[The following entry is from an article I wrote while at the ashram, for Shantivanam's 1993 “yearbook” publication:]

Yoga, the art of meditation, is a gift of India for all humanity. The yogis have discovered and refined numerous practices to aid in integrating flesh and spirit and interiorizing our experience of being in the world and time.

Many people, myself included, have asked why the West does not have its own yoga, why the Christian contemplative tradition has elaborated so few practical techniques of meditation. The answer, of course, is that, given the Christian emphasis on the role of divine grace in spiritual growth, Western contemplatives saw less need for the type of psycho-physical procedures used by India’s yogis. God’s grace would suffice to lead the meditator’s mind to a one-pointed focus on God.

However, Western Christianity did develop some methods of meditation, even before the famous Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Perhaps the most important of these methods is the practice called lectio divina (“divine reading”). Its classic form is given in a letter by Guigo the Carthusian, written in the year 1150. Guigo’s method comprises four stages: Reading, Meditating, Invoking, and Contemplating.

The first stage, Reading, does not refer to the way we usually read a book today, even the Bible, in order to obtain information, knowledge, and entertainment. It does not require that we read the text from start to finish. Guigo’s Reading means to allow the eye to move slowly up and down the page, focusing now on one phrase, now on another.

In the second stage, we concentrate on one brief phrase, even just a word or two. In this stage of Meditating we seek a meaning beyond the literal sense of the word, a fuller and deeper sense of the text. Above all we find the whole in the least part, giving us a holographic vision of God’s teaching.

Then our attention shifts, spontaneously and gradually, from the words and their various levels of meaning to the divine presence within us. We begin to call on that presence, with spoken or mental words or even wordlessly. Sometimes the words we use in this stage of Invoking are the same words we have been reading in the text, but now they come from our heart as if they were our own words.

We reach the final stage, Contemplating, when our interior gaze rests lovingly and simply on God, forgetting the words of the text and our meditation upon it.

However simple it might seem, this method is quite demanding. It presupposes a serious effort on our part to understand the meaning of the sacred text, using even scholarly tools to the extent of our ability. We are warned to be mindful of the difference between mere fantasizing and the fuller sense of the word that lectio divina can give us. But the greatest challenge is to lift the word from the page and place it in our heart.

Guigo’s method of lectio divina is not original with him; its roots are deep in Christian, Jewish, and Greek traditions. More than a century before Guigo, St. Peter Damian, in chapter thirty-one of his Life of Blessed Romuald, describes a spiritual experience of the monastic reformer St. Romuald of Ravenna. The four stages of Master Romuald’s experience correspond perfectly to those of the classic lectio divina method.

Romuald is in a place called Parenzo (modern day Croatia), where he has just built a monastery with a group of disciples. He has accomplished his outward tasks, but he is in anguish for his lack of the “gift of tears,” the ability given to many monastic saints, in which the intensity of their prayer leads them to weep for joy and yearning for heaven. However hard he tries, Romuald can’t wring a single tear from his eyes.

Then one day, as he is singing the Psalms, Romuald’s attention remains fixed on the verse in which God says: “I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you, with My eye upon you” (Psalm 32:8).

Instantly tears well up in his eyes, and his mind penetrates deep into the spiritual meaning of the words he has been reading. From then on, Romuald will be able to shed spiritual tears and see with his cleared inner vision the hidden meaning of Scripture.

On fire with love, Romuald cries out, “Dear Jesus, beloved Jesus, sweet delight of saints, bliss of angels…!” Then the Holy Spirit transforms his words into a chant of jubilation, beyond all human words and thoughts. St. Paul says, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but God’s own Spirit intercedes for us, with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

Peter Damian’s story about Master Romuald seeking God in the Psalms unfolds according to the same four stages of lectio divina that Guigo will describe, more than a hundred years later. These stages are related to the four verbs in the saying of Jesus: “Seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). Seek: Romuald is reading the Psalms and is seeking; he seeks not just the meaning of the words but rather the meaning of his existence in relation to God. He seeks to understand why his feelings remain cold and arid when he meditates. Find: then he finds a word of Scripture that speaks to his heart and responds to his seeking. He receives the “gift of tears” and the promise that God’s eye will be upon him and show him the way he must go. In other words, the deeper meaning that Romuald begins to find in the Scriptures is ultimately the sense of his own existence.

