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I,1 Mt. Angel’s Spiritual, Intellectual, Vital, Physical Values

I,1.1 Our alma mater’s Spiritual Nourishing

On that Labor Day Weekend of 1952, at the time of mother’s birthday

on September 6, Father Heeren came to our house for dinner.

After dinner he would begin the 500-mile drive to take me

to Mt. Angel, near Portland Oregon, where I would enter

the Minor Seminary with the Benedictine Monks where for

the next six years I would begin my studies to be a priest.

As we sat there for dinner in our humble little kitchen

daddy knew that mother and Father Heeren greatly loved each other

in an agape that sublimated affection, friendship, and eros.

And he knew that mother could think of nothing better for me

than that I become a priest like the priests she had come to know.

He could see how I had identified with my mother’s values

and how I had received a vocation to become a priest and

to serve God and others by greatly admiring Father Heeren.

So we drove a third of the way, stayed at a motel, and

arrived at Mt. Angel in the middle of the day on Monday.

Fr. Heeren who had grown up in Ireland had gone to

the Minor Seminary there and then he came to Mt. Angel

when he decided to be a priest for the Diocese of Boise, Idaho.

He knew Mt. Angel and the monks very well and he and

Father Bernard, who was rector of the seminary, had been classmates.

As we drove, Father Heeren told me about the Benedictine Monks.

He said that their motto was “Ora et Labora” and with them

I would learn “to work and to pray” and most of all I noticed

the spiritual atmosphere of the monastery and the seminary,

which at one time had been sacred to the Indians as Topalamaho.

I was familiar with the world of the spirit since my father

lost his father to that world when he was five and my mother’s

mother and father both learned of it when they lost a parent when young.

I,1.2 Our alma mater’s Intellectual Nourishing

As we drove up the hill a flood of feelings came over Father Heeren.

He pointed out to me the Stations of the Cross there among the trees.

Father Heeren was coming home to his nourishing mother whom

he loved so much and he was happy and proud to be bringing me.

We parked in front of the seminary, went in and found Father Bernard

who was so glad to see Father Heeren and so welcoming to me.

We were taken to the first- and second-year dormitory with my bags.

Father Heeren said goodbye to me, went with Father Bernard, and I

would not see him again until I went home for Christmas vacation.

From day one we got into the routine of seminary life arising

as 5:30 a.m. each morning and going to bed each night at 9:30 p.m.

We had the great silence from 7:10 each evening until

breakfast the next morning and we did not even look at each other.

There were many spiritual exercises beginning with daily Mass

each morning in the crypt where we would receive holy communion.

Then there was the sung Mass after breakfast with the monks.

During the day we recited Lauds, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.

We had spiritual reading each day before lunch and Father Bernard

gave us a spiritual talk five days a week in the evening.

But the intellectual life was just as important as the spiritual life

in terms of the time we spent in classes and in the study hall.

In our freshman year we had seven courses: Religion I, English I,

Latin I, General Science, World Civilization, Algebra I, and Chant I.

From Monday to Friday when we were not taking classes and during

the evening we had study hall and would work on our assignments.

Learning all the vocabulary and the grammar for our Latin class

was the most difficult task and it really trained our memory.

Father Louis was our first-year Latin teacher and learning grammar

helped us not only with English but with all the liberal arts

of reading, writing, speaking, and listening because we came

to reflect upon all the grammatical ways of our language.

I,1.3 Our alma mater’s Vital Nourishing

“I came to give you life and to give it to you more abundantly.”

Those words of Jesus were the basis of our life at the Angel Mount.

Spiritual love, intellectual light, moral life, and physical logos

all fit together in such a way so as to contribute to each other.

Like tributaries of the same stream that contribute to living waters

theological, intellectual, moral, and physical virtues were forms

of excellence nourishing the fresh seeds in that seminary seedbed.

Those moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance

were very important for future priests for they would have to be

excellent examples of those virtues that their people might imitate them.

The exercise that was most focused on growth in moral virtue

was our practice of weekly confession with our own confessor.

The virtue of temperance or self-control was central to confession.

Week after week I would tend to confess the same vices or sins,

of getting angry, swearing, or indulging in uncharitable thoughts,

words, or deeds and I just did not have consistent self-control .

We learned of a self-realization ethic that we could be happy

if we were virtuous for virtues are means to happiness.

This self-realization ethics for seminarians also aimed at

an other-realization ethics for priests loved as good shepherds

attempting to bring their flock to a healthy, happy, holy life.

We had to grow in vitality that we might help others do the same.

People tend to be so incompatible that they cannot be happy

and be at peace together and living closely with one another brought

many opportunities for disgust at each other’s strange tastes.

We were often told about the battle between the flesh and the spirit

in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he wrote:

You cannot belong to Christ Jesus

unless you crucify

all self-indulgent passions and desires.

We had to become free from sin to be free for serving others.

I,1.4 Our alma mater’s Physical Nourishing

At Mt. Angel we were nourished in the heart’s love, the mind’s

wisdom, the soul’s moral virtue, and the body’s physical strength.

Building up good habits of physical exercise was part of

our seasonal and daily routine. In the fall we played football,

in the winter basketball and we trained for boxing, and in spring

we had track and field and we were each on a softball team.

