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

By changing yourself, you’re beginning to change the world. In fact, you’re changing the world much more by changing yourself than if you’re running around blindly, involved in one cause after another.

[Cont. from page 3] ...

JL:   What is the connection between the life of contemplation and the call to social action in the world?

BD:   You can’t really be a contemplative, unless you also want to change the world. You want to change yourself, and that’s where the struggle comes in. By changing yourself, you’re beginning to change the world. In fact, you’re changing the world much more by changing yourself than if you’re running around blindly, involved in one cause after another. But the difference between what we call the apostolic and the contemplative orders, or vocations, is that the apostolic approach says, “We live in this world, we’re responsible for it, and we have to do something to change the world for the better.” The monastic answer is, “We are not strong enough to change the world in general. Let’s change that little spot where we are. And let’s put a wall around it and say this is as far as we go, as far as our strength reaches. And now within that narrow confine, let’s change the world, make it more what it’s supposed to be.” That approach has its drawbacks, too, because it can become ingrown, its own private little affair. And the apostolic approach has limitations, because it can become so watered down that nothing spiritual remains. So we need the two; they are the poles of one continuum. People who are now engaged in apostolically changing the world need to come back periodically to a monastic environment where what they are trying to achieve everywhere is to a certain extent achieved already. And if the world could gradually become what a good monastery or Zen center is, that would be fine. The monastic communities can provide the strength, the encouragement to realize that true order can be achieved.

JL:   Traditionally, Catholicism has emphasized that the contemplative life is valuable in and of itself, even if the effect on the outside world is not very immediate or direct, but with the faith that spiritual service of God would redound ultimately to the benefit of all of humankind. How would you translate that idea into contemporary terms?

BD:   The problem is that all too easily you can think of the spiritual as the opposite of the material. But in authentic Christianity, the material is completely integrated with the spiritual. The essence of Christianity is incarnation. Spiritual is not opposed to material, but to the unspiritual. It’s better to speak of alive and dead. Spirit, “breath,” means life. The unspiritual or “the flesh,” as the New Testament puts it, does not mean the material, the bodily. Flesh stands for that which is dead and in the process of decay. So it’s best to think of death not in the sense of negating life, denying life. Life-affirming and life-denying are what spiritual and unspiritual mean. So from that viewpoint, there is a struggle for more and more spirituality, but this spirituality does not deny the world and material things, but expresses itself in more and more beautiful transformation of the material world. Now and then you see a place where every roof tile and every door knob speaks of spirituality, and it reminds you that material things can be completely transformed.

JL:   I asked you earlier if a spiritual life demanded a special way of life, and in the light of the distinctions that you’ve made, I’m beginning to think that what it actually comes down to concretely is how you spend your day. Of course, monks spend their day differently than people who drive trucks or work in offices and so on. How do you spend your day? And what principles that the monastic life has taught you might apply to people who live in the “ordinary world”?

BD:   One doesn’t go to the monastery to lead a different kind of life from the rest of people. The challenge of living according to certain principles is the same for everyone, and we all need to lead a special kind of life if we want to come truly alive. The monastic day starts with getting up earlier than most of us would like to get up. So the struggle is right there at the start.

JL:   Do you get up earlier because it is difficult, or because it’s good to be up when the sun comes up?

BD:   You never do anything, theoretically or ideally, just because it’s more difficult. You do it in spite of it’s being difficult, but for a good reason. The reason for getting up early is that these early morning hours provide a setting, a quiet, a silence that never comes again later in the day; there is something special going on in those early hours. And you’re also there for the sunrise, dawn, which is very important: you celebrate the dawning of each new day. But it’s struggle to get up and to remain alert.

Then during the day, there are several times for prayer and times when we get together to celebrate important points in the day — high noon, sunset, night prayers at the end of the day. The rest of the time is spent studying or in manual labor. Manual labor is significant and everybody in the monastery takes part in it, including the Abbot. It’s simply a part of life. It keeps you humble, down to earth (humus—the word that also gives us humor and human). Essentially, then, monastic life is dedicated to prayer, manual labor, and study.

JL:   How much of this regimen can you take with you when you travel?

BD:   It’s very difficult, and that’s why monks don’t usually travel. The kind of prayer that I find most helpful, in place of the divine office that is chanted seven times a day in the monastery, is the prayer of the heart from the Eastern Christian tradition, which involves a kind of mantric repetition of the name of Jesus. But I try to restrict my travel, because it’s so hard to take much of the monastery with you, although it’s fine if I can stay in another monastery, such as Zen or Camaldolese [one of the Benedictine orders in the Roman Catholic church with a monastery in southern California].

JL:   And how would you suggest that the values of that sort of structure be translated to people who live their whole lives in the situation you find yourself in when you’re not in the monastery?

BD:   There’s no point in just imitating the externals. What one should and can take out of the monastic life is its very essence, and that is the grateful approach to life moment by moment, being grateful in everything you do. That means, for instance, an alertness to the character of every moment demands a response, and the basic Christian response is trust in the giver.

JL:   But you can’t have awareness just by wanting it, can you? There are people here at the Zen Center who have spent years and years of their lives trying to be more awake.

