Camaldolese monk Fr Cyprian Consiglio.
Camaldolese monk, author and musician Fr Cyprian Consiglio visited Australia in November last year. Recently retired Prior of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, he is now based in Rome, having been appointed the International Secretary General of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He spoke to me in Melbourne in the wake of the US election, and reflects on what this means for Christians; what the East has to teach Western Christianity; and his practice as a devotee of meditation and yoga.
RA: As an American, and as a Christian leader, how did you respond to the result of the US Election?
CC: Apparently, we don’t pick our leaders based on character anymore, and that’s really sad to me as a Christian leader. Not only his personal character, but also the way he’s behaved in public, the things he’s said, the actions he’s done, and the violence and rhetoric he’s inspired. I think that Christians especially, but all people of good will, need to speak truth to power, and to call President Trump to be his best self, especially if he claims to be a Christian.
I am also saddened by the people who believe in Christian nationalism. The Spirit of the Gospel, which is really very simple, is the total opposite of the way these folks have been behaving. Religion is not a cultural, political bludgeon! It’s a way of life, it’s more than just an imposition of morality. It’s a relationship with God which has to be fostered.
I believe in democracy, and the majority of Americans voted for him. So, the game has changed. Leadership is not now based on character, but on policy. In which case, in terms of the political realm, let’s just leave Christianity out of it, and let’s start calling people to the Gospel of Jesus. That includes caring for the poor, and caring for the refugees, and ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, and not surrendering to wealth. This is the time to start shouting the pure Gospel of Jesus from the rooftops!
And to live it out ourselves obviously too. Not to answer violence with violence, and not to answer hatred with hatred. Followers of the Gospel are going to have to look to the Civil Rights Movement, and such figures as Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day, and figure out how we can non-violently stand up for the Gospel.
The saddest thing is, I don’t know what we tell our children any more about who wins in our world. Obviously being a person of moral character doesn’t matter at this point. Somebody who is a real bully, violent in his rhetoric, and exclusionary, has won. So who do we tell our children to look to as their heroes?
I am very sad about the whole thing, I have to say. It’s not that I wanted Kamala Harris to win, but I did want Donald Trump and his whole movement to be defeated.
RA: Would you agree that the underlying cause of the major crises facing humanity lies in the lack of a contemplative consciousness? I’m obviously thinking in particular of war and conflict, fear and hate, climate change and environmental degradation, greed and inequality.
CC: I certainly think a contemplative consciousness could and should aid with that, but the surface problem is the lack of a moral compass at this point. I think you could come to justice and safe forms of government without a deep contemplative practice if you had a moral compass. That being said, I do think we are more and more shallow in our thinking. Because we’re pulled outside of ourselves so much, we’re not actually taking that deep dive within to access the deepest parts of our consciousness, let alone the ground of our being and the ground of our consciousness, which we believe in the contemplative tradition is the Divine. So that’s certainly a key part of it as well.
RA: On the one hand we see an enlightened spiritual consciousness developing in the world, while on the other we see humanity reverting to a condition governed by fear, hate, and tribalism. There are obviously two movements operating together and in opposition to one another. How would you understand that apparent dichotomy?
CC: I have recently been reading a biography of Charles Darwin. Darwin was hopeful, but not necessarily optimistic, about the human race. He thought we had evolved pretty quickly in the right direction but there was always the possibility of us reverting back to our more animal instincts.
One of the theories that the writer and philosopher Ken Wilbur talked about quite a bit was the idea of human beings moving from selfishness to care. We all start out selfish as babies. We have to be selfish. “Care” means care for your little circle, your family, maybe then your extended family, maybe then your neighbourhood, and maybe then your tribe. If this care ever gets threatened, what do we do? We normally batten down the hatches, we circle the wagons. We start protecting our smaller spaces. It’s such an easy thing to do, and there are leaders in the world who will exploit that.
