The Monk in Us by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

In order to find meaning in our purposeful activities we have to give ourselves to what we are doing.

The monk in us is very closely related to the child in us or, if you want, to the mystic in us — and we are all meant to be mystics.  We do a great disservice to mystics by putting them up on a pedestal and thinking of them as a special kind of human being.  The truth is that every human being is a special kind of mystic, and that creates a tremendous challenge for each one of us to become precisely that mystic we are meant to be.  Here I’m taking mysticism in the strictest sense as the experience of communion with ultimate reality.  All of us are certainly called to experience this communion.  And there’s no one and never will be anyone and never has been anyone who can experience ultimately reality in the same way in which you can experience it.  Therefore, you are called to be that special kind of mystic that only you can be.

Now when I say that this has something to do with the child in us, I mean that there is in the child a longing to find a meaning, an openness to meaning which tends to be lost or at least overshadowed by our preoccupation with purposefulness.  I should say right at the outset that when I use these two terms, purpose and meaning, I’m by no means playing off purpose against meaning or meaning against purpose.  However, in our time and in our culture we are so preoccupied with purpose that one really has to bend backward and overemphasize the dimension of meaning; otherwise we will be lopsided.  So if you find an extraordinary amount of emphasis on meaning, it is only to redress the balance.         

In the child there is certainly a tremendous curiosity about how things work and a tremendous thrust towards purposefulness, and that is the only thrust that we tend to develop.  The typical circumstance of a child when seen in public these days is one of being dragged along by a long arm, while whoever is dragging the child is saying, ‘Come on, let’s go!  We don’t have any time.  We have to get home (or somewhere else).  Don’t just stand there.  Do something.”  That’s the gist of it.  But other cultures, many Native American tribes for example, had an entirely different ideal for education: “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and look when there is nothing to be seen,” and “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and listen when there is nothing to be heard.”  Now that’s very different from our attitude, but it is very congenial to children.  That’s exactly what they want to do — just stand and look and be totally absorbed in whatever it is that they are looking at or listening to or licking or sucking or playing with in one way or another.  And of course we destroy this capacity for openness towards meaning at a very young age; by making them do things and take things in hand, we direct them very exclusively towards the purpose level.

Maybe I should say just a word more about purpose and meaning and the way in which I use these two terms, but I don’t want to impose my definitions on you.  I’d rather invite you to think about a situation in which you have to carry out a particular purpose and see what the inner dynamics are and then compare this with a situation in which something becomes meaningful to you.  When you have to accomplish a particular purpose, the main thing is that you have to take things in hand.  If you don’t know what it’s all about, somebody has to show you the ropes, as we say, so you know how to handle the thing.  You have to take things in hand, to handle the matter, to come to grips with the situation, to keep things under control — otherwise you are never quite sure that you are going to accomplish your purpose.  All this is very important for dealing with the situation in which a particular purpose has to be accomplished.

Now think of a situation in which something becomes meaningful to you.  What is there to grasp?  What is there to keep under control?  That is not the idea.  You will find yourself using expressions in which you are perfectly passive or at least more passive.  “Responsive” is really the word, but you are more passive than in a situation in which you are accomplishing a purpose.  You will say, “This really did something to me.”  Now you are not the one that keeps things under control and handles them and manipulates them; instead the experience does something to you.  “It really touched me,” or if it is very strong, “It hit me over the head!” or, “It swept me off my feet!”  — something like that.  That’s when something becomes meaningful to you.  So what really happens is that you give yourself to it, and in that moment, it, whatever it may be, reveals its meaning to you. Again let me stress, this is not an either/or proposition.  The two have to go together, but certainly in order to find meaning in our purposeful activities we have to learn to open ourselves, to give ourselves to what we are doing.  And that is typically the attitude that the child takes.

Now let me go on to a very important type of experience what Abraham Maslow has studied under the heading of the “peak experience,” those moments in which meaning reveals itself to us — and we know it.  In order to say more about this, it is again necessary that I don’t talk about something that’s unrelated to your own experience, particularly since the peak experience in its matter, in its content, is so very evasive.  In order to be able to speak about it at all, we’d either have to have a poetry session or a music session or something like that.  If we want to have a discussion of it, we can only discuss some structural aspects and leave each one of you to fill in the context on your own.  For those of you who may possibly not be familiar with the term or who need a little refresher for your memory, simply think of an experience that, when you think back on it, was a moment of which you could say, “That kind of thing makes life worth living.”  Or think of the term “peak experience,” a very well-chosen term suggesting, for one thing, that it is somewhat elevated above your normal experience.  It is a moment in which you are somehow high, or at any rate higher than at other moments.  It is a moment, although it may last quite some time; even then that long time, say an hour or so, appears as a moment.  It is always experienced as a point in time, just as the peak of a mountain is always a point.  Now this may be a high peak or a low peak; the decisive thing is that it comes to a peak.         

So you look over your day or over your life or over any period of time, you see these peaks sticking out, and they are points of an elevated experience, points of an experience of vision, of insight if you want.  That is also important to the notion of a peak.  When you are up on top of a peak you have a better vision.  You can look all around.  While you are still going up, part of the vision, part of the horizon is hidden by the peak you are ascending.  But once on the peak, you get an insight into meaning; there’s a moment in which meaning really touches you.  That is the kind of insight that we are speaking about now.  It’s not finding a solution to a concrete package of problems; it is simply a moment of limitless insight.  You are not setting any limits to your insight.

Try to think now of a moment of this kind and make it very concrete, very specific.  No generalities will help us here.  It doesn’t have to be a gigantic peak — they are very rare in one’s life.  But an anthill is also a peak, so anything that comes to a peak will do for our purposes.  So just try and remember very concretely an experience in which something deeply touched you, an experience in which you were somehow elevated above a normal level.  I will make a little pause so that I myself can also think of one, and then we will look a little bit into the structure of these experiences.  And, if these experiences are, as it appears to me they are, the epitome of the mystical experience, then even in our little anthill-type peak experiences there will have to be found the typical structure of monastic life as I will go on to demonstrate.  So please try now and focus on that one peak experience.  

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