Jews, Christians, and God

I would just say that Jews and Christians hold each other's keys. The Christians need the Jews to understand the church in Acts, and the Jews need Jesus to fill a gaping hole in their history, which, as the people of history, cannot be left empty.

Gary Cummings
Austin, Tex.

The Romance of the Cloister

This Catholic theologian has been enjoying your publication for several years, and I hereby renew my subscription. The recent issue was particularly good except for Mark Galli's trek ["The Romance of the Cloister," January/February]. I know Protestantism abandoned monasticism, but there are no Christian imperatives that no Christian should pray any more than any other. Monks who cultivate tomatoes in between their prayers have no more "left the world" than Galli has. They do not refuse "to enter into life's evils and sufferings, to subject [themselves] to the vicissitudes of life" any more than his home bound wife does by cleaning diapers, dishes, clothes, and bathrooms when she is not at prayer. They are no more impractical, out of the world, uninvolved, socially negative than she is.

Galli came at the subject with the prevailing attitude of the dying NCC that only social work or political activism expresses Christian faith, opposing "a community divorced from the world [the monastery] to a community engaged with it." That's a high schooler's rhetoric. He questions whether monks "have a great deal to teach us about experiencing the uniquely Christian God." I doubt if anyone could be accepted into a monastery who said his goal was to "experience God." Roman Catholics, monks or not, are not about "experiencing God," but as many of the monks quoted in the article tried to say, they are seeking closer union with God. While personal union with God in what ever degree oftentimes brings (never unambiguous) spiritual effects that can be experienced, if I sought sex with my wife only for my pleasure, she would be inaccessible, and rightly so.

Galli's own categories blinded him somewhat. He acknowledges the monks' "insistence upon the primacy [growth] of union with God" but then notes the extent to which they speak in terms of personal growth and development, in which he sees narcissism. Narcissism is always a danger for any Christian seeking growth in any area, but it's not inevitable, much less in seeking growth in a personal relationship with God. Further more, he completely ignores the content of 95 percent of their prayer life, the divine Office, and the books they read.

I don't recognize his "inner person" or his "inner workings of the soul." He falsely opposes reference to "spiritual battles, dark nights, struggles with God" and psychological descriptions of personal growth. The therapy one monk sought and obtained was obviously, as the monk described it, theological and spiritual as well as psychological.

The last subhead of Galli's article, "A Strange God," is sad. Obviously God does not call most of us to become monks or nuns. But he calls none of us to seek either experience (or feelings) of God, or the complete absence of feelings and emotions about everything else.

Richard J. Rolwing
Reynoldsburg, Ohio

Mark Galli replies:

I believe Mr. Rolwing and I agree more than he suspects. For example, he writes: "Monks … have no more 'left the world' than Galli has." Agreed. To be sure, it is commonly assumed—and even suggested by the language of the monks themselves—that, as Thomas Merton put it, monks become "strangers to the world." But upon closer examination of these Northern California monks, I concluded they are very much a part of this world.