A Monk’s Chronicle: 14 August MMXVII — Gobsmacked by the Silence

Gobsmacked by the Silence

I long ago gave up trying to combat the popular notion that monks are either benign curiosities or dangerous cultural misfits.  Being a monk, I naturally entertain a different perspective, but most people — including not a few Catholics even — cannot be convinced otherwise.

You can imagine my astonishment when I read Michael McGirr’s essay in the July 23rd Sunday Review of The New York Times.  Entitled Sink into the Silence of Summer, I presumed that it would provide suggestions on lovely vacations at the beach or in the wilds of the Adirondacks.  In fact, as the title advertised, it was about silence.

Well into the article McGirr finally gets to the real nub of the issue.  McGirr is dean of faith at Saint Kevin’s College in Melbourne, Australia, and each summer he and a colleague lead a group of student leaders for a few days of retreat at a Cistercian monastery.  I’m assuming that this is a Cistercian monastery of the Trappist persuasion, and the latter monks take the business of silence quite seriously.  By way of comparison, this offshoot of the Benedictine tradition tends to make us Benedictines look like chatter boxes, but I will leave to another occasion the relative merits of each group.  Anyway, the silence at the monastery in question is deafening, and McGirr describes it as a real jolt to the students.

Unused to such an auditory vacuum, year after year it’s been a wrenching experience for the students, and not just because of the absence of noise.  It’s in some ways a defiance of a world in which any and all noise has intrinsic self-importance.  To that end the prior and friend of the author, Bernie, provides the description that succinctly stops the students in their tracks.  McGirr sums up Bernie’s words thusly:  the monastery is “a ‘fridge magnet,’ something that reminds the rest of the world that it doesn’t have as much to say as it thinks it might.”

“Listen” is the opening word of the Rule of Saint Benedict, and Benedict follows up on that command with a key qualification.  Benedict in fact does not invite his monks to listen indiscriminately and absentmindedly to any old thing that comes along.  Rather, he asks them to listen “with the ear of their heart to the teaching of the master.”  That suggests that monks should exercise a bit of quality control when it comes to listening.

I dare say that a lot of what people listen to these days is white noise, at best.  Some is a lot worse.  But at bottom, indiscriminate listening welcomes the wheat and the chaff, the junk and the treasure, the destructive and the nourishing.  Indiscriminate listening proclaims that all noise is uncritically good enough, in its own way.

More than anything else, I think, careful listening is an exercise in personal responsibility.  It involves a thoughtful reflection on what I hear and factors it into the direction I choose for my life.  It’s the sort of exercise that causes me to evaluate where I’m headed, what’s of value going forward, and what will nourish me as a thoughtful human being.

McGirr writes that the students and he are “gobsmacked” by the experience. “Gobsmacked” is a term that’s new to me, but I think that’s pretty much the same thing that happens to monks who make careful listening a part of their lives.  Therein lies the renewing power of silence.

Listening in silence to the teaching of the master does not render us monks mute or numb.  In fact, it awakens us to the wonderful possibilities within.  It reminds us that God has blessed us with talents and all sorts of other gifts.  Likewise God calls us to do great things with our lives.  How wonderful it is, then, to cast off passive listening and discover the power of God stirring within us.

If that’s what happened to Michael McGirr’s students on their visit to the monastery, then I’m not a bit surprised that they were gobsmacked.

Notes

+On August 8th we hosted the priests of the diocese of Saint Cloud for a social gathering and dinner at the monastery.

+On August 13th we hosted for vespers and dinner the sisters from Saint Benedict’s Monastery, our neighboring community in St. Joseph, MN.

+On August 13th our confrere Brother Lucian Lopez left for Notre Dame University, where this fall he will begin his studies for a Ph.D. in the history of science.  Happily I was able to burden Brother Lucian with a few of my books, which will prove more useful to him than to me at this stage of my life.  Among them was my copy of Lewis & Short’s Latin dictionary, which forever has been the Bible for medieval studies.  This copy has special significance for me, since I inherited it from our confrere Fr. Ivan Havener, who passed away unexpectedly nearly thirty years ago.  In true monastic fashion, in Brother Lucian it will serve the next generation of scholars in the monastery.

+August 15th is the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and in honor of that feast I have selected images illustrative of that event in the life of Mary.  At top is The Crowning of the Virgin, ivory, ca. 1350-75, housed in the Louvre in Paris.  Second is the Dormition by Jaume Serra (ca. 1360, Barcelona), in the Museum of Catalan Art, in Barcelona.  Third is also a Dormition, by the Master of Cini (ca. 1330, Rimini), also housed in the Museum of Catalan Art.  Note how both of these show Jesus holding a miniature of Mary, meant to depicted her soul ascending into heaven.  The fourth photo shows The Coronation of the Virgin by Agnolo Gaddi (ca. 1370, Florence), housed in the National Gallery in Washington, DC.  Below is another depiction of The Coronation of the Virgin, by Paoli Veneziano, ca. 1324.  It too is housed in the National Gallery in Washington.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 3 April MMXVII — Find the Sinners You Can Live With

Find the Sinners You Can Live With

Last Saturday I gave a day of reflection for a young man who has now begun his formal entrance into the monastery.  It was his first day as a candidate, and Fr. John — the formation director — had asked me to deliver two conferences.  I was free to talk about anything I wanted, as long as it had something to do with the monastic life.  To say the least, that still gave me plenty of leeway for topics.

