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

It is through wholehearted living that meaning flows into our lives.

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What all this boils down to is that there is a lot more to life than just the phenomena.  There is a whole dimension of life to which we have to listen with our whole heart, mind-fully as we say.  Mindfulness is necessary to find meaning — and the intellect is not the full mind.  The intellect, one has to hasten to say, is an extremely important part of our mind, but it isn’t the whole mind.  What I mean here when I say “mind” is more what the Bible calls the “heart,” what many religious traditions call the “heart.”  The heart is the whole person, not just the seat of our emotions.  The kind of heart that we are talking about here is the heart in the sense in which a lover says, “I will give you my heart.”  That doesn’t mean I give you part of myself; it means I give myself to you.  So when we speak about wholeheartedness, a wholehearted approach to life, mindfulness, that is the attitude through which alone we give ourselves to meaning.         

A technical term that is mostly used in the Catholic tradition and is a good term for this is recollection — to be recollected, to live recollectedly.  It means the same thing as  mindfulness, whole-heartedness, openness to meaning.  Recollectedness is concentration without elimination (that is T.S. Eliot’s phrase), a paradox, because concentration normally limits.  But if you can accomplish concentration without elimination, if you can combine the attitude of focusing on something and yet being totally open without horizons, then you have accomplished what recollection means.  Then you have accomplished what all of monastic life in any of its traditions is after — recollected living, mindful living, deliberate living.  Thoreau, when he goes to Walden Pond, says, “I have gone into the woods to live deliberately.”  That means recollectedly in this sense.  There are many forms of monasticism that are not catalogued or recognized as such, and they may be much more important than the others.  The decisive thing by which you will recognize monastic life is that it is recollected life, mindful life, wholehearted life.  It is through wholehearted living that meaning flows into our lives.  That means that while we are engaged in purpose we keep ourselves open enough to let meaning flow into our lives.  We don’t get stuck in purpose.  

It may help us if we see that work in the narrowest sense is closely related to purpose.  Work is that kind of activity that aims at a particular purpose, and when that particular purpose is accomplished the work as work ceases.  Over against this is play.  Play does not aim at any particular purpose.  Play has meaning; play is the blossoming forth of meaning.  You work until you have accomplished your purpose.  You sweep the floor until it is swept.  But you don’t sing in order to get a song sung — you sing in order to sing.  And you don’t dance, as Alan Watts pointed out, to get somewhere; you dance in order to dance.  It has all its meaning in itself.         

Now we tend to think that the opposite of work is leisure.  Leisure is not the opposite of work; play is the opposite of work, if you have to have a polarity like that.  And leisure is precisely the bridging of this gap between the two.  Leisure is precisely doing your work with the attitude of play.  That means putting into your work what is most important about playing, namely, that you do it for its own sake and not only to accomplish a particular purpose.  And that means that you have to give  it time.  Leisure is not a privilege for those who can take time for leisure.  Leisure is a virtue.  It is the virtue of those who give time to whatever takes time, and give as much time as it deserves, and so work leisurely and find meaning in their work and come fully alive.  If we have a strict work mentality we are only half alive.  We are like people who only breathe in, and suffocate.  It really doesn’t make any difference whether you only breathe in or only breathe out; you will suffocate in either case.  That is a very good pointer towards the fact that we are not playing off work against play or purpose against meaning.  The two have to come together.  We have to breathe in and breathe out and so we keep alive.  This is really what we are all after and is what all religion must be about — aliveness.

As long as we keep everything nicely under control, everything’s purpose directed, everything’s in hand; there’s no danger, but no life either.  A world in which we could keep everything under control would be so boring that we’d be dead.  We’d die of boredom.  We experience that in little ways every day.  We get scared and we keep things under control, but the moment we really get them under control we get bored.  Think of inter-personal relationships: “I got her number; I know how to handle her; I know how to handle him.”  That’s all right to a certain point; it’s very reassuring.  But then comes the point where it gets totally boring, so we say, “Let’s have a little adventure.”  Now the moment we have adventure we have danger; we have risk.  We can’t have adventure without risk, and so we open ourselves a little bit.  We relax our grip a little bit, and the moment we do that it gets very interesting and adventuresome but also scary.  The next thing we know, we’re clamming up again and we’re trying to get things under control again.  So we go back and forth, back and forth, between these two poles all our lives, and that’s really what the spiritual life is all about.  That’s what religion is all about — the fear of losing ourselves and what it is that overcomes that fear.         

The thing that overcomes fear is courage.  But courage is our contemporary expression for what traditional religion in all its different branches called faith.  Let’s not use that term faith more often than absolutely necessary because it throws us off.  We have wrong notions about faith; we think that faith means believing something.  Yes, it does mean believing something.  If we really trust in a person, if we really have faith in a friend, that also implies that we are believing some things about that friend.  But that is very secondary, and if we get stuck in that we’ll never get at the root of faith.  That’s not what it means.  Having faith does not mean subscribing to some dogmas or to some articles of faith or anything like that.  Faith ultimately is courageous trust in life.  The particular form that our religious faith takes depends entirely on the time and the place and the social structure and the cultural forms into which we are born, and there is an infinite variety of these.  But the essence of our faith is the same at all times and in places, and it is the courageous trust in life.         

Faith versus fear — that is the key issue of religion.  That is also the key of our attitude towards truth.  We do know that religion has something to do with truth, but it isn’t the truth that we can grab and grasp and take home with us.  If we grasp and rigidly hold certain truths, next we will clash with everybody who does not hold those truths.  When it comes down to it, everybody holds a different truth; there are as many different truths as there are people around.  So if we insist on the truth being something that we must hold, then we are at odds with everybody else in the world.  But the real truth that we are after is something that holds us; it holds us when we give ourselves, in those moments when we really open ourselves.  There is only one truth and it takes hold of each person in an individual way.  There must be an infinite variety of ways in which truth takes hold of all of us because in that variety the unity of truth blossoms forth.  And it is beautiful and we must assert it and we must celebrate it.  That’s what life is and that’s what religious life is, but it’s giving ourselves to the truth, not taking the truth, grasping the truth, holding the truth.  It’s only the truth to which we give ourselves that will make us free.  The one truth for all of us is that we must have courage to give ourselves to truth.  Fear hangs on.  Fear always grabs for something.  The moment we get fearful, we grasp for something with the reflex of the monkey that grabs for the mother.  We have it all deeply in ourselves, genetically, that fear makes us hang on to something.  Faith is precisely letting go.  Even in religious traditions that may not use the term faith, you will find this essence, namely the letting go. 

Reprinted from Epiphany, Spring 1981.