Exploring the Essential
Right after Vatican II,
many Orders wanted to write a “definition” of their way of life. In our Order, there were a few projects of
“definition” of Cistercian life. Rapidly
we realized that it was impossible to write such a definition of Cistercian
life, or even of monastic life in general, because monastic life is not an
absolute, objective reality, that can be defined. You cannot find it as such in the Scripture. And in Tradition, what we find is not a
univocal reality but a series of facts, of phenomena, to which the name of
“monasticism” was given. And, as a matter
of fact, the use of the adjective “monastic” has been more or less elastic
according to centuries and traditions.
Then, we thought of
writing rather a “description” of Cistercian life. But that was no longer possible, because in
order to make such a description you have to decide beforehand which elements you
will include in that description and which ones you will exclude, that is, what
you consider authentically monastic and Cistercian and what you consider off
the mark. This would be what in
scholastic logic we used to call a petitio
principii.
We concluded that the
only thing we could do was a Declaration
or a “statement” on Cistercian Life – a declaration that was at the same time
an act of faith and a commitment. That
is, an act of faith in the values we felt called to live and a commitment
authentically to live them. It was a
rather humble approach. The meaning was:
We, Cistercians of today (1969), with the lights (necessarily limited) we have
at this present time, consider that we are called by God to live these values,
that is, to live our monastic life in this way, and we commit ourselves to do
it.
The text that came out
of that approach, at our General Chapter of 1969, has influenced all the
renewal and the evolution of our Order ever since. What we then described in that short text of
less than one page was what, at that particular time in history, we considered
the Essential in our monastic life.
Now, more than 35 years
later, I am asked to say a few words to you about the Essential. Fortunately, there
is also something humble in the title given to me: Exploring the essential. So,
let’s embark together on some form of exploration, without knowing beforehand
what we are going to discover.
Of course, what we are
going to discover depends on what we are looking for. Our monastic way of life is composed of a
number of practices, that we usually call the “observances”. Some of them seem to us to be still
meaningful nowadays, and other are considered out of step with today’s
culture. Some of them, we have already
abandoned, sometimes only to see new forms of monastic life re-assuming them,
at time with a vengeance! So we may be
tempted to a pause and ask ourselves which of those observances are essential
to a monastic way of living, and which are not essential. I sincerely think that this is a misleading
question and a wrong approach.
In our way of life
there is something that is more important than the observances. Or, to say it another way, what is essential
in our way of life is something anterior to the practices or the observances. It is the goal of our life, what Cassian
describes as the “perfection of charity”.
In monastic life, as in
any form of Christian life, or even of human life for that matter, there is
only one absolute – God. In relation to
that absolute, everything else, however important it may be is relative (and to
say this can certainly not be considered “relativism”). Our various forms of monastic life, whether it
be Benedictine, or Cistercian, or Carthusian, Camaldolese, or whatever, are so
many ways of living out our Christian commitment. And our Christian life is a manner in which
to live our human life according to the light given to us by the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. We cannot be real
Christian monks, without being authentically Christian, and we cannot be
Christian without being authentically and fully human. This is really the essential.
The mystery of the
Trinity that we celebrated a few weeks ago, reminds us that God is communion – koinonia – and, because we have been
created in the image of God, because God has breathed into us his breath of
life on the day of creation, we are called, as human beings, to enter into that
communion. As Christians, we have
received from Jesus of Nazareth the revelation of his communion with His Father
in their common Spirit of love, and the call to enter into that communion. “If someone loves me, he will listen to my
words, my father will love him. We will
come and we will make our dwelling with him.
There is the essential: Christian life is a life of communion. Monastic
Christian life is a particular manner to live out that communion.
Our
monastic life is therefore, essentially, a life of communion. This is true of any form of monastic life,
including the eremitical one; but it is particularly true of the coenobitic way
of life, as described in the Rule of Saint Benedict, according to which we all
live. I would like to look at monastic
observances or practices in relation to the various aspects of that communion.
That communion is
obviously, first of all, a communion with God.
If it is not, nothing else in our way of life has any meaning. We are all called, as any other human being,
to a contemplative union with God, through a life of continuous – or unceasing
prayer. This is the only real precept of
the New Testament about prayer: that we should pray unceasingly. Never does Jesus tell us that we must pray so
many times a week or so many times a day.
