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The Current features a monthly series exploring some of the spiritual wisdom of the Benedictine tradition. The Benedictine Columba Marmion, who helped to found the monastery of Mont Cesar in Louvain and was its first prior, also served as abbot of Maredous from 1909 to his death in 1923. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000. In his homliy at that Mass, John Paul said: "Throughout his life Blessed Columba was a n outstandin g spiritual director, having particular care for the interior life of priests and religious. To a young man preparing for ordination he once wrote: "The best of all preparations for the priesthood is to live each day with love, wherever obedience and Providence place us" (Letter, 27 December 1915). May a widespread rediscovery of the spiritual writings of Blessed Columba Marmion help priests, religious and laity to grow in union with Christ and bear faithful witness to him through ardent love of God and generous service of their brothers and sisters."

September 2019

BLESSED COLUMBA MARMION QUOTATIONS

​​​​​​​GOOD ZEAL
…Good zeal knows not this excess; it is not eager to impose its personal conceptions of perfection upon others, nor is it full of the sense of duty accomplished, nor of inconsiderate, violent impulses, but of the love of God, pure, humble, full of sweetness. Let us see how the holy Patriarch would have us manifest it. As for the forms of the good zeal of the monk towards his brethren, St. Benedict reduces them to three: respect, patience, and promptitude in rendering service. Our Lawgiver requires first of all respect: “let monks see to it that in honor they prefer one another.” These words are borrowed from Saint Paul (Rm 12:10: Honor one another above yourselves.) There are some who think that respect acts as a constraint to love, while in fact these two sentiments can be perfectly allied to one another: respect safeguards love. (Ideal of the Monk, 400)
 
MONASTIC LIFE IS CHRISTIAN LIFE
When we examine the Rule of St. Benedict, we see very clearly that he presents it only as an abridgment of Christianity, and a means of practicing the Christian Life in its fulness and perfection. We find the great Patriarch declaring from the first lines of the Prologue of his Rule, that he addresses only those who wish to return to God under Christ’s leadership. And in ending the monastic code, he declares that he proposes the accomplishment of this rule to whomsoever, through the help of Christ, hasteneth to the heavenly country: “Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners.” (Rule, 72). To his mind, the Rule is but a simple and very safe guide for leading to God. In writing it, St. Benedict does not wish to institute anything beyond or beside the Christian life: he does not assign to his monks any special work as a particular end to be pursued; the end is, as he says, “to seek God.” (Ideal of the Monk, 1-2)
 
 
A PERSONAL PRAYER
I have the custom of going every day at noon to make a short visit to the Blessed Sacrament, and there, putting everything else out of my mind, I say to our Lord: “My Jesus, tomorrow I am to receive you into my heart, and I wish to receive You perfectly. But I am all together incapable of this. You have Yourself said: “Without me you can do nothing.“ O Eternal Wisdom, do You Yourself prepare my soul to become your temple. I offer you, with this intention, my actions and sufferings of this day, in order that You may render them pleasing in Your divine eyes and that You may verify your words: The Most High has sanctified His tabernacle” (Ps. 65:5). Such a prayer is excellent; the day is thus directed towards union with Christ; love, principle of Union, envelops our actions; far from murmuring at anything disagreeable or troublesome that happens to us, we offer it to Jesus with a feeling of love, and the soul thus finds itself, as it were quite naturally, prepared when the moment comes to receive its God. (Abbot Columba Marmion, ch. 18)

For further reading:
- Christ: The Ideal of the Monk
- "Bl. Columba Marmion: A Spiritual Master for Our Time," R. Jared Staudt
- Biographical article from CatholicIreland.net
- Stations of the Cross derived from Marmion

 

Fr. Julian Stead, a monk of Portsmouth now in residence at St. Clare Home in Newport, Rhode Island, has published several books and numerous articles. His popular work, Saint Benedict: A Rule for Beginners, explores various elements in the Rule, demonstrating the applicability of Benedict’s wisdom to Christian life generally. Fr. Julian is a poet as well. Gregory Wolfe, in his 1984 review in Crisis magazine of the collection of Fr. Julian’s poetry, There Shines Forth Christ (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1983), praises the “voice of a remarkable poet,” who has produced, “poetry as written prayer.” In this poetry, Wolfe finds “a man – a literate and devout man, to be sure, but one troubled by the same daily struggle to be open to God’s love and call to holiness that any Christian experiences.”  It is Fr. Julian’s ability to effectively express for so many this “daily struggle” of love and faith that leads us to select exemplary passages from his books, to highlight the wisdom embodied in his writing, resonating so deeply with that of Benedict. We offer these brief glimpses, inviting the reader to delve further into these texts so worth exploring.
 



