Become What You Are by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

I met Brother David Steindl-Rast, of the Roman Catholic Benedictine Order, at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Edward Conze guest house where he was staying briefly on his way to a monastery in Big Sur. The setting was apt: Conze was a Westerner who became one of the century’s great authorities on Buddhism, and the Victorian house has an inviting spaciousness, an unpretentious elegance and absence of clutter, yet real warmth—all of which fit the monk with whom I was to speak. To those who encounter Brother David now and again, he seems very much a man on the move, remarkably mobile for a monk. Yet despite all this travelling and speaking, he always appears a calm eye at the center of any storm of activity. To a passing observer, he might look disturbingly gaunt and ascetic, confirming popular prejudices about monks being world-haters. But as soon as he greets you, the illusion of severity vanishes: he is so warm and effervescent that you really want to learn how he packs so much alertness and delight into his life.

  Originally from Vienna, Austria, Brother David has a doctorate in psychology and has been a monk for twenty-six years now; he currently lives in a small community, called the Grange, in Connecticut. He says that he is as much at home in a Zen monastery as in a Catholic one, and it’s hard to think that he would not be at home anywhere. For he has a remarkable ability to be joyfully and wholly present: when he listens, he does nothing else; when the phone interrupts, he takes the call with full attention and delight; when he answers questions he does so with the kind of care and élan that make an interviewer’s task a joy. More than many teachers I’ve met, the man is his message, and it is hard to imagine a more persuasive and attractive advocate for the Catholic monastic tradition.

  Many people ask him whether the spirituality he embodies and presents is really the Catholicism that they’ve found so difficult to appreciate in other forms which they’ve encountered. But it may be that few people have so appropriated that tradition that they can express it with such simple grace.

These three elements — anger, lust, and laziness — are precisely the three ways that we can fail to be present where we are, and the whole idea of getting yourself together is to be present where you are.

John Loudon:   What does “holy warfare” mean to you?

Brother David Steindl-Rast:   Today the notion of warfare is inseparable from that of alienation, whereas the very essence of spiritual warfare in the monastic tradition is the overcoming of alienation — what we call nowadays pulling or getting yourself together. And the monastic symbol for pulling yourself together is the belt, which monks wear in many different traditions. The aim is to overcome alienation from yourself, from others, and from God.

JL:   What forces need to be overcome in this struggle against alienation?

BD:   Well, in the classical discussion of holy warfare in the writings of the Eastern Elders of the early Church, these forces are personified as demons. Even in the New Testament Paul says that it is not against “flesh and blood” that we are struggling, but against principalities and powers of evil. But it’s not necessary to take these powers literally, in a fundamentalist way, and in fact to do so we probably would do an injustice to the early Fathers who wrote in those terms. They were no doubt as alert to the metaphorical nature of this imagery as we are, just as Buddhists have long known that the different hells in their tradition are best understood as mental or psychological states, not actual places.

JL:   Can you give examples of some of these personified forces and some indication of how you might express them today?

BD:   The three great forces that the Christian Elders in the Egyptian desert identified as the enemies against which we’re battling are anger, lust, and laziness. The third one is called the noonday devil. It is in the middle of everything — of a day, of a life — that you can lose your resolve, that torpor can set in. When you’re in the middle of swimming across a river, it’s too far to go back and seems too far to reach the other side, and you are tempted to give up. Well, these three elements—anger, lust, and laziness—are precisely the three ways that we can fail to be present where we are, and the whole idea of getting yourself together is to be present where you are and, in the Christian context, to respond to the presence of God.

Anger really means impatience (as opposed to the righteous anger that is desirable in many circumstances). Impatience makes us get ahead of ourselves, reaching out for something in the future and not really being content with where we are, here and now.

Lust extends much wider than the sexual sphere, and essentially means attachment to something that is not present, or is not the appropriate thing right now.

And one by-product of laziness, of being victimized by the noonday devil, is sadness — not the genuine sorrow of compassion, but the lifeless ennui of never really being involved in the present, with what’s happening.

If you would like another contemporary interpretation of the idea of spiritual warfare, there is C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters , in which he translates the tradition with great wit and insight into a modern idiom. It’s all about struggling with the forces that are all around us in the world and within us and that distract us from being really unified, in one piece.

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