I ever heard the name Mount Savior was when Henry Nouwen asked if he could stay overnight with us on his way to retreat here. I met Henry in the 60s when I was in training at the Menninger Foundation, Kansas, and he came from Holland to spend some time there. This is before he became famous. So I knew that Henry was on his way to Mount Saviour Monastery for a retreat. And many years later, I was introduced to the monastery by one of my favorite people, Bishop Frank Griswold. And I was welcomed at Mount Saviour by Father Martin, and later by Father James. And Father Martin, thank you again for all you did to help me in my spirituality courses at the seminary. Let me say just a little bit about myself.

[01:05]

I mean, you see me around here, but I may be somewhat of a close book. I was born in a mission field from Presbyterian parents in Java, and I'm very deeply imprinted by that experience. After the war, the Second World War, we went back to Holland, and in Holland, I managed to get a scholarship to come to this country as an exchange student for two years. I liked it so much, so I immigrated. I spent the first part of my professional life basically as a psychologist. And then in the early 80s, my wife, we lived in New Jersey, my wife got a job in her hometown, Elmira, New York. and I thought I could do a practice as a psychologist as well in Amara as I had in Princeton. A little bit I know what was kind of ahead of me, because I hardly had gotten here when I was asked to give a talk at a seminary in Rochester, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, which at the time was in a partnership with St.

[02:19]

Bernard's and with a small Episcopal Seminary called Bexley Hall Seminary. Can you hear me? I have a soft voice. They asked me to teach there, and it takes a while to get a practice going, so I thought, you know, let's make some money while I'm getting this practice going. I basically taught psychology at the time. After a year, I liked it a lot, and I said, well, if you'll tenure me, I'll stay. Well, they did. And I'm glad I was tenured because all hell broke loose in the seminary, and I'm sure if I had not been tenured, I would have been fired. All this leads up to what turned out to be a major turning point in my life. I started attending the daily worship services in the seminary, where there were ecumenical, there were Methodists, black church, and so on, but also there was a weekly Episcopal Eucharist.

[03:21]

And the Eucharist It got to me. It in some way resonated in my soul. I think it may have had a lot to do with the fact that I was unhappy with my Presbyterian background. I also grew up in a sacramental culture in Java, which is not Christian, but is very sacramental. But to make a long story short, after a number of years of being deeply moved by the Eucharist, I thought maybe there was a message here. So I went to talk to the Episcopal Bishop of Rochester, and I thought he'd say, get out of here, you're way too old, but he didn't. And all this ended up with my being ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1994. So I remember what they call a late vocation. And this actually was a helpful thing to... think about because one of my dearest friends is a Roman Catholic priest in Holland who was for many years what I call a rector, his name was Dean, of a very innovative Roman Catholic seminary in south of Holland called Bovendonk.

[04:35]

Bovendonk is still going on, he's now left, he's back in Brazil where his heart is as a priest. And Bovendonk was specifically organized about 25 years ago for late vocations. And my friend, his name is Mathieu Homme, did a wonderful job in making that go. They by now have ordained, I think, over 80 priests out of that seminary. It's a seminary done part-time. accepted by the seminary and approved by the bishop, you go for 20 weekends a year, Friday through Sunday, for six years. And after four years, if the bishop approves and the faculty approves, you give up your job, your secular job, and go into class or work, but still come back to Bovendong under supervision. It's a wonderful model.

[05:38]

I wish we had it in the Episcopal Church. It is an excellent model. But what I'm really getting at here is that during those years of conversion, really, to a Catholicity, I became acutely aware of my lack of formation or spiritual formation. I, like many Protestants and maybe some Catholics, have kind of confused the faith with just what you believe in your head. In other words, a cognitive ascent to certain truths, doctrinal truths. But I realized at that point in my life that there was a whole lot more to do than that, and that without any spiritual formation, the faith doesn't become rooted. So I went at it with a vengeance.

