Identity with Christ
Modeling
Our Lives on RB 72[1]
Chapter 72 of the Rule
ends with this beautiful sentence : « Let them prefer nothing whatever
to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life ».
Those are most probably the last words of the Rule written by Benedict,
since, as you know, chapter 73, which is the last chapter in the present form
of the Rule was written before, and concluded the Rule, after chapter 66,
Later on Benedict added the chapters 67 to 72, (We will return to those chapters on Monday)
I quote this short verse
of the Rule now, because it expresses the centeredness of Christ in the life
of the Benedictine brother or sister, and, at the same time, it stresses the
fact that preferring nothing to Christ means following Him on a journey that
will lead us to everlasting life – and all
together (which seems to be the best translation of pariter) since we are cenobites.
Therefore, when we speak
of our « identity with Christ », that identity should not be understood
in a static manner, simply in the sense of becoming more and more « christ-like »
by imitating Him in everything we do. In should not be understood either simply
because He is the First born, and we are all called to partake in His divine
nature -- which, of course is true
and important. It should be understood first of all in a dynamic way as following
him on his own journey, leading us to the goal where he is going.
Christ is not Himself
our goal. He is the Way. He is our
guide on our journey to eternal Life, that is, to the Father. Without wanting to be provocative I would dare
to say that sometimes Christ has taken too great a place in our Christology.
In the Gospel, He is not Himself at the heart of his teaching.
The Father is ! Especially in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus does not teach
about himself; He does not proclaim himself. He proclaims the Reign of God and he speaks
about God. He speaks about his Father.
The core of Jesus’ teaching
is to be found in the parables ; and most of the parables are about the
Father. Jesus wants to teach us what
type of a father God is. Of course,
the great paradox – or rather the great irony – is that we most of the time
read the parables as if they spoke about us (which is a manifestation of how
self-centered we can be). We read the
parables in order to find in them some moral teaching telling us how we should
act. The parable of the prodigal son, for example, is not, in the first place
about returning to God after our sins – although that message in implied
as a consequence; the parable is about God’s love and mercy towards
us. We could say the same thing of most of the other parables.
In the New Testament Jesus
is always on a journey. The first and
most basic aspect of that journey is that He came from the Father and returned
to the Father. That paradigmatic journey is described in a very majestic manner
in the Christological hymn of Philippians II : “Though He was in the form
of God, he did not regard (His) equality with God something to be grasped
(something to cling to). Rather, he
emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness... He
humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross”... That
was the descending movement... Then comes the ascending one : “Because of
this (and those words are very important), God greatly exalted him and bestowed
on him the name that is above every name – that is the name by excellence,
the name of Lord or Yahweh – so that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord...”
Christ’s identity is inseparable from his mission. In Him
the identity and the mission are the one and same thing. That Christological
hymn of Philippians II, as well as Ephesians 1-2 give us a grandiose theological
view of that Mystery. Nevertheless
Jesus, in his human psyche, only gradually discovered his identity, and he
faced great temptations at every step of that discovery.
Already at the age of 12, he “ran away” from his mother
and his father to attend his Father’s business;
but his Hour had not come. He
returned to
The question of His identity was as important for Christ
as it is for any other human being. When he asks his disciples : “Who do people
say that I am? and, then, “who do you say that I am – for you, who am I ?”
– this was not a rhetorical question used as a pedagogical means. It was an important question for him, a vital
one. At that time he already knew that
he was going to die soon. From a human
perspective his mission could be seen as a failure. He wanted – and needed – to know whether he
would remain alive in the memory of his disciples and whether they would be
able to continue his mission ( = his identity).
Through the Incarnation, God did not simply became a man
in Jesus. He became human; he assumed
our humanity. In Him it is the whole
humankind that is returning to the Father.
So much so that he is our deepest own identity. He is the plenitude of the “self”. We become
ourselves in the proportion in which we assumed our own christ-identity –
that is in the proportion in which we bypass all our false identities or our
superficial identifications so as to reach the deepest level of our being
where our own being grows out of Being (with a capital B).