What advice do you give to someone who’s come to enter the monastery?  “Don’t do it!” is certainly one option, and it would have made my day much easier had I selected that.  But I knew that Fr. John would frown on that approach, and it wasn’t my sentiment anyway.  So I puzzled over several themes until I concluded that it would be presumptuous of me to tell any candidate what he needed to know or to do.  I also realized that I was going to have to sit through these conferences.  So why not say something that might make an impression on me?  That way if the candidate’s attention were to drift off as I droned on, at least one of us might get something out of the experience.  So in the interests of pure self-interest I decided to remind myself of three points.

First of all, why do people come to the monastery?  Saint Benedict supplied the answer in his Rule, and it’s simple enough.  “The monk comes to seek God.”  Still, that’s a little abstract and doesn’t really touch on the practical reasons for why people embrace this life.  The fact is, novices enter for all sorts of reasons.  They may have a friend or two in the community.  They find the life attractive.  They enjoy the liturgy and the music.  They want to be involved in some aspect of the work of the community.  These are just a few of the lures that the Holy Spirit dangles to inspire people to enter.

But these are not the reasons that cause monks to stay in the monastery for a lifetime.  The fact is, monks grow and mature, as do whole communities.  What matters at one point may matter less twenty years down the road as monks grow in age and experience and wisdom.  What brought them to the monastery merely began a process that lasts a lifetime, and change occurs along the way.

That brings me to the second point.  In the course of life most monks gradually discover that the abstract business of the search for God is actually why they remain.  They also discover that God is not nearly so distant as they may have once assumed.  Gradually, little by little, they learn the lessons that Saint Benedict intended to teach.  They do begin to get glimpses of God in the abbot, in the sick and elderly, in the guests and the young, and even in themselves.  That’s the unexpected reward of the monastic life, unless of course a monk manages to keep his eyes closed to all of this.  But if a monk can keep his eyes alert to the possibilities, then he will rub elbows with Christ, resident in the people around him.

My final point has to do with a fundamental reality of life in community.  Monks may see the face of Christ in one another, but they also must come to terms with the fact that monks are people too.  In spiritual terms they are both sinners and saved.  In social terms, they all have their assets and their liabilities.  Every monastery and each monk does some things very well, and they fall woefully short in other areas.  The irony is that it can be as difficult to live with gifted people as it can be to live with sinners.  But the challenge for any candidate is whether he can live with these particular sinners and their particular sins.  If this is a deal-breaker, then he needs to find other sinners who are more to his liking.

These are the points with which I satisfied myself during that day of reflection.   That said, I harbor no illusion that these issues are somehow unique to the monastic life.  For bettter and for worse these crop up in marriage and friendships and in most any human relationship.  And if they are the challenges that we all encounter in the course of our spiritual pilgrimage, then no one should be surprised to encounter them in the monastic pilgrimage.  Therein is the struggle, and therein is the reward of a life well lived.  Along the way, the important goal is this:  find the group of sinners with whom you will flourish on the path to God.  Not surprisingly, then, that’s what novitiate is all about.

Notes

+On March 30th I sat in on the weekly meeting of the Benedictine Living Group, led by Brother Aidan.  Participants are college students who live together for a year in one of the residence halls and commit themselves to regular prayer together, as well as a fall and spring retreat and a weekly seminar on the Rule of Saint Benedict.  It was fun to participate in their discussion, especially since I didn’t have to prepare anything in advance.

+On April 1st I gave the day of reflection to our incoming candidate for the monastery.  For two months he will live and work and pray with us;  and at the end of that period he can apply for the novitiate.

+We had plenty of guests during the past few days in the monastery.  For two days four students from Saint John’s University lived with us as part of their introduction to the monastery.  On Saturday April 1st sixty students and three faculty from St. Olaf College joined us for Mass.  This is a yearly trek for these classes from St. Olaf, and no doubt they were surprised by the fact that their host for the day, Brother David-Paul, is an alumnus of St. Olaf.  He is subprior of the monastery.

+On March 31st Brothers Simon Peter and Asiel arrived and will spend a week with us.  They are newly-professed monks at Newark Abbey in New Jersey.  For years we have sent our Benedictine Volunteers to work in their school — Saint Benedict’s Prep — and since 2007 we’ve enrolled over thirty of their alumni at Saint John’s.  On Sunday the current cohort of those students joined Brother Simon Peter and Asiel for dinner in the monastic refectory.

