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

There is a paradox that when I am most truly alone I’m one with all. 

(Cont. from Page 1...)

I said that the content of these experiences is very evasive.  You might even have to say, “Gee, nothing really happened.”  Well, that is a profound insight, because if you allow nothing really to happen, that’s the greatest mystical experience.  But as you talk about it you will find yourself inclined to use expressions such as, “Oh, I just lost myself.  I lost myself when I heard this passage of the music,” or, “I just lost myself looking at that little sandpiper running after the waves; as soon as the waves come the sandpiper runs back and then the sandpiper runs after the waves.”  You lose yourself in such an experience, and after you lose yourself for a little while, you are never quite sure again whether the waves are chasing the sandpiper or whether the sandpiper is chasing the waves or whether anybody is chasing anybody.  But something has happened there and you really lost yourself in it.

And then, strangely and paradoxically — and this is exactly what we are aiming at; we are trying to find the paradoxes that must necessarily be in any mystical experience — you find that you would also say that during this experience in which you lost yourself you were for once truly yourself.  “That was a moment when I was really myself, more so than at other times.  I was just carried away.”  It’s a poetic expression.  There are certain things in life that cannot be expressed in any way except poetic expressions, so these expressions also enter into our everyday language.  But then you find again the paradox, because about the very same experience of which you say, “I was carried away,” I was more truly in the present than I am at any other time.  Like most of us, most of the time I would have to say that I am not really fully present where I am.  Instead, I’m forty-nine per cent ahead of myself, just stretching out to what’s going to come, and forty-nine per cent behind myself, hanging on to what has already passed.  There’s hardly any of me left to be really present.  Then something comes along that’s practically nothing, that little sandpiper or the rain on the roof, that sweeps me off my feet, and for one split second I’m really present where I am.  I’m carried away and I’m present where I am.  I lost myself and I found myself, truly myself.      

I go on to another paradox.  I suppose that many of you will have chosen an experience in which you were alone — a moment alone in your room or walking on the beach or out in the woods or maybe on a mountain top.  In one of those experiences you find that even though you were alone — and, paradoxically, not so much in spite of being alone, but because of being so truly alone at that moment — you were united with everything and everybody.  If there were no other people around with whom you could feel united, you felt united with the trees, if there were any, or with the rock or with the clouds or with the water or with the stars or with the wind or whatever it was.  It felt as if your heart were expanding, as if your being were expanding to embrace everything, as if the barriers were in some way broken down or dissolved and you were one with all.  You may check this out by finding in retrospect that you didn’t miss any of your friends at the peak of your peak experience.  A moment later you may have said, “Gee, I wish that so-and-so could be here and experience this beautiful sunset or could see this or could hear this music.”  But at the peak of your peak experience, you weren’t missing anybody, and the reason is not that you had forgotten them, but that they were there or that you were where they were.  Because you were united with all, there was no point in missing anybody.  You had reached that center, if you want, of which religious tradition sometimes speaks in which everybody and everything converges.         

All right, there is a paradox that when I am most truly alone I’m one with all.  You can also turn this around.  Some of you may have been thinking of an experience in which part of the peak experience was precisely that you felt one with all in an enormous group of people.  Maybe it was a liturgical celebration, maybe a peace march or demonstration, a concert, or a play — some gathering where part of your tremendous enjoyment was that you felt that everybody there was just one heart and one soul and that everybody there was experiencing this same thing.  Incidentally, this may not at all be objectively true.  You may have been the only one who was really turned on like that, but you experienced it as if everyone were turned on in the same way.  But even in this situation we turn the paradox around.  When you are the most one with all, you are really alone.  You are singled out as if that particular word of the speaker (if it’s some lecture that turns you on) were addressed to you personally, and you almost blush.  “Why is he talking about me?  Why is he singling me out?” or “This particular passage of this particular symphony was written for me and it was composed for me and it was performed for me; such a tremendous, lavish performance, and it is all for me, right here.”  You are singled out; you are perfectly alone.  And we come to see that this is no contradiction.  When you are really alone you are one with all — even the word “alone” in some way alludes to that.  It may just be a mnemonic device to remember this, but there may be more behind it — all one, one with all, truly alone.         

I’d like to draw out a third paradox, which in some respects is the most important one, and see again if it checks out with your own experience.  When the peak experience hits you or lifts you up or whatever it does to you, in a flash of insight everything makes sense.  Now this is a very different thing from laboriously finding the answer to some problem, which is the usual way we think that finally everything could possibly make sense.  We think we’ll get the answer to this problem, but the moment we have the answer to this problem, several others arise.  So we think, okay, we’ll follow this other problem up to its end; we believe that we can hand ourselves along from question to answer, new questions arising to the next answer, and to the next answer, and then finally we might arrive at the final answer.  But what finally happens is that this chain is a circle and we go around and around and around; the last answer raises the first question and so it goes on.       

In your peak experience, somehow intuitively you become aware of the fact that to find the answer, you have to drop the question.  Something knocks you over and for a split second you drop the question, and the moment you drop the question the answer is there.  You get the impression that maybe the answer was always trying to get through to you, and the only reason it couldn’t get through is that you were so busy asking questions.         

Why should this be?  Why should this happen in our peak experience?  There seems a grotesque disproportion between cause and effect.  I was doing nothing but looking at a sandpiper running after the waves and running away from the waves; I was doing nothing but lying awake and listening to the rain drumming on the roof; why should suddenly everything make sense?         