We often heard about a strong mind in a healthy body and to that

was added a warm heart and a virtuous self-sacrificing soul.

The monks imitated Jesus in all of that and their very lives

of poverty, chastity, and obedience let each of us know their love.

Even as freshmen we were told about cardiovascular exercise

and at the football field we would run around the track until

we were perspiring profusely and lift weights and stretch.

We would practice passing and catching the football and blocking.

In High school we had about eight football teams with

members from each of the four classes and we would compete

to see who won at the end of the season as we also did in basketball.

For the first three years I did not really understand what was

demanded to be really competitive in track and field even though

I was very interested in running and jumping especially because

I had delighted in my father’s high school annuals, and he

was a star athlete in all sports, but especially in the half mile.

With him when I was six years old I had already started

learning to box when he taught boxing at Carey High School.

So already as a freshman I was eager not only to play

basketball during the winter but also to train for boxing.

Father Louie called it the manly art of self-defense and

we had great fun sparring with each other and learning

how to work the rapidfire punching bag and even skipping rope.

That was the main thing about sports for me—they were lots of fun.

Play is fun and we did play football, basketball, and baseball.

I,1.5 Father Bernard and the Spiritual

Father Bernard Sander was the rector of the minor seminary

and as the person in charge of everything he primarily

concentrated on making sure each of us got deeply involved

in each of the spiritual exercises we could practice each day.

He was an excellent speaker and each day for about ten minutes

he would explain to us the deeper meanings of the mass,

of the divine office, of confession, and during May of the rosary.

During their fifteen-hundred-year history the Benedictines

have been forerunners in developing a beautiful liturgy.

Father Bernard would talk to us about the church’s year of grace.

He explained to us how the daily sacrifice of the mass was

at the very center of our spiritual exercises and how it was

divided into the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Each morning there would be a special reading from

the Hebrew Bible and from one of the New Testament Epistles

and from one of the Four Gospels. Father Bernard often

picked the connecting point between the three and spoke on that.

The Benedictine fathers would come together in the choir stalls

and chant back and forth the eight parts of the divine office.

Father Bernard explained to us how they sang the 150 psalms

of the Psalter each week and how many of the older fathers

had all the psalms memorized, which made them very dear.

As parish priests we too would eventually pray the Breviary

made up of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terse, Vespers, and Compline.

Each day we would recite Lauds, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.

Thus already as freshmen we started learning the Old Testament

and began to see what Matthew meant when he claimed

that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.

Father Bernard began to help us see how love and justice were

so important throughout Hebrew history and how Jesus came

to take them further even with a love for all our enemies.

I,1.6 Father Ambrose and the Intellectual

Father Ambrose Zenner had gone to Rome to get his doctorate

in sacred theology and the word was that he was being groomed

to become the next abbot of the monastery and he did become

the rector of the major seminary when the new building

was built in 1956, and there were then two seminaries.

When I arrived in 1952, Father Ambrose was the vice rector

of the entire seminary under Father Bernard and every two months

he would talk with each of us as he gave us our report cards.

He was very encouraging and right away I liked him.

I would ask him why a priest had to study algebra and science

and he would tell me why a liberal arts education was important.

We students would talk with each other about such questions

and we would discuss with each other what he told each of us.

Already as freshmen we began to hear about the intellectual virtues

of science, art, practical wisdom, intuitive reason, and philosophical

wisdom and in the seminary there were those studying philosophy.

We called the students in the major seminary logicians,

philosophers, and theologians because that’s what they studied.

Philosophy especially began to have a mysterious appeal

and it was good to believe that mathematics and science

could teach us special methods that would help us love wisdom.

My algebra teacher’s name was Father Method and Father

Ambrose joked that Father Method was teaching us a method

of clear and correct reasoning that could help us in everything.

My grandmother Coates had a book on her shelf called

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant and I loved

looking through it and certain quotations stayed in my mind

such as the saying of Dmitri from The Brothers Karamazov

“I don’t want millions, but only an answer to life’s questions.”

I mentioned this quotation to Father Ambrose and he told me

that I already seemed to be a philosopher with all my questions.

I,1.7 Father Anthony and the Vital

Father Anthony was both my confessor and my science teacher.

As freshmen he introduced us to chemistry, physics, and biology.

We put water in a container and after a few days looked at

a bit of it under the microscope and pretty soon bacteria began

to appear and after a couple of weeks it was loaded with many

kinds of little swimming critters visible only with the microscope.

We would remember forever how quickly germs could multiply

in water or any sort of unrefrigerated thing such as meat.

We were each growing rapidly and he kept a record of

each of our growth in weight, height, leg length, and even

the size of our muscles when we flexed our biceps, and we

each went individually to the laboratory for these measurements.

One day as he was measuring the inside of my leg his finger

touched my testicles and he asked me if I was missing one.

I asked him what he was talking about and he told me that

one of them felt diminished and I said to him: “I wonder why?”

He asked me if I ever played with myself and he said that

masturbation could momentarily cause the testicles to shrink.

I said that I had recently played with myself and he said

that I should confess that and break the sinful habit.

I told him how in the seventh grade some eighth-grade boys

had told me about it and I tried it and occasionally continued.