+The photos in today’s post all show art from the National Gallery in Washington.  At top is The Crucifixion, by the Master of St. Veronica (Germany, tempera on panel, ca. 1400/1410).  Next is Calvary, by the Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster (German, oil on panel, ca. 1470-1480).  Below that is The Crucifixion with the Virgin, St. John, St. Jerome, and St. Mary Magdalene, by Pietro Perugino (Umbria, 1482-1485). The gruesome Crucifixion is by Matthias Grünewald, Germany, ca. 1511/1520.  At bottom is St. Jerome in the Wilderness by Cima da Conegliano, Venice, ca. 1500-1005.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 20 March MMXVII — A Phobia We Can Live Without

A Phobia We Can Live Without

Last week I reached into my big bag of fears and took out two of my favorite phobias.  Claustrophobia is one I share with many people, but it has a special irony for me because I’ve chosen to live in a cloister.  If claustrophobia bothers me, then I have to bear some of the responsibility, even if I have no idea how I came by that phobia.

My fear of hypodermic needles is a different matter altogether, and I trace that back directly to our childhood nurse Rose.  To be fair, it wasn’t Rose the nurse who terrified me and my two sisters.  Rather, it was her long blunt needles.  They seemed ideally calibrated to take core samples from the earth, and even the hint of a visit to her office sent shivers down our spines.

Anyway, last week I faced a double-whammy of phobias when I had to visit a clinic for an MRI and a cortisone shot in my lower back.  It was my first time for each, and dire warnings had prepared me for the worst.  I’d always dreaded this moment, and I can only hope that my obvious anxiety mitigated my dramatic plea to the doctor for a tranquilizer.  Mercifully he obliged, but even then I knew it wouldn’t be enough to calm me.  And it wasn’t.

I trembled every step of the way as the nurse led me down the hall.  My mind went into overdrive, and in a last-ditch effort I tried to console myself with the thought that I’d wedged myself into airline seats that had to be smaller than this machine.  But even that dark humor failed to work.  Then the door swung open, and for a moment I stared in stunned silence at the machine that was about to eat me.

“What?!  Do you mean to tell me that you got me all worked up for THAT?  That’s nothing!”  I meant my mock outrage to disguise my relief, because in front of me was not the coffin-like tube I had expected to rest in for twenty minutes.  Instead there was a bright and airy contraption, well-lit and comfortable.  It even came complete with head phones and Sirius Radio for my easy-listening entertainment.  I chose soft jazz, climbed on, settled in and dozed off.  It truly was nothing.

Then came the ordeal of the cortisone shot.  That too turned out to be a bust.  There was no pain to speak of, and the worst of it was the anxiety of waiting for the pain that never came.  That’s when I began to realize what I had done to myself.  I had worked myself into a tizzy, and all I had to show for it was a totally unnecessary spike in my blood pressure.  Even worse, two treasured phobias of mine had turned out to be paper tigers, and I had embarrassed myself by the silly fuss I had made.

I’m not a professional psychologist, and so I’m in no position to explain the grip that phobias can have on us.  Still, as an amateur human being with plenty of phobias to my name, I will venture this.  Common to all phobias is the fear of losing control of ourselves in the face of something much bigger than ourselves.  Whether fanciful or quite real, these fears threaten our autonomy and perhaps even our existence.  Quite rightly we sit up and take notice.

Saint Benedict does not have a section in his Rule on phobias, but he does address one situation in which a monk risks losing his autonomy in the face of something much larger than himself.  In chapter 68 he writes of that moment when the abbot might ask impossible things of a monk.  A monk in this predicament rightly feels helpless — damned if he tries and fails, and damned if he fails to try.  He runs the risk of disappointing the abbot by his own failure, even as he is sure of his own inability to do the task at hand.  In short, he’s lost control of his life to forces beyond him.

Saint Benedict doesn’t offer a lot of practical remedies for this situation.  He doesn’t encourage the monk to protest wildly, nor does he suggest that someone act as an arbiter between monk and abbot.  However, he does encourage the monk to submit in love to the command of his abbot and hope that somehow it will all turn out well.

It occurs to me that Saint Benedict may have taken this approach because he is thinking about the larger issues of life.  On any given day there are things that a monk will find challenging, but life itself is the challenge.  Life itself can seem insurmountable, unless of course the monk submits to it in love.

Not surprisingly, we all find ourselves in the same pickle when it comes to God.  There are days when God seems to demand the impossible of us.  And when Jesus asks us to be perfect as his Heavenly Father is perfect, that too is a recipe for failure.  In the face of such a command, who is not bound to fail?  In the shadow of the majesty of God, who doesn’t fear being overwhelmed and forgotten?  How could God possibly take notice of a single poor soul?