I mentioned, at the beginning, that Christ did not proclaim
himself; he proclaimed the Father. At
times, however, he did reveal some aspects of his own identity; for example
when he said : “I am the Way, the Truth
and the Life”, or again when he said to Martha : “ I am the resurrection and
the life”. But it is only at the very
end of his life that he said once or twice : “I am” (without any qualification)
– for example when he said “Before Abraham, Isaac and Jacob existed I am”
or, most significantly, when, asked very explicitly by the Great Priest, at
the time of his Passion : “Are you the Messiah, the Son of God”, he answered:
“I am”. By then, he was abandoned by
all and was going to die. Everything
that was not his deepest identity of Son of God had been taken away from Him.
That was His Journey. So,
every time, in the Gospel, he says to someone : “Come and follow me”, he is
calling him to follow Him on that Journey. This is very clear especially in the call to
the Young Rich Man. At that time Jesus
is walking towards
Now, when we follow someone, we don’t see his face. We see him from behind. Like Moses who could
not see the Glory of God, if not from behind.
Those who are called to follow Christ are not simply called to sit
in front of him, admire his face and drink his words. When we follow Christ, we see his shoulders, not his face (we don’t see him
face to face yet). The shoulders we
see are the shoulders that carried the lost sheep, and also the shoulders
that carried the Cross.
This is also the meaning of our monastic journey, and especially
of our monastic conversion. First of
all, conversion means discovering our own true identity.
In that sense, Jesus’ journey
can be considered the paradigm of true conversion (which is not primarily
a passage from sin to virtue but a passage trough various phases of growth).
The conversion demanded of his disciples
by Jesus is not simply a superficial modification of their moral behavior.
It implies much more than replacing a personal "ego" by another
one, more respectable or more in conformity to the dictates or the expectations
of society. It requires a global and radical transformation touching all the
dimensions of the human being, "spirit, soul, and body," to use
the categories of
Of course, such conversion must be, first of all, a conversion
of the heart, the source of everything that is either good or bad in human
existence. Ezekiel described in beautiful and poetic terms the conversion
that would be characteristic of the new Kingdom: "I will give them, a
new heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the stony heart
from their bodies, and replace it with a heart of flesh" (Ez 11:19).
The journey to conversion is first of all an interior journey into the recesses
of the heart, towards the discovery of our true self, that is, the person
we are called to be by God, the unique image or word of God which we are,
the name he has given us.
In that deepest part of ourselves, we may have to touch
places that were unknown to us, unfamiliar and haunting lands where we are
strangers. We may have to become nomads within our own world. The first reality
we will encounter there will be our ego with all its limitations. When we
venture to journey to our own interior world we must be ready to be confronted
with fear and confusion, with temptation.
There is such an experience of the desert at the beginning
of every great spiritual journey. After his baptism Jesus began a new period
of his life by a journey into solitude – as I mentioned before. It was the
experience of the prophet Elijah, going through the awareness of his own poverty,
his fears and his weakness, in the desert before his encounter with the glory
of God on
That transforming journey may start with a very deep
or even shattering experience, like that of Jesus at the time of his baptism,
or that of Paul on the road to
When the Desert Fathers described their struggles with
yawning beasts and slimy snakes and grimacing devils (or with seductive women),
they were simply describing the various aspects of their own hearts that the
experience of the desert had made them discover. These are what Jung call
our shadow self, the unacceptable part of our personality with which we are
now brought face to face.
Such an experience of our sinfulness is not a discovery
to be made only at the beginning of our novitiate! It can be the sudden or
lagging discovery, after many years of prayer and faithful service of God,
that strong and persistent doubts arise in our hearts about God and our vocation;
that intense passions flare, that meaning and truths grow stale, that questions
abound and no answers appear. New kinds of darkness and sterility may then
touch us deeply. These are not the charming little darkness and dryness of
the first years, that reassured us because they somewhat convinced us that
we were progressing towards the higher stages of spiritual life described
by John of the Cross. We were a little proud of that darkness and dryness.
