I preached this morning at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, and as it was a written-out sermon, I thought I would share it.
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10 August 2014: Pentecost 9, Proper 14A
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33
One of the things that struck me about the lessons today is how both the story of Joseph and the story of the walking on the water upset the normal expectations of life. In each of them there is danger and in each of them a miracle occurs, and something new grows out of each of them: in the case of Joseph, in his faithfulness through his terrible troubles the new people of Israel are made possible. In the case of walking on the water, the new Israel, the Church, and her faithful members, will find a way forward through terrible troubles that are still to come.
In order to get through our lives with some sense of equilibrium we often create an artificial sense of how things function. We look for stability, permanence, predictability. It isn’t so much that our personal experience is stable, permanent or predictable, but that there is an expectation that it ought to be. Having this ideal helps us smooth over reality, simplifies our nonreflective preconscious expectations. Families ought to behave a certain way, nurturing their futures, and when they don’t, in our constructs of likely consequences we expect terrible, irreversible results. Nature ought to behave a certain way, so we live in the expectation that it will, and when it doesn’t, we gird ourselves in disaster response for what will surely follow. But these two stories overturn both our “normal” expectations, and open our eyes to something new from God.
Families ought to behave a certain way. Brothers ought to love each other. It’s a rough and tumble kind of love, the way that brothers often do love each other. They give each other a hard time but when push comes to shove they unite and support each other. Except in today’s story, when push comes to shove, Joseph is shoved in a big pit in the earth and only escapes being murdered by his brothers because a slave trading caravan passes by. So what might be the Brady Bunch actually turns out to be more like Roots. Joseph is carted off to be a slave in Egypt. His brothers probably think that’s the last of him. Our normal expectation would be that both Joseph’s life and his family’s happiness have been destroyed.
But the Joseph story is not just about the treacherous and savage behavior of brothers to each other, a replay of Cain and Abel, an instance of René Girard’s theory of violence, a setup for family systems therapy for millennia to come. It is about how God is using human behavior to create a people for himself. Joseph accepts the reality of his situation and does the best he can with it, which in the end is very good indeed. His faithfulness and hard work lead him from the pit to the palace, and along the way he acquires great wisdom, including the wisdom of forgiveness, a wisdom which surely can only come from God. His brothers return, this time in great need, and instead of using his new power to punish them, he sets his family on a new path, which will ultimately lead to the Exodus, the Covenant, and the Promised Land.
The normal expectation of what would likely happen was overturned by a miracle: God brought the nation of Israel into being out of jealousy and homicidal intention. St. Paul says to us this morning, “The word is very near us”. The word was very near Joseph. That word brought the future for the salvation of the world out of that sordid family drama.
The miracle of Joseph is at the end of the story, after his years of toil, insecurity, and danger as a slave, a miracle which ultimately produces a people for God. Our gospel story this morning is structurally the mirror image of the Joseph story. The miracle is at the beginning and points to a future of insecurity and danger for a people of God just being brought into being.
Peter sees Jesus, leaps out of the boat, and begins to walk on the water. For the moment he disregards the conventional wisdom about water, so intent is he on the presence of the Word of God to him. But, we say, people can’t walk on water. Crucified people don’t rise from the dead. Twelve guys can’t just bring a new people into being because they think they can. Except they do.
The people called to follow Jesus, the Word of God, can’t possibly navigate the uncharted waters of the future by themselves. We know this, because we are those people today. We are beset – we have always been beset, which is one way to read church history – with who knows what kinds of uncertainties and dangers. Why try anything new? The world we know conspires to defeat every good effort. Our future is like deep water in a storm in the dark. We can’t possibly keep walking forward, let alone on water. Except we do.
In my former parish in Anaheim there was a feeding program. It came into being because a few people listened to the word of God one morning in church, when Matthew 25 was read aloud: Feed the hungry, it said. The word was close to them. They didn’t have much money, and there weren’t many people to do it. But they did it. They scrounged supermarkets for food, raised small amounts of money for milk and meat, talked their friends into helping, served the meal on the church china for hungry, homeless people, who used those dishes as carefully as if they were their own prized possessions, and for almost fifteen years every Monday night a couple of hundred hungry people sat down to a meal served to them by people who already had enough. There were deep water and storms along the way. But they always kept the word before them: Feed the hungry. They walked across that water every Monday night. I am sure you can tell me stories like that about Trinity. Because God is always calling us to cross the water. God is always lifting us up out of the pit.