On the day when God appears to ask too much of us, that is the day when we must plunge ahead in love.  On the day when we imagine ourselves as nothing in contrast to God, that’s the moment to recall that God so loved each of us that he sent Jesus for our salvation.  On the day when we think God’s hand reaches out to smother us, remember that God reaches out for the sole purpose of gathering us into the palm of his hand.

Not for a minute would I suggest that it’s easy to toss away our phobias.  I’m sure that claustrophobia is lurking in the shadows, waiting for its next chance to scare the daylights out of me.  And as for hypodermic needles, these we will always have with us.  But to be afraid of God?  That’s a phobia we can live without.

Notes

+Last week was a time of missed opportunities.  I had planned to attend  a talk by Saint John’s alumnus Denis McDonough ’92, who spoke at Saint John’s on March 14th.  For the last four years Denis has been the chief of staff at the White House.  Then on March 16th I had registered to attend an alumni reception at the new US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.  I was able to attend neither of these events, much to my disappointment.

+On March 15th I spent the afternoon getting an MRI and a cortisone shot in my back.  Happily, I am making good progress with my back, and I look forward to the day when I can ditch the walker that currently allows me to get around.  The pain is down considerably.  What I have come to appreciate most these past three weeks is the enormous amount of work that people have put in to make our campus accessible.  I had no idea how complicated it could be to get through doors until I had a walker in tow.

+On March 18th retired Bishop John McRaith of the Diocese of Owensboro, KY, passed away.  Bishop McRaith was an alumnus of our Prep School.

+The photos in today’s post show the panels of the Troyes Altarpiece, ca. 1525, now housed at the V & A in London.  It is made of limestone, painted and gilded.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 13 March MMXVII — The Small Things: Where God Works Best

The Small Things:  Where God Works Best

It was my first morning as chaplain on a cruise ship.  How I got that plum job is a story for another time; but in return for a daily Mass, Sunday services for the crew, and availability to one and all, I got passage from San Francisco to Alaska and back.  The gorgeous scenery was merely a free extra, as were moments of quiet time.

I was seated in a cafe, sipping coffee and trying to compose a sermon for the Mass I would say later that morning.  Despite the hour, the place was surprisingly full, and when one white-haired gentleman asked if he could join me, I gladly welcomed him.  I could figure out a sermon later, I hoped.

So began a friendship that has developed in the course of over ten years.  Soon enough I and my friends John and Rose Lyden were on a first-name basis, and an encounter that began at sea took root on land.  Later I did a two-week stint at their home parish in Bridgehampton, NY, and still later I witnessed the renewal of wedding vows by them and nine other couples on the occasion of their 50th anniversary.  Last May I had the honor and the sad duty to preach at Rose’s funeral.  In the course of all that I recognized that in some way I had become part of the family.

Gradually John and Rose learned about my life as a monk at Saint John’s, and they also learned about my work at Saint John’s University.  It was after their first visit to Saint John’s that John stunned me with a question.  He knew we had done great work in partnership with St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, NJ.  Graduates from that inner-city school had come to Saint John’s for college, and the results have been extraordinary.  For his part John had worked with an organization to improve graduation rates at Immokalee High School, situated at the opposite end of the economic spectrum from nearby Naples, FL.  Many there were now ready for college, and he wondered if Saint John’s might be the right place for some of them.  The light bulb went on in my head, and my quick response was “Yes!”  John would help to make their education at Saint John’s possible, if we would extend to these guys the same sort of moral support we have given to the guys from Newark.

This year, two years into the project, we have four guys from Immokalee at Saint John’s.  This fall and next we expect to add two more per year.   Our goal then is to have eight students at any given time, with two students in each class.  We hope to see each graduate within four years, with little or no debt to encumber them as they embark on their post-college careers.  Considering the challenges of life in Immokalee — a community of migrants that struggles mightily — this is nothing short of a God-send.  It’s the chance for these young men to shape lives in which poverty will no longer be the major factor.  They can be who they choose to be.

John is nothing if not persistent and high-energy, and as we began the project he enlisted the partnership of his college classmate from Brown University, Jack Marshall.  The goal was to support a rotation of eight students and in time to have those eight scholarships fully endowed.  Obviously we need the help of others to make it happen, but ours is a noble objective.  We hope to shape the lives of some promising young men and to give them the chance for a future beyond anything they might have imagined.

Not a few people thought we were crazy.  Could a kid from Florida find happiness in Minnesota?  I pointed out that for decades Saint John’s has hosted students from the Bahamas, and none has ever died of the cold.  Of course there would be cultural differences between Immokalee and Collegeville.  But would they be insurmountable?