There’s another way of trying to approach this.  You might say, if you really try and check out the experience, that something teases you into saying yes.  You see the sandpiper and something in you says a wholehearted yes, or you hear the rain and your whole being says yes to it.  It’s a special kind of yes; it’s an unconditional yes.  And the moment you have said an unconditional yes to any part of reality, you have implicitly said yes to everything, not yes to each specific thing, but yes to everything that otherwise you departmentalize into good and bad and black and white and up and down.  You are not distinguishing.  You just say yes, and all of a sudden this whole thing falls into a pattern, and you have said yes to the whole pattern.         

Now if this in any way seems real to you, if there is any response in your heart that says, “Yes, that is something that applies to my own experience,” then that is enough to show that each one of us has really experienced at some very important moments in our lives what it is that makes monastic life tick.  That’s very important for us, because if there is no connection between me, whoever I may be, and monastic life, then this whole thing is not particularly interesting; but if I can see and appreciate that some of the most important experiences in my life are precisely what is the core of monastic life, that puts me in an entirely different position.  And that’s exactly what I mean when I speak about the monk in us.

So all of us throughout our lives are in a sense amateurs of the monastic life.  The only difference between us and monks is that monks are professionals.  But, especially in our time, we know that professionals very often are much less good at whatever they profess to do than amateurs are.  Therefore, the more people discover how important the monk in them is, and the more they discover how important the openness towards meaning is, then the more important it becomes that everybody, amateur or professional, has access occasionally to this controlled environment in which he can cultivate the monastic or contemplative dimension of his life.      

Now I’ll just very briefly pick out these three paradoxes once more and show how they are really what make monastic life, or religious life as professional religious life, tick.         

If anybody has experienced the paradox that when we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, then that person has inner access to the very heart of what a life of poverty is meant to be.  A life of poverty has only one goal and that is precisely to lose yourself and so find yourself.  Everything else that has to do with the life of poverty in all the different monastic traditions, everything else that you may think of as phenomena of poverty (monks have no money, or they have all their money in common and have a lot more money than everybody else, or they must ask permission if they want to use the car, or they are only permitted to have so much money in their pockets, or they are not allowed to touch money and so they have to let other people touch the money…) are just ascetic means to cultivate that seed.         

Let’s not make the mistake of saying, “I lost myself in order to find myself.”  That is already turning this whole thing into a purpose matter and that’s not it at all.  I lose myself and I discover that so I have found myself.  And now I spend my life cultivating this seed.  What lies between the seed and the harvest is that ascetic effort in many, many different forms according to the different monastic traditions.  And the harvest is nothing else but what the seed was, because you never harvest anything but what you sow; that is, you lose yourself and so find yourself — only more so.  That’s all.         

If you take the second paradox, that when I’m truly alone, I’m one with all, and when I’m really one with all, I’m alone, you have the seed of a life of celibacy.  Again, what lies between the seed and the harvest is simply ascetic effort that can take many, many different forms.  It is just meant to cultivate this seed so that in the end you have precisely that, namely to be one with all and alone.  One could make a very good case (but I think someone else ought to do that rather than a monk) that married life is another road towards the same goal of being one with all and truly alone.  That means that you are one with yourself, that you are not just half of a pair, but that you are truly alone and so one with all — not only with your partner, but one with all.  Marriage is not an egotism for two.         

And now the third paradox lies at the root of what we call obedience.  The first thing that we think of is that you do what somebody else tells you to do.  That’s a time-honored and very helpful ascetic means towards the end, but to get stuck in this would be totally wrong and totally fruitless.  If it is just a matter of replacing my self-will with somebody else’s self-will, I would rather have my own self-will; it is much closer to home.  The whole idea is to get beyond self-will altogether, because self-will is the one thing that gets between us and listening.  All our questioning, all our frantic looking for solutions, is just an expression of our little self-will over and against the totality.  The moment I drop that, give it up, the whole comes through to me and gives itself to me.  I’m not so intent on grasping it and grabbing it and holding it when I give myself to it.         

Obedience means literally a thorough listening; ob audire means to listen thoroughly or, as the Jewish tradition says, “to bare your ear.”  The ear locks have to be removed so that you can really listen thoroughly.  That’s obedience in the Old Testament.  In many, many forms, in many, many languages, the word for obedience is an intensive form of the word listening — horchen, ge-horchen; audire, ob-audire; etc.         

In other words, obedience, doing what somebody else tells you, may be used as an ascetic means to get over that self-will, that always having your own ideas and your own little blueprints.  It’s a means to drop all this and to look at the whole and to praise the whole, as Augustine says.  But the decisive thing is to learn to listen, and very often doing somebody else’s will can be a hindrance to learning to listen; you just become a marionette pulled on strings.  This is very important in the context of finding meaning, the context in which we see the mystical experience.  When you find something meaningless you say that it is absurd.  But when you say “absurd,” you’ve given yourself away — because the term absurdus is the exact opposite to ob-audiens.  Absurdus means absolutely deaf.  So if you say something is absurd, you are simply saying, “I am absolutely deaf to what this is going to tell me.  The totality is speaking to me and I am absolutely deaf.”  There is nothing out there that’s deaf; you cannot attribute deafness to the source of the sound.  You are deaf.  You can’t hear.  So the only alternative that all of us have in any form of life is to replace an absurd attitude with an obedient attitude.  It takes a life-time to get just a little way in this.         

» next page