The person who could speak to this is French literary critic and philosopher René Gerard, who spoke about the mimetic theory. This is the theory that we learn things by imitating others, but a big part of it that theologians focused on is the idea of the scapegoat, that people unify as a group by naming an enemy. So that we have somebody we cast out, we can rally around and find our identity by having an enemy. That’s another thing that’s very easy to exploit. “Let’s all get together and protect ourselves from the one who’s ‘poisoning our blood’”, as Hitler or President Trump might say.
Theologian James Allison says this scapegoating is exactly what Jesus came to address. He became the scapegoat to show us that this has nothing to do with God, nothing to do with religion. Jesus is all about open and universal commensality. Everybody is welcome. Everybody comes in. So, it’s strange that people would use Christianity to batten down the hatches instead of as a place of inclusion and healing. If Gerard and Allison are right, and I think they are, these people are just using Christianity as the opposite of what it was meant for. But we do that with religion all the time. It becomes something we impose … We can use religion in many different ways.
RA: I would like to turn to Bede Griffiths now, the English Benedictine monk who set up a Christian-Hindu Ashram in India and devoted his life to integrating the philosophies and spiritualities of East and West. You say he has been a major influence on your thinking. You have written that he believed that everyone is called to the grace of the contemplative life, and that he believed the source and summit of all authentic spiritual traditions is the experience of union with God.
CC: The book of Bede’s that had most influence on me was Marriage of East and West. Western European consciousness has been very much tied to Greek philosophy, which tends towards dualism, which has also been a major influence on Christianity. My confrère Bruno Barnhart would say it also downplays the feminine, downplays the intuitive, and elevates the place of the rational.
Bede thought this explained the failure of the Western missionary effort in India, because it didn’t deliver Christianity in a way that made sense to the Indian mind. The idea of interiority, the sense of the indwelling divine, seems to be very much present already to the Indian mindset, the idea that God dwells within.
In the West we have to be shaken and woken up to that, even though it is very clear in the Scriptures, and has been there in the Christian contemplative tradition from the Desert Fathers and Mothers on. This seems to be much easier for Asian people to access, the idea of the indwelling presence of the divine, and that tends to be the transformative side of spirituality.
Jesus’ best images of the reign of God for me are the ones that work from the inside out – the salt of the earth, the seed that goes into the ground, and especially my favourite image – the yeast in the dough. From within it transforms, but that’s not the first thing we talk about in Western Philosophy and religion.
The second gift of Asian spirituality is the idea that the body is a part and parcel of the spiritual life. There is nothing like that in Western Christianity, such as I’ve found in the yoga tradition for instance. The practice of meditation is also, like yoga, about training the senses and stilling the mind so as to realise Absolute Reality pervades one’s own being.
The Jesuit William Johnston loved the idea of mindfulness that he found in Japanese culture – which fosters attentiveness to everything you do, how you dress, how you make tea. And Bede also had a real sense in India that the Divine just pervaded everything. Things would be blessed, things would be named after gods. There would be shrines everywhere. We have pretty much lost that in secular Western culture. I’m told Australia is even more secular than America in that way. Many people in the West don’t have any real sense of the pervading of the Divine.
And many in the West would be embarrassed to talk about it in public. I have recently spent time in Oxford, another place where I was just told, over and over again, “you don’t mention spirituality or religion in a place like this,” which is ironically a place that is so saturated with the sacred. The colleges were founded to train religious. In my little bubble in California there has been such a recovery of that sense, not necessarily through Christianity, but among so many people who have immersed themselves in the yoga tradition, and in the different Buddhist schools of meditation and the Sufi tradition, you really do get that sense that the ground is holy, the forests are holy, the material world is holy. Something which is also taught by the native American traditions.
RA: St Paul said the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and Christ, St John tells us, was the Word made Flesh, but the Church you have said has often scorned the body and its functions in favour of the soul. “What we do in Church is so often different from what we do in the gym” you have said. Would you like to add any comment in terms of this dualism that has developed between the body and soul?