Last fall, a month into the school year, Osbaldo, a freshman from Immokalee, stepped out of his dorm room and ran into some of his floor mates.  He had just cut his own hair, and some asked if he might cut theirs.  Later a freshman who had graduated from Verbum Dei High School in Los Angeles asked if he might cut his hair too.  Osbaldo hesitated, then said he was self-taught and had never cut black hair before.  “Go for it,” replied the Angelino.  A month later he was back at Osbaldo’s door.  “I have an interview for an internship tomorrow.  Can you cut my hair again?”

There you have completely non-scientific proof that such a crazy idea just might work.  Anytime a Latino from Immokalee, FL, cuts the hair of a guy from Los Angeles in a dorm room in Collegeville, MN, something good must be happening.  It may be community; it may be friendship; but whatever it is, it isn’t bad.  In fact, it may just be a bit of the magic that Saint John’s can work.

Saint Benedict in his Rule wasted no time writing about transformative experiences on top of a mountain.  For him most anything of value takes place slowly and deliberately, and generally in the most ordinary of times and places. So it was that I was blessed to be having coffee one morning off the coast of California.  I thought I had sat down to write a sermon, but God had other plans.  Because I welcomed another person to sit at my table, I ended up knowing two and then three terrific people.  Then one thing led to another.  What came of it all was the chance for a few kids from Florida to come to work their own magic and to create new lives for themselves at Saint John’s.

Notes

+On March 11 St. Martin’s Voices, a choir of ten from the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, joined us for evening prayer.  They sang two psalms as well as the Salve Regina, and we listened in awe to the beauty of their voices.  Saint John’s has had a long relationship with St. Martin’s, and this was not the first visit of their choir to Saint John’s.  A set of the Heritage Edition of The Saint John’s Bible sits on permanent display in their educational center, and they’ve hosted an exhibit of the Bible.  More recently the former vicar of St. Martin’s, Bishop Nicholas Holtam of Salisbury, joined us at Westminster Cathedral in London when Cardinal Vincent Nichols invested our scribe Donald Jackson as a Knight of St. Gregory the Great.

+About two weeks ago Brother Walter led a group that fixed 1,100 taps to maple trees in one section of the forest.  For the sap to flow well it must climb above freezing in the day and go below freezing at night.  Since then we have had rollercoaster weather.  Twice we we’ve gone into the 60s, and on the 12th it snowed.  Who knows whether the sap will flow today.

+I have much improved since I pulled something in my back a few days ago.  I have stayed at home, save for trips to the doctor, and later this week I will have an MRI, which I dread.  This is an irony worthy of Dante, in that someone who lives in a cloister should be claustrophobic.  But I will survive.

+There is a postscript to the story of the cruise worth sharing.  At that first Mass cheers erupted from the back of the room when I introduced myself.  “What’s that about,” I thought to myself.  They came from two alumni from Saint John’s — one from Atlanta and the other from Danville, CA.  We’ve been friends ever since.

+In today’s post I have a variety of images from two museums.  At top are two stained glass windows, each from the 16th century.  The first is French glass, and the second Italian.  Both are from the Civic Museum in Bologna, Italy.  Below them is an ivory image of the Arrest of Jesus, made ca. 1320, in Paris.  Following that is a Crucifixion by Leonard Limosin, made in Limoges ca. 1552. At bottom is Christ in Blessing, Byzantine, 10-11th c.  The bottom three pieces are housed in the Louvre in Paris.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 6 March MMXVII — Lent: A Time of Renewal

Lent:  A Time of Renewal

How the hotel staff managed to miss the signs of decay is anybody’s guess.  Perhaps because they used the employee entrance in the rear they simply never noticed.  Meanwhile, the obvious stared at every incoming guest.  Some must not have cared and registered anyway, while others saw it as fair warning and walked on by.

What was the issue?  Through the ravages of time the Princesa Sofia Hotel had morphed into the Princesa So.  Worse, its treasured fifth star had begun to plummet comet-like down the facade, and two others had definitely lost their luster.  Most definitely this was not good advertising, but it certainly was truth in advertising.  It suggested to guests that what they saw on the outside was what they should expect to find on the inside.  Caveat emptor!

This may be an odd segue into Lent, but it does point out a seldom-appreciated reality that we all face as we make adjustments in our lives.  The view we have of ourselves by its very nature is going to differ from the perspectives others have of us.  From the inside looking out, we see ourselves as people of good intentions, highly principled, hard-working, and wonderful to be around day or night.

That said, no one should be surprised to discover that many of the people around us do not share that view.  From their position on the outside looking in at us, they see someone with gifts and foibles, with strengths and weaknesses.  For better and for worse, our wiser friends hesitate to share these insights with us, while we wave off the views of our harsher critics as gratuitous and mean-spirited.  That explains why so many of us conclude that there’s no need for us to change.  We’re fine, just the way we are.

Once such an attitude is entrenched, growth and improvement are much harder to come by.  We slip into ruts from which we cannot escape so easily, and we end up missing so much that life has to offer.

