Br Stephen, OCist, is a monk of the Cistercian abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Sparta, Wisconsin. In this post on his blog Sub Tuum he contrasts the Benedictines, whose principal raison d'etre is communal prayer and personal contemplation, with other orders that have more visible (flashier?) ministries. Read the whole post for full effect. Written on August 8, the feast of St Dominic, it ends thus: "With apologies to St Dominic, not that he was particularly nice to us."

In short, we have no charism. We're not practicing the spirituality of X while doing work Y and wearing the habit of Z. We have no distinct spirituality though it can sometimes look as if we do since we have maintained the office while it has gone by the wayside to varying degrees elsewhere. We have no manuals or exercises. We have no distinctive apostolate. We wear a basic habit free of distinctive trinkets. In 1500 years the Benedictine family has produced preachers, teachers, mystics, and theologians, but the first task was always simply to seek God and try to save our own souls. A Benedictine monastery is just a place to try to live out the Christian life. It ultimately has no other purpose or mission.

...In summary, if you're looking for a rather pedestrian life, don't mind a boring outfit, think repetition is cool, and can't keep up with trends, the Benedictine charism may be just the thing for you.

My biggest problem with evangelicals is not homophobia or right-wing political extremism--although these are bad enough--but rather the low esteem in which many of them hold the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Apparently there are some evangelicals who feel the same way. Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, has a very interesting post called "Your Mission: Resacramentalize Evangelicalism". Very informative and eye-opening, especially for those of us who still labor under some stereotypes about what evangelicals are about. Read a sample of the comments as well.

What are evangelical sacraments?

• We have sacramentalized technology.
• We have sacramentalized the pastor and other leaders.
• We have sacramentalized music (ie the songs themselves and the experience of singing).
• We have sacramentalized leaders of musical worship.
• We have sacramentalized events (God is here!)
• We have sacramentalized the various forms of the altar call.
• We have sacramentalized the creation of an emotional reaction.

We've done all of this, amazingly, while de-emphasizing and theologically gutting baptism. (I'm not buying everyone's baptismal theology here: I'm simply saying the standard approach now is nothing more than could be accomplished by having someone jump through a hoop.)

We've done this while reducing the Lord's Supper to a relatively meaningless, optional recollection (and being deeply suspicious of anyone making it more than a glorified sermon illustration).

We've done this while removing any aspects of sacramentalism from out worship and even our architecture...

What's the answer?

We need to resacramentalize our worldview in its entirety. Go read some Anglicans and Catholics about that. We're ridiculously secularist and modernist in so much of our thinking, and so selective and inconsistent in our idea of how God relates to physical things.

Anthony Bloom (1914-2003, aka Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of Russian parents (a maternal uncle was the composer Scriabin). He spent much of his early life in Paris, where he was educated as a physician. After successively serving as an army doctor and in the French resistance, he was ordained to the Russian Orthodox priesthood. Eventually he moved to England in order to serve the Orthodox community in that country. He wrote several books on prayer which became widely influential throughout the Christian world.

Today's feast of the Transfiguration is supremely important for Orthodox Christians, for they interpret it as pointing towards the eventual fate of us all. The light with which Jesus shone on Mt Tabor is the uncreated light of God himself, a manifestation of theosis or deification. Not only will all the just be deified at the end of time, but the entire physical cosmos will also be set free from corruption and decay.

The excerpt is from a sermon Anthony preached in 1973. A hat-tip to the Ora et Labora site.

Here, in a shrouded manner, is revealed to us all of the greatness, all the significance, not only of man, but of the material world itself, of its indescribable potential, not only earthly and transitory, but also eternal and Divine...

...And if we attentively and seriously accept what is revealed to us here, we must change as profoundly as we can our attitude toward everything visible, toward everything tangible; not only toward humanity, not only toward man, but toward his very flesh, and not only toward human flesh, but toward everything around him that is physically perceptible, tangible, and visible...Everything is called to become the place of indwelling of the Lord's grace; everything is called to be at some time, at the end of time, drawn into that glory and to shine forth with that glory.

And it is granted unto us people to know that; it is granted unto us people not only to know that, but to be co-workers with God in the illuminating of that Creation which the Lord created...We perform the blessing of the fruits, the blessing of the waters, the blessing of the grains, the bread, we perform the blessing of bread and wine, changing them into the Body and Blood of the Lord; the source of the miracles of Transfiguration and Theophany is within the confines of the Church. Through human faith, the matter of this world is separated out, matter which through man's lack of faith, through human perfidy, had been handed over to corruption, death and destruction, is set apart by the miracle of Transfiguration and Theophany. Through our faith, it is separated from this corruption and death, and is given over to God Himself, is accepted by God, and in God fundamentally becomes a new creation...

