Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 40
One of the great joys of producing the Desert Fathers series has been the engagement of viewers and listeners. Through our occasional Q&A sessions Jamie and I have the privileged opportunity to have real exchanges with them. You can find a transcript of our most recent session below. As usual, we are grateful to a generous Canadian Benedictine for providing it.
Jamie Baxter: So Bishop Erik, since our last Q&A in July, we’ve covered a lot of ground: three chapters from the systematic collection, the sixth through the eighth, on possessing nothing, on fortitude, and on not showing off.I think a lot of our questions will address aspects of those chapters.
As we look forward we’re excited to cover a few more chapters from the systematic collection: on not judging anyone, and then also on discernment, before wrapping up our series in December on the life of St. Benedict, similarly to how we bookended it at the beginning of the series with St. Antony the Great. But before I dive into our wonderful listener questions, we are excited to announce that we are publishing a book. That will come out late next year.
So stay tuned for that book launch. But Bishop Erik, it’s quite an accomplishment—all these writings month by month. They’re going to be assembled into a collection not so far off.
Bishop Varden: Likewise. It’s been wonderful to pursue this dialogue with you and through these sessions with some of our listeners and followers. I’m touched and grateful that so many people have taken the time to follow this series, to engage with it deeply, to let themselves be questioned by it, and then to put some questions back.
Jamie Baxter: Oh, yeah, perfect. Okay, so on that note of questioning, our first comes from Joshua, Bishop Erik, and, yeah, I just thought I’d start us here by focusing on the first thing, the main thing, and it’s a question about love. He says this: I’ve often heard that true humility involves a sort of self-forgetfulness, not thinking less of oneself as much as thinking of oneself less. How can we learn to forget ourselves? Is there any tension between self-forgetfulness and that proper self-love which seems implied in our Lord’s exhortation to love our neighbour as we love ourselves?
Bishop Varden: Now, that’s a very sensible question to ask. Obviously, there isn’t a contradiction. What does it mean to love ourselves? It means, more than anything else, self-acceptance, which presupposes self-knowledge. Because it’s one thing to accept myself as I would wish myself to be, or as I project myself—be it by the masks I put on, or through the social media I use, or whatever. And it’s another thing to face myself as I am. We’ve talked about this already: the Fathers insist a great deal on self-knowledge. They will say again and again that that’s the only realistic and viable foundation, really, for any kind of growth in the spiritual life—to really face ourselves as we are, to receive ourselves as a gift, to believe in the goodness of ourselves inasmuch as we are willed by God and are manifestations of, iconic manifestations of, his nature. Then to try and let that nature shine forth in us as we become more and more truly ourselves.
Because that’s the key Christian paradox, isn’t it? That we forget ourselves by assuming ourselves. That’s got to come first.
But it’s got to reach a stage where it becomes unselfconscious, because I accept myself and I assume myself, not in order to become blinkered and to keep looking at myself in the mirror, but in order just to be balanced in myself and then to look out. So we could say that self-knowledge, self-acceptance, healthy self-love is a kind of preparatory, propaedeutic stadium that equips us to go out and meet others fearlessly. Because unless we’re properly rooted in ourselves, the chances are we shall encounter others either fearfully or domineeringly.
But if I’m secure in myself, if I accept who I am, I can meet the other without anxiety. So I think there’s a kind of progression, a progress involved—a progression. And the turning out from self presupposes a rootedness in self.
Jamie Baxter: You know, we know the call to take up our cross, and “he who does not hate his life loses it.” And I think the real distinction to make here—and you can feel free to elaborate on this further, Bishop Erik—is that that kind of hatred is very different from a self-loathing that is actually profoundly self-conscious and self-referential. I think we’ve all met people—and maybe even at times in our own experience have experienced—a kind of hatred of ourselves that actually does keep us from carrying the cross well and gets us stuck in our own sin or trauma, and ultimately keeps us from laying down our lives or encountering God or our neighbour, which is obviously in contradiction to the commandment.
Bishop Varden: Absolutely. I think it’s really important to stress that when the Lord in the Gospel talks about hating oneself, that is by way of hyperbole. It is a rhetorical excess that simply speaks about establishing true priorities, and it invites us not to live a self-centred existence, not to put ourselves first.
But you’re right to make that distinction: self-loathing is not evangelical, because in some ways it would even be blasphemous — if we really believe that we are made by God to resemble Him and to be His messengers and ambassadors. If we believe that He looks upon us and sees in us beloved sons and daughters, who are we then to loathe ourselves?
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, whom He has willed and created good.
Bishop Varden: That sort of self-loathing is a perverse kind of presumption.
Jamie Baxter: You know, I think another way to frame it is: we know this call to love God, we know this call to love neighbour, but we are made in His image, and we are a neighbour to others, right? So with this kind of self-loathing, that kind of self-destruction, and without that foundation of self-acceptance that you mentioned, it becomes impossible, actually, to love our Lord generously or a neighbour well.
