Monk?

Thought readers would be interested in this article from The Weekly Standard. A hopeful sign that may emerge here in the states as well. We hope and pray. Peace!

Abbey of the Genesee field of sunflowers

One of the underappreciated truths about the ecology of the plant kingdom is the fact that much of the activity that needs to take place to provide for the health of growing things takes place out of sight, in the soil. The plethora of specialized reactions which occur within the soil’s horizons which must take place for plants to survive and thrive is astounding. One handful of living soil will contain millions of individual microbes silently living in a world unavailable to our eyes, yet whose function is critical to such things as soil aeration, the breakdown of plant debris which is in turn made available to the roots of plants, and many more fascinating tasks. These things are worth knowing especially as our world experiences more and more serious ecological challenges.

This is analogous to the living reality taking place within a monastery. Within it’s cloister, also hidden from the eyes of the world, there is a rich plethora of relationships taking place as monks quietly live their lives. The ecology of the cloister is familiar in its human interactions: monks sleep, eat, take care of their physical, mental, and emotional needs, have friendships, suffer dissapointment, loss, and pain, experience joy, and happiness, look forward to special occasions, have hopes, suffer from anxieties, have jobs, and other resposibilities they are expected to meet, and on and on I could go. Quite simply monks are folks just like the rest of us.

But monks are immersed within a lifestyle quite different than what most of us will ever know. It is a life lived at a deep level, like that of the living earth, hidden, yet alive with rich ecological interactions; call it monastecology, if you will. I’ve written about what makes monastic life unique, but the ecology of the cloister is so subtly rich I could reflect on it until my fingers freeze at the keeyboard and I would barely scratch the surface. Besides, more qualified folks could say it better than me anyway. But the point I want to make is the monastery is really another world, and any attempt to water it down and make it familiar and comfortable would be a failure to understand it or appreciate it.

Entering a monastery means crossing a border into a very different world, one that operates by laws sometimes the opposite of what is familiar and valued. No longer will he pursue his own ways and hold jealously onto his own ideas, but he’ll freely submit his desires to the rule of life he takes on, to an abbot, and to the needs and requirements of the community.

It is interesting to note that the longest chapter in the Rule of St. Benedict is Chapter 7 on humility, which takes us back to the beginning, for humility and humus share the same latin root, meaning soil. May God continue to water the soil of the clopistral world and send young men and women to fertilize its secret and mystical garden.

There is a long tradition in Benedictine monasticism from Chapter 48 of the Rule of St. Benedict that requires the monk to receive a book from the library to read through during the days of Lent. The Abbey of the Genesee continues to follow this practice and some of their lenten reading suggestions can be found on their web site. A blessed Lent to one and all.

Perseverance and stability are intimately linked in the life of the monk. They are fundamental elements in his life, habits of mind if you will, a part of the very fabric of his identity. Stability is so important that that it is one of the three promises a monk takes on the day of his profession; the promise to remain a member of a particular community of individuals as they each and together seek to follow their God. They become not so much like trees rooted in one place, but more like fellow sailors on a ship at sea, pledging to remain faithful to their captain, Christ, who is first faithful to them.

Unfortunately, today, words like perseverance and stability are at odds with the prevalent cultural ethos, and so they’re often misunderstood, if thought of at all. Perseverance is simply the carrying out, day-to-day, of the promise one has made. It’s the opposite of straining against the tide of events, refusing to adapt and learn, like some monastic Oedipus. But faithfulness, while not being blind, is a challenge to men and women of any age, and most certainly for us today. We want to keep our cards close to the vest, and our options open, ready, when things get difficult, to fold our hand and move on. We’re all familiar with the litany of divorce statistics, etc. Are we any happier for our fickleness?

It is by way of the monk’s promise to be true to God’s vision for him that the haze begins to lift and he begins to see. It takes time, and so the wisdom of perseverance and stability. In the end, it is his need for God and his unspeakable knowledge of His faithfulness that preserves him and sustains him through his own tendency toward unfaithfulness. Because God loves him he can be true. (Hebrews 12:1)

Peace!

God is at the center of the monk’s life, yet often a man or woman enters the monastery with an unclear notion of the why of his or her motivation. There is a sense felt within that this is what God wants and the way God intends to reveal himself to him. Almost always, there is at a deeper level a belief that this is where he will grow and experience self-realization, in effect, where he will become his true self. All this is very good, but not the real story when it comes to a vocation to monastic life. The real story has a twist.

As Michael Casey points out in his latest book, Strangers to the City: Reflections on the Beliefs and Values of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic life is not really about self-realization, but rather self-transcendence, a much more profound process, the process of conversion. This becomes clear to the neophyte monk at some point or other in his journey when he realizes that his original conscious motivations for discerning the monastic way, though good, were only the tip of an iceberg that has yet to reveal itself. The Holy Spirit’s work on him is here beginning to bear fruit, though it is often felt as an extreme inner challenge. Perseverance emerges in his lexicon as a fundamental practice, and he begins to understand its place in monastic history and his own monastic identity.

Every monk at some point goes through an identity crisis, where his cherished ideas of who he is and what he is all about come into question. His reliance on the grace of Christ is no longer just a nice theological theorem, but a matter of survival. He begins to let go of his facades, and surrender to the love of God. He’s beginning to become a real monk.