He explained to me how just thinking about a girl sexually

or how just touching myself for the pleasure of it was a venial

sin but ejaculation was a mortal sin and I should not

go to communion until I confessed it and amended not to repeat.

He did help me to become honest and to try to stop my self-abuse.

I did get the sin down to a few times a year and he told me

that there was a relation between my lust and my anger.

I never could understand what he meant but I tried to move

from self-abuse to self-realization and to increase my vitality.

I,1.8 Father Louis and the Physical

When I was a first-year student in grade nine and the minor

and major seminarians were still together in one building

the three administrators were Fathers Bernard, Ambrose, and Louis.

Father Bernard, the rector, primarily concentrated on the spiritual.

Father Ambrose, the vice rector, concentrated on the intellectual.

Father Louis, the prefect of discipline, concentrated on the physical.

He was very convinced that a strong mind in a healthy body

was essential if one were to live a long, happy, and productive life.

His conviction was convincing to us and each year our physical

exercises became more pleasant, significant, and deeply habitual.

Down by the football field there were two hardly used tennis courts.

Father Louis had some tennis rackets and said we could use them

whenever we wanted and he taught a few of us how to serve,

hit backhands, forehands, and to keep score and he said

that learning hand-eye coordination was valuable for any sport.

I believed him and saw a relation between the arts of fly-fishing,

wing-shooting, and tennis playing and I looked forward to more tennis.

However, as the prefect of discipline, Father Louis

not only got us into the physical exercises of sports

but we also did physical work especially on many Saturdays.

The monks had a very large farm with acres of hops below

the hill and various kinds of orchards and even a pig farm.

Brother Fidelis, a saintly little monk with a white beard,

took care of the pigs for years and we liked to help him.

The fathers all spoke of him with great praise for his life

of obviously sweet prayer and work and we were told how

he prayed all the time as he was taking care of his dear pigs.

In the seminary there was the activity of working on “The Chain

Gang.” If someone broke a rule Father Louis would assign him

to a Saturday morning of digging a ditch, or shoveling snow,

or some fairly strenuous type of hard, physical labor.

I,1.9 From Money—to Death—to Sex—to Religion

My father had always stressed that each of his five children

should get a college education so that we could get good jobs

and have happy lives without all the difficulties he suffered.

He made sure that we each did well in grade school and that

we worked and saved our money to pay for our college tuition.

But when I decided to become a priest the motive of money

was put into a new perspective and was no longer a priority.

Instead I began to move into the realm of the three great secret things.

Sex, death, and religion became more and more the center of my life.

Religion comes from the verb ligare, which means to bind

and re-, which means again, so religion is a binding of oneself

to God over and over again in the spiritual, intellectual,

emotional, and physical ways that made up our seminary life.

Prayer was the primary way in which we kept binding ourselves

to God again and again and prayer is rooted in a love that is

stronger than death, which my father learned when his father died.

With his mother and sisters he went through the mourning process

in a successful way by learning how to pray for his father

and his family by asking his father to pray for them.

He learned to converse with his guardian angel and Mary

the Mother of God and Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit.

When I was five he taught me to do the same and I prayed

especially with my mother as she too bound herself to God

over and over again in her prayer and by all that she did.

In the sacrifice of the mass twice a day we reenacted

the death of Jesus and we were bound together in communion.

You cannot take your money with you when you die and

religion with its crucifixion and resurrection can make sense

of death so that we can pray: “Oh death, where is thy sting?”

and as I tried to pray with purity sex began to take me

through various transformations in the religious life.

I,2 Growing Spiritually in that Seminary Seed Bed

I,2.1 Nourishing Agape for All Persons with the Liturgy

Already during our first year in the seminary we began

to practice the spiritual, intellectual, vital, and physical exercises.

We all knew that as future priests the spiritual were the most

important and that the others were for the sake of the spiritual.

At the center of our spiritual exercises was our praying of

the mass twice a day and all of our prayer was a practice

of agapeic love by which we would love God more and more

with our whole heart, mind, and soul and our neighbor as ourself.

The mass consisted of two parts: the liturgy of the Word and

the liturgy of the Eucharist, and Father Bernard in his teaching

focused most of all in relating Jesus and his love to both of these.

The church’s year of grace was organized around the main events

in the life of Jesus so that the seasons of Advent, Christmas,

Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost each had a buildup of lessons

in the readings from the Hebrew Bible, the Epistles, and the Gospels,

which let us pray in detail about each moment of Jesus’ love.

This first half of the mass in its liturgy of the Word also

included the beautiful prayers, “I will go up to the altar of God,”

which, as an altar boy in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades,

I had said in Latin with Father Heeren, and the Kyrie or Lord

Have Mercy, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, and The Creed.

This liturgy of the Word prepared us for the liturgy of the Eucharist

with its three main parts of the offertory, consecration, and communion.

We brought all of our thoughts, words, and deeds, all of our praise

repentance, thanksgiving, and petition, and offered them up

with the bread and the wine the priest offered to God.

And then with the bread and the wine they became the body and

the blood of Jesus, which were separated in the consecration

so that the sacrifice of the mass is the center of the priest’s life.

Then there is communion in which the resurrected Jesus lives on.