Ash Wednesday has its somber side with the reminder that we came from the dust of the earth and to dust we shall return.  But that’s not meant to depress or paralyze us.  Rather, it’s meant to be a clarion call to make the most of what God gives us — be it years, talents, and the capacity for growth.  That sometimes can involve the need to step back and appreciate what others might see in us.  But above all, it requires us to pause and inventory what God has invested in us and how well we are or are not using it.

In his chapter on Lent in the monastery Saint Benedict wrote that the life of a monk should be a Lenten observance.  Of course monks in the 6th century had no patience for that, nor can modern monks be convinced of that either.  But Benedict anticipated this, and so he prescribed some minor and distinctly non-showy things that monks could add as a Lenten supplement.  On a general level he suggested “refusing to indulge evil habits and devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial.”  He offered this not so that he could make life in the monastery drudgery, but so that monks could begin to anticipate the joys of Easter.

It occurs to me that one point of all this is the need to avoid the ruts that so easily stifle our personal growth.  Tweaking a schedule or shaking up a day can be disruptive, but it’s also a way to get a fresh perspective on our lives.  That in turn can give us the insight to change and to grow and to experience Easter — not just once a year — but every day.

My thoughts return to the staff of the Princesa Sofia.  In their use of the employee entrance they never had to confront the most obvious signal of the slow decay that was happening inside the hotel.  They got used to what was inside and learned to live with it.  Perhaps it never dawned on them that it didn’t have to go on like that.  It could be different, and both the hotel and they could flourish.

Lent invites us to break free from our customary ways of doing things.  As a time of renewal Lent encourages us to discover the possibilities in life that we’ve ignored all too often.  It’s a reminder that the point of Christian life is not the sobering reality of the cross on Good Friday.  Rather, we look beyond the cross to the resurrrection on Easter Sunday.  That resurrection is something we can celebrate every day of our lives.

Notes

+This was not the best of weeks for me.  Last weekend I pulled something in my back, which made getting around extremely difficult.  Then on Ash Wednesday I woke up, got out of bed, stood, took a step and fell down.  That had to be a fluke, I thought, but after another try I fell again.  Thankfully it is a pinched nerve that’s causing this, and I will recover, but only after six weeks of therapy.  The doctor advised me to eliminate airports and travel from my immediate plans, and that’s led to a complete rewrite of my calendar for the next two months.  (Actually, I have torn it up.). In the meantime, it is a little strange to have to rely on a walker to get around the monastery.  This too will pass, however.  So that is my Lenten observance.

+Readers of my notes are accustomed to seeing weekly travel reports, but there’ll be none of that for a while.   Thankfully I do other stuff too, including reading.  A couple of weeks ago I finished a book by Cambridge professor Mary Beard, on the history of the Roman Empire.  Entitled SPQR, it is easily accessible to the non-history reader, and it lingered on The New York Times Best Sellers list for weeks.  She gives an insightful overview while at the same time pointing out the cultural legacy of the Romans 2,000 years later.  For example, the political and social boundaries that the Romans set in Europe largely endure to this day.  We observe the month of July in honor of Julius Caesar, and August in memory of Augustus Caesar.  On something as benign as the moment when a new day begins we still follow the Roman custom of midnight.  Does it have to be that way?  In Jewish tradition the new day begins at sunset of the evening before.  This is a book I highly recommend.

+On March 2nd our confrere Fr. Bryan Hayes passed away at the age of 97.  To say the least, he led a varied life, and it’s worth noting a few bits.  He was born in Clarksville, TN, and he grew up with a fondness for music.  Before coming to the monastery he already was an accomplished composer, with some of his works played at Carnegie Hall.  Later he studied under Aaron Copeland, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and while studying in Italy he met and kissed the hands of the mystic Padre Pio.  That sparked his conversion to Catholicism.  At Saint John’s he taught French, but we will best remember him for the hundreds of hymns he composed.  We sing many of them, and they are among our favorites.  But there are hundreds yet to learn.  I would be remiss were I not to mention that we all considered him to be a “character.”

+I discovered the Princesa Sofia as I walked the streets of Barcelona one afternoon.  As the photo at bottom indicates, eventually someone told the manager about the sign, and he must have gone out and taken a look.  The place seems to be going through a complete overhaul.  One of the favorite Lenten disciplines in former centuries was the giving of alms, and Saint Martin of Tour was venerated for cutting his cloak in half to share with a beggar.  The next three images come from the cathedral of Utrecht in Holland.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 20 February MMXVII — The Price of Perfection

The Price of Perfection

One of my favorite illuminations from The Saint John’s Bible shows the wrinkled face of an elderly woman, staring out from a mirror.  Her face is weathered, and however else she may have acquired that look, she did not get it from an absence of toil or anxiety.  In fact, as the passage from the Book of Wisdom reads, she is the image of eternal light.  Her face shows the result of a lifetime of service to family, to friends, and to those in need.  And in contrast with our conventional notions of physical beauty, hers is the face of eternal beauty.  Hers is the face of perfection.

