Heroic Virtue: an interview with Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B. by Richard Smoley Gnosis, Summer 1992

Life always creates structures; structures don’t create life.  They protect it to a certain extent, and for that I’m grateful.  But now we have to make the spirit really strong, so that when the external forms collapse, out of that strong spirit new forms will come. 

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Smoley: There’s an enormous interest in Christian contemplative practices today; the Orthodox Prayer of the Heart comes to mind.  Where in Latin Christianity can somebody go for contemplative practice? 

Brother David: Well, my own practice is the Jesus Prayer, which was originally Eastern, but is widespread in Western Christianity also.  First let me say that any practice, not only Christian practices but other practices, that are helpful for the spiritual life are to be encouraged.  We don’t look where it comes from.  I think St. Irenaeus said, “If some statement is true, don’t ask where it comes from.  It’s always the Holy Spirit.”  You can apply this here too.  You can say that if a practice is truly helpful don’t look where it comes from, it’s always the Holy Spirit that has inspired it.         

But since you ask what is typically Western, I would mention an unfortunately not well-known practice; it is typically Benedictine, St. Benedict mentions it, and it is called lectio divina — “spiritual reading.”  It consists of reading, as the name says — not necessarily, but typically, sacred scripture — but reading not as much as you can but as little as you can.  So you read only one word, maybe, of a passage, and that already sends you, because you give yourself completely to that.  You let it speak to you and it takes you where it comes from.  So if one word is enough, fine; if you need two words, all right; maybe you need a whole sentence, all right; maybe you need a whole page or two, and that’s all right still, but the less the better.  And then this reading sends you into — I would not say reflecting on what you have read, because that is too active — but into basking in it, savoring it, and that usually lasts for a little while, depending on your psychological state.  Sooner or later you begin to daydream, and then you can come back to the next word or the next sentence or the next page, so that the reading is really like a landing strip from which to take off, and whenever you can’t stay in the air anymore, you come back down to it, taxi, and take off again.  Lectio divina is a practice that has been continuously in use in the Benedictine tradition for fifteen hundred years.  There are now many lay people who practice it too, and they find it very helpful, but it isn’t as well known as it should be, and it is a typical Western meditation practice.  

Smoley: Perhaps you’d like to say a little bit about your own practice with the Jesus Prayer.  I’m not familiar with those beads you’re holding, for example. 

Brother David: Well, I made them.  I wear them on my finger as a ring.  They have ten beads, so I can use them as a rosary.  The moving of the beads sets in motion a psychomotoric circular process.  It takes some practice, but every time you move the bead, it lets this prayer run off on a subliminal level.  While I talk with you or do other things, moving the beads triggers something within me that lets this prayer flash through my heart.         

As you know, there are many different forms of the Jesus Prayer, longer and shorter forms.  I really use only the short form: “Lord Jesus, mercy; Lord Jesus, mercy.”  I find the others too long; I get distracted.  Also with my breathing, “Lord Jesus, mercy; Lord Jesus, mercy” works better.  Besides, I think there is a lot of emphasis in our tradition on sins, and the longer form, “Have mercy on me, a sinner” reinforces that emphasis.  We certainly are sinners, rightly understood.  Not even so much personally, but we live in a world of alienation, of sin; no matter how good-willed you are, you really can’t help causing millions of people in the Third World to be exploited, just by the fact that you live in the First World.  This is sin, much more than your little peccadilloes.  I really am quite aware of this sinfulness.  But I don’t think it is necessary to rub it in with every breath.  I’d rather praise God for having forgiven and overcome sin.  When I say, “Lord Jesus, mercy,” that can be a call for mercy, you are showing!”  It’s a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. 

Smoley: Our discussion has mostly been in the context of institutional Christianity; yet institutional Christianity seems to be at some sort of crisis, and a lot of people have turned away from it, partly as a reaction to what Christianity has or is believed to have perpetrated in the past.  I’m wondering where you see it going, and where you see the spirituality of the future, for mankind in general, going. 