I,2.2 Nourishing Agapeic Affection with the Liturgy of the Word

Love and personal growth in the seminary had to do most of all

with cultivating the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

Loving everybody is a very unnatural sort of thing for people are

so different that they irritate each other very frequently with

negative reactions that are habitual and that they often express.

Even our family members who are closest to us might be of

different body types and have tastes that tend to disgust us.

The whole seminary lifestyle with its lengthy silence and all

of its spiritual exercises aims at a self-overcoming so that we

could come to affirm all others constantly even with a loving affection.

Father Bernard helped us to see how the liturgy of the Word

operated on three planes at once: the historical, the plane of grace,

and the eschatological plane involving us in past, present, and future.

During the six seasons of the year the liturgy of the Word told us

the story of salvation as it was foretold by the prophets and lived out

by Jesus from his birth to his death and resurrection and his Spirit’s coming.

But all of this historical reality offered us grace in our present life.

It was our task to appropriate it and love with the love that Jesus

loved as he came to teach love and to live it out in suffering joy.

And finally the liturgy of the Word was always preparing us for

the life to come when we would die but resurrect in glory with Jesus.

So the liturgy taught us faith in the past, hope for the future, and a life

of love for all in the present so that all the readings during mass

with new stories each day brought us to reflect upon and understand

the mass that as priests we would pray each day and teach to others.

We came to see how certain Saints like St. Francis especially

imitated Jesus in his affection as Francis would love brother moon

and sister sun and have affection for all persons and living beings.

The monks loved us with a certain affection that we could hear

in the tone of their voice and they began to teach us the history of

this special agapeic affection that would last forever as we lived it now.

I,2.3 Nourishing Agapeic Friendship with the Word’s History

Affection and friendship are two different kinds of love and the liturgy

of the word taught us of each throughout the history of the Hebrew Bible

and throughout the twenty-seven books of the New Testament

and on into history.

For besides the Sunday masses, which took us into a prayer life

of the development of the seasons of the year, there were also

the feast days of the saints who exemplified the kinds of love.

We knew of the affection of the family life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

We also came to know of the friendship between David and Jonathan.

Affection seemed special because it was a felt sort of warm kindness

within a family and you would not feel that familial love for all.

Friendship also seemed to be a special kind of shared interest

between two or a few and it could be quite exclusive of others.

In fact, in the seminary we were warned about the dangers

of special friendships in which two seminarians would spend

much of their time together and even want to exclude others.

There is a self-love in the natural loves of affection, friendship,

and eros insofar as I have a special preference for my child,

my friend, or my beloved and universalizing these loves with

agape and letting them give a felt content to agape was the

lesson of Jesus and what the liturgy of the Word was teaching us.

St. Augustine was a great example of sublimated friendship and

St. Francis was a beautiful example of sublimated affection.

In the way they imitated Jesus we came to see how Jesus

had a special agapeic affection for everyone, a special

agapeic friendliness for all, and agapeic eros for each woman.

We came to see how Jesus loved each person as having

an equal worth, each person as unique and each person in

relation to all other persons so he would even love each woman

with a special sublimated eros that went out to her uniqueness.

The liturgy of the Word’s history taught us of Jesus’ friendliness.

I,2.4 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Word’s Present

The liturgy of the Word taught us the history of many examples

of love that we should practice in the present for the sake of

a blessed eternity in which every true love will conquer death.

Trying to be celibate and get my eros sublimated into agape

was the main trial of my life for I still a few times a year

fell into mortal sin, and sex for some of us was the great temptation.

In our first year there was a handsome, blond, curly-headed

youth from California who told me that sometimes

even when he was going up to communion he had impure thoughts.

He did not return in our second year and must have decided

with his spiritual advisor that the celibate life was not for him.

My confessor in my sophomore year was Father Justin who

had previously been a rector of the seminary and yet again

told me as he listened to my sins that my lust and anger

were related as are the concupiscible and irascible appetites.

I must have inherited from my father and his example

the habit of getting angry and swearing and no matter

how hard I tried I would still get angry on the spur of the

moment at something that hurt me and use God’s name in vain.

The liturgy of the Word taught us a lot about eros for we could

wonder about the polygamy of Abraham and all the sexual sins

of David that are right at the center of the court history of David

and that brought him and his family the punishment of the rods of men.

And then there was Solomon and The Song of Songs, which began

with those words of a woman, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”

When Father Bernard became a Benedictine he took the new name

of Bernard after St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Father Bernard

told us that he wrote over sixty sermons for nuns that were

based upon The Song of Solomon and that had to do with the kisses

of the feet, the hands, the mouth, and the breasts and somehow

the female within us was supposed to be the beloved of Jesus.

I,2.5 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Word’s Future

The three great secret things that make their way into great art

are sex, death, and religion and the liturgy of the Word is filled

with meditation upon the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

The history of art since the beginning with the Egyptian pyramids

and with the early cave painting and with all early literature

like The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had to do with the mourning

process that lets us help our blessed dead with prayer and ask

the community of saints to pray for us so that the very core

of spirituality is also to live in the world beyond the material.

St. Paul’s epistles which form a big part of the liturgy of the Word

focus most of all upon the death and resurrection of Christ’s body

and upon how we should live now to be resurrected with him.