CC: I think it’s endemic in every religion. But it should just be a real surprise for Christianity since Christianity is based on the incarnation. That is Christianity’s founding point, you might say. It differentiates us from the other prophetic traditions of Judaism and Islam. The Incarnation is a great mystery to them, and we don’t understand it either!
One of the reasons I love the yoga tradition, and why it speaks to me as a Christian, is the fact that I feel that my body is involved in my spiritual life in a way that it never was when I was growing up as a Catholic. What I do with my body matters for my prayer life. I do these stretching asanas (postures) so I can sit in my meditation longer. I also take care about what I eat so that I’m not weighed down by sugar and fat, and my mind can be clear and available for God.
What I would love to see is Christians learning some more embodied practices. I use three elements which I talk about all the time – the feminine, the earth and the body. These are three of the big social movements, at least in my country, and Western European countries in general – the environmental movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the sexual revolution, all of which went astray at some point, askew a little bit, as far as orthodox Christian teaching is concerned, but I think their instinct was right, to recover the feminine and also make sure women are not treated like second class human beings.
Pope Francis has made great strides in bringing environmental concern to the forefront of Christian spirituality, and I would also go as far as to say it should be a part of our ascetical life – how we learn to treat the planet, what we buy for our clothes, how we treat our garbage, what we eat.
And then of course the body which the sexual revolution maybe again skewed but I think there was something really right in there, trying to break off the suppression and oppression and the hatred for the body and sexuality that came out of Christianity.
A big surprise was Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which some people thought didn’t go far enough, but it went pretty far when you see some of the old Catholic manuals about sexuality. They would discourage you from having sex at all, when it’s supposed to be this quite beautiful expression of love. John Paul II talks about it in such beautiful terms that suggest he really knew what he was talking about! So, I think we’ve made great strides in that way.
Yes, to incarnate our incarnational theology - I think that’s Christianity’s big challenge for this day and age. This includes psycho-sexual emotional development for our people generally, but particularly for our clergy and religious. It also means equalizing the place of women in our society and in our church, whatever that means, because we’ve seen the abuse of women that has happened over millennia. This abuse has been justified even by the Scriptures, sometimes. There is a little line in the Letter to Titus which now gets left out of the lectionary. And then of course there are the environmental issues which are pretty much at crisis point and are only going to get worse. I know because I have been living on the central coast of California. We have a front row seat there with which to view climate change – and the fires and rains have been getting much more severe.
RA: I’d like you to talk about your own practice now. How you cultivate a sense of the Divine, through meditation and yoga. When you sit down to meditate, what is your aim?
CC: I first just want to put it in a bigger context, to say that meditation is not my whole practice. It was the mineral that was missing from my diet, but I still have a full diet. I would consider my full daily practice to be physical exercise, yoga asanas, lectio divina, reading texts from different traditions as well as my own Christian prayers, psalms, scriptures and liturgies.
But silent meditation has become more and more important to me. It involves training the senses and stilling the mind – a phrase I really love. I meditate in order to realise the place of connection between God and me. Between the small self of my individual identity, and the Great Self of Being - Being with a capital ‘B’, as in God as Being. We are already in union with God, we just have to realise it. God is constantly breathing the breath of life into us and renewing us in each moment. And as St Paul tells us in Romans 5:5 “God has poured his love into our hearts through the Spirit that has been given to us”.
Whereas Daoism, Buddhism and Hinduism would think the self disappears, we don’t. I meditate to realise that aspect of me that never separates from the Source. That aspect of me, even in the long process of individuation as a human being, never separates from its divine root. If I had to describe the telos, the why, of my meditation practice, it’s to realise that. In the 11th step of the AA 12 step program, they use a great phrase. They talk about “conscious contact with the Divine”.
RA: What’s the form your meditation takes?