So thank you. Okay, a couple of philosophical questions came through. Samuel asks about progress, I would say, in general, and he says this: since the Enlightenment and through philosophers like Hegel, the West has talked about time as something evolving and progressing.It seems to me inevitable that there is truth to this. Decades and millennia of sustained thought have without a doubt provided us with new knowledge and perspectives that were inaccessible to people before us. But, Samuel says, he feels uneasy when this idea of progress is pushed forward by cultural movements who proclaim themselves to be standing on the right side of history.
I wonder what the view of time was in the desert, and do the Fathers provide us with an alternative way forward, another way to progress?
Bishop Varden: Good question. Evidently, there is progress in history in the sense that a Christian understanding of history is not cyclical. We believe in an alpha and an omega.
We believe in a beginning and an end, and we believe that time somehow unfolds linearly and leads toward a finality. So there is a simple chronological progress that is evident and that calls to be acknowledged.
That chronological progress does not necessarily mean that everything keeps getting better. I think we’re living now in a very interesting time and a preoccupying time in so many ways. I’m struck by that when I think of my own parents, for instance, who were born in the ‘30s.
They’ve both gone to God now, and they were by no means naive people. But they came of age in post-war Europe, in Norway, when the world was being rebuilt and there was tremendous progress in industry, in technological advance. You saw the country, the continent emerging from ruins and acquiring a degree of prosperity.
And to my parents, it was simply axiomatic that things were getting better. Because that was, as it were, the paradigm that had shaped their existence. I myself—born in 1974—am to some extent still lodged within that paradigm a bit because I was brought up on it.
But it strikes me when I encounter young people today, teenagers or people in their early 20s, that they quite often have a worldview which is extremely somber. And what they see is everything going to the dogs and everything getting worse. And they see so many elements of precariousness that make them anxious and sometimes angry.
So I think we are living through a historical moment now where the hermeneutic is shifting from a fairly universally accepted narrative of continuous progress to a narrative which is much more self-doubting and ambivalent. That is why it’s so important and so interesting to study history and to have a historical perspective on things. One of the wonderful things about living within the Church, living within the liturgical universe of the Church, engaging with the history of the saints, just following the calendar, is that we have the outstanding advantage of being confronted on a daily, weekly basis with a span of human and Christian experience that covers 2,000 years.
And we have but to follow what is dished out on our plate, day by day, in order to put ourselves in context. And if we do that, we shall render a real service to our society, which is stuck in amnesia and remembers less and less and less and less, and tends to believe that we are somehow living through now a historical moment so exceptional that nothing that has happened before has anything to say to us. That seems to me a supreme illusion and really a great absurdity.
So I would say in response to the question, yes, there is a progress which is historical. How would the Fathers look at this? Well, the Fathers believed in God’s creative purpose, they believed in the centrality of the incarnation of the Word of God in Christ, and they believed in his coming again at the end of time.
You’ll remember one of the apophthegmata we’ve studied: that of Arsenius, who on a Saturday evening would take up position and turn away from the sunset and face east and raise his hands in prayer and stand there and await the dawn—the rising sun of Sunday, a symbol of Christ’s return from the East at the end of time. So they would take the historical progress and the linear unfolding of time for granted, but they would not have fallen for an account of history supposing that everything is in a constant state of improvement, because they saw in their own time, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh century, so many things falling apart, so many structures being ruined, so many great edifices crumbling, that what they believed in was the preparation of a new heaven and a new earth. They had an eschatological purpose to their life here and now.
I think that’s something we could do with resensitising in our own time, because doing that is not a matter of relativising historical experience and the necessity of engaging with the historical process and building up society and building up a civilisation of love. It is remembering that our work of building has a specific purpose, which is that of preparing the world for the Son of Man when he comes and ensuring that when he comes, he will find faith on earth.
Jamie Baxter: The image that comes to mind is just relying on daily bread—that our cups are filled day by day, not all at once, not for a month. The manna comes day by day, essentially. But I would say the other aspect of this, for me in our own context here in the States, I mean, there have just been profound acts of violence within the last couple of weeks. And this idea that everything is just progressing and getting better is challenged in the face of great violence.
And then obviously, on a global scale, you can think not too long ago of just some of the greatest massacres in human history, which completely contradict this idea that as many advancements as we make, and as comfortable perhaps as life can be in places of the world—not everywhere—we are capable of the profoundest falls, I think. And then applying that personally, and within the wisdom of the desert, I mean, that’s the call to constant humility and dependence, recognising that in the falls that we see recounted, we’re capable of every evil. And at times, yes, perhaps making progress by grace, but at other times taking three steps backwards.