[06:38]

I read all over the place, I had some very good guides, Fr. Martin. I was here that I learned about Father Damasus, about the famous monastery in Germany called Maria La. I also had a dean, John Kevin, who was very helpful. And I went for a spiritual direction for the first time, and my first spiritual director was Brother Nathan. Do you remember him? Right here. And then he went to the Tastanese, I think, in Pennsylvania. I lost my spiritual direction. I went to someone in Manchester. The reason I'm saying this all to you is that what I'm sharing with you comes out of that deep need for ongoing spiritual direction. And you might say that what I'm doing here, doing these retreat addresses, is to share with you some of my own experiences in that regard.

[07:41]

Now, from the very beginning of the Christian way, and you know all this, and I'm assuming that most of the stuff I'll be saying you already know. I think most retreats are the content of many retreats you already know. I think what's important in the retreat is to be open to the workings of the Holy Spirit, so that if something does touch your heart, that you can begin to work with it. From the very beginning of the Christian way of formation, has been understood as an intentional process, the aim of which is to acquire what St. Paul calls the mind of Christ, in Greek, nus chistu. In order to be liberated from the burdens of internal and external oppression, including being forgiven and so on, and to live into being the human beings we are called to be.

[08:45]

And also, not to forget, to reflect some of the light of Christ to the people we come in contact with. So the miracle here for me was to begin to understand that already in this life, and we live in a fallen creation, and we all have our problems, But already in this life, it is possible to acquire at least a measure of this mous kestou. Now, you probably know all this better than I do, but the Greek word mous, n-o-u-s, is translated as mind in English, but it's really, it means a lot more than mind. There's a perfectly good Greek word for discursion reason. which is deanoia, but this is not the word that St. Paul used. He used it, nous.

[09:47]

Now, nous encompasses the heart, the soul, the very essence of who we are. It certainly includes the mind, but there's a great deal more than the mind. What I want to do in this retreat is to look at four characteristics of the mind of Christ as I've come to understand them and know them. And in doing so, I'll take a brief look at what is entailed in manifesting, to the degree that it is given to us to do so, the mind of Christ. and in that way contribute to the transformation of a religious order, or a parish, or a family, or a marital couple, to be in some way a reflection called a resurrection community. Now, let me make clear that the mind of Christ goes way beyond the four characteristics that I will talk about.

[11:00]

Think, for instance, of the three theological values that the tradition talks about—faith, hope, and charity. Think of what the Church Fathers call the cardinal values, such as prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. Think of St. Paul's long list when he talks about the fruits. Incidentally, he doesn't talk about fruits. He talks about fruits as a singular, of the Spirit. namely love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But now, in these two days coming, I want to focus on these four characteristics that have become particularly important for me, and I think are important for all of us. And they are, and I'll talk a lot more about them, and other addresses, they are compassion, truth, humility, and presence.

[12:08]

And these aspects of the mind of Christ are deeply relational, whatever else it may be. They manifest the reality of Christ in our lives, the reality which is there for all. And again, not to forget that this is not just for us, ourselves, this is for others, for the whole world, really, in which we live and move and have our being. And I always think, when I think about the importance of perfecting the light of Christ, I remember something that the great Abba Anthony the Great, you know, the founder of monasticism, he was not the first one, but he certainly was the greatest one in the beginning. articulated as kind of a mandate. This is a quote. Our life and death is with our neighbor. If we gain our neighbor, we have gained God.

[13:12]

If we scandalize our neighbor, we have sinned against Christ. There's another point I want to make here, in a way I already have made it, in these introductory remarks. And this was famously expressed by Phyllis Brooks. Phyllis Brooks, who died in 1893, was the Episcopal Bishop of Boston. And he is the one who wrote the Christmas hymn, O Little Town of Bethlehem. And he was once asked to give lectures on preaching in my own alma mater, which is the Yale Divinity School. And he talked about preaching as truth through personality. And I believe that he was right. That every time we speak of God, no matter how hesitatingly, we dare to speak a truth that comes through our own personality, our own being, our own being in the world.