The new ones are terrible. The love of God that once sustained us and motivated
us seems now elusive and illusory.
When Jesus tried to describe the reality of conversion,
he used images that were not images of smooth and gradual transformation,
but images that reflected the two most traumatic events of human life: birth
and death. He knew, more than anyone else, that the fullness of life cannot
be reached without passing through the river of death.
To Nicodemus (Jn 3:5-6) he said: "I tell you most
solemnly, unless a man is born through water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
the
If in the darkness of our night, wanting to understand
what is happening, we go to the Master for advice or solace, his response
will probably be as enigmatic to us as to the poor Nicodemus.
Very often entrance into the monastic life is considered
as "the conversion" (or "the second one," following the
first one of baptism). The rest of our life is supposed to be a smooth, if
not always easy, growth, development and faithful perseverance. Our vow of
"conversatio morum" is understood as the commitment not to stop
on our straight, smooth journey to perfection. Likewise, we tend nowadays
to privilege "instant conversions," sudden transforming mystical
experiences. The danger is that such conversions can be simply changes of
behavior, the trading of an "ego" for another "ego."
In any case, even the most extraordinary experience of
God is usually only the first step on a long journey toward conversion, and
it does not exempt a person from entering into the desert of his or her own
heart and wandering there, often for years, like the people of
All the riches, the painful riches, of such human experiences
of conversion can be lost when undue emphasis is placed on extraordinary mystical
experiences, on unrealistic charismatic enthusiasm, or when ascetical practices
substitute for the fullness of life to which we are called. Asceticism is
necessary and indispensable, but it can also be a convenient excuse for escaping
from the pain of growth. It can be a convenient way to exempt ourselves from
the painful process of learning to care, to listen, to live, to love - in
other words, to come "gradually" to the fullness of perfection.
Paradoxically, to try to look outside of ourselves and
to attempt to live up to external ideals and expectations can prevent the
authentic conversion we are talking about. And I am afraid that very often
our monastic formation does just that. Instead of leading people to a painful
conversion, we invite them to put on a nice new ego over their old one. When
persons attempt to find the ground of their identity solely in doing things
and living up to society's roles or community's expectations, they unwittingly
promote a false self. Ideals very good in themselves, such as being a good
novice, a good abbot, a good prioress, a good teacher, or a good pastor, can
become obstacles to a deeper conversion. We are often too fearful to let go
of our own creations and to allow God to touch us and to give birth to our
true self.
If we courageously continue our journey through the desert
of our hearts, we will eventually reach somehow the ground of our being, where
it grows out of Being, where our own self is one with the One who is the plenitude
of the Self, so that we can say with Paul: I do not live; He lives in me.
Conversion leads us to a renewed image of ourselves, of God and of our neighbors.
Or rather, it allows us to go beyond the images and to transcend in that blessed
simplicity, which is the ultimate end of monastic life, all that keeps us
away from ourselves, from God and from our brothers.
Monastic conversion therefore involves gradually renouncing
all our false identities or identifications by growing out of them.
Identification is the process of identifying to something or somebody
outside of us; identity is the essence of who we are.
A form of “imitation of Christ”, simply trying to do what we think he would
do in our situation, remains at the level of identification.
We know how a child normally identifies with his father
or mother, how a teenager identifies with a sport star or a movie star, or
simply with an adult whom he admires – who could be a teacher. Later on the young man will identify with what
he does and achieves or what he acquires and owns; the young woman likewise
or with her affective conquests. But
when someone really becomes an adult – which is not simply a question of number
of years – that person will discover and realize her identity : who she is
– or who he is – independently of all the superficial egos and of all the
images that she has or other have of her. She is the person who has some talents
and does not have other talents; who has things and can lose them, who has
successes and failures, and who always remains the same person through all
the upheavals of life, while becoming more and more herself,
That process of becoming an adult and an autonomous person,
both humanly speaking and spiritually is very well expressed in a number of
parables of the Old Testament as well as of the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, we have the story of Job. Job has everything in which people normally
find their psychological, social and spiritual identity. He is a good man,
he has a good reputation in the people of God, he has a wife and many children
(seven sons and three daughters), numerous possessions – fields, camels, sheep,
oxen, and also male and female servants to take care of all those possessions.