But I guess this gets me back to the daily bread: receiving what God has to give now, taking the next step. What also comes to mind in this is the focus on work, the daily work. I think of Anthony’s boredom in the desert and the angel—him going out to see the angel rising from work to pray, going back to work, rising to pray—and that being the solution to his boredom as well. So yeah, I think there are a couple of aspects there from the desert that really touch on this question of progress, and at the very least share the same concern that Samuel has in asking this good question.
Bishop Varden: And the Fathers were so lucid in that regard. When Anthony speaks about the battle of the heart, he makes it quite clear what the stakes are. And he reminds us just how important it is to position ourselves squarely on the side of good, and to make sure that we’re lucid in our discernment of where good is to be found, and not to accept any instrumentalisation of the vocabulary of good for the promotion of a lesser good, which might even be a disguised evil.
Jamie Baxter: Okay, so Grant asks about Stoicism, and his is a wonderful question. I’ll set the context that he provides.
We’re invited to embrace philosophy to better understand our relationship with God. It also seems apparent that as early Christians were attempting to understand how they might develop a practical and spiritual interpretation and application of Christ’s teaching in the world, they were also strongly influenced by several aspects of Stoicism. And he mentions a couple of them: St. Augustine incorporating Stoic virtues and ethics into his theology, Stoic texts forming part of the contemplative literature of monks in the Middle Ages, and the influence of Stoic philosophers in Athens. So this includes a particular focus on virtue ethics in cultivating wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance as a path to moral excellence.
Therefore, considering the recent rise in the modern public’s interest in Stoicism—I might say especially among young men, where I find this all the time—is there value in reading and studying more widely about philosophy and philosophers to better understand our life in Christ?
Bishop Varden: Thank you. It’s very useful just to name that sameness in many ways of cultural aspiration that the Fathers faced and we face. It is extraordinary, as you say, that there is this resurgence of interest in Stoic thinking and Stoic ideals now. And by all means, yes, we can gain great profit from that in terms of the formation of character and a preparation for virtue.
But let us never forget that the finality of Christian living is other than that of Stoicism, which isn’t to say that it’s contradictory, but it transcends it. Because the Christian purpose is not just to become a more complete and harmonious and happy human being, but it is to open myself for the formation of Christ in me so that I may begin to understand what it means to live in him through his indwelling in me, and thereby to become a human being transformed. Because the fundamental Christian proposition is not just a proposition of betterment, but a proposition of the renewal of our being inasmuch as we grow into a participation in divine being.
Jamie Baxter: We’ve a question come in from Zebulon, who asks about artificial intelligence. I was excited to surface this to you, Bishop Erik, perhaps anticipating your Erasmus lecture, which will be coming up next month by the time this is released, through First Things in New York. And so he just asked, what wisdom of the desert could we reflect on to instruct us on the common use of artificial intelligence, if there is any?
A lot of people look to AI for providing them with truth and understanding of the world these days, and we’re now at a point where we ask a question on the internet, and artificial intelligence primarily provides the answer. So I don’t know. Yeah, and I would just say that’s true in my own experience of life.
Whereas maybe a few years ago, maybe even two years ago, you’d go to Google to ask questions, you’re now corresponding with a chatbot, essentially, trying to ask questions that way. So yeah, what wisdom might we glean from the desert for this specific kind of challenge we’re facing in practice today?
Bishop Varden: I think they would be thoughtful. As we’ve seen, many of them—not the majority, but a sizeable minority—were cutting-edge intellectuals. There were some of the finest minds of their time, who were entirely up to date on what was going on.
I think they would have been conscious of the movements and currents in popular culture, and they would have thought deeply about them. They weren’t just bumpkins or society-haters who went out into the desert in a posture of rejection. That said, their purpose in leaving the city and going out into the wilderness was, first of all, to face themselves in truth, and then to seek God as he is.
So what they consistently aimed to do was to go beyond projection and to face the real. We’ve seen, and we’ve talked about, the role that the demonic plays in the life and experience of the Fathers. And again, they had a fairly sophisticated notion of the demonic as being that part of the spiritual universe that issues from God’s creating hand as does every other being, but has somehow gone off the rails and submitted to disorder in order to become agents of disorder.
And I think that’s where they would be profoundly sceptical about an intellectual universe that is governed by algorithms. Because, you know, the Fathers—we’ve talked about this, particularly with regard to Antony, given his friendship with Athanasius, and Athanasius being one of the great upholders of Nicene orthodoxy and one of the great preachers and teachers of the incarnation—what the Fathers were interested in was an encounter with a logos who became flesh, and they were keen for that logos to be embodied in themselves, and they themselves wanted to become logical.
That reasonableness of divine intelligence, ordering intelligence that structures the universe, which is not automatic but a personal intelligence, revealed in an encounter—that was what they were after. So, I think, while they would have been interested, they would be sceptical about an intelligence, however wonderfully adept at providing information, more or less accurate, but at once disembodied and impersonal, because those were the two things they were striving for: to become thoroughly embodied human beings and to see themselves realised in a personal encounter.