Brother David: Again I speak mostly from the Catholic point of view.  I think you are correct in saying that we have reached a crisis point, but I wouldn’t focus on what we have done wrong in the past.  Surely there is plenty of that, from the Crusades to the witch-burnings to the treatment of the Jews and so forth.  But today’s crisis goes deeper than all that.  One ancient flaw has today reached an unprecedented peak, and that is the abuse of power and centralization.  The emphasis on power and centralization really started very early; and in the first centuries it was probably necessary, humanly speaking, to help the church survive.  But when it was joined to the political power of Rome and became politicized, it really continued to get out of hand.  It is one of those flaws in the Christian tradition that so far has only gotten worse and worse.  Some other abuses, like those of the Renaissance popes, hit bottom and were eliminated.  We don’t have crusades; we don’t burn witches anymore.  But this centralization of power has never abated, and now has reached a point where it is obvious — or should be obvious — to observers inside and outside of the structure that it can’t go on.         

I find myself in a position today where the last thing I want to do is push these structures and make them topple over.  They are standing on such thin clay feet that we can’t afford to make them topple over.  They’re going to topple whether we like it or not.  We have to spend all our energy on preparing for how we’re going to pick up the pieces when the structure collapses.  The collapse is imminent.  I can’t tell you whether it’s a matter of days or years or decades, but it is imminent.  Anyone could have predicted that the Berlin Wall was going to fall, though no one could tell when.  We were surprised it went that fast, but it was obvious that it had to fall.  Whatever becomes rigid crumbles.  So this rigid power structure of the Vatican is bound to fall.       

I’ve grown up in the church.  I come from a Catholic country and from a Catholic family.  I’m totally identified with the church.  Therefore I am primarily concerned with how we are going to rescue the spirit that created the external structures that are now about to collapse.  How are we going to strengthen that spirit and help it to find new forms?  Life always creates structures; structures don’t create life.  They protect it to a certain extent, and for that I’m grateful.  But now we have to make the spirit really strong, so that when the external forms collapse, out of that strong spirit new forms will come.  What shape they will take, I haven’t the slightest idea.         

Actually, the question of centralization and power politics in the church is quite relevant to your hagiography question.  When things are the way they should be in the Christian church, a particular local group will recognize a member of their community as exemplifying the life of Christ in a heroic way: their local saint.  This is the way it should go: from the grass roots up, not by a fiat from above and far away.  More and more people are becoming conscious nowadays of how the process of canonization has become politicized.  We have experienced it here in California with Junipero Serra; he was beatified.  I certainly believe that he was a devoted missionary.  I have no indication that he didn’t exercise heroic virtue for the love of God.  I visit his tomb whenever I have the chance.  But I think that to beatify him in opposition to the wishes of our Native American brethren is not only unwise but uncharitable.  Besides, we have other candidates for canonization who have exercised heroic virtue in helping the Native Americans, Bartolome de las Casas, for example.  He was a Dominican; the Dominicans have tried to get him beatified, but there is nothing happening there.  Well, of course he was also controversial; I’m aware of that. 

Maybe the Mohawk Tekakwitha would be more acceptable to Native Americans, but I’m not sure.  Black Christians at any rate have raised objections to the beatification of Toussaint, a black man from Haiti.  They claim that he represents virtues that appeal to whites who would call a genuine black Christian saint “uppity.”  Tensions of this kind cannot be solved as long as white authorities in Rome decide who is to represent genuine black or Native American sanctity.  Their predominant whiteness is not even the major problem, but there is also the question of their recent fascist leanings, represented by the way Opus Dei railroaded their founder, Monsignor Josemaria Escriva de Balanguer, through, despite the most serious objections against his beatification.  At the same time, there is no support from the Vatican for veneration of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, hero and martyr for millions in Central America.  Or what would happen in the unlikely event that the United States Bishops’ Conference should declare, “Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker was really somebody whom we in our time and place can put forward as a model for Christian living”?  Under the present system there is no chance of this happening.

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