Romuald’s new understanding leads him to knock at God’s door. His knocking, his prayer, is the name of Jesus. He reaches the final stage when the door of contemplation opens, and his prayer dissolves into sighs too deep for words. Just as meditation leads into the prayer of invocation and gratefulness, so prayer leads beyond itself into that state where, as St. Antony Abbot (fourth century) said: “You truly pray when you no longer know that you are praying.”

This is the final step described in yoga texts as the passage from savikalpa samadhi to nirvikalpa samadhi, from a contemplation with mental acts to one without them, when “knower, knowing and known are one.”

Clearly, the spiritual practice implied in Peter Damian’s narrative of Master Romuald’s realization of God’s eye follows the path of bhakti yoga, as all Christian practice must. However, Romuald’s experience, leading as it does to silent jubilation and “divine unknowing,” is also the “royal way” (raja yoga), which includes the three ways of love, knowledge, and service.

FRI 28 MAY 93

Anthropological reflections: In human beings, love is physical or it does not exist. There is “infused love” — the Holy Spirit in us — but there is no “supernatural” love which floats about disembodied. Even infused love of neighbor, “heroic charity,” is physical; it is love for the neighbor’s embodied person and for our union in the Mystical Body.
    I love my neighbor when my love facilitates the fulfillment of the basic needs of the human person as embodied. These needs can be summed up under four headings: nourishment, repose, creative activity, and sexual activity.
    1. Nourishment: all humans need to eat, but this need is not answered only by filling the belly. Nourishment is best when food is taken in a convivial atmosphere: “How good and how pleasant it is, when people eat [live] together” (Psalm 133); “Thou preparest a table before me” (Psalm 23). This number 1 often precedes and leads to the others, but it may be postponed for the sake of 2 (fasting).
    2. Repose: writers of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages gave great importance to otium, leisure, or what Italians call “the sweet doing nothing, il dolce far niente”, which may become a vice but can also be a virtue. “The Lord gives to His beloved while they sleep” (Psalm 127). “Yoga is not for him who sleeps too little” (Bhagavad-Gita 6:16). Beginning with the Renaissance and especially with the late 16th century, otium began to be despised, the contemplative life was ridiculed, and human existence was ordered to “production” as its ultimate end. The last hundred years or so have seen the rediscovery of the value of not-doing. The first democratic right is the right to strike, to sit down on the job, to protest by not doing anything. The first and highest freedom of the human being is to see with your own eyes, to hear with your ears, and to draw your own conclusions. “Unless I see with my eyes and touch with my finger, I shall not believe” (Thomas, in John 20:25). Contemplation of reality as it really is makes possible number 3, as the creative changing of reality. Activity follows contemplation.
    3. Creative activity: the human body needs to move, to walk, to dance, to run and play, to plant and harvest and build and tear down. This activity is fundamental for experiencing your body as your own and as a member of another, greater Body. Creative activity can also be productive, because it serves number 1, but humans nourished themselves for most of the time since their appearance not by working the soil but by gathering the fruits of the forest, the savanna, and the waters. The activities of number 3 are not to be justified by their productivity. When productivity is the chief or only criterion, these activities lose their human quality, number 2 tends to be reduced to the minimum, and number 1 becomes mere belly-filling. Even sports and the arts are ruined by being reduced to the production of “goods and services” for the “market.”
    4. Sexual activity: this usually comes after the other three, although 4 may end with 2 as sleep or it may be set aside for the sake of 2 as contemplation (monastic celibacy). Sexual activity is good in itself and needs no extrinsic justification, not even its possible fruit in the generation of a new human being. Every human enjoys the right to sexual activity, pleasure, and fulfillment, and has the duty not to impede this in others. Even those who refrain from sexual activity for the right reasons — ultimately, for the sake of love — do not lose this right, and if their renunciation is not repressive or violent, they will continue to experience some degree of sexual pleasure, normally in connection with number 2 (sleeping and dreaming).