Jamie Baxter: One of my great concerns, I guess, about AI and its widespread adoption is its effects on our own persons, and the enfeeblement we can experience where we don’t know—we just know how to ask or know how to search for answers. There was just a beautiful homily yesterday that the priest gave at the local parish on St. Jerome, and he was reflecting upon, in some sense, the profound understanding of Scripture that Jerome had, but he was saying that if he were here, what he would want is not for you to just read his words—he would want you to engage personally with the Word, to be someone who has taken that kind of time to do the work with the Word of God. And obviously ignorance of the Word is ignorance of Christ in St. Jerome’s vocabulary. And I think that’s perhaps one of my greatest concerns—just the degradation in capacity that we might see, and especially in a religious context. We have to just take the time in silence, we have to take the time to wrestle through, meditate, and receive it, embody these Scriptures just like the Fathers did and modelled for us, as we’ve seen all throughout this year.
That didn’t just happen by seeking answers to quick questions. It took a lot of time in community, in an embodied way, as you’ve said.
Bishop Varden: A structuring of our own intelligence and a structuring of our sensibility, and that is work that simply can’t be farmed out. No other person, and certainly no machine, can do that on our behalf. It’s good to remind ourselves and others that we’re not actually obliged to think in a certain way. We can also just put our phone in the fridge and go to the library.
Jamie Baxter: Okay, this question comes from another listener who is seeking to understand a religious vocation, and I thought it was just perfect for you to speak to this personally from your own experience as a monk, Bishop Erik. And he says: I understand the decision of a person to seek out and commit to a rather solitary life of a religious contemplative, and that that might be primarily motivated out of a desire to draw personally closer to Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God. He says, could you please comment on how the opportunity for an individual man or woman to eventually reach a state of sanctification might of itself offer a blessing on behalf of the rest of humanity—to those who are such a long way, perhaps, from achieving that same sanctification?
So it’s basically, how does a solitary religious life serve others? How does that work?
Bishop Varden: Well, it works through the mystical body. And it’s important to take that notion very, very seriously. We do not—we read in Scripture—we do not live for ourselves, we do not die for ourselves.
And St. Paul says—he develops this particularly in the first letter to the Corinthians, a book worth rereading from time to time—he says, if one member of the body is hurting, the whole body is hurting. If one member is glad, the whole body is glad.
We know that from experience. I think of a very spiritual person I know, a very learned person, who some years ago had to have serious knee surgery, and had all sorts of plans for what he was going to do during that time of convalescence—you know, he was going to reread the works of several great theologians and such. So that was all very well.
He went away to have his surgery and to convalesce. And then when we met again, after a few months, I asked, “So how did you get on with all that wonderful reading you were doing?” And he said, “It was a disaster. The only thing I could think about was my knee.” We know what that is like. So the simile that St. Paul develops is a very realistic one. But it also emboldens us to believe that whatever benefit we confer on the body, whatever blessing we imbibe, whatever goodness we draw into it, whatever delight and joy we enliven it with, will somehow affect and somehow oxygenate the whole. And that is the fundamental nature of the apostolic impact of the solitary life. It’s played out at that, you might say, ontological level, in the oneness of the body.
And then, of course, you have the more relational aspect of intercession and prayer. Because anyone who goes into solitude, be it the relative solitude of the cenobitic community or into an eremitical life, which is a very rare vocation, does so not just in order to obtain a personal ecstasy, but in order—we’re recording this on the 1st of October, the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who is emblematic of that vocation. And well, what was her goal?
It was to live as close as she could to the heart of the Church, in order there to embody love. And that is what the consecrated state is about. And insofar as we really say yes to embodying love, well, then we have to discover it in all its height and depth and length and breadth.
And the more we enter the mystery of Christ’s love, the more we shall be fired with compassion for suffering mankind, and the more we shall make that suffering of mankind the object of our own intercession. So there is an economy of charity which is presupposed in the consecrated life. And that is of concrete and very real benefit.
Jamie Baxter: This question reminds me so much of your introduction to The Shattering of Loneliness. Can I read a passage from this? Is this okay? It speaks to it perfectly. You say—you’re talking about remembrance—but it’s a task that stretches me in every direction.
‘To be a monk is to inhabit a limitless universe. It is to be pulled toward a height and a depth, a length and breadth that touch infinity. When lived sincerely, monastic life is a habitat of transformation. The Fathers describe how the monk’s heart is crushed, then opened, and in the process healed. It begins to grow wider to the point of containing the whole world, calling its plight to mind before God, recalling the world to God’s mercy.’
Bishop Varden: I really believe that that is true.
Jamie Baxter: So beautifully and powerfully said. Okay, I wanted to surface a few questions we received on prayer and asceticism next, Bishop Erik.
One is from Gustavo, and I’ll summarise this pretty briefly. He says he felt called to more silent prayer, and he started waking up earlier in order to do so.