The Hail Mary, which we prayed many times a day, ended with

those words: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

The eschatological theme of death, purgatory, heaven, or hell

was always there in the liturgy of the Word and we prayed often

for the poor souls in purgatory that they might go through

their reconciliation process and come to love all with no negativity.

As the liturgy of the Word taught us more and more of the lost

things we came to see how the theological virtue of hope was

being strengthened by all of our prayer, for the Our Father

brought us to pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.” And the Glory Be taught us to pray:

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world

without end. Amen.” And that was the pattern of our spiritual life.

So we came to see that sex had to do with beginnings and death

with endings and that religion dealt with both and the eternity

that was there before sexual beginnings and our mortal endings.

Of course, as a second-year fifteen-year-old student I thought

a lot more about sex than about death and it was as if

I was coming to mourn a sex life and family I could never have.

I,2.6 Nourishing Agapeic Affection in the Liturgy of the Eucharist

The second part of the mass that we prayed twice a day was

the liturgy of the Eucharist in its offertory, consecration, and communion.

As our teachers and especially Father Bernard taught us,

the Eucharist makes history become present and our hope

becomes so real that our agapeic love makes real for us

our faith in all that Jesus did 2000 years ago and it makes real

our hope in a future life with Jesus and all he came to save.

At the consecration of the mass when the bread and wine became

the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus my heart grew

in affectionate love as I prayed: “I praise, love, worship and adore you.”

Adoration is a special kind of feeling that we might have for

the baby Jesus and for the suffering Jesus and for God once

Jesus makes God known as the love between the persons of God.

A lover might feel this love for his beloved and a parent might

feel it for a baby and adoration is a kind of affectionate

feeling that can grow as we say prayers of love for each other.

Twice a day in the liturgy of the Eucharist at the making

sacred of the bread and the wine we were reminded of Jesus’

incarnational love that went beyond atonement justice as

the Son of God became flesh that he might even suffer and die

for us to show us the love that loves all others even enemies

with a love that goes out to them as more important than ourself.

As we prayed with an adorational affection at the consecration

there was cultivated in our hearts an affection for everyone

even those who hurt us or disgusted us so that we could

see through any of their faults to the person for whom Jesus died.

The sacrifice of the mass at the consecration not only brought

forth the body and blood of Jesus into the bread and the wine

but also as they were separated there was a renewal of the

very sacrifice of Jesus as he died for us upon the cross.

From Jesus’ agapeic affection for us we learned to have that for others.

I,2.7 Nourishing Agapeic Friendship with the Eucharist’s History

The middle part of the liturgy of the Eucharist focused on Jesus

as present with us in the present moment there on the altar

when as the lamb of God he came to die for us again out of love.

As St. Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 11:26,

Until the Lord comes, therefore every time

you eat this bread and drink this cup,

you are proclaiming his death

and so anyone who eats the bread

or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily

will be behaving unworthily

toward the body and blood of the Lord.

Receiving Jesus in communion in his body, blood, soul, and divinity

was the highlight of our day and St. Paul called it the agape meal.

We came to the seminary that we might become priests and offer

the sacrifice of the mass for God’s people throughout our lives.

The whole purpose of the daily mass and communion was that we

might spend our lives growing in love for God with our whole

heart, mind, and soul and in loving all our neighbors as ourselves.

We learned from Jesus and the monks who taught us how to love

especially our enemies by praying for them even at communion.

In the seminary we were warned about the dangers of being

special friends with some to the exclusion of others and we learned

that as priests we had the common task of bringing the kingdom

of love to all humans that we might all live in communion.

In receiving communion together we became friends in the

common task of bringing communion to all the peoples of the earth.

God is the love or agape between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Human persons have an equal dignity like the persons of the Trinity

and deserve our agapeic affection and all persons belong to

the mystical body of Christ in a communal personhood and thus

we should have an agapeic friendship for every person.

I,2.8 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Eucharist’s Present

The liturgy of the Eucharist makes Jesus present in the past,

present, and future dimensions of his presence and nourishes

our love with a special kind of felt affection that is universal.

The third part of that liturgy, the communion, especially nourishes

an agapeic, affectionate friendship uniting all in bringing about

the kingdom of God’s agape so that all might be reconciled.

My special problem was eros or sexuality so that sometimes

in my sinfulness like a black sheep I could not receive communion.

Thus the offertory come to have a special meaning for me

as I offered myself up in all my sinfulness with the bread and

the wine praying that I might be transformed in the consecration

and become a sacred priest set apart to serve God and his people.

Whereas each part of the liturgy of the Eucharist had past,

present, and future dimensions the offertory made Jesus present

to me in a heartfelt way as I tried to imitate him in his celibacy.

As time went on I came to see that many women loved him and

he loved many women for there was the Samaritan woman who

had five husbands and Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene.

I was especially struck by how after the resurrection Magdalene

recognized him by the way he said her name with a love

that let her know right away that it had to be her Lord.

Jesus had a sublimated eros that let him love each unique

woman in a very special way even in all of her female uniqueness.

Many women came to love him with that sublimated eros

that would give a special content to their agape and a universality

to their eros even as Father Heeren had that toward my mother

and she toward him and she named her youngest son, Tommy

Joe, after Father Thomas Heeren and her husband Joseph.

Could such a transubstantiation ever happen to me in which

my sinful habitual substance would become a sacred substance.