SAT 29 MAY 93

Today is the last weekday of Easter time, and the Gospel (John 21) gives us the “other disciple,” the “one who remains,” while Peter is led away bound. The other disciple, the one whom Jesus loves, is a figure of contemplative witness, charismatic and not institutional, or perhaps the sages of India, before and after Jesus — Yajñavalkya, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Anandamoyi Ma…
    Regarding the “four basic needs,” our society and our economy have commercialized and “productivized” everything. Food is “fast,” repose is replaced by voluntary insomnia, work produces without creating, and sexual activity is either repressed or reduced to one more piece of merchandise. Sex in art, the fusion of 3 and 4, has degenerated into pornography. Sports and the arts are “spectacularized” and are turned into multi-million-dollar deals. All nourishment tends to assimilate itself to “fast food,” although I admit I have a soft spot in my heart for the original McDonald’s, next to where I lived through my teens, at Fourteenth and “E” Streets in San Bernardino, California. All told, McDonald’s has offered low-income and marginalized persons a certain possibility for convivium, at modest prices, having become a kind of triclinium pauperum (“banquet hall of the poor”) for advanced capitalism.

THU 29 APR 93

In Apulia, at the Abbey of Santa Maria della Scala, near the city of Noci in southern Italy, for an inter-religious gathering on “Guilt and Forgiveness.”
    The abbot asked me to preach at Mass this evening, for the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, and my meditation this morning was accompanied by much discursive consideration of this twenty-something lay Dominican who in the 14th century dictated letters to popes and prelates and then was declared a Doctor of the Church by Paul VI.
    Some notes on the talks.
    Italian phenomenologist of religion Pettazzoni wrote a book in 1929 entitled La confessione dei peccati, “The Confession of Sins.” He said confession is based on a primitive, totalizing, magical world view. Sin disturbs the divine order. To confess means to “invoke” the sin in order to purify it. But both Christianity and Buddhism point beyond this magical view.
    The problem in Buddha’s time was a “mechanistic” paradigm of karma. He said that what counts is intentionality, motivation. There is no karma without mindfulness and an act of the will.
    “In Buddhism, ‘Dharma” occupies the place which ‘God” occupies in Christianity.” Buddhadasa is quoted to sustain this affirmation. D. T. Suzuki said that both Buddhists and Meister Eckhart worship “the Nameless Nothing.”
    Venerable Seevali, Theravada Buddhist, says that “guilt” is an unwholesome thought, and “remorse” is a hindrance. Remorse is grieving over evil done, good not done. Most guilty feelings come not from the awareness of having committed gravely evil actions but from a sense of personal inadequacy in the face of too-high expectations we have for ourselves (I agree). Buddhism sees we do right and wrong, although our essential being is of Buddha-nature. Our minds become impure through wrongdoing. Monastic discipline: casuistry and confession do not affect the monk’s karmic destiny, which must be worked out through practice of virtues, meditation, and wisdom. “Forgiveness” is of the Buddha-nature; it is expressed through forbearance, tolerance, patience, compassion.
    Yesterday afternoon I was translating for the Hindu and the Buddhist, and so I could not take notes on Francis Tiso’s talk, which was erudite, as expected. Several were pleased with my talk at Mass.
    Supper conversation with Tiso and Father Sacchi: on the coming collapse of Catholic structures, because the vast majority of Roman Catholics do not live their belonging to the Church in the context of a Eucharistic community. Structures will collapse, also because most priests formed in the clerical paradigm will die out early next century.
    Tomorrow afternoon I am to give a talk on chapter eleven of the Bhagavad Gita. My focus will be on Arjuna’s cry, “God, I do not understand you!”
    A Muslim speaker stated that the Turks were the only people who embraced Islam on their own initiative. He also spoke of a young man in Turin who wanted to “become a Sufi” without having to hear any sermons about Islam.