He simply tells us that we should pray all the time, unceasingly. This is not an observance; it is a way of
being. To pray unceasingly, or to live
in a contemplative union with God, is to be constantly present to God’s
presence in us. We are constantly united
to God in every fibre of our being, since he is constantly creating us and
keeping us in existence. He is more
present to us than we can be present to ourselves. To pray is to bring to the level of awareness
that communion, that groaning of the Spirit of God in us, as Paul says in his
chapter eight to the Romans.
Again, this is not an observance;
it is a way of being. But in order to be
able to live that communion with God with at least some level of consciousness,
we need to use various means, and our monastic way of life – concretely, for
all of us here, our Benedictine way of life -- offers us a series of tools,
that are so many observances. The use of
those tools is what makes us authentically to be called monks or not.
A constant communion with God
in an attitude of unceasing prayer is not possible without, not only an
attitude of listening to God, but also some frequent moments of explicit
listening to God through what we now call lectio
divina, that is the reading and the meditation of the Word of God. And in a coenobitic way of life, this is
lived also through a frequent collective listening to the Word of God and
collective answering to that Word through a common celebration of what Benedict
calls the Opus Dei.
Therefore, we can ask: what is essential here and what is not
essential? An attitude of contemplative
communion with God through a constant, unceasing prayer belongs to the
essential. As for the collective
expression of that communion in a personal listening to God’s Word through lectio divina, and through a common
celebration of the Liturgy is what I would call a basic characteristic of the Benedictine
monastic life, without which there is no authentic Benedictine monastic life. Now, how this Office is structured and
celebrated, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, according to this or that
schema of the distribution of psalms, with so many moments of gathering in
church every day, etc., all this may be very important – in various degrees;
but all this is secondary and even “relative” in its “relationship” with the
essential. In each choice that needs to
be made in this regard, in any particular context, the real question is not “is
that observance essential”, because no observance as such is essential; but how
does that observance help us authentically live the essential, that is the
communion with God, and also, how much is that observance a basic
characteristic of the Benedictine way of living the essential.
Communion with God can
never be lived in the abstract. It must
always be incarnated. It is the
communion with a group of brothers or sisters with whom we form a community. It is the communion with the Church – the
local one and the universal one; it is
the communion with the society around us, with the whole of humankind and also
with the whole cosmos.
Since our Benedictine
way of life is coenobitic, communion with our brothers or sisters in a life
according to a common Rule belongs to the essential. In order to be authentically “Benedictine”,
that common life must be structured in a certain way. Benedict expresses this in his chapter on the
various types of monks, when he describes what a coenobite is. He says that a
coenobite is someone who lives in community, according to a rule and under an
abbot. Those three elements -- and the right order or relationship between them
.-- is the most basic structure of the Benedictine way of life. The more you go into the details of how the
daily life of a community is structured, the more you need to distinguish the
various degrees of importance; and this is basically determined by the common
understanding of those who live that way of life. In the end, to live an authentic life of
communion with brothers or sisters belongs
to the essential. No observance of
the common way of life is in itself essential.
They are all relative and the
importance of each one has to be judged according to its degree of relationship with the essential.
Communion, by its very
nature, has to be open to others, as I have already said. The communion that binds a group of brothers
or a group of sisters together in a monastic community would not be Christian,
if it were not open to all the other communities that, through their koinonia with one another make the
Church.
Communion with the
whole Church belongs to the essential.
And by Church we must understand not only the hierarchy of the Catholic
Church, not even the Catholic Church as such, but the great Koinonia made up of all those who believe
in Christ. An ecumenical dimension to
our monastic life belongs also to the essential. Now, how this communion with the diocesan
Church, with the Church of our nation, with the whole Catholic Church will be
concretely expressed and how we will participate in the ecumenical dialogue,
all this belongs to the realm of decisions that each one of us has to make
daily, taking into account the particular tradition of our community, the needs
of the Church around us, our own possibilities and our own limits. None of those various practical expressions
belongs to the essential. Their value
resides in the relationship with what we consider the essential.
Likewise, we cannot be
fully human, and therefore we cannot be fully Christian or authentically monks if
we do not live in communion with people around us, if we do not share the
preoccupations, the fears, the expectations and the hopes, the joys and the
sorrows of all our fellow human beings.
This, of course, is essential.
All the concrete expressions of that communion are relative and should
be judged according to all the circumstances.