Both these stories tell us that the way we see things is not the way God sees them. To the eyes of the world what happened to Joseph was surely the effective end of his life. Except that it was really just the beginning. To the eyes of the world the way things usually are can’t be transcended, especially in stormy times, distress and chaos. Except that those times are precisely the times when we can find the way through which God offers us in faith, finding firm footing not in our expectations and fears but in the Lord.
These miracles show us to keep our eyes fixed on the future. God will make possible what now seems impossible. When your whole world turns upside down and all seems lost, like Joseph keep on working, make the most of what you have, use the wisdom that comes to you. Who knows what God has in mind in the end. When the night is dark and stormy and the Lord just isn’t there, don’t be distracted by what in fear seems “normal”, by what is raging all around, like Peter was. Look through the storm and see Jesus calmly walking toward you. With your eye fixed on the Lord, who knows what you can do?
The Word is very near you.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
News: Better Late than Never
At our annual Chapter in early June the Order of the Holy Cross made two changes to the way we function. These are experimental, in that they require formal approval to change our formularies, which takes some time. But we will try them for the next three years and see if they work.
The first is in the way each of our monasteries chooses its leader. In the past the Superior has chosen the Prior of each monastery and that choice was ratified (or not) by the Council. The members of the household had at best conversational input, and sometimes no input at all. Beginning this year each house elects its Prior, who takes office after the Superior and the majority of Council give their assent. I was elected Prior of Mount Calvary on June 28 and confirmed shortly thereafter.
The second change is that each of our houses will now be a house of formation for its new members. This is not much of a shift for West Park and Grahamstown, who have had formation programs for many years. But it will be a major change for Toronto and for us here in Santa Barbara. We are quite excited about the prospect of attracting and training new monks for our monastery here. I hope to write more about this in this blog soon, and there will shortly be a new page for it on the monastery website. If you are considering a vocation to be a monk in our tradition, I hope this will perk your interest!
In terms of people, Br. Bob Pierson joined us in May. Bob was a member of St. John's, Collegeville, for many years, and decided to become part of Mount Calvary after a year of discernment with OHC at West Park, where he was received into the Episcopal Church and into the Order in life vows on March 31. He is a delightful addition to the community here!
The first is in the way each of our monasteries chooses its leader. In the past the Superior has chosen the Prior of each monastery and that choice was ratified (or not) by the Council. The members of the household had at best conversational input, and sometimes no input at all. Beginning this year each house elects its Prior, who takes office after the Superior and the majority of Council give their assent. I was elected Prior of Mount Calvary on June 28 and confirmed shortly thereafter.
The second change is that each of our houses will now be a house of formation for its new members. This is not much of a shift for West Park and Grahamstown, who have had formation programs for many years. But it will be a major change for Toronto and for us here in Santa Barbara. We are quite excited about the prospect of attracting and training new monks for our monastery here. I hope to write more about this in this blog soon, and there will shortly be a new page for it on the monastery website. If you are considering a vocation to be a monk in our tradition, I hope this will perk your interest!
In terms of people, Br. Bob Pierson joined us in May. Bob was a member of St. John's, Collegeville, for many years, and decided to become part of Mount Calvary after a year of discernment with OHC at West Park, where he was received into the Episcopal Church and into the Order in life vows on March 31. He is a delightful addition to the community here!
Sermon for Sunday Pentecost 7, Proper 12A
It was a joy and privilege to preside and preach at St. Bede's Episcopal Church in Mar Vista (Los Angeles) last Sunday, July 27. The Rector, Jim Newman, an Associate of Holy Cross and a friend of long standing, was on a well-deserved vacation.
Despite the best efforts of the lectionary revision people, this time all three lessons worked together for good, to use St. Paul's language from Romans in the second reading for the day. At St. Bede's they record the sermons electronically and paste the link into the sermon page of the parish website, making it available for the benefit of shut-ins, people who can't get to church, and anyone else who might be interested. Which might include you, gentle reader!
Lessons:
Genesis 29:15-28
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Here's the link:
http://www.stbedesla.org/sermon/sermon.htm
Despite the best efforts of the lectionary revision people, this time all three lessons worked together for good, to use St. Paul's language from Romans in the second reading for the day. At St. Bede's they record the sermons electronically and paste the link into the sermon page of the parish website, making it available for the benefit of shut-ins, people who can't get to church, and anyone else who might be interested. Which might include you, gentle reader!
