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lssanjose
Guest
Thanks, for the heads up, brother Peter.
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ConstantineTG
Guest
Monasticism. While there are true monastics, the Eastern way is that everyone is called to monasticism in some way, shape or form. But only the monks are called as such because they live the ideal.
Monastic tonsure is seen as a Sacrament in the East.
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TrueLight
Guest
Do you call others “Brother” or “Sister?”
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Celticnovice
Guest
I’m speechless…and as usual you articulate things in ways I can’t even touch.I’ll put it this way, with apologies in advance to anyone who will protest “well, that’s not MY experience of the Catholic Church”… (I know. Just like I’m not wearing your clothes, or cooking your food, or kissing your wife goodnight, either.)
The last thing I did before leaving Oregon in July of 2009 was take a trip to Mt. Angel Abbey on the coast with my Father of Confession. He knew I had been struggling for some time by that point with the Catholic Church, and thought it would help to show me another side of Latin spirituality (as I had been already to see the Ruthenians, and that hadn’t really been the revelation he’d maybe hoped it would be). If you’ve never been to the Abbey and happen to be in Mt. Angel, Oregon, I really recommend it. It’s beautiful, very serene, the monks are serious and committed, they have a great bookstore (which sells some books by HH Pope Shenouda III, my FOC pointed out while we were there…hahaha), etc. But because it is so wonderful, and so serious (almost to the point of being dour, but maybe that’s just my memory coloring it that way), I was actually kind of mad. How could it be that there was this kind of spirituality here, but just a few hours away at home in the church in Eugene, we had jazz bands and people with folk guitars ruining everything on a relatively regular basis? I was actually kind of mad. I mean, my FOC would always extol the East and the Orient, encourage me to learn more Byzantine hymns in Arabic (this is what I did instead of learning the family lineage of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Arabic class I had been taking at the local university), etc. So he seemed on board with many of the things that I was being exposed to at the time, and yet in actual practice, none of this was reflected in the masses that he served. I remember I once asked him why it was, since he was such a lover of St. Ephrem, that we didn’t have these kinds of traditional hymns in our mass (hey, give me a break…I didn’t realize at the time how out of place that would be; I just figured “St. Ephrem is better than this Marty Haugen stuff, and Father would obviously approve”). He told me that the senior priest (my FOC was in his mid-30s) wouldn’t have it, since he was afraid that if we did anything too traditional, we’d lose a lot of people, since it was a college town and of course kids need guitars and harps and standup basses, or whatever. That confused me then, and it confuses me now. I think I was…I dunno…25? Maybe a little older than the target demographic, but still…it doesn’t wash with me.
So it is not that I don’t recognize that there is this strain in Latin Catholicism, though I must say that in terms of actual “mystic” RC writers such as St. Therese, St. John of the Cross, etc., I tried them all in the course of my attempt to discern where I should be, and found them to be either creepily carnal or surprisingly dry/detached; I got way more out of the likes of G.K. Chesterson, who is of course not a mystic at all, but I still love him to this day. But anyway, I think this entire approach is wrong-headed. Were I searching for “mysticism” I’d be following some Indian yogi. The idea of even having some kind of separate category of spirituality that is “mystical” seems weird to me, especially when it doesn’t really impact the everyday practice or experience of the mass in the vast majority of parishes in America (Catholicism elsewhere is something else; I’ve been to tiny Mexican villages that were a lot more like my experience in the Coptic Church in terms of pastoral guidance in the everyday life than anything I subsequently experienced in the Latin Church). It’s like…for the Maronites, do they say that St. Maroun was a “mystic”? I kind of doubt it, because that requires a context where he is set apart from the everyday practice of the faith, and that makes no sense, as he founded that particular expression of the faith! Do you see what I mean? There is no “mysticism” when we’re just talking about what you do. That’s just everyday life. That’s what I like about Orthodoxy. Looked at from the outside it seems mystical and weird or whatever, but I will tell you that there’s nothing “mystical” at all about cooking ful muddames for dinner 210+ nights out of the year, but we do it because it’s part of how we live our faith, day in day out. Sobriety is the name of the game. If you read the monastic literature of the East and the Orient, you’ll see that many saints fled “mystical” experiences, such as contact with angels.
