowns her son "not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty."¹³⁰ It is thus through Mary's wisdom and "sweet yielding consent" that "God enters without publicity into the city of rapacious men:” Indeed, her "sadness" and "full awareness of what she is doing" reflect a wisdom well beyond her years, a wisdom deeply attuned to the "wisdom and foolishness" that will one day cause a sword to pierce her own heart. "She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible mercy, to die for us on the Cross.”

It is Significant that Mary is depicted in Hammer's picture neither as the mother of an infant nor as a royal Queen of Heaven. Her crowning of the boy Christ, notes McCaslin, is "an act of feminine power;' subverting traditional depictions of "the Coronation of the Virgin" in which Mary is crowned by Christ, rather than she actively empowering him. In crowning the Child with his "human nature,” the poem reminds us "that all men and women come from a common womb (the earth, the Feminine) and are alike vulnerable, frail, and utterly dependent on the earth and the feminine matrix.”¹³¹  Moreover, by depicting the Child not as an infant but on the brink of adulthood, both the picture and the poem underscore our common humanity with Jesus-not only "as ones who have undergone birth,”¹³² as McCaslin suggests, but also as a people called to serve in a world riven by sin and contradiction. As the incarnation of divine Wisdom, "the Child goes forth to ... crucifixion and resurrection. As humanity the child goes forth, an Everyman or Everywoman, into exile from paradise.”¹³³  

Mary, in her "wise answer;' accepts the contradiction. Through her understanding, God enters "without publicity" into human history. The final scene of the poem, as Michael Mott notes, is a scene of haunting "solemnity, great beauty, and a piercing loneliness.”¹³⁴:

The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep Night embraces the silent half of the earth.

A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification, without even a number, a frail expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and entrusts Himself to sleep.”¹³⁵

McCaslin sees in these lines "a strangely modern figure of the exile or God as exile in us,”¹³⁶ -suggesting that human destiny in a world exiled from Sophia is not altogether different from that of Jesus, the Son of Man who "has nowhere to lay his head.” O'Connell makes a similar point, citing Philippians 2:6-11, Paul's striking hymn of kenosis, God's self-emptying in Jesus: "In identifying fully with the human condition, Christ is the perfect epiphany of Sophia, embodying and extending to all the redemptive mercy of God.”¹³⁷

The final scene of Hagia Sophia unforgettably reprises Merton's celebration of Pasternak, whose protest is "the protest of life itself, of humanity itself, of love" against the "reign of numbers,"¹³⁸ against the alienation and anonymity of mass society. What meaning can our lives have, after all, in "the vast expanses" of an evolutionary universe? Like the hospital patient in the opening section of the poem; like Mary, receiving with astonishment the message of the Angel Gabriel; like Joseph, who struggles in faith to make sense of it all; like Mary Magdelene, Peter, Nicodemus, John, all the hidden but crucial players in the narrative subtext of the gospels-when "night embraces the silent half of the earth;' everything depends on our laying ourselves down "under the sweet stars of the world" and giving ourselves over to the hidden Wisdom of God. Though our heads may pound with the clamor of many doubts and fears, and though it is more difficult than ever to see the stars, or even to remember to look for them through the glow of towering, sleepless cities, there is an inner music of Love, Mercy, and Understanding that rises up from the earth itself, Natura naturans, and from the still point of the human heart, asking to be set free in the world. She is Wisdom, our Sister: "God-given and God Himself as Gift.” When we attend to her tender voice and give our quiet consent, she effects in us a work greater than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of mercy and peace, justice and love.

Who, then, is Hagia Sophia? She is the Spirit of Christ but more than Christ. She is the Love joining the Father, Son, and Spirit that longs for incarnation from before the very beginning. She is Jesus our mother, and Mary, the Theotokos. She is the "pivot" (le point vierge) of nature, Natura naturans, and all creation in God from the beginning. Perhaps most of all, Merton's Sophia is our "true self;' when we (like Mary, seat of Wisdom) allow Christ to be birthed in us, and so realize the hidden ground of mercy, creativity, and presence in our very selves, the mystical Body of Christ. The moment her name awakens in us a sense of mercy, communion, and presence, Sophia is one Wisdom, one Child, one Meaning, one Sister" -is not symbolic, but real, more than literally real. The remembrance of Sophia opens onto a mystical political spirituality of engagement in the world.

Hagia Sophia COMMENT

hagiaprayercard

Hi, Wiiliam, 
It so happened that the COMPLINE of Thomas Merton in Hagia Sophia giving us our actual Compline.
And your underlining is enlightening. - and the pictures.
Thank you,
. . . . Donald
________________________________

--- On Fri, 20/1/12, William . . .

From: William
Subject: Re: [Blog] Hagia Sophia. Thomas Merton
To: "Fr Donald"
Date: Friday, 20 January, 2012, 19:36

Dear Father Donald,

 

hagiabroadside

What a joy and a delight to be sharing this wonderful book with you at one and the same time!

 

I cannot remember when any book held my fascination as this one has done.

 

With great excitement I found on the internet the image of Sophia (as on page 300), and one that has subtle variation [attachments].

And these are the lines of the poem highlighted below that capture it for me..."It is she, it is Mary, Sophia...."

 

Wonderful! 

. . . in Our Lord,

William

 

IV. Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina.

Now the Blessed Virgin Mary is the one created being
who enacts and shows forth in her life all that is hidden in Sophia.
Because of this she can be said to be a personal manifestation
of Sophia, Who in God is Ousia rather than Person.

Natura in Mary becomes pure Mother. In her, Natura
is as she was from the origin from her divine birth. In Mary Natura
is all wise and is manifested as an all-prudent, all-loving, all-pure person:
not a Creator, and not a Redeemer, but perfect Creature, perfectly
Redeemed, the fruit of all God's great power, the perfect expression
of wisdom in mercy.

It is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness
of what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown
which is His Human Nature. Thus her consent opens the door of created
nature, of time, of history, to the Word of God.

God enters into His creation. Through her wise answer, through her obedient
understanding, through the sweet yielding consent of Sophia, God enters
without publicity into the city of rapacious men.

She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with
what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than
glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.

She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth
as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible
mercy, to die for us on the Cross.

The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep.
Night embraces the silent half of the earth. A vagrant, a destitute
wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A
homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without
identifications, without even a number, a frail expendable exile
lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and
entrusts Himself to sleep.