Let us think about this; we are not called to enslave nature, but rather to free it from the prison of corruption and death and sin, to free it and to bring it back into harmony with the Kingdom of God. Therefore let us begin to treat all created matter, all of the visible world, thoughtfully, with respect, and let us be in the world Christ's co-workers, so that the world might achieve its glory and so that, through us, all of creation might enter into the joy of the Lord.

Andrew Louth is an Orthodox priest as well as a theology professor at Durham University in England. In his article "The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology" (appearing in Partakers of the Divine Nature, Christensen and Wittung, eds, Baker Academic 2007), he outlines the Orthodox understanding of the Incarnation of the Son of God, which is seen as not exclusively a remedy for human sinfulness, but primarily as God's way of uniting in love with his creation. The quote appears on pp 34-35.

Deification, then, has to do with human destiny, a destiny that finds its fulfillment in a face-to-face encounter with God, an encounter in which God takes the initiative by meeting us in the Incarnation, where we behold "the glory as of the Only-Begotten from the Father" (Jn 1:14), "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor 4:6). It is important for a full grasp of what this means to realize that deification is not to be equated with redemption. Christ certainly came to save us, and in our response to his saving action and word we are redeemed; but deification belongs to a broader conception of the divine oikonomia: deification is the fulfillment of creation, not just the rectification of the Fall. One way of putting this is to think in terms of an arch stretching from creation to deification, representing what is and remains God's intention: the creation of the cosmos that, through humankind, is destined to share in the divine life, to be deified. Progress along this arch has been frustrated by humankind, in Adam, failing to work with God's purposes, leading to the Fall, which needs to be put right by redemption. There is, then, what one might think of as a lesser arch, leading from Fall to redemption, the purpose of which is to restore the function of the greater arch, from creation to deification. The loss of the notion of deification leads to lack of awareness of the greater arch from creation to deification, and thereby to concentration on the lower arch, from Fall to redemption; it is, I think, not unfair to suggest that such a concentration on the lesser arch at the expense of the greater arch has been characteristic of much Western theology. The consequences are evident: a loss of the sense of the cosmic dimension of theology, a tendency to see the created order as little more than a background for the great drama of redemption, with the result that the Incarnation is seen simply as a means of redemption, the putting right of the Fall of Adam: O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!--as the [Exultet of the Easter Vigil] has it: "O certainly necessary sin of Adam, which Christ has destroyed by death! O happy fault, which deserved to have such and so great a Redeemer!"

Orthodox theology has never lost sight of the greater arch, leading from creation to deification.

The French Benedictine Jean Leclercq was one of the leading scholar-monks of the 20th century. In The Love of Learning and the Desire for God ( New York, Fordham University Press 1982) he discusses some of the ways in which the monastic West was influenced by the monastic East. The quote following is found on pp 89-90; I have omitted Leclercq's footnotes.

...Benedictine monasticism is attracted, not only to patristic sources in general, but to Eastern sources in particular....

This is a fact which must be strongly emphasized, for St Benedict had no wish to break with ancient monastic tradition, which is largely Eastern. Quite the contrary, in the life of St Benedict by St Gregory, in the spirit of his Rule, in the readings he recommends and the observances he prescribes, everything betrays his concern for continuity and for fidelity to ancient monasticism. Not that Benedict is "an Easterner who has strayed into the West." He is a Latin; but he respects the Eastern tradition "which is to monasticism what the apostolic tradition is to the faith of the Church." Even more, as can be gathered from allusions found in his Rule, he feels a certain nostalgia for the monasticism of ancient times.