On the twelfth degree of humility: “The twelfth degree of humility is that a monk not only have humility in his heart but also by his very appearance make it always manifest to those who see him… Having climbed all these steps of humility, therefore, the monk will presently come to that perfect love of God which casts out fear…” This is the top of the ladder, the ultimate goal which makes the upward struggle worthwhile: to be “cleansed from sin,” arriving at “perfect love of God and of Christ, good habit and delight in virtues,” which is far superior to what human nature itself can achieve, but “the Holy Spirit will show it forth.” The test of perfect humility is not just seeing ourselves as unable to look down on anyone but living in the presence of God and Christ, so in love with them that you forget about yourself. Actually, this means humility gets left behind; you will no longer need the ladder when you have reached what the gospel means by love. Until we get there, beware of the spiritual cancer of pride: it eats up common sense as well as love and contentment. But do not get discouraged; be confident that you will make it if you persevere.” (Beginners, p. 93-94)
 
On obedience: The English word “obedience” implies something slavish. It has not that connotation in the Latin language, much less in Benedict’s spirituality. It is derived from the word meaning “to hear, to listen to (and heed) someone’s voice.” Perfectae Caritatis (“Vatican II’s decree on the renewal of religious life”) expresses the ideal of religious obedience as a way people choose “to follow Christ more freely, dedicated to God, and to devote themselves in a special way to the Lord.” … The labor of obedience is seen as the opposite of the disobedience of our first parents and the way to retrace our steps out of the mess into which they unfortunately plunged their progeny. (p. 52) …Benedict values stability (the ability to be faithful to commitments) and order; their opposites are restlessness, chaos, and negligence – marks of an unhealthy society or individual. The spirit of obedience (we might call that “cooperation” today), evangelical meekness and patience are the virtues needed to preserve stability and order. (Beginners, p. 50)
 
On grace and perseverance:  The Prologue is an echo of the preaching of John the Baptist, a call to conversion, inviting us to listen to the voice of God and in cline our will to his, in order to reach our unique place in God’s eternal scheme of things. Seek peace and quiet; be much more of a listener than a talker; listen with reverence; if you must speak, speak the truth from your heart. In other words, walk in the presence of God under the guidance of the gospel, in order to deserve to see him who has called us to his kingdom. To start with, ask God for the help of his grace; then never give up; be assured that eventually you will arrive at the love of God, as close as possible to the paradise of intimacy with him enjoyed by Adam and Eve before their fall. (Beginners, p. 62)
 
On love of God and others: A monk’s love of God is an illusion if it does not include this kind of mutual love which Benedict terms “obedience.” He has no chapter on the love of God; it is too easy to be deluded about one’s love of God; what proves that it is the real thing is all the ramifications of what he calls “humility” and “obedience.” Likewise, he has no chapter on “chastity,” there are just little phrases like “Tender the charity of brotherhood chastely,” which show how Benedict understood this indispensable Christian virtue: the right or appropriate way to love your neighbor. There is nothing wrong with friendship or affection, but it can go wrong, if you prefer something else to Christ. (Beginners , p. 17)
 
“Let it be what it is called”: … [Saint Benedict] provides an Oratory and prescribes that it “be what it is called” (the term comes from the Latin orare, “to pray”). He says something similar of the abbot, “who… should always remember what he is called” (Rule 2), and chapter 4 applies the same let-it-be-what-it-is-called philosophy to the individual person: “Not to wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that one may truly be so-called.” It seems to have been a favorite expression of Benedict’s, a favorite thought: that things should be what they are called. One of his sons, giving a retreat conference some fourteen centuries later, used a similar refrain, “Be what you are, and you are sure to grow.” (Beginners, p. 104)

And from There Shines Forth Christ, a poem:
 
CONFITEOR
 
When I was a bluejean kid
Footing Kentucky field path dust
The colors were sunlight green in the world
Summer sky blue
My song was a lung laugh
With face in the sun and eyes closed
The birds sang a lovelier song
Sang it to death
Happy death in earth’s forgetfulness.
Bare branches of apple trees
Where your feathers imperceptibly trembled
And fell to the ground in agony
Violin strings of earth’s trees’ root joy broken.
O bare branches of apple trees
I saw you in fat fruit green in sheep-shade
I loved you in that hour with your redwing blackbirds
That chanted my confiteor.

LINKS:
~ Article in 2011 Portsmouth Abbey Bulletin (reprinted from 2004; see first article in the issue)
~ A different project Fr. Julian was involved with!
~ Gregory Wolfe article on Fr. Julian's poetry

To purchase books:
https://www.newcitypress.com/authors/stead-julian.html
https://www.amazon.com/There-Shines-Forth-Christ-Julian/dp/0932506291

 
Fr. Aelred Graham, former prior of Portsmouth (1951-1967), is perhaps best known for his connection with Zen Buddhism, particularly as found in his book, Zen Catholicism, published in 1963. Those familiar with Portsmouth also link him to his “zen garden,” located outside the Abbot’s reception room in the monastery here – even Thomas Merton had heard of it!