[14:16]

So another way to put this is that sharing theological views, or talking as I'm doing right now, in this retreat is to some degree always autobiographical. Another Episcopal priest, actually he's Anglican, he was a physicist in Cambridge. His name is John Polkinghorne. You've probably heard of him. He's written quite a bit. And he was a very well-known physicist and all his fellow physicists physicists thought he was absolutely going crazy when he decided to become an Anglican priest. But Popping Horn at some point talks about the scripture as being lab notes of people's experiences with God. And I think that's a very felicitous way of thinking about it. In that sense, everything we say ourselves about our experience with God are sharing lab notes about those experiences.

[15:21]

In the summer of 1995, I flew to England to attend a conference on Affirming Anglican Catholicism. It was there that I first saw Rowan Williams, who is now the Archbishop of Canterbury. If you watch the wedding, you'll see Rowan Williams. He was a chaplain of the conference. and preached at all the Eucharist. I've never read any of his works, but I was mildly impressed by his homilies. They were very brief, but very profound. I liked it so much that I went to the bookstore they had there and bought several of his books, including the book Resurrection. Are you familiar with that? Okay. I better ask you about it then.

[16:27]

Okay. Well, as you know, the book is not an easy read. But it became a great gift, my own spiritual foundation, for it transformed my own understanding of the most foundational assumption of the Christian faith. Namely, that the resurrection of Jesus It's not just a historic event, but an ongoing reality. And this book, more than anything else up to that point, this is in 1995, helped me to loosen the dominance of a lingering negative theology, which sees God mainly as judge and human beings as inherently evil and hopelessly fallen. Now I'm quite aware of the fact that this, in me, comes from some of the radical Calvinism of my forebears.

[17:32]

But I understand that some of the Jansenism is very similar, of thinking that human beings are inherently evil and hopelessly fallen. And I began to see how contrary to the good news such an understanding is. There are always impediments to Christian discipleship, both external and internal. The external ones are too numerous to mention, especially if you have bad experiences with with people if you've been abused and God seemed absent, if the church had let you down. But also the external obstacles of our culture, and they're huge. The consumerism, the widespread belief of solid science that it will solve anything.

[18:38]

Right now we're involved in a big to-do about that with the drilling in Pennsylvania. I have a hard debate with people there about that. Most of them really believe fully that no matter what goes wrong, science can fix it. That can be an obstacle. It's also the obstacle of the diversity of Christian denominations, the claims of other religions, and so on. But internal obstacles, abusive and traumatic experiences I've put at the top of the list, not having been adequately nurtured or protected in childhood. But there's one obstacle that, in my own personal and pastoral experience, stands out as a major stumbling block, and that is the pervasive self-denigration that affects so many people of faith across denominations and faith groups.

[19:46]

Unfortunately, the self-demigration is very often connected to a belief in a punitive God. And you don't have to do spiritual direction for very long with people to see that come up. A few years ago, a friend of mine wrote me about his own struggles with such a damaging and negative but usually unacknowledged theology. And he articulated his experience so clearly and compellingly that I asked permission to share part of this letter with others. This is what he wrote. All my life I've searched for God. Some of my earliest memories include trying to find places to pray where no one could find me. My relation to my primary caregivers was not good.

[20:48]

You talk about his parents. Maybe I was in search of a safer or more responsive parent. I don't know. But I do know that from as far back as I can remember, any accomplishment seemed trivial compared to finding God. Unfortunately, as adolescence and adulthood unfolded, depression set in. The hunger for God was still my primary concern. but I lacked the sense of self-worth and power to actively search. Fifteen years ago, fifteen years of shame and addiction came and went. The metaphor for spiritual awakening that I was operating under was that at some point, if I was lucky, a new spiritual reality would erupt within me. Through this eruption, all my old anxieties and feelings of powerlessness would simply melt away. As a consequence of this view, I thought that it would be futile to make plans and work on the restrictions of the current order.