In Matthew 5:45 Jesus tells his disciples that they must be perfect, just as their Heavenly Father is perfect.  That’s a tall order, and to my mind it’s a recipe for disaster.  In fact it brings to mind the sin of Adam and Eve, who in their hubris wanted to be like God.  They reached out for the proverbial apple, in hopes that as gods themselves they would be eternal, perfect, and in no need to report to some higher force.  They would be all-knowing and entirely self-sufficient.  But the price for the bite into the forbidden fruit was the awesome realization of their own fallibility.  Their hopes for personal divinity did not square with the sudden shock of their own imperfection.  They could never be what they aspired to be, because their aspirations were self-delusional.

We know the price that many athletes pay in their quest for perfection on the playing field.  We are all too familiar with the psychological toll of those unrealistic efforts to achieve lasting physical beauty.  Sometimes more than a few of us come to terms too late with goals that are clearly beyond our reach.  That kind of perfection is both elusive and perhaps even self-destructive, because it seduces us with the notion that we can be who we cannot nor should not be.  That disconnect from our own reality, our gifts, and the unique path down which God calls us can leave us with irreparable harm.

When Jesus asks perfection of us, that perfection has nothing to do with physical beauty or athletic prowess or professional expertise.  Certainly none of these are in and of themselves bad, but Jesus reminds us that they are not what life is all about.  Rather, the beautiful life embraces in its arms family, friends, and neighbors.  It is they to whom we are called to pay attention, and it is they whom we should love, in the same measure that we love ourselves.

Sadly there is an unhealthy disconnect within people of obvious talent who leave a path of destruction as they wander through life.  Like the muggers in the parable of the Good Samaritan, they shove person after person into the ditch, expecting someone else to clean up the mess they’ve made.  God forbid that we should ever become such people, and that is what Jesus cautions.

It’s interesting that in his Rule Saint Benedict wrote no chapters on quality control or professional development.  It’s not that he didn’t care about such things, because he did.  But his primary concern were the healthy relationships that should exist among the monks.  Love and respect should be the bonds that bring them together and congeal them into a family.  All else is bonus.

So it is with all of us who strive for perfection.  The perfection to which Jesus calls each of us does not preclude ideal physical health or athletic prowess.  Nor does it belittle professional expertise.  But all of these are secondary to our love for one another.  If, come the autumn of our lives, we have no wrinkles to show for our service to our brothers and sisters and to the neighbors whom we stumble across in our meanderings, then something important is missing.  We’ve fallen short of the perfection that God hopes for each of us.

Notes

+In my last post I neglected to report that a few days ago a water pipe burst in the attic two floors above my office.  From a selfish point of view I was glad that the resulting flood missed me by four offices.  However, it did a lot of damage to offices of several of my colleagues down the hall and to the theology department on the floor above.  It turned out to be a mixed blessing for our office manager, Marie, who had put off the filing of mountains of material.  She was able to abridge all that work by sending everything to the dumpster.  Happily, there were electronic copies of most everything anyway.  She also consoled herself with the news that her son, Ben, a senior at Saint John’s University, had just been signed to play football in Europe with the Stockholm Crusaders.  I see game-day trips to Stockholm in her future.

+On February 18th the 2017 edition of Hymnfest took place in the Abbey church.  The Saint John’s Boys Choir and The National Lutheran Choir were the featured singers.

+The photos in today’s post show the monastery of Pedralbes, located at the edge of Barcelona.  It was founded in 1326 by Queen Elisenda de Moncada, the young (and third) wife of King Jaume II of Aragon.  He financed the construction of this abbey of Franciscan nuns so that she would have a place to live after his passing.  It is a highly unusual complex, for many reasons.  First off, it is the only three-storey cloister I have ever seen.  Second, because they had all the money in hand to build it, it took only some twenty years to construct.  As a result, it has a unified architectural style.  Best of all, it never suffered the ravages of war, and so all the elements of the original monastery are still in place.  The cloisters are serenely beautiful, and the dormitory (second photo) and the refectory (third photo) appear largely as they were built.  The nuns continued to live in it until the 1980’s, at which point they built a new monastery on the other side of the church.  I don’t blame them a bit, because  the old monastery had to be incredibly cold and impossible to heat in the winter.  Today it is a museum open to the public, while the nuns continue to pray in the adjoining church.  (At right is the screen that separates the nuns’ choir from the main body of the church.)  Pedralbes was a treat that I had not anticipated, and I’d return to see it in a heartbeat.

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A Monk’s Chronicle: 6 February MMXVII — Growing in Age and Wisdom

Growing in Age and Wisdom

We can only imagine what went through the minds of Joseph and Mary as they approached the temple to dedicate their son to God.  For any Jewish family this was a momentous occasion, but of course their experience up to that point had been a bit unsettling.  Then the ominous words of Simeon had to inject even more anxiety.  Their child was to be the cause for the rise and fall of many in Israel.  What did this old man see in their son that they did not yet see?  What was happening to them?