Something does not become essential because our community has always
done it for the last 50 or 100 or 500 years.
A judgement about how our various implications in the building of
society are still opportune has to be made constantly, taking into account all
the changing situations of the world as well as those of our communities.
Then there is the
communion with the whole cosmos of which we are a tiny part. A preoccupation with the preservation of our
planet and our world also belongs to the essential and a monk should have an
ecological sensitivity, especially in our time when the general balance of the
ecological system is threatened by our Western lifestyles, and when also some
radical political theoreticians of a certain superpower consider that the
faster we destroy our planet the more we will hasten the Apocalypse and the
return of Christ. Of course that does
not mean that we should all join anti-pollution demonstrations and all get into
biological agriculture. It means however
that it is “essential” for each one of us, in each one of our concrete, daily,
relative decisions to maintain that ecological preoccupation.
* * *
I am aware that my
approach and the meaning I give to the word “essential” may sound
unsatisfactory or even annoying to many of you, when, in our time of renewal
and reassessment, the preoccupation is to determine what are the “essential”
monastic observances, that we must maintain at all cost, and those that are not
essential and that we can discard or modify.
At least let us be aware of the fact that when we speak in this way, we
give to the adjective “essential” a rather specific meaning.
Of course, it would be more
reassuring if we could find an easy way of determining which monastic
observances are essential and which ones are not. Or simply to determine what is “monastic” and
what is not. But that easy way does not exist.
Since the time of the wandering ascetics of the second century in
Palestine and the time of the hermits of Lower Egypt or the Pachomian
coenobites in Upper Egypt to the time of today’s new monastic communities,
without forgetting the great Cluniac monasteries of the 10th century
or the Cistercian Reform of the 12th century, the adjective
“monastic” has been given to a very large spectrum of forms of life.
Concretely, when we
want to assess what we have been doing up to now in our local community -- or
in our Congregation, or Federation, or Order -- in order to determine what must
be kept at all cost, and what may or must be abandoned or changed, we cannot
avoid a careful and often painful analysis of the situations in which those
practices or observances were born and the meaning they still have or can have
– or maybe cannot have – in today’s situation.
When we study the
history of Christian monastic life, we immediately realize that every time
there was an important new foundation or a significant reform, it was at a time
of profound social and cultural changes and as an answer to those changes. I know that a lot of people like to say that
monastic life is or should be counter-cultural.
I know what they mean; that is, that monastic life runs counter to the
negative aspects of our or of any culture.
That is true, but that way of speaking, which goes back to 1968, is
ambiguous. In reality every time there
was a significant monastic movement, it was when a group of monks were
particularly sensitive to the culture of their time, and found in their own way
of living an answer to the challenges and aspirations of their contemporaries –
an answer that was valid not only for them, but for every other person.
The real question,
therefore, concerning each aspect of our way of life is: how far that aspect is
linked with and is dependent on a specific cultural context and to what extent
it still has a meaning nowadays. And
there is a place nowadays as in the past for many quite different forms of
monastic life. There is a place for a
large community involved in superior education with a university or a large school
attached, and there is a place for a small community of 5 or 10 monks in a poor
suburb or in an isolated corner of the countryside. There is a place for a
community heavily involved in social services for the surrounding population,
as there is a place for small poor monastic communities simply sharing the
conditions of the surrounding population.
Being a monk is a quality
of being and does not imply any activity in society or in the Church; but it does
not exclude any activity that is worth doing by any human being and any
Christian. We have to be aware that
monks have often been called to fulfil roles that do not necessarily belong to
them, at a time when nobody else was available to fulfil those roles. Saint Benedict wrote his Rule at a time when
the Roman Empire was crumbling under the successive invasions of the various
groups of “Barbarians” that make up all the present European nations. The process of building Europe started then
and is not yet achieved.
During a large part of the
Middle Ages, and even before, when most of the nations and the various feudal
lords were constantly at war, monasteries were often the only place where there
was enough stability to preserve the culture of the past, to copy manuscripts
for the future generation and to offer education, hospitality and various forms
of social and medical care. When Saint
Augustine of
The question is a little more
complex when we speak of observances or practices. But even there, one of the difficulties
resides in the distinction that should be made -- but is neither simple nor
easy – between what is a constitutive
element of the monastic way of life and what is not.