The young Graham was seemingly a near-miss for the Jesuit order, influenced early by Ignatius of Loyola: he notes that when he was in his early 20’s, “still ‘in the world,’” he came under Jesuit influence and “was much affected by the meditation system of St. Ignatius Loyola. This led to a period of considerable personal austerity: hair shirts, fastings, disciplines and the like: which together produced, or seemed to produce, a highly conscious devotion to the person of our Lord in his sacred humanity. It produced also a desire to be virtuous and to engage in some apostolic work for the spread of God's kingdom.” This fervor soon led him in the direction of monasticism, as he entered Ampleforth Abbey at the age of 23, beginning a religious practice guided by the Rule of St. Benedict that would last for the rest of his life. His brief sketch says surprisingly little about the influence of the Rule, other than to note that it fostered both “corporate life,” in Mass and the Divine Office, and “the importance of solitude,” allowing time to meditate, though he expresses a lack of guidance in his early days, and a habit of using unstructured time for “falling asleep.” 

 
Graham was also deeply influenced by the 14th century treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing, particularly its presentation of “the extreme simplicity to which private prayer may be reduced – perhaps to no more than the mental utterance of the single word: God, or Jesus.” The Cloud proposes as a goal, and one that continued to attract him, “the possibility of being aware of ‘Ultimate Reality’ by way of an almost continuous state:  “there are some who by grace are so sensitive spiritually and so at home with God in this grace of contemplation that they may have it when they like and under normal spiritual working conditions, whether they are sitting, walking, standing, kneeling. And at these times they are in full control of their faculties, both physical and spiritual, and can use them if they wish…” (Ch. 71). One perhaps sees here the harbinger of an interest in Buddhism and its meditative practice.
 
Graham then turns to what he calls his “amateur interest” in Buddhism. He finds “incontestable” and “obvious” parallels between the teachings of the Buddha and Christianity, and the appeal of Zen meditative practice in his own spiritual journey. First, the well-known Buddhist focus on suffering: “Buddhism accepts as the basic fact of life the omnipresence of suffering, in the sense of frustration. We live in a vale of tears. Things never go right for long. We are faced with death – eventually our own, but continuously other peoples – with sickness, ill-health, poverty, or just those every-day hour-by-hour setbacks and annoyances of being in uncongenial company, having unsuitable work, living with disagreeable people – or, at the subjective level, living with our own depressions, guilt feelings and general sense of inadequacy.” Next, Buddhism points to “craving” as the underlying source of suffering as such: “The source of this trouble, be it noted, the very heart of human distress, is not the thing craved for – sensuous experience, for example – but the craving itself. A person may and should enjoy himself in the appropriate context; where he goes wrong is when he is possessed by an obsessive longing for such enjoyment. The way to deal with this problem, according to Buddhism, is to get rid of (or be relieved from) the craving.” The path of liberation from craving, and thus from suffering, “the point and purpose of human existence,” then opens famously along the Buddhist “eightfold path.”
 
Meditation fosters this journey. To follow this path of liberation, which seems for Graham to merge readily with Christian practice, “we need the appropriate thoughts, or more accurately, the appropriate attitude of mind or spirit. The proximate means for bringing this about is by meditation.” Graham discovered that meditative practice for him opens readily upon Christian faith, and he is comfortable being able to, “speak of meditation, not in a specifically Buddhist sense, but in a way that is equally applicable to Christians – those Christians, at least, who are concerned with the spiritual life at its deepest or maturest level.” He then tries to express the proper meditative focus: “Here I would suggest that the fine point of meditation is not to think about something, however edifying, but just to be something – in this case to be our true selves. Whenever we are doing anything that requires external action – necessary as it is that we should be concerned with external activity almost all day long – we are never quite our true selves. We are actors, doers, assuming some necessary role or other, though it could be a highly virtuous, even an heroic role.”
 
“Yet at times we need just to be ourselves – for it is only when a man's actions flow out, so to speak, from his true being that they make acceptable sense. It is commonly admitted, I think, that we are our best selves when we are wide awake and aware. Not self-consciously aware, in an egoistic self-preoccupied sense, but in so far as our consciousness is actualized – ‘existentially’ (to use a current phrase) – so that in some quite indefinable way our being and our knowledge merge. Momentarily freed from distractions – we just are.”
 
