As was posted earlier, Fr. Matthew Flynn from our mother house in Spencer is directing our community retreat. Fr. Matthew is well known to this community. In 1988 he underwent open-heart surgery at NIH; as part of an experimental group, he had to return regularly for follow up since 1989. While in the area, our Abbey served as his monastic base. In any event, his warm and personal manner, quiet irony and ready wit–as well as deep insight–make him a memorable visitor. I took this opportunity to speak with him so he could share a few reflections with you.
HCA: I’m sure at Spencer you experience the same phenomenon that we do: people are very interested in monastic spirituality to feed their own non-monastic lives. What’s happening?
Fr. Matthew: At Spencer, on any given day, you’ll see cars parked outside our church. Speak to any of these people and they’ll tell you, “When I drive onto this property, I experience peace. When I pray in your chapel, I experience God.” I believe God choses places where he can draw people to himself and often our monasteries are just those places.
HCA: In a period when people are questioning religious institutions, though, how do we maintain that appeal, that attraction?
Fr. Matthew: Remember that song Peggy Lee used to sing: “Is that all there is?” We’re living in difficult times and even people who are comfortable are asking what life is all about and whether there’s more than what we can buy. It may be because people question the institutions that they want to find out for themselves. So they drive out to a monastery where men or women live a very different life from theirs. They might talk to a monk and find out that these are intelligent people who think about life and the world’s problems. They’re not in a monastery because they had no other option; and they begin to wonder how a life like this is possible. They see the peace and they begin to think that may be possible for their lives too.
HCA: It seems to me that we attract all kinds of people, not just practicing Catholics, not just Christians, but people who are on the threshold of belief and uncertainty…
Fr. Matthew: I don’t think that everyone who calls his or herself an atheist is really reacting against God. They may be rebelling against the idea of an old man with a long white beard in the sky…
HCA: …a childish anthropomorphism…
Fr. Matthew: Precisely! They’re reacting against an obsolete image of God that doesn’t work for an adult and they come to the monastery and find out that we’re doing the same thing! We try to reach beyond the mere images of God…
HCA: …that need to be smashed like idols…
Fr. Matthew: Yes! and that God is always ready to smash for us in the course of our lives. And, of course, agnostics are searching like we are. This past autumn in Assisi, Pope Benedict gave a wonderful address about the common ground of agnostics and Christians: we’re looking for an experiential truth. The Holy Father followed that up with a meeting in Paris: ecumenical and interfaith groups, people of no faith and intellectuals. He established a “Court of the Gentiles” outside the portal of the Notre Dame Cathedral, the three great doors closed, and addressed the group there, outside the sanctuary. And then he had the doors opened and invited everyone to come in and join us! He invited them to pray with us or meditate, or to contemplate the sculture and stained glass–or just listen to the music! But as human beings, as children of God in the broadest sense, we had reason to be together and a in sacred way.
HCA: Perhaps, as you say, that’s why a “place” is important: it’s neutral and people can grow into it and discover the depth of their experience at their own rate.
Fr. Matthew: I saw that at Santa Rita [our monastery of nuns in Arizona, where Fr. Matthew has often filled in as chaplain]. People flock there because they need a place set apart from their busy and noisy lives. There’s no regular chaplain at Santa Rita, so they don’t come there to speak to the chaplain; it’s a small community and the nuns are very busy, so they don’t come there to talk with the nuns. They may not even come to the liturgy. But if they can spend time in that place, pray or meditate in that chapel and know that these women are managing to live something very special and different from what most people live, they find something sacred there. They find God; we human beings can’t live without God!
HCA: Mentioning the Pope reminds me that when you gave us the community retreat eight years ago, you spoke from the writings and teaching of Pope John Paul II. In this retreat you’re presenting the teaching and experience of Pope Benedict XVI, especially the theological insights, less faniliar to most Catholics, that he’s taken from Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus. Often retreat talks are motivational and moralistic, but you’re presenting our tradition’s great insights into God’s relationaship with us as expressed in dogma. You’re inviting us to reflect on all this as our perception of God, as if our perception of God is part of our relationship to God.
Fr. Matthew: (laughing) I never talk about morality. As I mentioned the other evening in the conference, people have been telling you since you were a baby, since your mother stopped you from knocking over your glass of milk or eating your porridge with you hand, what’s right and wrong. You should know that already; you don’t need me to tell you that. And monks are always trying to be perfect anyway! God forbid, we get anything wrong and we’re not the best at what we do! And that’s part of the problem. If I have to be perfect, I don’t need God or I have a very strange idea of God. This isn’t the God that the Scripture describes who reaches out into time and history to be close to us. That’s why I want to share what our great theologians and saints have to say about God. We need to get the wrong images of God out of our head; they have an effect on how I live–on how I am. Why can’t I be content with the mess that I am? Whatever good I might seem to do, is being done in me by God. All goodness comes from God. My job is to not let the ego get in the way or to turn over my life to my ego and its goals.
HCA: Yes, I’d like to return to that point you made earlier when you were talking about the Pope in Paris: that as human beings we need God.
Fr. Matthew: This is what people are searching for today. But they’re searching for the real God, not ideas about God. Back when I entered the monastery, you were in the novitiate during your period of temporary vows, when you were no longer a novice. I had one more year to go until solemn vows when Fr. Thomas Keating was appointed as Novice Master, so I was with him for that last year. I’ll never forget when he quoted that verse from the Book of Wisdom that’s used in the Christmas liturgy. It was quoted in Spencer’s Christmas card that year: “When peaceful silence lay over all and night had run half her swift course, your all-powerful Word, leapt down from heaven, from your royal throne.” Fr. Thomas said, “That’s what the experience of God is.” You see, we don’t make it happen. It’s like prayer: we pray the prayer that God gives us. It’s my ego that wants’ to be the best at prayer or be better than everyone else or get to this or that level of prayer. But God is always coming to us. I just have to get my ego out of the way and accept God as God comes to me.
HCA: Which may not be as I’m expecting God to come to me or how I might prefer God to come to…
Fr. Matthew: That’s just it. If I can stop paying attention to myself and worrying about “what level” I’m at, God can work in me. God will work in me anyway, but I’ll keep missing God because I’m paying so much attention to myself. If I can just learn to forget myself…
HCA: So in a very real way, my ego can replace God and I can expect God to resemble and act like my ego!
Fr. Matthew: Yes! and wouldn’t that be a mess. God isn’t an idea, so we don’t have to think about God in prayer. God is taking the initiative all the time; I just have to forget about myself and enjoy my dependence on God. As St. Benedict says in his Rule, at the end of the day, I have to admit that any good I’ve done comes from God, and not myself. Anything wrong I’ve done, I have to own as my own. The ego doesn’t want to do this.
HCA: Many voices in our society would say I lack good self-esteem to do that!
Fr. Matthew: But in fact, that’s my great dignity: to be nothing on my own but receive everything from God.