According to the first and most
important meaning of the word monachos
-- and, before that, of the Syrian word ihydaya
-- the monk is the one who has only one goal, only one love, and who organizes
all the other elements of his life around that one love and that one
preoccupation. It has rightly been said
that “blessed simplicity” is the most basic characteristic of the monastic way
of life, and it implies a number of renunciations. So much so that, at the time of early
Egyptian monasticism, monks were called the apotaktikoi,
that is, those who have renounced their family and the world in order to give
themselves totally to the Lord.
Celibacy is the most basic of
those forms of renunciation. Is celibacy
a constitutive element of monastic life? It has certainly been considered so during
almost two thousand years of Christian asceticism and Christian monasticism. As
such it certainly belongs to the essential, that is, it is a constitutive
element of the monastic way of communion with God. Nowadays there are new forms
of communities that include both married people and celibates, men and women,
some living a secluded life and others involved in economic, social or even
political life. Those new forms of
communities have certainly a place in today’s world and today’s Church. Some of the members of those communities
insist on calling themselves monks whether they are married or celibate. Well, vocabulary and language belong to the
realm of social conventions. To call a
married member of such groups a “monk” is certainly to give the word “monk” a
meaning it has never had so far in any monastic tradition. On the other hand, to refuse the name of
“monk” to a married ascetic does not imply any negative attitude towards
married life.
As I mentioned before,
Benedict says that a coenobite – for whom he is writing his Rule – is someone
who lives in community (in monasterio),
under a common rule and an abbot; and therefore when a candidate is admitted to
commit himself permanently to the community after a lengthy and serious
discernment (cf. RB 58), he promises stability (in the community), conversion
or rather conversatio (that is the
life according to the Rule), and obedience (to the Rule and to the abbot who
has the responsibility of looking after the quality of the community’s life
according to the Rule).
Therefore, one cannot be a
monk, at least a monk according to the Benedictine tradition, without belonging
to a community (with all the rights and obligations implied by such a
belonging), without conforming to a common rule of life that is the rule of
that concrete community and without accepting that someone in that community
has the responsibility of exercising within it God’s fatherhood, as
representative of Christ. Those three
elements belong to the monastic way of living out the various aspects of
communion that constitute the essential of monastic life.
That’s really simple!... But
from that arise a large number of rather complex questions? Let’s start with
the last one of the three elements, the abbatial authority, or, if we prefer,
the abbatial pastoral care. This
certainly belongs to the basic characteristics of the Benedictine way of life;
but perhaps nothing has been more dependant on the cultural context, throughout
the centuries, than the manner in which that authority and that care are
exercised. During the Middle Ages, the exercise of the abbatial authority was
very much influenced by the practices of the feudal system and the examples of
the feudal lords. Likewise, the present
practice as a whole, since the beginning of the 20th century, owes
very much to the nostalgic monarchical approach of the monastic restoration in
France and in Germany by Dom Guéranger and the Wolter brothers. Some recent
experiments, perhaps especially in the United States, owe something to the modern
democratic sensitivity, and new foundations in Europe seem to return to the old
tradition of the paterfamilias. And,
in African communities, it is often influenced by the figure of the local
“chief”. Therefore, while the role of the abbot in a Benedictine community is
“essential” (if we want to use that word) or is a constitutive element of the
Benedictine way of life (as I prefer to say), we should be attentive not to
establish as normative any of the culturally and historically conditioned
manner in which the abbatial authority and the abbatial pastoral care have been
lived in the past; and therefore we should not consider as normative any of the
culturally conditioned ways of practising obedience to the abbatial authority.
Let’s move to the first element
mentioned by Benedict, the life in community.
It is pretty obvious that you cannot be a Benedictine monk without
belonging to a monastic community. But that does not simply require that you
have made a valid profession in a community, that you are on the books and that
they will have to bury you there when you die. What is essential to a community
is that all the members are united by bonds of brotherly love and that each one
feels responsible for the quality of the monastic life of each one of the others.
Now, how will that express itself in daily concrete life? That will depend on
several factors. In some cultures it
seems that it is considered that the more time you spend together in a day, the
more you are a community; and the more things you do together, the more you are
a community. In that perspective, if,
apart from celebrating all the hours of the Office together in the Church, you
do lectio divina together in a
scriptorium, and you do some common work, and you all share the common meals
three times a day, you are a very authentic community. I obviously have nothing against any of those
things done together, but I would add that all those common exercises have a
meaning if they express an authentic deep communion of the hearts; and if the
communion of the hearts is missing, all those things done together don’t have
any meaning. On the other hand, the
situation of a community and the demands of work (of any kind) done for the
community or in the name of the community may require some members of the
community to absent themselves from some or from all of those exercises and
that will not affect their community spirit.