I prayed each morning to become a sacred, sacerdos priest.

I,2.9 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Eucharist’s Future

The liturgy of the Eucharist is all about a love stronger than death.

It is about death and dying and a mourning process that can be

totally successful if one can live out the sorrowful mysteries

in light of the glorious mysteries to bring about the joyful mysteries.

In the sacrament of the sacrifice of the mass the sacred heart

of Jesus who is the high priest is slaughtered as the lamb of God.

He was born for us in his incarnation that he might be killed

for us in his crucifixion but then in the reliving of this in the mass

he lives on in us in communion in his glorious resurrection.

The glorious mysteries that began with the resurrection bring

out the futural dimensions of the liturgy of the Eucharist,

which we can begin to understand by thinking about the prayer,

Glory Be:

Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

as it was in the beginning, is now

and ever shall be world without end. Amen.

Levinas explains in Otherwise Than Being (pp. 144ff.) how “Glory is

that which manifests the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness.”

So each day in communion we would give glory to God and

experience the glory of God by knowing God’s love more dearly.

Each day in communion it would become manifest to us

that Jesus who had died for us was now living within us.

So in communion we went through a mourning process

in which the lost, dead Jesus would be found alive within us.

As we were nourished day by day in communion the Love

that is God became more and more manifest to us even

though it remained beyond us in its mysterious unmanifestness.

The manifest is that which we can hold fast in our hand

or even in our mouth as we held Jesus in holy communion.

No matter which of our loved ones dies our mourning

for them through prayer and communion lets them be present.

I,3 Growing Intellectually in That Seminary Seed-Bed

I,3.1 Nourishing Agape with the Trivium

In the seminary our alma mater constantly cultivated within us

the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and we came to see

how the intellectual virtues of science, art, practical wisdom,

intuitive reason, and philosophic wisdom aided the theological virtues.

Growing in the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love contributed

greatly to understanding agape and its various sublimations.

Right from the beginning in the minor seminary our teachers

began to train us in the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

In our first year Father Louis taught us Latin and in our

second year Father Ambrose started us with German while

we continued with Latin and we studied English in both years.

So we began to get a very good training in the basics of grammar.

During our third year we were also being trained in the rhetorical arts

of expressing ourselves in both writing and in public speaking.

In English we learned to write an essay with an introduction, a body

with three parts, and a conclusion and we talked about defending

a thesis with demonstration, definitions, distinctions, and dialectics.

We were also introduced to public speaking and down in the Little

Gym we began to see fourth-year students address an audience

in a speech contest and we knew that next year we would do the same.

We would not study logic in depth until our sixth year

but we knew and were friends with the logicians and looked

forward to learning both the traditional and the new mathematical logic.

We came to understand how our study of algebra, of geometry,

and of trigonometry was already introducing us to logical thinking.

When we got our report cards in November of my second year

I received 89 in Latin II, 84 in German I, 81 in Geometry

and 84 in Chant II, plus 95 in Religion II, 95 in English II,

and 98 in World History and when Father Ambrose gave me my

report card he said I could do better and I believed him.

I,3.2 Nourishing Agapeic Affection with Grammar

That conversation with Father Ambrose about my report card

started a mysterious new phase of my life in the seminary.

In January I got basically the same grades and I even fell

from 84 to 81 in German, which he was teaching me.

But he must have inspired me to a New Year’s resolution

because by June all my grades were much higher and

I went from 81 in German to 92 and he was pleased.

From then on I got good grades and I continued to talk with

Father Ambrose and I told him about my troubles with celibacy.

In my third year we decided together that he would be my confessor.

And so once a week I went to his office, knelt before him,

and confessed my sins and somehow as long as he was my

confessor and spiritual advisor I never committed another sexual sin.

He was as affectionate to me as was my own father who,

when I was in the third grade, worked hard with me to keep

my grades up and it was as if they were parallel events.

It seems that Father Ambrose with his celibate life had sublimated

his erotic passion in such a way that it even gave him the power

of a sublimated agapeic affection and a sublimated friendship.

Because Father Ambrose was celibate with no wife or children

of his own he could be affectionate and friendly toward each of us.

Somehow the power of his celibate agape even let me be

celibate and to become a much better student with that new

concentrated and passionate energy channeled over from

the black horse to the white horse and the charioteer.

Father Ambrose was my German teacher and all the intricacies

of grammar were becoming clear to me as I declined nouns

and conjugated verbs in both Latin and German and started

learning the tenses and voices of the verbs and the nominative,

genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative roles of the noun.

Growth in attention to grammatical structures increased loving attention.

I,3.3 Nourishing Agapeic Eros with Rhetoric

Perhaps Father Ambrose’s sex drive was quite strong and thus

the sublimation of his eros into agape could be so powerful

that I could identify with it and be graced with celibacy myself.

Up at Sun Valley where I worked during the summer and Christmas

vacation there was a beautiful waitress by the name of Myrna.

I remember wishing that she and Father Ambrose could meet and marry.

She was a very devout lady who would go to daily Mass each

Tuesday and Friday and I felt a reverent love for her myself.

My continued study of grammar helped me with reading and

listening so that if I heard any incorrect grammar I would

silently notice it unless it were from my brothers whom I corrected.