I returned to Berkeley after forty days in Italy — so good being with
the wonderful monks and nuns I lived with for more than thirty years —
and now I want to pick up the thread of this blog, as well as the
YouTube channel (“thomasmatus”). Here, I mean to post excerpts from
ashram diaries other than those that made it into print, thoughts and
dreams I cut in order to simplify the book and give it narrative flow.
But in a blog one can be more contemplative and meandering. I hope
you’ll enjoy it, and visualize India with me.

At the monastery of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome, from where I departed for most of my retreats at the ashram, Shantivanam, in Tamil Nadu. The Ashram Diary is circulating among readers here, in the UK, and of course in the US. The reason for my being here was a symposium on "Mission and Monasticism" held at the Benedictine University of Sant'Anselmo. I spoke about "Mission as Divinization" according to Jules Monchanin, Henri Le Saux, and Bede Griffiths. In other words, "conversion" is not the aim, but rather "becoming God" as the ultimate end of a dialogue both interpersonal and interfaith. "Heart speaks to heart" says the Latin motto: Cor ad cor loquitur. (The image above is of Swami Chidananda who is clasping my hands; it was taken in Assisi, on May 12, 1997.)

I'm reading a few pages near the beginning of my Ashram Diary (London: O Books, 2009; ISBN 978-1-84694-161-0). I hope you enjoy it!

It has taken years for me to find the voice I needed to express what India has meant to me. Now I have extracted — from the first few years of the journal I kept while at Shantivanam, listening to Bede Griffiths — a coherent story, part of an initiation journey, and I discover that my whole life has been like the symbolic immersion into the sacred river Kaveri. The story is in the book Ashram Diary: In India with Bede Griffiths — a story of immersion and induction into the freedom of the sannyasis, India’s “renunciants” who paradoxically embrace all reality, sacred figures who are free from all rituals of home fires and temple fires. Bede was an exemplar of the cross-cultural human, a Christian who “transgressed” — literally, “walked across” — the boundaries that seem to separate East and West. He truly married them in his soul, both sides, breathing with both lungs.

When Bede immersed me into the river, I was only a beginner, although with some years of monastic life and training behind me, and with my teen-age initiation into Paramahansa Yogananda’s kriya or sacred action of breath and energy leading into consciousness of the cosmic Christ. Kriya Yoga was an original gift that I brought with me when I embraced the traditional Christianity of the Camaldolese monks in Big Sur, and they have let me keep it.

Time has passed since the years of my diary, time with its gift of greater harmony between outer and inner life, and perhaps I am finally ready to follow Bede’s holy transgression and make my own crossover into a consciousness more and more cosmic. If you read my book, join in my thankful hope for this grace, and find your own crossing-point.

Of course the community soon returned to the Big Sur hermitage, unscathed by the flames, which however did blacken the hills that you see while approaching the hermitage bookstore (after the last curve in the entrance road). It is sad to see the land so disfigured; and yet we know by experience how resilient the Big Sur ecosystem is, and we hope that after seasonal rains, green will again overtake the charred terrain.

Ashram Diary: In India with Bede Griffiths is now in page proofs. I have corrected these, and soon will begin posting videos and passages both from the published diaries and even some diary entries — stories and scenes of India and elsewhere — that I had to cut. The book is due out in February, and if you like these postings, please order Ashram Diary (London: O Books, 2009; ISBN 978-1-84694-161-0) online or at your local bookseller.

On the web site of the Jesuit magazine America, a recent blog entitled “National Security and the Quran,” contained the following passage, to which I add a comment. Tell me what you think:

“If we wish to be seen as champions of freedom, including religious freedom, desecrating anyone else’s sacred texts or symbols is counter-productive.”