But he knows that grace builds on nature, and it’s wearing him out. And he’s sad that he hasn’t been able to respond to this invitation to make this sacrifice, but at the same time, he has the needs of his body. And so he’s trying to give himself more to our Lord and to Our Lady, but is struggling to do so within his circumstances.
What would you suggest for a practical question like that?
Bishop Varden: Well, I think we can all recognise ourselves in Gustavo’s predicament. First of all, I congratulate him on his high ideal. You know, the underlying thing is that we must practice our spiritual lives and pursue our ideals with a degree of pragmatism and realism.
And we have to observe our own state of life with its obligations, because that too is part of the providential scheme in which we find ourselves. So, you know, if I have a job that imposes certain parameters that make it impossible to attend to liturgies and prayers the way I might ideally want, well, my duty is to do my job. And, well, I may try to see if I can find another job, which would be more accommodating.
But that in itself is a Christian duty—to be obedient to our task and to be faithful to it. And likewise, with the sort of obligation that ensues from family commitments or community commitments, whatever. So I think rather than—and, you know, we see this in the religious life and also in anyone really who wakes up one day—we may have read something, or we may have had an experience of grace, or we may have encountered somebody that has fired in us a desire to begin a new life.
And we think, “Right, from tomorrow I’ll begin. And I’ll do this and this and this and that.” And then we form a very glorious scheme, wanting to make sure that both we and others see that this has really made a difference.
And we stick to it for a week and a half. And then we’re either exhausted, or overwhelmed, or questioning, “What is this really about?” The secret is always to proceed by small steps.
And to broaden the scope of my purpose, little by little by little. Growth in the spiritual life—I think I’ve said this before—it really is important, like any other growth, it is organic. You can’t force a carrot to grow by pulling it out of the ground.
It’s got to have the time it needs, first of all, to extend downward. And it’s the same with us. So my advice would be not to give up on the high aspiration, but to pursue it with small and realistic steps, and to rejoice in every little progress.
Jamie Baxter: And this can be one of those areas of self-acceptance. So for me, personally, when I just accepted that I needed about a normal night’s rest as a regular human being, and tried to stop fighting that to find more time to do more, pray more, etc., I found just the acceptance of that limitation to be very liberating for me personally.
At the same time, one of the other things that I’ve received or kind of observed is that there are these periods of silence, even throughout the course of a really full life. Maybe it’s just on the drive to the grocery or between events where there is an opportunity to recollect a bit, but you have to take the opportunities as they come, and it’s not necessarily always all planned out.
Bishop Varden: It’s a really good point, Jamie. I think if we can only learn to begin to live a bit more recollectedly, and to integrate prayer into what we’re doing, whether it is when we’re traveling, or when we’re working, or when we’re studying, to practice quite simply that awareness of being in the presence of God, and living there in a state of reverence and of thanksgiving, then the chances are that prayer may begin to saturate our existence in a new way, and also our encounters and our relationships. So let’s beware of thinking of prayer as always being a separate kind of activity, because when St. Paul urges us to pray at all times, he doesn’t presuppose that we’ll be constantly on our knees in chapel saying the rosary, but he is saying let that upward and outward attention condition each aspect of your existence as you learn more and more to live ecstatically—turned outward and attentive to what is given, attentive to the presence that surrounds you.
Jamie Baxter: Thank you. We had an anonymous question come in from a man who, as a young man, was a novice in a Trappist community. He has been married for many years.
He’s now in his 60s, and he finds himself struggling with just the challenge that contemplative prayer over time has become more difficult for him, and he was willing to suggest perhaps this is just a period of purification in his prayer life, but he was asking about preparations for more contemplative forms of prayer as a layperson.
Bishop Varden: Again, I think I would sound a little note of caution about making contemplative prayer into a thing, or even into an achievement. In the Greek church, when we speak of contemplation, contemplatio—we’ve talked about this a little bit, and I’ve developed it elsewhere—that has to do with seeing. The Latin notion of contemplatio is rendered in Greek, in the Greek contemplative tradition, as theoria, which means even more straightforwardly, seeing.
So, to become a contemplative woman or man is a matter of learning to live with eyes open, eyes capable, eyes purified—I mean, letting our cataracts be extracted, the cataracts of sin, the cataracts that turn our gaze inward, making us self-centred and navel-gazing, helping us to look out, helping us to see the world as it is, and to rejoice in it, to give thanks for it, looking out for Christ, seeking Christ, seeing him as he chooses to reveal himself in his creatures, in other people primarily, in his word, in his sacraments, in his church. So, in order to grow contemplatively, the first thing I must learn is to live with eyes wide open, and to let my gaze be purified. And so, I must ask myself, well, what obscures my gaze?
What are my particular customised cataracts? Where am I short-sighted? And where are my blind spots?
And to work on those—it’s on those terms, and by being radically focused on the search for Christ, on the longing to see Christ, on the desire to follow him, to follow his commandments. That’s how we grow contemplatively, and that’s how we learn to pray.