CC: I was taught mantra meditation. That was really the one that has served me all these years. The mantra can gently lead me to that place of conscious contact with the Divine, and when it does so, I can let the mantra disappear. But I do find throughout the day, even if I just touch my prayer beads, it reminds me of the mantra, and it can pull me back to that sacred place.
The mantra for me is like a pebble you drop into a pond that you attach your breath to and use it to sink to the depths of your consciousness. That image stays with me quite often - I just hold onto it and let it take me down. I like the intentionality of the mantra. Bede also talked about this and was really influential on me. He would say we’re taking a trip through the psyche, and that’s dangerous territory. I don’t know about yours, but mine’s a jungle! To go through those layers of the psyche, those layers of consciousness. Who knows what’s in there? I’m not going unprotected! [Laughter]
RA: So the mantra is essentially a prayer, it’s not just a way to still the mind?
CC: I can honestly say that at this point the boundary between prayer and meditation has disappeared.
RA: I’m interested in the fact that you are also a musician and composer. Music and the arts generally have been important in nurturing your faith and attuning you to the Divine.
CC: I express myself really well through music. I almost have to sing sometimes. In fact, when I was first in the monastery I got into trouble because I was always breaking into song, often at the wrong time in the wrong places! It just naturally comes out of me that way. And when I read certain sacred texts, sacred texts of poetry, I just have to set them to music, I have to sing them.
To my own surprise, I often get accused about being too intellectual in my approach to spirituality, philosophy, and religion. That approach also really speaks to me. I can read something, and it will lead me immediately into prayer and/or meditation. But I consider myself first and foremost a singer-songwriter-guitar player since that took hold of me from the age of ten, almost like the archetype that resonated in me from the beginning. Both teaching, through writing or preaching, and music are ways of communicating, and I am a communicator. All things being equal, I do recognise that music speaks more directly to the heart, and can have a transformative effect almost immediately, without any lag time for processing it, like a stealth ambush of grace. I see it do for others what I has done for me. So I consider myself very blessed to be able to do both––and I always bring a guitar along with me when I am teaching.
RA: Could you say something about the Camaldolese, and your founder, St Romuald?
CC. We are Benedictines, but we are a small congregation within the big confederation of Benedictine monks. We’re one of the smallest – less than a 100 in the whole world. St Romuald joined a Benedictine monastery in Ravenna, but he left it because he found the observance somewhat lacking. He sought out a deeper life and went to live as a hermit near Venice. He lived in the 10th and early 11th century and died in 1027.
He was also called on to reform monasteries and bring them back to a stricter observance. Sometimes he would reform a monastery and found a hermitage next to it, or he would build a hermitage and found a monastery nearby. He believed in having both communal life and solitary life together. This is a big part of the genius of our tradition, this communication between the hermit life and the communal life, or the coenobitic life, as we call it. Because the coenobitic life gives you discipline and training, and also gives you relationship with the community and abbot and prepares you for solitude. Without that preparation solitude can be a really dangerous thing. It’s so easy to live in an unhealthy way.
Some of Romuald’s first disciples were missionary martyrs. This is another key aspect of the Camaldolese charism - our absolute availability. The end is not community or solitude but being absolutely available to whatever the Spirit calls you.
RA: Including martyrdom?
CC: Well yes, that’s what martyrdom is about – giving your life away. And it could also mean spending ten years as a prior! [laughter]
RA: Or it could be living in America under a Trump presidency!
CC: Well, I don’t want to be too apocalyptic about it. But I do think people who want to really preach the Gospel right now could face real persecution in the face of this form of political discourse and Christian nationalism.
Fr Cyprian’s books include Prayer in the Cave of the Heart – the Universal Call to Contemplation; Spirit, Soul, Body – Toward an Integral Christian Spirituality; and Rediscovering the Divine – New ways to Understand, Experience and Express God.
You can also view Fr Cyprian’s talk at the University of Melbourne on Christian monastic wisdom today, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn8c4oc-dXg