Today I ran across a piece I wrote for a series of articles on monastic spirituality for the OHC (more or less) quarterly publication in the Autumn 1986 issue. It joined articles by Bernard Van Waes, Robert Hale and Bede Thomas Mudge. I didn't seem to have a word processing document of the original , and the OCR function on my older Canon scanner wasn't up to the job of transcription, so I typed it again. I think it is accurate.
It is a product of my early fervent monastic self - I was 39 at the time, 12 years in OHC, 7 in life vows, Prior of Mount Calvary since 1981. In other words - lots of water still to flow under my bridge, but the product of a self that now seems to me to be energetic, idealistic and ready for life's adventures.
The Voice of God is a Living Voice
Adam D. McCoy, OHC
1986
Solitude, silence, scripture, sacrament, celebration, community: these and the Vows of Conversion of Life, Obedience, Poverty and Celibate Chastity, are primary components of monastic spirituality. They are disciplines, ways to train the soul to achieve the monastic desire: to give all one has and to follow the Lord. The monk is a person who takes the Gospel call literally, and gives his life as totally to God as he is capable. These disciplines have evolved over centuries and are full of the wisdom of thousands of lives given to God in the monastic way, and therefore they are a well-worn path for any who follow the Lord in the monastic way.
The monk is most of all a person who listens for the voice of God: in scripture, in tradition, and also in truth, wherever found, in study, in science, and in the wisdom of human experience as well as through religion. The voice of God is a living voice, and so the monk who listens to that voice must be a very contemporary person. The monk is also a person who, after he has heard that voice, acts. Both action and contemplation are part of monastic spirituality. Often the uncomprehending world, and sometimes the uncomprehending Church, endorses an apparently passive contemplation. But when the monastic life issues in action, often evangelically radical action, it may be disapproved.
There is power and danger in monastic, indeed any real Christian, spirituality. There is power because the person comes to know himself in reality, loved, redeemed, able to act not as a fantasy self but as he really is: a Bernard, a Mother Teresa (both Avila and Calcutta). And that self, acting together with God’s intention, sets the world afire. There is danger because God is not satisfied with the world as it is, and truly evangelical action frequently upsets entrenched power, whether it is economic or political power, or the power of entrenched but alienated selves.
The Gospel call is not unique to monastics, nor is the action issuing from it. But the monastic path is unique. Monastic spirituality is for those who are called to abandon themselves to the love of God as completely as they are capable, to listen to his voice of truth, and to make their lives instruments of truth. Monastic vows create the existential condition for this abandonment, and the disciplines of monastic spirituality train one to hear the voice of God. But in the end, only the living fire of love and desire for God creates the monk, the one who is monos, one, single, whole, completely, uniquely attached to the Lord.