[21:56]

And with this sense of meaninglessness in my current reality, I literally put my life on hold. Five more minutes, okay? Anyone want to observe this? The waiting model is predicated on the view that nothing I could know in the present held any validity, and no action on my part would have any effect on the encounter process with God. I could no more prepare myself for or initiate the encounter with God than I could outfit myself for a walk on the sun. From this it is clear that I was working with an extremely low anthropology. It's easy to see how this condition accommodates depression. I was hopelessly fallen and powerless and could do nothing about it. I struggle with self-demigration a lot myself.

[22:57]

And as I already said, as a spiritual director, I've encountered this in many others. And it seems to be irrespective of whether we're theologically conservative or liberal, that deep down in many of us, there is that low theological anthropology. So in closing this particular half hour, I go back to Rowan Williams' resurrection, and I take his major point, and you know this all better than I do at this point, because you've heard the whole book, I take a major point of my own, that God in the crucified and risen Christ did not return as judge, but as one who forgives and makes new beginnings possible, not only for Paul, the persecutor, Peter, the betrayer, and Mary, the lost and grieving soul,

[24:03]

but for all persecutors, betrayers, and lost and grieving souls ever since. Let me stop there. It was a wonderful program. I learned a great deal. We had mentors, had to write papers during the year, nice responses. But every year there was a 10-day period at a retreat center in Bethesda. Two days of that were a silent retreat. During one of those silent retreats, we were introduced to praying with icons by Tilden Edwards, who was then the executive director. He told us about the rich tradition of icons in the Eastern Orthodox Church and about their role in liturgy and prayer. You mentioned that you don't paint an icon, but you write an icon.

[25:10]

And moreover, the iconography is considered by the Orthodox a religious vocation. This was driven home to me a few years ago when I was visiting Romania and ran into a man, a young man, who was an iconographer who had studied for the priesthood. had completed his studies, but then felt called to be an icon. Tilden emphasized that you do not pray to an icon, but with an icon. And that an icon is meant to portray transfigured humanity, and that for that reason it is never a naturalistic depiction. And then he said something which I'll never forget. He said, when you pray with an icon, you look through the eyes of the icon as if God is looking at you through the eyes of the icon.

[26:16]

So pray with an icon as if God were looking at you through the eyes of the icon. He had brought two icons for us to pray with. The group I was in was about 26 people. And there was a large room, somewhat like this, with two tables with a bunch of chairs in front of them. And he put one of the icons on one, and the other on another, with candles burning and so on, so we could play with the icons. One of them I had seen before, the Vladimir Madonna, from the 12th century Byzantian period, with Mary Theotokos holding the Christ child. I think you may have it here. The other one I have never seen, but you can also have it here, is the Sinai Panto Prater Christ. That I've never seen. And I immediately felt a strong attraction almost to that particular icon, almost as if something was pulling me for praying with that icon.

[27:21]

The Ponto Crato Christ, Ponto Crato means ruler of all. That one is a surviving icon which was written in the 500s and can still be seen in the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sina Peninsula. Maybe some of you have actually seen that. So there we were, sitting with the icons, and at that point I became rather uneasy. I told you last night a bit about my background, but a foreign part of myself got very uneasy about this business of praying with icons. Worries about idolatry began to arise in me. But after a while I was able to kind of let go of my anxiety a bit and to settle into experiencing praying with the icon. And then I remembered what Tillman had said.

[28:24]

that you pray with the icon, because God is looking at you through the eyes of the icon. This is the icon. I'm sure you've seen it before. Here's a young Jesus, a Semitic man, about 30 years old. He has the golden nimbus of divinity. In the Nemesis is written in Greek, ho, on, the one who is. He's clutching scripture with his left hand. His right hand is in the blessing. So I was kind of looking at taking all this in as I sat there. Then I looked at his face, his hair parted in the middle. It's pulled back. You can't tell whether you tie it in the knot in the back, but it's pulled back.

