
<p>Now there are lots of theological subtleties to that and all kinds of fine print and sub-clauses in that contract, but still... that's not something I heard about at St. Andrews' Parish growing up. That's enough to last a lifetime, unpacking that. I often say, after I proclaim that in a homily or a retreat talk, "I have no idea what that means, by the way––that we become God––but I can't wait to find out!" But it doesn't stop there. I remember when one of my friends left the monastic life to get married, I was really heart broken because we had become very close friends. He wrote a beautiful letter to the community in which he quoted Johannes Metz, a variation on Saint Augustine: "God became human so that we might become human." Ah, that's it too. Even becoming divinized is not an end; it's the beginning. Like Saint Anthony coming out of the tombs as one with right reason and abiding in a natural state. Athanasius is showing through Anthony what a deified human being is like, and he is still <em>kata physin</em>–according to nature. We are somehow not destroyed by our encounter with grace; we are brought to who we are, who we are meant to be. My friend found that monastic life had helped him discover his humanity, and he fell in love with a wonderful woman and is now a husband and a father. But I decided that very day, not to denigrate his choice in any way, that if I was going to remain a monk, I was also going to be a full human being, that this was possible even, maybe especially, in monastic life.</p>
<p>But there's also a step before all this as well. Fr. Robert loves to quote don Benedetto's famous maxim, "Before a man can be a monk he must be a Christian. Before being a Christian he must be a human being." At times I must admit, with all due respect, I found that a little too facile as well: one can make the argument that spirituality is not something added on to the human person. But sure enough, again I found it in the Patristic era. Saint Irenaeus writes, "How could you be God when you have not yet become human? How could you be complete when you have only just been created?"<sup>2</sup> That reminded me of a famous quip of the great yoga teacher B. K. Iyengar: "How can I teach you how to meditate when you don't even know where your legs are?" So the first step in spiritual life is to make us into human beings. The next step is to become divinized. The next step is to become human again.</p>
<p>And so with the saints, they are not necessarily extraordinary people at first––from Saint Peter with his clumsiness and cowardice, Saint Paul with his bitter zeal, through Saint Jerome and his biting sarcasm, Saint Thomas with his protruding stomach so big they had to cut a space in the table for him to sit, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who had such gastric troubles that no one wanted to sit next to him in choir for the smell, Saint Teresa of Avila with her love for steak, all the way up to John XXIII smoking French cigarettes in the Vatican garden, John Paul II with his Polish propensity to stubbornness, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta with her gnarled up toes and her dark despair that lasted fifty years. These are not necessarily extraordinary people at first, but ordinary people doing extraordinary things.</p>
<p>But you could say it the other way around too, and that's what I've discovered in monastic life. Every now and then in my first years here I would have these <em>ah-ha!</em> moments, and I'd say to myself, "Oh now I get it! <em>That's</em> what this life is all about." And they still happen sometimes, but they aren't always or even usually in choir. The other day when I saw Bruno and Robert speaking to each other outside of church, or Bro. Emmanuel picking up some food in the kitchen to take back to his cell, or when I watch Gabriel or Joshua carefully folding the altar cloth quietly every day after Mass humming to themselves, Benedict cleaning off the Sriracha bottles on the tables in the refectory––and I say, "Oh <em>that's</em> it! That's what monastic life is all about!" In this case it's people that I think are pretty extraordinary, doing very ordinary things, but in an extraordinary way, with attention, with care, with prayer under their breath.</p>
<p>And that's when there is another one of those <em>ah-ha!</em> moments, too. It's a big step to realize that God<em> is in us</em>, again something I never heard spoken of when I was a little Catholic boy growing up. That too is a big leap, and you have already heard that so many times here that you might already be sick of hearing about it. But it's true and it's real, and it's as orthodox as anything. And our prayer, our monastic prayer, is particularly suited to realizing that indwelling presence. But there's another step too, and that is the next step that the saints take: to realize that we are in God! That's even more mind blowing (!), because that's what saves us from closing in on ourselves; that saves our mysticism from quietism and solipsism and all kinds of –isms and schisms and makes us realize that we are part of something bigger, a community, a body, the Body of Christ which is the church, but the body of all humanity which is somehow one being as well, but also somehow intimately connected to all created reality from the mud to the stardust. That's our sacramental view of the universe. And that's what allows that awareness to bear fruit, to become incarnate, and that enables us to truly be participants in the divine nature, co-creators. And, as far as I am concerned, that is what we are doing here on this beautiful little spot 55 miles from civilization 1300 feet above the ocean: building a whole new way of life based on those realizations, a little village of human beings with right reason and sound bodies, a domestic church built on common worship and charity, realizing the reign of God in our midst.</p>
<p>So God became human so that we might become divine, so that we might become human. We discover God is in us and then discover that we are in God. We are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, so that we might become extraordinary people doing very ordinary things with joy, with attention, with love. So, Ignatius, I pray that that is what this life will do for you: help you be human so that you can become divine––a saint!––so that you can become human; realize God within you so that you and me and all of us realize that we are swimming in the ocean that is God, and so to build the city of God, so that God's kingdom come, God's will be done on earth, in you, as it is in heaven.</p>
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<p>1 (Cap. 9, 22-23: PG 32, 107-110), Office of Readings, 632.<br />2 Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 87.</p>