I guess in a way, I am against mysticism as a thing, but I can still recognize that a more serious kind of spirituality is something that is in the Latin Church, however small and hidden away it can seem (and my FOC even agreed with this, as we had stopped to get some lunch on the way back from the Abbey and I asked him why it seems that we have to drive out of our way to go visit Catholics actually LIVING the faith in a serious, consistent manner; he said, to the best of my recollection, that it was not really hidden away, but it does take some digging to find. Poor guy…)
Thank you for sharing this
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dzheremi
Guest
Thank you. Honestly I’m feeling rather incoherent today, but I’m glad that you were able to get something out of what I’ve posted. 
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Peter_J
Guest
Sometimes, e.g. if a poster’s screenname was “Brother Alex”.
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Marybeloved
Guest
The best summary you can give about this Latin classifications is to just understand this: In Latin Catholicism, Mysticism refers to a greater and greater increase in the rule of divine action on the soul over its own will and initiatives, while ascetism refers to the actions and initiatives of the soul aided by divine grace. A mystic would mean someone at that stage where he cries out with St. Paul- No longer I live, but Christ lives in me!Well, I guess I don’t get the “mystic thing” either, or at least not the whole picture of it.
All of this leads me to remember the story of the one Maronite “mystic” I’m familiar with: her name was Hindiyeh (do a find for Hindiyeh on the page). It’s actually an interesting account … replete with Roman interference in internal affairs etc.) Now, whether I’d actually consider her to have been a “mystic” is up for grabs. I tend to agree with youabout the whole classification thing.
They are not separate in the interior life because one naturally leads into the other. We necessarily begin as ascetics, lots of initiatives aided by grace, but the ideal (or goal) is that through cooperation with divine grace and asceticism, we end up mystics. It does not look the same in all the Saints- But it’s the reign of the Divine action over our will, perfectly docile to it, which comes after a lifetime of grace and struggle.
Latins would say, ascetism is our action aided by God’s action- but we end up (ideally) with God’s action taking greater and greater precedence in the life of that soul, as the will and whole soul is made more and more subject and conformed to the Divine action. So to us, a ‘‘mystic’’ is a Holy soul who lives by faith, hope and love at the summit of his spiritual life where the Divine action rules the soul that’s perfectly docile to it. So that in a mystic, whether active or contemplative, their activity and life follows and more or less perfectly flows from the divine action.
We don’t know much about Our Lady’s earthly life, the picture I have is that it was pretty ordinary like the other Jewish women of her time- Yet she is THE Catholic mystic- The Holy soul in whom the Divine action operated perfectly unhindered.
The thing is that many people associate mystical theology with a study on extraordinary phenomena- Rather it’s the teaching on the progress of a soul to holiness.
Would you agree that St. Therese de Lisieux (The Little Flower) at the summit of her life was a soul in whom the divine action reigned generally more freely than not? I would. It’s in that sense that she (and the others) are ‘‘mystics’’.
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Bookcat
Guest
This book may be of interest (it is for those of us who are Roman) (my Melkite Monk friend noted (I would note) that he is very into Evagerius in this book)on the idea of such
Such is very good for the life of prayer
My wife and I found that once we set aside a room as our oratory (influenced by Carthusian cell)-- such was a wonderful way to seek God more in silence and solitude or pray as a family.
A great little section in the Catechism:
Places favorable for prayer
2691 The church, the house of God, is the proper place for the liturgical prayer of the parish community. It is also the privileged place for adoration of the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The choice of a favorable place is not a matter of indifference for true prayer.
scborromeo.org/ccc/p4s1c2a3.htm
- For personal prayer, this can be a “prayer corner” with the Sacred Scriptures and icons, in order to be there, in secret, before our Father.48 In a Christian family, this kind of little oratory fosters prayer in common.
- In regions where monasteries exist, the vocation of these communities is to further the participation of the faithful in the Liturgy of the Hours and to provide necessary solitude for more intense personal prayer.49
- Pilgrimages evoke our earthly journey toward heaven and are traditionally very special occasions for renewal in prayer. For pilgrims seeking living water, shrines are special places for living the forms of Christian prayer “in Church.”
As I recall he gets into the little oratory from the Eastern perspective:
ignatius.com/Products/EV-P/earthen-vessels.aspx
I saw it on my book shelf last night and thought to note it here…good book.
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