Meditation becomes a journey to our true selves, our authentic being. So, here Graham seems to articulate a journey, both personal and universal, that is passing through suffering, through withdrawal from craving – perhaps one can point to the “triple concupiscence” of Christian teaching in this connection – to arrive at one’s authentic and genuine being. He sees this “existential” interest appropriately expressed by the theologian Tillich:
 
“Paul Tillich has pointed out (truly, I think) that ‘Religion is not a special function of man’s spiritual life, but it is the dimension of depth in all of its functions.’ Again, it has been well said that the only secular thing on earth is the secular heart of man. When we are not reminiscing vainly about the past, or gazing hopefully into the future, but facing present reality – of which, as T. S. Eliot observed, we cannot bear too much – our attitude cannot but be in some way religious: because our mind is then in touch, however obscurely, with the Source of our being.”
 
This meditative communion leads Graham to speak of God as not only the transcendent Creator, but as the immanent Spirit, the one indwelling within us. The kneeling posture in prayer, he suggests, expresses God’s transcendence, while the sitting posture His immanence. Graham’s journey to this mode of meditative prayer has proven fruitful for him:
 
“Anyone, not least a believing Catholic Christian, who has learned to sit, with body upright, the eyes downcast though not closed, the limbs folded into the center, the breathing so slow and regular as to be hardly perceptible, will testify to a remarkable heightening of consciousness. Mentally, one seems in an indescribable way to be in touch with the Ultimate – and for anyone brought up in the Christian tradition, such periods of meditation, even though practiced with Buddhists (as has been my privilege from time to time) – the Ultimate, in so far as it tends to be mentally formulated, is always in terms of the God manifested in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
 
Graham does not refer to Benedict’s “conversatio morum” here, which has been translated and understood variously. But can one see an opening here to interpret it along these lines, with the Rule of St. Benedict providing the outward structure whereby a monk, through stability and obedience, can modify his living and thus his very being, so as to achieve the being God has always intended for him? In this perspective, the transformation that is “conversatio morum” has taken a turn for Aelred Graham down a path he calls “meditation,” and an illumination of the true self that he sees as resonating with much in the traditions of Buddhism.  
 
Fr. Graham had not yet set foot in India when he presented this paper. He finally did so in 1967, near the very beginning of his post-Portsmouth life, returning to Ampleforth after these journeys. One product of that time was his autobiographical book, The End of Religion: Autobiographical Explorations, published in 1971. These explorations reveal a man encountering, in the late 1960’s, the radical re-examination of religion and its place and culture that followed, and influenced, the Second Vatican Council. Graham adopts a position in which contemporary religious life, and the present self-understanding of Christianity, need to be transcended. Huston Smith, reviewing the book for the New York Times, summarizes some of Graham’s key findings effectively: “ Soft‐pedal the Bible;  Play down belief in favor of methods for transforming consciousness; Make room for now;  Cultivate inwardness…;  Transcend the God‐man dualism; Shuck Christianity's superiority complex.” In The End of Religion, whose double-entendre is surely intentional, Graham criticizes fundamental institutional and historical realities of Christianity, which he would like to transcend, while he yet sees in the religious impulse a path to the true end of each human, an opening of the way of truth about ourselves. There is something of the Socratic “Know Thyself” here, with both its radical intellectual self-critique, and its avowed love of wisdom, as a yet partially fulfilled search.
 
While his book includes accounts of his discussions with Indians who try to correct western misrepresentations of Hindu and Buddhist teachings and worldview, these did do not deter him in his belief that resonance is to be found and a mutual ground of agreement can emerge. And always accompanying his being intrigued by the Asian insights is his being disenchanted with his West and its limitations. Toward the end of the book, he presents “A Miscellany of Thoughts,” which may indeed appear to be a Miscellany of Doubts. The Bible: “the world’s most overrated book.” Vatican II: “failure of the church to first radically exam in itself.” A problem: discerning “how much of official Christian teaching is… no more than a credal position.” Graham wonders: “If institutional Christianity is to transform itself into a truly world religion, it has drop its implicit claim to be the world religion. That is to say, it must practice what it preaches – die in order to be born again.” This death will find in its rebirth something of India. “We are nearer to salvation in realizing that there is a share of the divine in every man and woman, including ourselves, then by seeking to be saved by a God who is ‘out there’.” Graham has noted his concern that one should not prioritize salvation, and its securities, over the search for the truth about oneself, and the challenges and insecurities that search may bring. “My position as a Catholic is that I accept everything that the Church teaches in the sense in which it is true. But how far in each case or in what sense it is true I do not profess to know.”
 
Not a resounding affirmation of the faith, to be sure. But surely part of his ongoing “attempting to be honest,” as he humbly couches the beginning of his “autobiographical explorations.” Aelred Graham certainly remains an intriguing and important piece of the history of Portsmouth Abbey. The questions he raises are no less contemporary than in 1970’s, both in the present Church climate, and in our modern culture that is, paradoxically, increasingly global and divided. And though we may see in Graham’s journey  a certain ambivalence toward his own religious tradition, we also find an avowed dedication and commitment to encountering it, persevering in its practice, and seeking his own self-discovery within it.