Lessons:
Genesis 29:15-28
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Here's the link:
http://www.stbedesla.org/sermon/sermon.htm
Friday, February 7, 2014
Simplicity in Santa Barbara - 2
Months have passed. I just reread what I wrote in September, and realize that the two things I thought were necessary for simplicity -- enough and direction -- have been given me.
I have enough, and that is something I am getting used to. Not just the basics of life, which are actually pretty elegant here -- our terrific chef Luis Ruelas, the lovely property and house we live in, the community of Santa Barbara -- but also enough time, enough sleep, enough work, enough intellectual stimulation. I have never really not had enough, but for various reasons buried in my psyche, I have not easily been able to recognize the enough-ness of my life. And one of the great things about being this monk in this monastery in this place is that I am, maybe for the first time, relaxing into the realization that I have enough. And with that comes more contentment, more trust, more ability to look away from myself from time to time.
And direction. I guess I would say, not that I have found direction, but that it has found me. Two things have come to inhabit my working time and to exercise my intellect in the last months. One of them is working on the financial and regulatory aspects of our monastic use of the new property here. Not to go into the boring details, but our change of property ownership and our evolving sense of what we might want to do with the property in the long run have offered challenges which have engaged the energies and work of the whole community here. We certainly live in a complex society now, and the fact that we want to to use the property in monastically life-giving ways does not mean that we can without a lot of work. The wider secular community has many interests which must be served. So there has been a lot of green eyeshade work.
The second direction that has come to me is scholarly. Quite unexpectedly I was asked last August to contribute the chapter on Anglican Monasticism to a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press called the Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism. This is a marvelous thing. It has affirmed work I did earlier when I wrote the history of the Order, which is very gratifying. But more, it has called me to organize my thoughts on a wider field. I have had a marvelous time the last few months updating my bibliographies, reading things I had not read before, many of them new, and thinking about the subject in new ways. The point of the project is not so much a survey of the history of the subject as an overview of the direction of scholarship and discernment about where it might usefully go. I don't want to steal my own thunder (if such it be) but suffice it to say that while there have been good biographies and narrative community histories, analytical scholarship of the subject is in its infancy. Which I find quite exciting.
So. I have enough and more than enough. And I have direction(s). And I have to say, I think what I wrote in the last blog in September is true: These -- enough and direction -- are good platforms for simplicity. I find myself less scattered, more focused, better settled in lectio and quiet prayer. These particular two directions are, of course, time limited. By June I will have written the chapter and sent it off. Not by June, but in a reasonable time the context we are living in here will clarify itself. And then I will be searching again. And I am confident a new directional focus will find me.
But in the meantime -- what gifts I have received! Deo gratias!
I have enough, and that is something I am getting used to. Not just the basics of life, which are actually pretty elegant here -- our terrific chef Luis Ruelas, the lovely property and house we live in, the community of Santa Barbara -- but also enough time, enough sleep, enough work, enough intellectual stimulation. I have never really not had enough, but for various reasons buried in my psyche, I have not easily been able to recognize the enough-ness of my life. And one of the great things about being this monk in this monastery in this place is that I am, maybe for the first time, relaxing into the realization that I have enough. And with that comes more contentment, more trust, more ability to look away from myself from time to time.
And direction. I guess I would say, not that I have found direction, but that it has found me. Two things have come to inhabit my working time and to exercise my intellect in the last months. One of them is working on the financial and regulatory aspects of our monastic use of the new property here. Not to go into the boring details, but our change of property ownership and our evolving sense of what we might want to do with the property in the long run have offered challenges which have engaged the energies and work of the whole community here. We certainly live in a complex society now, and the fact that we want to to use the property in monastically life-giving ways does not mean that we can without a lot of work. The wider secular community has many interests which must be served. So there has been a lot of green eyeshade work.
The second direction that has come to me is scholarly. Quite unexpectedly I was asked last August to contribute the chapter on Anglican Monasticism to a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press called the Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism. This is a marvelous thing. It has affirmed work I did earlier when I wrote the history of the Order, which is very gratifying. But more, it has called me to organize my thoughts on a wider field. I have had a marvelous time the last few months updating my bibliographies, reading things I had not read before, many of them new, and thinking about the subject in new ways. The point of the project is not so much a survey of the history of the subject as an overview of the direction of scholarship and discernment about where it might usefully go. I don't want to steal my own thunder (if such it be) but suffice it to say that while there have been good biographies and narrative community histories, analytical scholarship of the subject is in its infancy. Which I find quite exciting.
