Tag: monks

BEWARE THE CHEESE MONKS!

Modern values focus on individualism

postmodern values focus on relativism

and often both result in nihilism and meaninglessness.

We all have limitless wealth –

the whole Creation is given to us by God

but we get so caught up in individualistic or relativistic

competition/defeat/victory

that we no longer see

what is right in front of us.

 

A competitive society is violent

so the apparent passivity Jesus preached

in the Sermon on the Mount –

turn the other cheek – seems absurd

but is actually subversive resistance

which forces perpetrators to face

their own violence.

 

What Thomas Merton rejected in the “world”

was not wealth or ambition

but the world’s triviality –

its fads/advertising/masks of hypocrisy

which even his comrades he disparagingly called

the “cheese monks” got caught up in –

as if their true calling/purpose was to produce

excellent cheeses or liqueurs!

 

The Catholic Church got so off track

that sex scandals broke it –

one third of people raised Catholic

vacated the premises

and with the pandemic

another third departed.

 

If real transformation never happens for Christians

then for professional church staff

their work becomes just a career

and for lay people church becomes something

one just attends, an afterthought

instead of the living Body of Christ

which heals the “world” and its violence

by giving it profundity.

 

 

LIBERATION THROUGH MINDFULNESS

All ‘holons’ (living systems)

have four fundamental capacities:

self-preservation/self-adaptation/

self-transcendence/and self-dissolution.

The 100 billion people who have come and gone

have always been caught up in ‘I’/‘We’/and ’It’ –

and they have always created ‘Its’ –

institutions/governments/religions

to control them and tell them what to do.

 

Persons with an insecure

or particularly avoidant ‘attachment style’

are much more prone to dramatic religious conversion –

out of a deep need for security

they follow religious authorities without question

and become fundamentalists in every religion.

 

However, when people go to retreat centers

often the monks teach them mindfulness

and that everything can be done mindfully

whether praying/walking/eating/working.

This new level of consciousness

liberates those with a fundamentalist bent.

 

Still, shadow projections can prevail

in every human conflict. The need to be

right/get your way/dominate/control others

can cause the breakup of relationships –

friendships/marriages/families.

 

But children and parents at least

help each other by standing together

through hardships at every stage:

infancy to old age –

through every manner of challenge

until death parts them

but even then, wise spouses

bravely accept and esteem widowhood

as a continuation of their marital vocation –

even death can be overcome with mindfulness.

 

3 Big Ideas for April 18, 2019

  1. Every spiritual path begins with a founder who experiences a deep spiritual conversion. Then his followers turn this I-THOU relationship between the founder and God into an I-IT relationship by developing beliefs, creeds, rituals, and institutions. And the gap grows between the founder’s experience and his disciples’ lives as the founder fades away in historical time. We need to constantly try to recapture the founder’s original experience.
  2. D. H. Lawrence, mostly known for his erotic novels, was also a spiritual man who wrote that our deepest religious urge is to come into direct contact with the deep elemental life of the cosmos and to derive energy and life from it. He believed that erotic energy underlies everything in the universe, and that God is not only “agape” (suffering love) but also “eros” (the power of attraction) which expresses itself most fully in human sexuality. When the masculine energy of the universe meets the feminine energy, fire happens.
  3. In his “Discourse on Mindful Breathing,” the Buddha taught “Breathing in, I recognize my feeling. Breathing out, I calm my feeling.” Christian monks teach similar spiritual practices. Medical science has now proven them both right: when you inhale and then slowly let your breath out, the breathing out activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which has a calming effect on your whole body. Science is gradually catching up with and proving wisdom taught by ancient religion.