As the gospels suggest, the next few years must have been quiet ones.  That may explain the skepticism that greeted Jesus when he began his ministry.  People thought they knew him, and there had seemed nothing unusual about him.  So came the ultimate put-down:  wasn’t he just a carpenter, the son of Mary?  And if nothing good ever came from Nazareth, could someone remarkable come from Nazareth?  “We think not,” was the derisive conclusion of many.

Part of this response to Jesus was due to the circumstances of his upbringing.  If people expected all the good and important things to come from Jerusalem, then nothing of real value could come from out-of-the-way places like Nazareth.  Beyond that, there was nothing to hint that Jesus had the training or the capacity to be a mover or a shaker.  He was a nobody, the son of nobodies, from a no-place town.  This was type-casting at its normal, and small wonder that people tried to box Jesus in with such thoughts — especially in his home town.

Typecasting is a convenient way to sort people out, and its grip can be iron-clad and last a lifetime.  What makes it so destructive is that we bless some people with unreasonably high expectations and overlook their flaws, even as we dismiss the talents of others.  Common to each extreme is the tendency to take a quick inventory of others that falls short of their true essence.  So it is that we meet people early in life and forever after our assumptions about them go unchallenged.  We never give them a chance to break out of the pigeon-hole to which we’ve assigned them.  Sadly, not a few go on to live up to the expectations people ascribe to them.

So it could have been with Jesus.  He could have grown up to be a simple and unassuming carpenter.  Yet, somewhere along the line, he broke free from the stereotype which others had imposed on him.  He grew in age and wisdom, even as few people watched.  Eventually he had to be about his Father’s business, and the people who thought they knew him were more than a little surprised.  They had not counted on this, and when Jesus did not step back into his assigned role, they were disturbed.

If people did this to Jesus, it’s good for us to realize that we do this all the time to each other.  We meet so many people, and we often rely on the memory of first impressions to keep track of everybody.  But then we are oblivious to the growth that quietly takes place in them, and we miss the talents that are latent within them.  Happily, some have the fortitude to break out of the mould that others impose on them;  but too many accept it and then live up to expectations.

To no one’s surprise, we often do this to ourselves as well.  Often enough it’s just easier to pursue the path of least resistance and make do with our lives.  We fail to step forward and rise to the occasion.  We fail to accept some of the talents that we’ve been given, and a lot of our potential goes unrealized.  We lose out on life, and others never benefit from what we might bring in service.

At least two things strike me as the antidote to these tendencies.  The first involves the need to be open to others.  Saint Benedict in his Rule asks the abbot to seek advice from even the youngest in the monastery.  He notes dryly that wisdom can reside in the most unexpected of places — even in the young.  Translated to another level, Benedict suggests we should always be keen to see the potential in others and encourage them to grow into it.  Any other course of action impoverishes us all.

The second suggestion has to do with ourselves.  Growth in wisdom is not restricted to our early years.  We can grow and develop at any age, and we should embrace the challenges that life sends our way, rather than retreat from them.  If Jesus could grow in age and wisdom, then so can we.

Through prayer Jesus learned the will of his Father for him, and he accepted and acted upon it.  That’s why we too pray.  We pray especially because we all have plenty to do, at every age, and the Lord gives us the energy and the drive to grow.  All we need do is ask.

Notes

+During my recent trip to Barcelona I had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite museums in all the world.  I spent almost an entire day in the Museum of Catalan Art, which has a vast collection ranging from Romanesque to modern.  On my first visit years ago the collection of Romanesque frescos especially intrigued me, and it is the largest such collection anywhere.  The genesis of the collection was due to foreign acquisition of such frescoes at the turn of the last century, and as an example of such a purchase you can visit the Fontedueña Apse at the Cloisters Museum in New York.  Alarmed that they were losing their patrimony, officials of the museum visited the many derelict churches in the mountains outside of Barcelona, carefully removed the frescos, and reassembled them in the Museum.  Today they awe visitors with their scale, majesty and striking abstract qualities.  They heavily influenced Picasso when he first viewed them, and today there is a permanent exhibit of Picasso alongside the exhibit of frescos.

The first three photos in today’s post originally were in the parish church of Santa María in Taüll, and the fourth photo shows an 11th-century fresco from the Monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal.  Below that is a ca. 1200 fresco from the church of Santa María d’Aneu.  In addition to the frescos there is also an extensive number of statues and altar frontals, such as the last photo in today’s post.  It comes from a parish church in the diocese of Urgell and it dates from the 12th century.  The variety of holdings is amazing, and next week I plan to insert pictures of an altar frontal that will knock your socks off.

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