I mentioned meals. Meals are something important; and common
meals have a sacred dimension not only in monastic life, but also in any
culture. However the frequency or
regularity of common meals may change from one situation to another. When I grew up as a child in a large family,
we always had three meals as a family every day, and we would normally not
begin a meal before everyone was there (and we were twelve children). Nowadays,
even the closest families rarely have more than a meal a day -- if they have --
at which everyone is present. Therefore,
the cultural meaning of a common meal has changed. Saint Augustine, when he was asked about the
best practice concerning the frequency of the celebration of the Eucharist,
whether it was better to celebrate it once a week, twice a week or daily
answered that the best thing for a Christian was to follow the practice of the
community in which he lived. The number
as such was relative. We can certainly
say the same thing concerning the meals.
According to circumstances, a community may require all its members to
be at all the meals; another community may choose to have only one common meal
a day. All this is relative. What is important is that people do not
simply start absenting themselves from the common meal, as well as from any
other community meeting, for purely personal and selfish reasons. Then the community is disrupted.
What about poverty? Renunciation of material goods is a
constitutive element of monastic renunciation.
Often in the past this has been transformed into simple dependency
through a system of permissions. You
could have all the gadgets you wanted to have – even if you did not have any
need of them, but you were still poor because they did not belong to you but to
the community, and you had a valid permission to use them or simply to keep
them in case you might need them some day.
What is essential in this field is that there be a real communion
between the brothers, expressed in the fact that everything is common, and that
nobody considers anything as purely his own thing, and also that there be an
authentic simplicity of life, with the renunciation of anything that is not
really necessary or that is unnecessarily luxurious. All the rest is relative and secondary. Many monks nowadays, either for their study
or for their pastoral work or for some work for the community, need a personal
computer. Personally I consider that for
reasons of efficiency, as well as for reasons of good management and therefore
of economy a personal computer must be in most of the cases as personal as a
tooth brush. The fact of having one at
your more or less exclusive use is not what is against poverty, as long as the
use you make of it is justified by your service of the community. A community may still require that each monk
will receive all their most personal items like clothing, pens and pencils,
books, directly from the cellarer or will ask for money to buy them, every time
they need to buy something; another community may decide that each monk will
have a certain allocation every month for this type of personal needs. All this is extremely relative. I don’t think one practice is any better than
the other, as long as there is a real detachment of the heart and that no
artificial needs are created, and that tools remain tools to perform community
responsibilities and not gadgets to enjoy personal unjustified moments of distraction.
Through these few examples we
have already touched upon perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Benedictine triad:
the Rule, and more especially the series of observances and practices, that
make up the Benedictine conversatio
or way of life. That goes from the form
of our buildings to the way we receive guests and the way we celebrate the
Divine Office, from the type of work we have to earn our living to the manner
in which we prepare and make community decisions. All of this, to my mind is extremely relative
in itself. What is essential – really essential
– is the manner in which all of this expresses and fosters an authentic
communion – a communion with God, with our brothers, with the Church and the
World and with the Cosmos.
We constantly have to make
choices. In making those choices in these various areas, we have to be aware
that most of our monastic practices and observances have essentially a symbolic
value and that a great cultural shift has occurred in the last half-century or
so; a type of shift as happens only rarely in human history and has deeply
affected that symbolic value.
Monastic life as all of us
have known it, developed in a long phase of history that was called
“Christendom” (in French “Chrétienté”).
Whether we like it or not, whether we are nostalgic or not, that phase
of history is finished and every effort to restore it is bound to be a pathetic
failure.
The main characteristic of
that period in history was that the Christian values were for everyone points
of reference -- for those who lived according to those values as well as for
those who did not live according to them.