Jamie Baxter: Okay, a few questions on asceticism. Spencer asks—essentially, he loves penitential seasons, he loves Lent every year, but when Easter rolls around, in the Easter season, he seems to kind of lose the progress that he feels he has made. And he’s basically just asking, how do we live these seasons of joy, and do I need ascetic practices within celebratory seasons like Easter—maybe especially Easter?
Bishop Varden: It makes me think of a story from a book that I love, written by a man called Pavle Rak, who’s Bulgarian, I think, about Mount Athos. There’s a story there about this very austere monk who lived on bread and water, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to feast at Easter. But what he would do on Easter Sunday is that he would take some fish bones and draw them through his water, and then he would reassure his brethren that he’d regaled himself with a delicious fish soup.
But I think the question to ask is, why does feasting distract me? Is it because I overdo it? And is it because when the opportunity arises, I indulge in a surfeit and thereby get distracted?
If so, I think it would be a good exercise to practice feasting with moderation, and to rejoice in good things without taking that enjoyment to excess, and thereby to make the contrast less violent. Because I would say, in response to the question, it is good to maintain moderation in our practices, in our eating, in our drinking, in our self-indulgence, in the way we engage with comforts, etc. But at the same time, it is good to rejoice in what is good, and particularly it is good to share it with others.
I think of that scene early on in the life of Saint Benedict, when Benedict has lived as a hermit at Subiaco for quite a long time, and he hasn’t got a calendar, so he lives in his cave, and he prays, and he fasts, and he offers himself up, and he’s not entirely sure what day it is. And then there’s a priest in the neighbourhood who receives an illumination from God on Easter Sunday, telling him that there is a servant of God nearby who’s living in the forest as a hermit, and that this priest should go and share his Easter lunch with him. And Saint Gregory the Great tells the story very nicely, and you can get a fairly vivid image of this priest, who’s probably kept a good Lent, and he’s been looking forward to his Easter lunch, and it’s all ready.
And then he gets this instruction to go out into the forest and put it all into a basket, and he sort of says, “All right, then, if it has to be, I’ll do that.” And so he does all that, and he takes all his good things along, and he finds Benedict, and he says, “Brother, rejoice with me, because today is Easter.” And Benedict says, “Today is Easter indeed, because you are here, and the Lord has brought us together.”
And then they sit down and eat. And I think that is wonderful, that this extremely austere and purpose-conscious ascetic doesn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second to receive graciously and with gratitude and joy the good thing, the baking that this stranger brings, and that he’s been saving up through all of Lent. So I think, let’s not forget that that too is a kind of self-overcoming—to share in the joy of others and to engender joy for others.
Jamie Baxter: Chris asks about the discipline of the tongue, which we’ve talked about at length within the series, and especially the chapter on self-control. That was one of your observations—how much of this is about speech. And he just admits, “This is something I think a lot about, but I also struggle with most mightily,” he says.
And he resonates with the father—he couldn’t remember his name—who holds the pebble in his mouth for three years until he’s finally learned to keep silence. But he was just wondering about similar strategies or suggestions. How do we put this into practice today?
And he does reveal, “I’m in a communications job. It’s my job to talk. So I can’t do this literally.”
Any recommendations for those of us working to better hold our tongue?
Bishop Varden: It makes me laugh because I remember when we recorded that episode—that was at home in Trondheim. And I had a group of friends who were helping me with the recording and doing the camera and things like that. And when I’d finished that episode and finished with the story about the man who held the pebble in his mouth for three years, and we’d finished recording, the cameraman just looked at me and said, “Ouch.”
So I think we can all recognise ourselves in that.
Jamie Baxter: We didn’t record that month together. And my crew had the same thing happen. They were like, “What?”
Bishop Varden: Three years? I think the secret is to proceed rationally and realistically. And just to try and seek out some time every day to shut up.
To be quiet, to enjoy quiet. And you might do that by going for a walk in the park, or by just sitting in a chair, by saying a decade of the rosary, or even just by sitting entirely still and doing nothing. Or you can do it —
I mean, that’s something I do myself sometimes. Quite often, actually. Because in the job that is entrusted to me now, I talk a lot and I get so tired of the sound of my own voice sometimes to the point of despair.
So at the end of the day, I’m full of words and full of noise. And what I do then is to sit down in a chair and listen to music. If I have time, I might listen to a Mozart piano concerto, or even a movement from a Mozart piano concerto, or a song, or whatever it might be.
There’s something about settling down and deliberately listening without having and without wanting to formulate an answer, without saying anything about what I hear, but focusing entirely on taking it in. That can be a way into silence, and may help me then afterward just to enjoy being quiet for 10 minutes or 15 or half an hour. So I think, you know, if your job is in communication, communicating is what you have to do.