He has a good health and good friends.
He loses all of this, including the understanding of his
wife and of his friends and his health. Then
he makes the wonderful discovery that, even after losing everything, he is. He exists. He
is the same Job who had all those things and has lost them. The Job who now has nothing is the same person
who was a rich, powerful and influent man.
Having nothing to lose any more, he is free. Therefore, he can stand before God and speak
very strongly to God. Nobody in the
Bible speaks like that to God. This is not arrogance; it is parrhesia – confidence and freedom – the
freedom of those who have nothing to lose.
At the end he will be able not
to recover what he has lost, but to acquire again similar riches (what is
lost is lost). That will not change
who he is. He is free.
In the New Testament, the same growth process is described
in one of Jesus’ parables : that of the prodigal son (better called the parable
of the prodigal Father). We have there
a family whose life seems to be happy and without story. It is a well to do family, since there is a
fortune to divide among the children : there are fields, flocks and servants.
There is evidently a mother and probably sisters (although they are
not mentioned), and at least a brother. What
the parable wants to show is the different attitude of three of the characters.
One of the sons has enough of that quiet family life, although
it seems to have been harmonious, easy and pleasant. He wants to live his own life. The life he shares with his father, his brother,
and the rest of the family does not fulfill him any longer. He needs personal achievement. He wants to be
somebody and enjoy life. He wants to
exist as an independent and isolated individual and not as a member of a whole.
(Something we hear in our communities, at times).
What does the father do?
He does not express any objection.
He has certainly done his own mistakes during his youth, and he acknowledges
his son’s right to make his own. What
is important to him is that his son have life. The conditions in which he will realize his
life are important but secondary. The
prodigal son then tastes all the pleasures of life. They are real pleasures, but at the superficial
level of existence. Gradually he squanders
everything he has and, as a matter of fact, he experience the same losing
of everything that Job did. The only
difference is that he inflicts it upon himself while it was imposed on Job
by the Tempter. Then, he comes to himself – he has therefore reached his identity
in that way – He has found himself in his own way. There was someone who lived in the past with
his father, and who left his father, who had a fortune that he has squandered,
who has enjoyed the pleasures of life that he cannot afford any more. This person is capable of conversion and of
returning to his Father. He is free
enough to return. He does not fear
to be disinherited, since he has already had his inheritance and wasted it. He does not fear to be rejected as a son, since
he does not claim the right to be considered a son. He simply wants to be a servant (this word is
perhaps the most important of the parable),
And when the father sees him coming, he runs to him and embraces him,
because his son is alive. The father
does not see the ungrateful son, he does not see the fugitive, he does not
see the debauched person. He sees his
son who is alive and he wants to
celebrate life with his family and servants.
Not everyone is able to celebrate life, especially life
in others. The second son is the most
pathetic figure of that parable. He
is like the good Christian, or the good religious, always faithful to all
his obligations, but who has not understood the meaning of life, and mostly
has not understood anything about love and mercy. He is unable to celebrate. In fact he has nothing to celebrate. When he returns from the fields and he hears
the music and the dance, he asks what is the meaning of that music and those
dances. That poor man, with all his
virtue and his faithful observance, has not made the journey to maturity and
adulthood that his brother has made.
Let us now return to the story of the Young rich man .
He asks Jesus what to do in order to have eternal life.
His goal is certainly good – eternal life.
He is very concerned about the “doing”. He asks what he should do;
and when Jesus quotes some of the commandments of the Decalogue to him, he
says that he has done all of that since
his youth. Then Jesus invites him to get rid of everything
and come and follow him. In reality
Jesus invites him to do voluntarily and freely exactly the same letting go
of everything that was imposed on Job by circumstances and that the prodigal
son imposed upon himself. He is unable
to do it. He is not free. He has not achieved adulthood.