[29:29]

It has a kind of a brown robe on. At first I thought that this was somewhere in the country, but if you look carefully, there are buildings visible on either side of Christ. You see it? Sounds like you might say a CNN close-up. I remember thinking, this is what it may have looked like. Because there must have been centuries long traditions of what Christ actually looked like. And then I kind of say that out. And then I look at the eyes as if God is looking at me through the eyes of the icon. And at that point, something happened that has changed my life. Completely unexpected.

[30:32]

I began to weep, not loudly, but solemnly. Because when I looked at the eyes of the icon, the one with the right eye, I experienced it looking right through me. Like, I know you, Han, completely. all the good and the bad, everything. It was not judgmental, but kind of diagnostic. Now this is you, including all the parts that I don't like people to know about. So that was kind of startling. But then the other eye, which has a faint, it's hard to see, but it's a faint tickle of a tear. coming down the sheet. I experienced the other eye looking at me with profound compassion.

[31:35]

And that combination, I'll leave it here for you to look at, that combination is extremely powerful. To be utterly known, warts and all, and to be held in compassion. It was quite incredible. When I thought about it later, the first thing that stood out was that these must be key qualities of the mind of Christ. The combination of compassion and diagnostic judgments. what's really going on in us and around us and so on. So compassion and truthfulness, not sequentially, but together.

[32:47]

And then, because I thought about it a lot, as you can imagine, And then it occurred to me, and this was a real slash of insight, that I had had an experience of the Holy Trinity. Now, I've been to seminary. I read a lot about the Trinity. But frankly, the Trinity, I could talk about it myself, but it was on such a high conceptual level that it didn't really connect much with my life. As a Christian, I accept that this is important, a foundational doctrine and so on, but I can say it connected. But this connected big time because I realized that this feeling being drawn to the icon was the Holy Spirit in me. I was thinking about, you know, the famous phrase in Romans 8.26.

[33:55]

Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the very Spirit in the seas decides to be for worse. That happened to me. So the Spirit in me drew me to Christ. And through the eyes of Christ, I experienced the bottomless mercy and compassion, but also judgment. of God. So the Spirit and God and Christ were all together. As often happens when you have an experience like that, very soon you run into some writing about it. And indeed I did. And one scholar I read, she is a Patricia scholar, and then was Sarah Coakley, you may have heard of her English. has made a very compelling case that this is actually how the thinking about the Trinity started.

[35:02]

The New Testament has a lot of implicit talk about the Trinity, but the more explicit teaching about the Trinity that this came from prayer. So not a bunch of fathers sitting in their studies figuring out what God is like as fathers on the Holy Spirit, But people praying, as I had been praying with the icon, and realizing, hey, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But there's something else that struck me. I've always puzzled how to make sense of God as judge and compassion at the same time. In my own tradition, the judge thing is pretty well emphasized. But how do you, how do I wrap my mind around this?

[36:10]

And here too that experience gave me some better sense of it. As you know, as well as I do, that in the New Testament, especially in the Gospel in John, the light metaphor is key. The light of Christ, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The gracious light, the source hileron, very key. And that's made me see that this judging And compassion happens at the same time when the divine light shines in our hearts, so to speak. What the Orthodox call the uncreated light, not light that we manufacture, but it comes from natural light, the light that comes from God. Well, when light shines, it illuminates.

[37:16]

It illuminates everything. the good and the bad, but in a compassionate fashion, in what I describe as a diagnostic way rather than a judgmental way. So the divine light is not judgmental but judges truthfully what is going on. And when the light of Christ shines in our hearts, It's just impossible to keep anything hidden because the light illuminates everything. But it not just illuminates things. There's this invitation, you might say, to move out of the limitations, out of the addictions, out of the imprisonment toward the merciful, compassionate and liberating light.