But your communication will be the more effective, the more it springs from a base of silence. I think we can all ascertain that, you know, if we just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, we end up repeating ourselves, peddling banalities, just saying what people have heard already. And we bore ourselves, and we bore other people even more.
But if somehow our words spring from silence, they will have authority and meaningfulness, and potentially even a kind of beauty that they wouldn’t have otherwise. The chances are then that our words might actually contribute something, rather than just being part of the endless music that is like, you know, the sort of tunes you hear going up and down an elevator. You take notice of it when you hear it. But the moment you step outside the elevator, you couldn’t tell anyone what you’ve heard.
Jamie Baxter: Bishop Erik, we have a few more personal questions, but we can try to hit them a little bit more quickly so that we can wrap up with the time that we both have for this recording here today. Raphael asks a question about how to think about savings for retirement—he obviously has been following us closely and the sayings from the chapter on possessing nothing, I believe. And he says, “I understand that I cannot place my trust in the savings, but I need to trust in the Lord. But I do believe I should save for the future. What’s the correct way to understand this as a married person? Yeah, thanks for the podcast,” he says.
Bishop Varden: To be rational and responsible—responsible with regard to yourself and with regard to the people who are entrusted to you, and with regard to the people who would need to take care of you if you couldn’t take care of yourself. And, you know, we heard of one of the fathers who lived on Mount Sinai, who, while he was there, because he was far away from people, would make sure that he ate properly, that he slept properly, that he looked after himself so as not to be an inconvenience to others. And the same holds for all of us.
And, you know, if you’re a person living in the world with a family, you couldn’t and you shouldn’t live like a monk under vows. So I would say, you know, plan responsibly, avoid hoarding for hoarding’s sake, but make sure you have enough so as not to be a burden to others, and perhaps in order even to be able to be generous to others and to help them and be at peace.
Jamie Baxter: A similar kind of question on the application to lay life was one from David, in which he was recalling the saying about spitting blood. You know, a brother had said a hurtful word, and an angel turned it to blood and he spat it forth from his mouth rather than offer a hurtful word in response. And he’s essentially asking, how do I apply that without drawing away from my spouse as conflicts arise that do need to be addressed together for the communion of the relationship?
And he just kind of plainly admits to often kind of not engaging, but withdrawing, and that not actually bringing reconciliation and causing other pain. How do I live out this teaching in marriage?
Bishop Varden: Sensible question. Well, what that teaching is about is not that we shouldn’t say things as they are. What the saying addresses is the temptation to speak in anger, and so to speak precipitately and to speak vengefully in order to inflict a wound as retribution for the wound that I myself have suffered through whatever humiliating remark was addressed to me.
And so it is about holding one’s tongue in order not to speak passionately, but it is a Christian virtue and a Christian imperative to speak the truth in love. So the secret is to try to keep one’s tongue as long as anger is burning or as long as an inward pain might draw me to say words aimed to hurt rather than to repair, but by all means to address wrongs and to try and put them right and to pursue reconciliation and not just to sweep difficulties under a carpet.
Jamie Baxter: Okay, and our final question comes from a listener in Canada. He’s a young man who’s read all of your writings and is really grateful for the spiritual paternity you’ve offered him from a distance. And yeah, he just has a really honest question that I think a lot of young men would recognize as a struggle in themselves.
And it’s this tendency as he’s finding himself in romantic relationships to invest so heavily early that it becomes a kind of idol and ultimately becomes this top priority and God gets kind of backburnered in these periods of his life. And he says he thinks that this comes from a desire to kind of compensate for a wound through these relationships and affections. What advice would you suggest on how to rightly order these desires while also being open to a potential vocation to marriage, while also keeping God at the center of my life?
Bishop Varden: Well done for asking the question! I think it’s very promising if you can ready yourself for a relationship with that degree of self-knowledge and insight. I would say, you know, if the focus on romantic relationship, on the possibility of romantic relationship is overwhelming, that may have something to do with a felt need for affirmation, for reassurance, for being found attractive, lovable, desirable.
And, you know, at one level, we all have that thirst within us, but that too is something that needs to be ordered. And so if that becomes a passionate impulse in my life and even something that I need, as it were, to be stocked up regularly—you know, if I need affirmation to be given me in regular doses—let me ask myself, well, why is that? What is it in me that makes me doubt my desirability or my capacity for relationship in such a way?
And I think the best way from a faith perspective of doing that is to really train oneself in believing that God loves me, to believe that I am lovable, to believe that I was conceived in God’s mind lovingly, and that I’m lovingly intended to manifest and share an aspect, an inalienable aspect of God’s love in this world, and that God has a purpose for me, and that my great task in this world is to embody that purpose and to spread it, to spread it abroad, to share it, and to be a source of happiness and peace and flourishing and fecundity for others. So to root yourself in the certainty, which is a certainty of faith, but to labor to interiorize it, the certainty that I am loved and that for that reason I can actually, without fear of losing myself in the bad way that we talked about earlier on, that I can turn out of myself and toward others, and I can love them in God, even as I can love God in them, and thereby to overcome this dichotomy, this felt dichotomy, that somehow the love of God is over there and the love of another person, of other people, is over there, because love is one, and the task of our lives is to unite it.