In my opinion, this purely political reasoning is totally inadequate. The acts of desecrating the Quran, part of the torture program in Iraq and at Guantánamo, are immoral and inadmissable from the standpoint of the Second Vatican Council, which exhorted Catholics to “acknowledge, preserve, and promote [promoveant] the spiritual and moral goods found among [the followers of other religions], as well as the values in their society and culture” (Nostra Ætate n. 2). It is not enough to “be seen”; we must be persons who seek religious freedom — not only, or primarily, for ourselves, but for all. And as the Council would have it, Christians must promote the Islam of Muslims, and see their life of faith, prayer, pilgrimage, and charity as part of what Christians believe to be God’s plan for the happiness of humankind.

Incredibly we heard the news from Fr. Isaiah — Hermitage guest master — that the New Camaldoli community was evacuated again, under threat of fire. Never before in these fifty years has the community had to leave the place twice in a season (or even twice in successive years).

I give you the latest posting from www.InciWeb. org/

Incident: Chalk Wildland Fire
Released: 11 hrs. ago (Sunday, October 19, 8:00 p.m.)

CHALK FIRE UPDATE

Fire Statistics

Acres burned: 14,666

Miles of fireline to build: 7.5

Date started: 9/27/08 (evening)

Percent contained: 79%

Expected containment: 11/01/2008

Firefighter injuries to date: 17

Structures threatened: 49

Structures destroyed: 0

Suppression cost to date: $18.2M

Firefighting Resources

Crews: 8

Engines: 25

Helicopters: 11

Air tankers: 10

Dozers: 4

Total personnel assigned: 601

Current Status: The firing operation which started about noon today was successful. Crews started from the dozer line approximately 2 miles north of the New Camaldoli Hermitage and burned south along the dozer line. As of this afternoon the firing had almost reached the Hermitage. Crews will continue with the firing operation into this evening as long as there is still opportunity to burn. Crews supported by helicopters and air tankers worked to hold the ridge NW of Twin Peak parallel with the Carizzo Trail. In the Limekiln State Park area, the fire is backing down slowly.

Tonight crews will continue to hold and support the firing operations. Structure protection continues in Limeklin State Park and the Hermitage. Cool temperatures and good relative humidity with light winds should result in minimal perimeter growth. Along the coast, below 1,500 ft. the marine layer will continue to be temperatures cool and moist throughout the night. Firefighter and public safety continue to be the highest priority.

Evacuations: On Friday, October 17, The Monterey County Sheriff's Department issued an EVACUATION WARNING for Limekiln State Park north to the New Camaldoli Hermitage. Approximately 9 residents are within the evacuation area. This stage of Evacuation Warning is given for affected areas where there is imminent threat to life and property. Persons who receive notification of this warning should evacuate in accordance with the direction given to them by Sheriff's Department Deputies who are on scene.

An EVACUATION WATCH was also issued by the Monterey County Sheriff's Department for Lucia north to Lopez Point. This stage of Evacuation Watch is for areas where a threat to life and property exists. Persons who receive notification of this watch are not required to evacuate but should be prepared to evacuate should an Evacuation Warning be issued. Significant resources (hand crews, engines and dozers) are engaged in structure protection.

Highway, Road and Area Closures: Highway-1 is open. Nacimiento-Fergusson Road remains closed, as well as South Coast Ridge Road, south to Willow Creek Road.

Last Sunday, Arthur and I (from the monastery in Berkeley) joined the parade in Oakland from where the old Catholic cathedral used to be (at 21st Street and San Pablo, ruined by the 1993 earthquake) to the new one overlooking Lake Merritt. A great melange of ethnic groups singing, dancing, and drumming (Koreans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Hispanics, Brazilians and what not), we marched the six blocks to the new Cathedral, under the eyes of other Sunday congregations along the way (True Faith Baptist Church had people on the steps watching). This was the first liturgical ceremony in the new building, which is now open to the general public, and I think they will be giving guided tours at some times. The ceremony included a beautiful gesture of pouring different waters into the baptismal pool: from the River Jordan, from Saint Peter's in Rome, from the healing pool at Lourdes in France, and from Lake Merritt itself (!) along with water from each of the 84 parishes in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.