In certain classes such as English we would be called upon

to read out loud and being able at once to spot sentence structure

with its phrases and clauses helped me to be a good reader.

Constantly working with grammar gave me a familiarity with

language and that familiarity became an affection for speaking,

which encouraged me to always speak with affection to all,

as Father Ambrose and the other monks would always speak to us.

Before Father Ambrose became a monk his name was Joseph Zenner.

Perhaps he chose the name Ambrose partially because of the way

Ambrose helped Augustine not only by teaching him about the

four senses of Scripture—the literal, moral, mystical, and typological—

but also advised Monica that a child of so many prayers and tears

would never perish and thus helped Augustine become celibate.

Father Ambrose was a great rhetorician and as a public

speaker he had a sense of presence plus a well-argued

message that enabled him to be a truly inspiring teacher.

If we think back to Plato’s Phaedrus at 245c and following

and that first great example of erotic sublimation it seems that

the power of Father Ambrose’s creative speaking and writing

fits right in with that creative enthusiasm and divine madness.

I,3.4 Nourishing Agapeic Friendship with Logic

Father Gerard Marx went out to Notre Dame and studied

symbolic logic with Bochenski and in our sixth year

we had a great time learning traditional logic and mathematical

logic in the notation of Whitehead and Russell and the Polish logicians.

But, of course, from year one on we were always learning the logic

of practical consequences for if I did not confess my sexual sins

then my conscience would harden and not grow in sensitivity.

In our third year a happy-go-lucky Irishman Father Brendan

was teaching us religion and Pat Carney from Boise, Idaho knew him.

As a joke we hid a pillow under each of our desks and as he

was lecturing we pulled them out and put our heads on them as if

we were going to sleep and Father Brendan sent us to Father Ambrose.

Father Ambrose got a laugh out of it but said that we were being

insulting to Father Brendan by suggesting that he was boring.

Father Ambrose told us that for our penance we should each write

a thousand-word paper and Father Brendan would correct them.

The title of mine was “My Last Night with a Renegade” and

when Father Ambrose read the title he got a great belly laugh but

really it was only about fishing with my dad and using renegade flies.

So by our third year we clearly saw that any unkindness and

lack of friendliness would have its consequences and we

were learning from the Benedictine community that any act

of friendly agape would have its logical consequences for now

and for the future and that acts of love built the kingdom of love.

As we grew in experience we learned more and more about the logic

of opposites for there could be exclusive, inclusive, dialectical,

and mixed opposites and we were always told about loving enemies.

We were told that even a terrible criminal would have much good

within him and that we should reach out in loving prayer to enemies.

In the seminary we came to see the transcendental logic that any being

is beautiful, good, true, and therefore worthy of affirmative love.

I,3.5 Nourishing Agape with the Quadrivium

In the seminary the spiritual life and the intellectual life fit

together and promoted each other in natural Benedictine harmony.

We learned about the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire

and we came to see how the only light burning was in the monasteries.

The Benedictines always taught the Trivium with its grammar,

rhetoric, and logic, and the Quadrivium with its mathematics,

music, science, and history, and we were constantly trained in both.

After algebra in my third year all my grades were in the 90s,

except for trigonometry in which I received a final grade of 83.

I do not understand why but I always had a difficult time in math.

One time in our first year Father Method had me up at the board

working on an algebra problem in front of the rest of the class.

He kept asking me this and asking me that and I just wasn’t getting it.

Finally, I slammed the chalk into the board and started working out

the answer and he said, “Good, Goicoechea, get mad, maybe you

will wake up and see that this isn’t so difficult after all.”

I did get angry quite easily but did it really wake me up and

did sexuality also awaken me from some lack of passionate energy?

Father David was the Gregorian Chant Master for the Monastery

and the teacher of chant to the seminarians and I did learn

to sing but I never made the choir, for others sang far better.

Science was also greatly appreciated by the monks and after

general science in year one with Father Anthony we then had

chemistry and a wonderful full year biology course with Father Mark.

We learned about the scientific method and did many experiments.

But most of all I really liked history and we learned Roman

History when we studied Latin and the history of music and

also of science as we learned of Mendel, Copernicus, and Galileo.

All of this learning was a way of more deeply loving all of being

with an agape that appreciated more and more all of nature.

I,3.6 Nourishing Agapeic Affection with Mathematics

No matter what the monks taught us they did it with that

universalized affection for which their celibate lives prepared

them so that they truly were fathers to us their adopted sons.

My father as a professional gambler was a kind of mathematician.

As he would count the cards and remember with laws of addition

and subtraction what had been played and what had not he

greatly appreciated a good memory well trained by mathematics.

He made sure that we each learned rapid-fire addition,

subtraction, multiplication, and division but I just never

seemed to have the talent for building on that with higher math.

However, when you think that all things can be understood in

terms of mathematics then you come to a new appreciation

for the complexity and the simplicity of each thing, that is, one

being with two parts of this and five parts of that, and so on.

If you are a monk with a sublimated eros and thus a new

agapeic affection for all persons, places, and things then you

can see how training in the various kinds of math

could bring about a greater affection for all the orderly detail.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God and it does

flame out like shining from shook foil, and a mathematician

can better love all the wondrous complexity of that simplicity.