This is the process that is described through the whole Rule
of Benedict and that finds its achievement, when it is lived in a coenobitic
community, in what Benedict describes in his chapter 72, about which we will
speak more explicitly on Monday.
We also find there an important teaching concerning spiritual
motherhood or fatherhood and formation. Formation consists in helping someone to acquire
very soon in his/her monastic life a clear personal identity, that will be
then gradually transformed or converted during the rest of his/her life. When
someone has acquired that identity, he knows who he is before God, and does
not depend on the appreciation of people on the image others have of him,
on the appreciation of his superiors or of other members of the community.
In order well to understand that chapter 72, in the light
of our identity with Christ, we have to consider another aspect of Christ’s
identity.
We want to identify with
Christ. It is certainly a noble desire !
But perhaps it would be more important to ask ourselves, « with
whom does Christ want to identify ». The answer is quite obvious in Matthew
25. Christ identifies with the little ones, the needy, the downtrodden. « I was sick, I was hungry, I was in jail,
I was persecuted... What you did to the little ones, you did it to me. It is when we belong in one way or another,
to one of those categories, that we can be sure that Christ identifies with
us.
Ephesians 1-2 must also
be read in that context. Identity with Christ is not something static simply
to admire and be grateful for. It is
something to achieve by following Christ in his Paschal Mystery, Paul, who wrote this to the Ephesians, knew
very well what he was talking about, since this Christ’s identity with the
little ones was revealed to him on the road to Damascus : « Lord,
who are you ? » And the answer was « I am the one whom you
persecute ». That revelation that
Christ identified with the persecuted ones changed Paul’s life – and quite
radically. Up to that time, Paul was
a privileged person. He had studied with the best masters, had a good standing
in the Jewish people. he had what seemed a clear identity. After he meeting with Jesus on the road to
I would like to reflect
on yet another aspect of Jesus’ journey – from his Father and to his Father.
It is his passage through hell. In one of the earliest Symbols of faith, it
is said that Christ, after his death, and before his resurrection, went down
to the abyss of hell. The most common
understanding, in the Latin tradition, is that he went to visit all the just
who were in the bosom of Abraham and who were waiting for Jesus to come and
bring them to heaven with him. Many
of the early Eastern Fathers had a rather different interpretation. For them this going down to hell was a part
of Jesus’ emptying himself and assuming all the aspects of our humanity. It was the most radical kenosis.
In the popular understanding,
we can imagine that Christ had three days to fill or to occupy after his death
and before his resurrection. So, he
went down to visit and console those who had been waiting for a long time
to be introduced to heaven. Then he
rose from the dead – resurrection being understood as coming back to the life
here on earth. He spent here another
forty days in order to form his disciples before going up to heaven definitively.
This, of course, is a form of caricature, but is not too far from the
popular understanding. This understanding takes the earth as point
of reference. After living some 33
years on earth, Christ, after his death, went down to hell, then came back
to earth in a different form and hen left earth for heaven. For the Greek Fathers, Christ, through his obedience
unto death, went to depth of evil – which what evil is -- as a victim of that
evil, and from there was risen by the Father to the heights of heaven.
Resurrection is not a coming back to earth but a going straight to
the Father from the depths of suffering and humiliation. (Cf. Philippians
2). The apparitions after the Resurrection
are then something peripheral that happens really in the disciples rather
than in Christ, who is with the Father.
The reason I mention this
is that it may be of some help to understand what Benedict means when he speaks,
at the beginning of RB 72 of the two forms of zeal, the one that leads to
hell and the one that leads to eternal life.
That will be my next talk.
[1] This is the first of two talks
given at the Conference of Benedictine
Abbots and Prioresses at the Mercy Center,
[2] In the next few paragraphs
I repeat something I said in a lecture
given at the American Benedictine
Academy in 1984 and published in The
American Benedictine Review (37:1, March 1986, 34-45). The full
text of that conference can be found on the Web at the following address :
http://users.skynet.be/bs775533/Armand/wri/conversion.html