BD:   That’s true. But there are degrees of wakefulness. And people who have practiced for years and years may not realize that they have made great steps toward greater wakefulness. The difficulty in speaking about wakefulness is that when you are asleep you can’t just wake yourself up. But if you focus on thankfulness, it is easier, since being grateful is within your power. If you do it again and again, you remind yourself that every moment is a given moment. Gratefulness is an experience that everyone has, and seems very natural when cultivated. Actually, it is emphasized more explicitly in Buddhist monasteries, where there are so many formal bows. It is a form of teaching us to receive everything — a cup of tea, another person — with gratitude.

JL:   So this rhythm of gift and response is a spiritual practice, or at least a way that anybody can practice in any circumstances.

BD:   Yes, and I don’t think spiritual practice is too grandiose a term for it. If you really explore its larger implications, it is at the core of every spiritual practice, although it may be expressed in quite different ways.

JL:   What is the importance of the dialogue between Christianity and Zen?

BD: These are traditions that seem to me to have a lot of future and that complement one another well. And what really interested me in Buddhist-Christian dialogue was the monastic dimension. I wanted to know in what sense Buddhists are monks like I am. And ultimately I’ve come to see that monastic life isn’t something that is especially connected to Buddhism or to Christianity, but is related to one’s frame of mind, one’s own inner bent.

JL: So it’s an essential human vocation or option; in any culture or society there are going to be people who want to live this way?

BD:  Right, and you could even think of it as an externalization of a dimension that is in every human being and is sometimes very strong in people who do not externalize it because of their life circumstances.

JL:  You spoke about our always becoming and never reaching the end. What is it that one is supposed to become? What’s the struggle for?

BD:  As the Christian tradition sees it, each one of us is a unique word that is spoken, or a unique way of saying the one eternal Word of God. Each one of us is a word, and we become the word that we are by our response to all the other words around us, human or otherwise. Thus we become the word that we are meant to be. If the word is in the process of being spoken, you can never really say it’s finished. In a certain sense, the word is completed with my death, when all that I have made of my life is rounded off. But even then, the Cappadocian Fathers in the early church taught that heavens is not a static state, but a dynamic experience of moving deeper and deeper into the ultimate, and the ultimate can never be completely discovered.

Both eastern and western monastic traditions have stories of the spiritual master who is very accomplished and is having trouble finding a teacher of his own. And he is directed, in a dream or a vision or in some other way, to someone who is more advanced than he is, but is the last person you would have expected.

JL:  If you’re playing tennis, I suppose that one person eventually wins in the end, but the joy of playing is not just getting to the end.

BD:  That’s a good point. The spiritual struggle is like learning to play tennis, with the muscle pain, the awkwardness, the frustration, and so on at the beginning. The element of playing is very important in spirituality, because otherwise you begin to wonder what all this struggling is for. The goal is partly the enjoyment; it doesn’t come later, but within the very process of the struggle.

JL:  What about the people who aren’t even playing the game?

BD: I tend to be very trusting and to believe that even in people in whom we least see it, deep down there is that aliveness, that longing, that struggle, and it’s just well covered over. My world view is not that there are a few people who really struggle and that the masses haven’t awakened to their real calling. My view is that in some the process is more obvious and in others the process is more hidden. And that is a common view in monastic traditions, East and West. Both have stories of the spiritual master who is very accomplished and is having trouble finding a teacher of his own. And he is directed, in a dream or a vision or in some other way, to someone who is more advanced than he is, but is the last person you would have expected. In Buddhism it’s a butcher for example, someone way down the spiritual line, who you’d expect to have no spiritual consciousness at all. And in the Christian tradition it’s often a merchant with a big family and no time to pray, just buying and selling all day. And all of a sudden the searching teacher discovers this is it, this is the one.

And the most urgent spiritual task today is one being waged by just such “ordinary people” — the struggle against nuclear arms, the struggle for peace, which means harmony among all things.

JL:  What do you regard as your special vocation?

BD:  Strangely enough, I really joined the monastery to spend the rest of my life there, and I am perfectly happy to stay there without going out at all. But I do accept invitations to speak or participate in events when there are not that many people available who are interested and experienced in an area, such as the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. And these days I’m more and more involved in working with people who are quite alienated from the Christian tradition, even though many of them were raised as Christians. I very much enjoy, for instance, workshops with New Age people, many of whom come out of a Christian background but have been away from it for a long time and are now ready to give Christianity a new look. They have a real need and longing to be reconciled with their roots. Much has to be thrown out and forgotten for good, but there also is a lot in the Christian tradition, if you grew up in it, that cannot readily be replaced by anything else. So you have to come to terms with it. Essentially, my vocation is simply to be a monk, but part of that is this sort of healing mission that not too many others are involved in.

JL:  So your vocation is to live the Christian monastic life, and then to communicate what you discover in it?

BD:  Really the latter part is more a matter of exposing myself to other people who have the monk within them, and haven’t discovered it. One doesn’t need to say much; it seems to be a help to find a monk who can be a catalyst for the monastic bent of mind that is in all of us.

Reprinted from Parabola, Fall 1982
(Vol. VII, #4, pp. 60-67)