Our math teachers Father Method and Father Hilary had a vision

that they imparted to whomever could share in their delight.

And even though I seemed to be limited in my capacity to

follow all the nuances with them, their affection for me, which

I tested, still taught me. And the math I could learn definitely

helped me to better love the world of Euclid and the geometricians.

That those earth measures and those who knew trigonometry

were privileged to see certain laws of the universe impressed

me and though I could not easily get it I at least learned

enough to trust in the order of all, even with a kind of faith.

I,3.7 Nourishing Agapeic Eros with Music

As we practiced singing our scales and learned about the history

of the growth from plainchant in its various kinds to polyphony

we came to see that music is all based on mathematical measuring

just as is science and we learned about whole, half, and quarter notes.

Could you say that music is math transformed into lovely sound?

Some of the eighteen masses that we sang on different feast days

were especially sweet and sorrowful songs, like Stabat Mater, and

still had a beautiful sweetness about them so that as mathematics

could build up affection so music could build up a lovely eros.

We not only studied music in class every year but it was

a big part of our prayer life since each day we sang high mass.

The Benedictines not only sang high mass each day but they sang

the eight parts of the divine office, for music was a major part

of their life of “Ora et Labora” and its beauty let them grow in love.

For Christmas in my second year my mother gave me the three-volume

set of The Works of St. John of the Cross and during my third

year at meditation at the end of each morning I studied intently

The Dark Night of the Soul and I took many pages of detailed notes.

I condensed them down and talked about that beautiful poetry

with Father Ambrose and I came to see a metrical music in poetry.

That poetry together with the Gregorian chant formed me further

in the agape of a sublimated eros for it sang:

On a Dark Night enkindled in love with yearning

oh happy chance, I went forth

my house being now at rest.

Once the internal and external senses of our interior castle

are at rest Jesus can recline his face upon our flowery

breasts, kept wholly for himself alone. I came to see

how celibacy can develop a loving femininity even in the male.

From then on deep in the anima of my animus I would never

think of having sex but always of making love even in celibacy.

I,3.8 Nourishing Agapeic Friendship with Science

In our science classes we learned how physics and biology were

still parts of philosophy before modern times and how Aristotle not only

wrote the first book on physics but was also the father of biology.

In defining genus, species, difference, property, and accident he worked

out a classification for the various species of plants and animals.

In his psychology he distinguished scientifically plant, animal, and

human souls and went on to give proof for the immortal human soul.

We learned how Gregor Mendel, a monk himself, worked out the laws

of genetics and how Copernicus, a Catholic priest, came up with

the Copernican revolution that encouraged Galileo and his experiments.

Father Mark had us make a biology book and Bill Wiegand,

a brilliant student from Idaho who was a year ahead of me,

let me use his notebook that he made the year before and I can

remember even tracing some of his drawings and copying much.

Learning the scientific method was a big part of seminary schooling

and we learned how to put forth an hypothesis and to try to

prove it mathematically, logically, and with experimentation.

The five intellectual virtues according to Aristotle are science,

art, intuitive reason, practical wisdom, and theoretical wisdom.

Our schooling was meant to teach us many kinds of knowledge

so that our intuitions could guide in science and help us

to find a fruitful hypothesis as Mendel and Copernicus did.

Intuitive reason and the scientific search that could grow out of it

aided us even in getting a kind of certitude in our faith, hope, and love.

Aristotle defined science as a certain knowledge of things through

causes and our liberal education helped us to intuit probabilities

so that with a practical wisdom we could integrate our lives

as a universal whole within the big picture seen by wisdom.

For Aristotle friendship was a unity of one soul in two bodies

based upon common values but once we saw Jesus’ agapeic love

for all, even enemies, we knew that we should be friendly to all.

I,3.9 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning with History

The monks nourished their agape artistically with music,

scientifically with the sciences, mathematically with intuitive reason,

and came to a practical wisdom that revealed their celibacy

as a sublimated eros that facilitated a new affection and friendship.

They nourished us in all of that historically, for we had art

and music appreciation courses in which we came to know

the history of art and music and we learned the history of ideas.

We studied the Hebrew Bible in the nine stages of its history.

All the fathers had majored in philosophy before they

studied four years of theology and then studied their specialties.

Just at the time that I went to the seminary around 1950

Scripture study went through a revolutionary change in the Catholic

world, for the higher biblical criticism was making an impact.

Father Mathias was back from Rome and teaching us after getting

his Doctorate of Sacred Scripture and William Foxwell Albright’s

“From Stone Age to Christianity” was being read by Catholics.

We saw how the Law and the prophets with their loves of

Ahava and hesed prepared the way for the new agape of Jesus.

We were beginning to understand the history of the various

spiritualities, from the Benedictine to the Franciscan and

Dominican to the Jesuit and the Carmelite; we started

to understand the history of modernity, from Luther and

Descartes to Calvin and Hobbes to Henry VIII and Locke

to Spinoza and Leibniz to Berkeley, Adam Smith,

Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx; and all of this at bottom was

a history of agape, which gave us confidence even as high

school students that all things work together unto the good.

The monks, who knew this history so well because much of it

was their own Benedictine history, gave us such a positive

attitude that we could successfully mourn any loss that came our way.