Men (and women) as a whole were probably not any better than they are
nowadays; but for everyone, whether they were saints or sinners, whether they
lived according to Christian values or not, those values were points of
reference. Consequently almost
everything in the life of a Christian and particularly in the life of a monk
had a symbolic value. The forms of our
architecture, the height of our churches and especially of the steeples, the
enclosure of the nuns, with the veils and the grills, our monastic habit,
etc. – all of that had a symbolic value
and spoke of those values to people outside as well as inside. At least it reminded them of those
values. Now a symbol is really a symbol
only when its meaning is spontaneously perceived. Nowadays, most of those symbols are no longer
symbols. They have completely lost their
symbolic value. The habit, for example,
is no longer a symbol at all for men and women of today. (For most people nowadays, when a man goes
around clothed in a robe, it is a symbol of something else, we prefer not to
think about). It is simply a means of
identification. When people see us with
a monastic habit, they know we are monks, although they may have a very vague
idea – or no idea at all -- of what a monk is and they may not have a clue
about what values we are trying to live in our monasteries. Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to using
the habit. There might be a good number of reasons to continue to wear a habit,
as there may be a number of good reasons for discarding it. But let us be clear that the meaning of
wearing a habit is no longer what it was in the past.
As a matter of fact, very few
of the traditional Christian symbols, including the liturgical ones, are
perceived as symbols by most men and women of today, including the good
Christian. In most cases, those rites
and gestures have lost their symbolic value.
My personal conviction is that we should not try to invent new symbols
with the hope that they will speak to today’s men and women. We should rather try to recognize the
symbolic value of everything we do in our daily life and of everything around
us. And this is linked with something still much deeper, culturally as well as
theologically. I mean the place of the
“religious” dimension in human life.
This is probably the most important cultural change of our time,
touching not only Christianity but all the great religious traditions of the
world; and that change is, to my mind, a fruit of the Gospel, at the end of a
long evolution of humankind.
This has to do with the place
of the religious dimension or religious “practice” in human life. And most of our monastic observances are in
fact types of religious practices.
All cultures of the past,
including Judaism and early Christianity, lived in a sacral world. For that sacral world, the language of
religious rituals was more important than the language of life. The centre of gravity was the sacral and
ritual activity, by which human beings could enter into relationship with
God. The teaching of Jesus on that point
was so revolutionary that it has taken two thousand years for its meaning to be
gradually grasped. For Jesus, the centre of gravity was not the ritual
activity, but the quality of daily life.
In the Western world, since
the time of Jesus, and certainly as a consequence of its teaching and
influence, the centre of gravity has constantly moved from the area of the
religious and ritual expression to the area of daily life. The new awareness of human freedom has led
people to a deeper sense of personal responsibility. The temple of stones has become less and less
important and the living temples have acquired more and more importance.
Our daily life of every day
is the place where we are called first of all to live the message of love of
the Gospel. We must become more and more
aware of the fact that each human being, by the very fact of his/her humanity
is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Of that temple, Jesus is the corner stone.
The difficulties met nowadays
by the Church in our old Christian countries of Western Europe (and rapidly so
of Eastern Europe too), as well as of North America come most probably from the
fact that its heavy institutional structure often reposed on foundations that
have crumbled. Besides the phenomenon of the loss of Christian attitude or
Christian sense, which is real in our time, we must be aware of another
phenomenon that is quite different although apparently similar. And that other phenomenon is precisely this
gradual shift from the ritual to life – a move that was started with Jesus
himself. Many authentic Christians
nowadays are very attentive to practice the Gospel values in their daily life –
in their family life as well as in their professional life – but are not
interested any longer in what we call “religious practice”, like going to Mass
on Sunday.
I think that we have to take
into account that important cultural and religious shift, when we try to assess
our monastic practices. Of course, we
should not try to be too abstract and we all know that there is no “monastic
spirit” without that spirit being put into practice in concrete life. But, at the same time, we should not be too
quick in identifying the monastic spirit or the monastic values with the
observances in which they were expressed and lived out in the past.
To be true, we are dealing
here with a phenomenon of inculturation.
From the experience of the great number of monastic foundations made by
our communities in Africa and Asia, especially during the last fifty years, we
know that inculturation cannot be planned and cannot be devised at a working
table. It simply happens when the
conditions are realized.
Therefore, I think that we
should not spend too much energy and time trying to find new monastic
observances more adapted to today’s culture.
Let us rather put all our energy into trying to deepen in our own life
as well as in the life of each one of our communities the communion – with God,
with our brethren, with the Church, the World and the whole cosmos. Then let us be somewhat detached in relation to
our traditional observances, and new observances, more adapted to today’s
culture will most probably appear of themselves. Good practices are not created or invented.
They are born from life.