Yesterday in his regular Sunday address the Holy Father spoke of his namesake, St Benedict, the father of Western monasticism whose feast we celebrate today. Pope Benedict summarized Benedict’s teaching with the phrase, Quaerere Deum, which is Latin for “to seek God.” The monk is the one who seeks God. This comes from the section in St Benedict’s Rule for monks (RB 58:7) concerning the admission of novices: “The concern must be whether the novice truly seeks God.” Another well-known phrase from the RB that the pope quoted is very much like it, from Chapter 72:11, On the Good Zeal of Monks: “Let them prefer nothing to the love of Christ.”

I heard a tape of Fr Bede Griffiths preaching on this very phrase––literally in the RB, Et sollicitudo sit si revera Deum quaerit––on the feast of St Benedict just before he died. He was comparing the Western Benedictine notion of the monk with the sannyasa ideal of India, saying that they were basically the same thing at their root. For a time I lived in a cabin in the woods in Big Sur that had been inhabited before me by one of our recluses, the recently deceased Bro Antony, and over the door he had placed a small plaque which read in French, Dieu Seul, “God alone,” which I left there when I moved in. Not just “seeking God,” Fr Bede said, but the monk is the one who seeks “God alone,” only God. He then laid out three different meanings of that phrase, “seeking God alone.”

First of all, the monk is the one who is alone. This may the origin of the word monk, from the Greek monos, meaning single or alone. This could mean the hermit, but certainly it also means the celibate, or the one vowed to chastity, the one who seeks God by his- or herself. In every culture the monks “aloneness,” as we say in Christian terminology, is an eschatological sign that ultimately we will face God alone: “there will be no marriage or giving in marriage” (Mt 20:30). No doubt in this individuality we will find union through communion, but the monos, the single one, stands as a sign of that fundamental aloneness of the path.

Secondly, “seeking God alone” means of course what may be most obvious: seeking nothing but God. Not riches, not fame, not glory, not family. During the sannyasa diksha (initiation) in India, the candidate proclaims, “I renounce the desire for offspring, the desire of riches, the desire of the world.” In the RB (33:6) Benedict qotes the Acts of the Apostles (4:32), that the reason that all things are held in common possession among monks is so that no one presumes to call anything their own. And after monks makes solemn vows they are to be aware “that from day they will not even have their own bodies at their disposal” (RB 58:25). This is the monk as renunciate, an image we have lost a little in our day and age in the West, where most monastics are highly educated and cultured folks who usually live in middle- to upper-class air-conditioned comfort. (There is a darkly humorous saying: “Nothing is too good for those who have given up everything for God!”) In India, too, quite often in modern times to enter a monastic order is to take a step up on the social and economic ladder. In Asia perhaps even more than here, especially in Buddhist cultures, the monk is often thought of as erudite preacher and scholar, and is highly respected in and even pampered by society. But the archetype remains of the sannyasa, the bhikku: God alone––the monk is the one who has renounced all and everything for the liberty to search for God alone.

Last of all is the aspect of the Benedictine way that the Holy Father mainly underlined in his talk, saying that Benedict did not found an institution that was oriented primarily to the evangelization of the barbarians who were invading southern Europe or any other peoples, as other great missionary monks of the time, “but indicated to his followers that the fundamental, and even more, the sole objective of existence is the search for God: ‘Quaerere Deum.’” St Benedict knew “that when the believer enters into a profound relationship with God, he [or she] cannot be content with living in a mediocre way, with a minimal ethic and superficial religiosity,” the Holy Father said.

We speak often of the difference between charism and institution; what starts out as a charism sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, becomes an institution with laws and rules and traditions and expectations. What we are speaking of here is not the institution of monasticism so much as the charism of monasticism, the first movement of monasticism, to fuga mundi––to “flee the world” to be alone with the Alone. The famous Benedictine scholar Jean Leclerq writes that monasticism resulted not from law or obligations, but from a spontaneous phenomenon––or one could say, at its first movement, a “charismatic” phenomenon––that allows the monk to enjoy an enormous liberty, bound only by this search for God. For this reason St Benedict, though writing a rule for monks, carefully outlining the hierarchy of the monastery, and telling the monks that even their bodies are not their own anymore, nonetheless recognizes that the monks’ main obligation is seeking God alone, and therefore recognizes their right to make choices different than the ones he made, as long as they place themselves inside that which Benedict considers the one absolute: the love of Christ. And so Benedict calls his rule a “little rule for beginners” (73:8) that can lead us to the perfect love that casts out all fear when we will “run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love” (RB Pro 49).

In that same line, Abhishiktananda, in one of my favorite passages from his letters, writes about his impatience with going to seminars about monasticism. “Congresses and seminars,” he says, “will not contribute anything.”

"Monasticism is in the first place a charism. Structures will be born from the charismatic enthusiasm of individuals. … Reform is not going to come from chit-chat and discussion. Benedict, like Antony, went off into the desert, and Francis took to the roads without collecting all the neighboring monks for a congress." (Stuart, “his life told through his letters,” p. 301)

This also reminds me of what our Prior General Emanuele Bargellini told me once: “Cipriano, monachesimo non è un contenitore; è un’energia–– monasticism is not a container; it’s an energy!”

What this all meant furthermore to Bede was that the monk seeks God not through something else, but seeks God directly. Ultimately, the monk does not seek God through work, nor through music, nor through art, nor through study, nor even through service, but through a pure and simple search for a direct, immediate experience of God. This does not necessarily mean that the monk does not work––even the work of evangelization––but somehow the work comes through and from the experience of God, not the other way around. Perhaps ultimately a monk would not so much say, “I find God through music,” “I find God through my work,” or “I find God through my study,” as say “I find music through God, I find study through God, I find work through God.” “Let them prefer nothing to the love of God.” A monk teacher of mine told me something similar years ago in regards to sacred music, for example; he said he did not think that liturgical music was so much the sound of our searching for God as it was the sound of our having been found by God. It’s a subtle difference, but very important. God alone, nothing preferred to the love of Christ.

This last meaning also applies to our way of meditation. The monk, Fr Bede said, is the one who seeks God in the heart above all, ultimately not through any image, not through any of our meager understandings or thoughts or images of God, as poetic and beautiful and lofty as they may be, but seeking a conscious contact with the God–As–God–Is. To do this we enter into the darkness of unknowing, a way of knowing that is a way of unknowing, stripping ourselves of all that we think we know about God––is this not a renunciation, a form of poverty as well?––, ready for an encounter with God-As-God–Is. Now, anything may spring from that, work, service, or art, when the spring of living water flows back from out of our heart, but the contemplative way puts that “love of Christ” above all other things, seeking God alone, seeking God alone, seeking God alone.

cyprian 11 july 05