A few summers ago, I went on retreat at Guadalupe Abbey. I’d been flirting with the idea of becoming a monk for years, but had never set foot inside a monastery. So I drove down to Oregon, past the Columbia River and well into wine country, to finally do something about it. The fields were full of crickets and thistles. August heat slouched on the hills like a couch potato.
Each morning, I got up hours before sunrise to hear the monks chant Vigils. I had decided to follow the monastic rhythm during my stay, punctuating my days with the services held in the chapel. I even started to enact the movements of the monks as they prayed: standing, genuflecting, bowing. The bowing, I noticed, was uncomfortable for me. What, exactly, were they bowing to? A god made in their image? While I admired the monk’s devotion, their belief seemed to me helplessly naive — a shelter from the epistemic tensions of the modern world. But for some reason, despite my skepticism, I continued to bow.
Days later, upon returning to the world, I was struck by the sight of people hunched over their phones. Everywhere, it seemed to me, we were transfixed by the allure of digital technology. In the middle of the sidewalk, or a visit with a friend, even in traffic, I saw us returning to this slouched gesture of supplication. After days in the monastery, days of bowing in prayer, I couldn’t help but see this posture as a ritual. What were we bowing to?1
It’s easy to be skeptical of monks who leave the world to worship their god. But the god in the palm of your hand, too, demands your withdraw from the world. Demands your unwitting devotion to distraction.
And yet this thought, however poignant, feels incomplete. Because as I fell into the rhythm of monastic life, I sensed that my initial response to the bowing monks had been mistaken. More compelling than the question of the object of their worship was the manner in which they bowed. The monks’ movements were ceremonial, not merely habitual. Their observances, I realized, were not just a display of piety. Their gestures were doing something.
In his essay on Cistercian observances, Tim Lilburn insists that the “actual world, in its own nature, on its own terms, appears as a result of a particular, decorous way of acting in it.”2 This is a remarkable claim. It suggests that the actions of these monks — their gestures of supplication — were making them permeable to the world as it is. Humility, in this sense, is not just a moral posture; it is also a phenomenological act. What matters, perhaps even more than which god you bow before, is whether you’re aware that you’re bowing. If Lilburn is right, then so much depends on this: nothing less than the creation, and definition, of the world.
“To go to the world,” Lilburn writes, “you must leave ‘the world’ of apparently sustaining meanings and observances.”3 Perhaps the best way to know which god you’ve been serving is to notice which observances you keep.
By my last day at Guadalupe Abbey, something had enveloped me. Time stretched and collapsed, canticles scaled the chapel walls like mountain goats, and my skepticism was napping in the fields. I stood one more time as the monks chanted the Gloria Patri, bowing for the first half of the prayer. In bowing, we were making our way into another world, a world I hadn’t even considered existed — nor could I have, had I not decided to bow.
The gods, of course. I had not read Jung at the time, but I learned years later that he’d seen this very clearly: “We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases.” C. G. Jung, CW 13, par. 54.
Tim Lilburn, The Larger Conversation, “Thomas Merton’s Novitiate Talks on Cistercian Usages and Richard Kearney’s Theandrism,” , 175.
Tim Lilburn, The Larger Conversation, “Contemplative Experience; Autochthonous Practice,” 204.