[38:21]

So all this helped me, through this experience with the Sinai Bantocrator, to get a better sense of the importance of Paul's memorable phrase, putting on, he uses it several times in his letters, putting on the mind of Christ to noose his tooth. I think I said last night that the word noose is much more than just English understanding of mind. One definition is that it's the heart and mind of a human being, the totality of the mental and psychic powers of the individual. So our own little noose needs to be transformed by the noose of Christ.

[39:28]

And the hallmark, we never get there in this life, obviously, but we can let progress with it. The hallmark of acquiring more of the noose of Christ is a palpable increase in being more loving. But not loving as, you know, goody-two-shoes loving, or intimacy loving, or feeling good about someone loving, but agapeic loving, which is to seeing others as brothers and sisters in Christ, no matter what they are, what they've done, whether they like it or not. So this kind of love is a disposition of the heart. It's not a feeling. It's not based on feelings. So this is the great blessing that we can participate in.

[40:38]

Even in this life, our global news, which is often so limited and fearful and self-occupied, self-important, and whatever you can make your own list, can begin to be transformed this way. I ran across a definition, a description rather, of the heart by Saint Macarius of Egypt. He supposedly was a camel driver before he became a monk, so in other words a truck driver. And this is what he said. You may know the quote. Within the hearts are unfathomable depths. There are reception rooms and bed chambers in it, doors and porches, and many offices and passages.

[41:41]

That kind of visual, I love those descriptions. In it is the workshop of righteousness and of wickedness. In it is death. In it is life. The heart is Christ's palace. There Christ the King comes to take his rest with the angels and spirits of the saints, and he dwells there walking within and placing his kingdom there. The heart is but a small vessel. And I love this. And yet dragons and lions are there. And there are poisonous creatures and all the treasure of wickedness. Rough, uneven places are there and gaping chasms. There likewise is God. There are the angels. There are life in the kingdom. There are light in the apostles.

[42:45]

the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace, all things are there." So the transformation into the news of Christ is into more and more being filled with the light and less and less with the poisonous creatures and the dragons and lions. I love the imagery here. I think most of us have experienced a moment in our lives when we look into our own gaping chasm and wonder if we will survive. But then how do we acquire the mind of Christ? How do we acquire the mind of the One who returned back to Roland Williams? who in turn is not as judge, but as one who forgives and makes new beginnings possible.

[43:46]

Well, insights will not do it. Insight is helpful but will not do it. Insight is not to accomplish transformation. The first thing that comes to mind is that famous saying by, you know more about us than I do, by Brother Lawrence, that we're called to practice the presence of God. Now, at this point, if you were an audience of lay people, I would go into some detail about this practice, but you are extremely blessed to have committed your lives as monks to living the rule of Saint Benedict. And St. Benedict, in his great wisdom and piety, saw the importance of practice as part of the spiritual life, ora et labora. But I also realized that I'm not a monk, that I've been part of a monastic order of two Christian marriage.

[45:07]

And I have some idea what this kind of commitment entails. And that there are ups and downs. There are periods of great peace and love and knowing that you're in the right place where you are called to be. And then there are times when you wonder, what the hell are you doing there? And there are times when the spiritual practice itself can become stale and humdrum. I told you about how critically important the mass is in my own spiritual formation. Watch this wonderful Mass this morning.

[46:11]

You're so sad. But even the Mass, when you celebrate the Mass a lot, then become routine. And I recall what Frank Griswold once told me. He may have told you that too, but Frank Griswold, you know him all, Frank Griswold. as he told me the story, was a newly ordained Episcopal priest in Philadelphia and did not get much spiritual seating from his fellow Episcopal brothers and was invited by a group of Roman Catholic priests, also newly ordained, to go to Mount Savior. And that's where he met Father Damasus. And he told me that one of the things he very clearly remembered about what Father Damasus said was beware that you do not become practitioners of the holy. And that is such an important insight because, in a way, the more we get involved with religious life, the greater the temptation to become practitioners of the holy.