Consequently, it is not at all surprising that, during all the great periods of Western monasticism, the desire has been felt to renew relations with this authentic tradition. In the Carolingian period, Benedict of Aniane accords great importance to the Eastern rules in his Codex regularum. In later periods, the monks were always clearly aware of what they owed to ancient monasticism, and an Italian manuscript of the eleventh century furnishes a revealing example of this. Immediately after the text of St Benedict's Rule, there is appended a list of those who "founded" monastic life. Out of the twenty-six Fathers of monasticism enumerated, there are only four Latins. And even among these we find St Jerome, who was often considered an Easterner. In fact, monastic observances and the texts which inspire them owe a great deal to the East and to the writings through which it was known: the Apophthegms and Lives of the Fathers, the Conferences of Cassian, the Rules of St Basil. Everything in Benedictine life is ordered according to the ideas, practices, sometimes even the words, which have come down from the monks of antiquity and which link each generation to the origins of monasticism. Furthermore, each renewal of Benedictine life is effected with reference to these same origins. For example, at the beginning of what was to become the Cistercian Order, Ordericus Vitalis, not implausibly, attributes to Robert of Molesme this characteristic speech: "Read the acts of Sts Anthony, Macarius, Pachomius. ...We are no longer following in the footsteps of our Fathers, the Egyptian monks, of those who lived in the Holy Land or in the Thebaid." Thus at every period, the monks feel the attraction of the "light which comes from the East," from which they know they have recieved there ideas and the practices on which their way of life is founded. And William of St Thierry is speaking for all when he expresses the wish in his Letter to the Brothers of Mont-Dieu that they "may implant in the darkness of the West and in the cold of Gaul the light of the East and the ancient fervor of Egyptian religious life."

The longer I stick with this whole contemplative spirituality thing, the more I realize that it boils down to living fully in the present moment. Which is, of course, easier said than done. A good perspective on this issue is provided by Archimandrite Meletios Webber in Bread & Water, Wine & Oil (Conciliar Press). A double tip of the eastern monastic veil to In Communion and to JN1034.

We can only meet God in the present moment. This is an area where God chooses to place limits on His own power. We choose whether or not to live in the present moment. Because we can encounter God only in the present moment, whenever we live in the past or in the future, we place ourselves beyond His reach.

We can only make decisions in the present moment. We can only enjoy sights and sounds in the present moment. We can only love and hate in the present moment. The present moment is the interface between ourselves and the rest of the universe, and, more importantly, it is the only point of contact between the individual and God. Of all the possible points of time, only the present moment is available for repentance. The past cannot be taken back and remade. The future remains forever out of our reach.

The present moment may appear to be tiny in duration--so much so that the human mind thinks it hardly exists at all--but in depth it is infinite. Actually, it has no shape or form. There is nothing to measure here, and that really infuriates the mind, since measurement is what the mind is good at. It is remarkable that this quality, so essential to our existence, has no shape. It just is. And it just is in a way which the past and future cannot be. The past is a done deal, the future is all guesswork. The formless present moment may be experienced as large or small. In some senses it is almost of no duration. In other ways, it is eternal life. Whichever we choose, it is, nevertheless, the only space within which we can operate. Indeed, this is the unique means through which we can confront the reality God gives us second by second.

It is odd that we do not consciously spend more time in the present moment than we do. Unfortunately, the mind blocks the availability of the present moment whenever it has the chance to do so. The mind cannot trust the present moment, since it cannot control it, and is thus almost always at enmity with it. I think this may be part of what Jesus means when He contrasts "this world" with the Kingdom.

The mind cannot control the present moment, the time during which things can arise, so it pretends that it does not exist. This causes a person to behave in a completely unconscious way, forcing the individual to wait for the mind to absorb an event (which by then has become an event in the past) before she or he is allowed to experience it.

Christ Pantocrator (Christ the Ruler of All) is one of the most popular genres in Byzantine iconography. The oldest known example, believed to date from the sixth or seventh century, is found at the monastery of St Catherine located in the Sinai peninsula. Ironically, the icon arguably owes its existence to Islam, since the Sinai had come under Muslim control by the time iconoclasm erupted within the Byzantine Empire. The Muslim authorities were content to let the monks live in peace, and to this day the monastery maintains cordial relations with the nomadic Bedouin who are its immediate neighbors.

Luiz Coelho, a Brazilian Anglican seminarian and artist, has an interesting two-part article (available here and here) on Episcopal Cafe. I include an excerpt below.

Symbolism emerges in the use of light. In the Sinai Pantocrator, the light moves from left to right creating a sense of mystery on the right side of the image. In fact, although the figure is pretty much centered in the picture frame, there is a very noticeable asymmetry between the left and right sides of Jesus' face. The left side, bright and shiny, shows relaxed eyebrows and lips. On the right side, Jesus' face is contracted and shadows make it even more mysterious. This duality of a serene and compassionate Jesus, and a dark and severe one are very appropriate at a time when the concept of the dual nature of Jesus Christ was being discussed by the Church. The use of light, and also of different facial expressions, reinforce the human and divine natures orthodox Christians believe exist in Jesus Christ. He is simultaneously Mercy and Judge.