Jamie Baxter: Well, with that, Bishop Erik, thank you so much for your time and to our listeners for such wonderful, touching and personal questions as well.
Bishop Varden: I second that, thank you very much.
Jamie Baxter: I was actually at a conference a couple of weeks ago at Notre Dame, and someone said, honestly, some of my favourites are just the Q&As, hearing both of you kind of go back and forth, but also the questions that have come forth are so many that I’ve experienced listening to the series along through the year. So, thank you to those of you who took the time to write in to us. It’s been a gift to present them here to you, Bishop Erik, to speak to from your wisdom and experience.
Just a note: our October episodes coming out are on the ninth chapter of the Systematic Collection, and they’re on Not Judging Anyone, a very powerful, convicting chapter, as they all have been, but I found that one to be particularly personally powerful for me. And those were filmed in Subiaco, so to maybe let the cat out of the bag, Bishop Erik and I were together a few weeks back recording through sites of St. Benedict, who, again, we’re ending our series with. And our October episodes were filmed from Subiaco, where he retreated from Rome for a period of a couple of years before he would go to Monte Cassino, which is where we filmed our November and December episodes, which will be on the topic of discernment from the tenth chapter before turning to the life of St. Benedict to wrap our first season up in the month of December. But before we close and have a closing prayer and blessing from you, Bishop Erik, I thought I wanted to open the floor for you to kind of speak to these geographies, what they mean, yeah, and your perspective on why we chose the sites that we did to wrap this series that began with Anthony, through the systematic collection here with St. Benedict.
Bishop Varden: Well, I was keen from the beginning when you and I talked about this series to begin and end with a biographical profile in order to make the point very clearly that we’re talking about real lives and real persons who in the communion of saints can become our friends and our helpers, and who can become real exemplars. I love the sites. I’ve had the good fortune of visiting the main sites of St. Benedict’s life a number of times over the years. I first visited Subiaco as a very young man when I was 19, and I was overwhelmed by it. And every time I go back, I can feel some of that thrill that I felt there. And, you know, Benedict was born in Nursia, modern-day Norcia, not all that far from Assisi, so in the plains of northern Italy.
And then he went to Rome for his studies, but he didn’t stay there long. He didn’t like Rome. He thought there was something not very sane about the air he breathed, and he wanted to live a different sort of life.
So he retreated to the south of Rome to Subiaco, which is a valley with a river running through it. And that’s where he settled in this cave, which is in a mountainside in a forest. So he really went, you know, he retreated into the bowels of the earth in order there to live a secret existence and to be reformed, much as Antony was, you know, in his fortress in the desert.
And then there was his discovery when this priest came on Easter Sunday, and various other circumstances led to his revelation to people round about. And various things happened—we’ll talk a bit about that—that decided him not to stay in Subiaco. And so he took some of his followers who’d gathered around him with him and moved away from Subiaco to Monte Cassino, and there settled on the top of a mountain.
So he goes from the bowels of the earth up onto this mountain, which is not terribly high, but because the plain is so flat, it seems like a real mountain. And even to this day, when you stand there, you have a sense of being in a very high place. And there, you know, he set about exemplifying the evangelical topos of the city built on a hilltop that cannot be hidden.
So I’m just—well, I was thrilled, first of all, that you and I could actually be together, Jamie, having had these conversations on screens across continents, that we could experience these places together, that we could meet in them, talk in them, pray in them, and that we could follow some of Saint Benedict’s progression from hiddenness to epiphany, and thereby also reflect on what that means for our own lives, because any ascetic endeavor is ultimately for the purpose of the revelation of Christ to the world. And so I think it’s good, too, that at the end of this intense year that we shall spend together by the end of December, we ask ourselves, each and every one of us, in our particular circumstances, what is the mountain that is waiting for me, so that I there can proclaim a word of life and of hope to our time and to the people in the places committed to me?
Jamie Baxter: Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap up with that exhortation, Bishop Erik. So thank you so much. That time together was such a gift to me and to Doyle, and I’m so excited to share those sites with our listeners over the coming months.
Bishop Varden: Likewise, thanks to you, Jamie.
Jamie Baxter: Would you close us with a prayer and a blessing, Bishop Erik?
Bishop Varden: Absolutely.
Lord, we thank you for calling us into your Church and for letting us discover the untold riches of the communion of saints, and for letting us benefit from the teaching, wisdom, and example of so many of the saints who’ve gone before us and who surround us now. Help us to absorb, understand, and embody wisely the light that you entrust to us, to let it shine gloriously, here and now, that the world may believe.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen. And may the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit come down upon you and remain with you always.
View from the Loggia del Paradiso at Montecassino.