[47:32]

There can be times in our life, in our spiritual practices in our life, when words start to irritate, only that we get part of all the words coming at us. I found one, at that point, I think we often have to rely on our brothers, on their prayers, to kind of fly in there like birds, like the geese. fly behind them, not have to work so hard because they do the work for us. But there's one prayer that in my experience has been the greatest blessing of all when it comes to maintaining our course in formation and in Christian life together. Because it's always together, never by yourself. And that is a Jesus prayer. We don't quite know when the Jesus prayer started, but it's clear that from the very beginning of the Christian church, people were praying to Jesus.

[48:47]

Maybe just Jesus, Jesus, or Jesus have mercy. And then, as you know, they put together a couple of texts, the public and the blind Bartimaeus. So they ended up around the fifth, sixth centuries with a whole phrase, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. And then later in the Middle Ages they added the sinner. Although in Greek it's the sinner. So it's Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, emotionally the sinner. Repetitive praying of that prayer calms the soul, invokes an awareness of the presence of Christ. Because we know that, we know theologically that the presence is always there. Always there. But our awareness of the presence is often quite lacking and we cannot compel that awareness.

[49:57]

We can believe that the presence is there. It starts flying on instruments. You may have to believe the instruments and not what you see around you. But the awareness of the presence, that is such a great gift, such a consolation. And the Jesus prayer very often conveys that consolation. You can pray it anywhere, anytime. I prayed a lot for a while. I commuted back and forth to Elmira and Columbus to teach at the seminary there. And I prayed a lot of... time as I'm sitting in a chair in an airplane. I prayed lying on a gurney waiting for an operation. I prayed waiting for the traffic light to change. After a while, as you know, begins to pray itself. And especially for us who, what you assume, who are so committed to

[51:07]

The horarium to be the frequent prayers together was such a blessing. But to avoid the feeling of getting too used to it, becoming technicians of the Holy, I would suggest to you that the Jesus prayer is a blessing beyond compare. When asked by a solo monk, What is a compassionate heart? Saint Isaac of Assyria replied, he lived in, I think he died around the early 700s. A compassionate heart is a heart on fire for the whole creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists, all that exists. At the recollection of the sight of them, such a person's eyes also flow with tears, owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart.

[52:17]

Thomas Burton had an experience once in Little Louisville, where he stood waiting for a lighter to change, with a lot of people around him, and he had that feeling of compassion for all that exists. Back to St. Isaac, that the recollection at the sight of them, such a person's eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart. As a result of his deep mercy, his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look at any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. This is why he constantly offers a prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals and for the enemies of truth, even for those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy. That's a lovely phrase. Even those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy.

[53:27]

And I love this. He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion which is poured out beyond measure after the likeness of God in his heart." Let me end there. When you're used to having some questions and answers, is that right at this point? Whatever you're used to is following me. I use the rosary all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of tactile. Just the ceiling of the beams helps you to be more attentive.

[54:30]

Yes, absolutely. The ortharchs have a pair of rope with knots, but my hands are kind of big, so I slip on the knots, so I stick with the rosary. Yes, by all means. Well, as you know, it was considered one of the great sins. I think psychologically, it also accompanies the ceiling of not knowing a way out, like stuck or something.

[55:32]

Psychology can be helpful in that sense. The abbot of the Mepkin Monastery, who he gave talks here about 10 years ago, Klein, he died I think. I listened to the talks. Only the tapes, but they're wonderful. But he said in those talks that every age has a gift to give to the church. And that in our age, one of those gifts is a more sophisticated understanding, these are my words basically to say, of how we function as human beings, both internally and between ourselves. So that's been helpful to me.

[56:35]

So when I kind of thought as a kid here, part of the demonic of it is that you kind of don't give a damn. Right? It's like, okay. So then to ask, now what at this point is making me feel stuck? What was this point was kind of hemming me in.

[57:03]

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