So. I have enough and more than enough. And I have direction(s). And I have to say, I think what I wrote in the last blog in September is true: These -- enough and direction -- are good platforms for simplicity. I find myself less scattered, more focused, better settled in lectio and quiet prayer. These particular two directions are, of course, time limited. By June I will have written the chapter and sent it off. Not by June, but in a reasonable time the context we are living in here will clarify itself. And then I will be searching again. And I am confident a new directional focus will find me.
But in the meantime -- what gifts I have received! Deo gratias!
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Simplicity in Santa Barbara - 1
As promised, I will begin more detailed posts on simplicity, space and contemplation, in particular about Mount Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara and our life here. At least as I see it.
First of all, I would say that my life is not as simple, after being here going on three months, as it was a few weeks after I arrived. I have a few more responsibilities now: breakfast dishes, picking up the mail at the post office daily, keeping an eye on maintenance and workmen from the outside. There are also other things, but they really have not changed my basic insight: That our monastic life here is actually fairly simple.
I have been pursuing the ideal of monastic simplicity for a long time. What might that mean? Does it mean less is more? This, it seems to me, plays out on two fronts simultaneously: on the front of things and externals, and on the front of the will.
For some an ideology of simplicity in the monastic/religious life definitely implies poverty of a very literal sort. Having nothing, wanting nothing, is supposed to set us free to be with God. I sometimes find this appealing in an esthetic sense. In my mind there is this sort of "Idea of the Monastic Cell": a very small room with a bare floor, an uncomfortable bed, an armless wooden straight-backed chair, not enough heat, and out of that is supposed to flourish an amazing encounter with God, bringing forth a rich interior life. Well, that's exactly what I had when I joined the Order as a postulant 40 years ago this month. The bed was rumored to be a reject from Sing Sing prison, and the metal slats overlaid with a 2-inch "mattress" caused me actual physical distress. When the winter started I discovered I had no heat and an electric heater with an extension cord was found. I did not find holiness in physical deprivation. I decided then that I am not cut out to be a desert father, at least in their life of physical austerity. It was not until I could have a decent night's sleep and enough heat that I could begin to settle down into the monastic life as OHC led it at that time. So, learning number one about simplicity: You have to have enough.
For some, a monastic ideology of simplicity means redirecting the will through obedience. The ancient advice, enshrined most notably in the Rule of St. Benedict, is that the monk finds Christ in obeying another, which is imitating Christ's obedience to the Father. This is the basis and justification of the vow of obedience. Christ was obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Monks can at least do what they're asked to do by the head of the monastery, which is usually not as severe as what Christ was pointed toward. In fact, every Christian is called into an obedient relation with God through Christ. The tricky part, of course, is discerning what to be obedient to. In the Rule it is Christ in the Abbot. My experience is that religious superiors aren't much trained in being Christ to others. The ones who really want to be Christ to others probably don't want to take an abbot's job, not least because we really do not know, cannot know fully, and so cannot ever really successfully embody, the nature of Christ.
How can anyone be Christ to another? Without getting too abstruse, there are universes of assumptions in every Christian culture about who Christ was and is, about how his humanity manifested itself, and what the application of his example to the Christian, to the monk, might be. Most often, of course, we don't ask the question and plow right ahead as though we already have an adequate understanding of who we are, much less of who Christ might have been. In fact, we are largely mysterious to ourselves. And we have to reconstruct who Jesus of Nazareth might have been using history and literary criticism of the texts and cultural anthropology and so forth, discovering along the way that perhaps he wasn't what we think he was at all. The work of Margaret Barker, as curious and off the beaten path as her Temple theology is, has opened my eyes to this: that what we have thought was going on in the time of Jesus is as much a projection of our own cultural concerns as it is genuine insight into His world and time and character. It seems to me that one can only be Christ to another, become an abba, to the extent that one has allowed one's own life to be filled with Christ. But how do we, twenty-first century people with our own understandings of self, how do we leave self behind and follow, be filled with, in some sense become, Christ? I sometimes suspect this is the real reason why Benedict revered the hermit life: he would rather be seeking Christ himself than embodying Christ for others.
As regards monastic life as well. Things change. As with scripture, so with the historic Rules of monastic tradition: We look for our answers to a text not written for us. What it meant to a sixth century Christian who wanted to be a monk might be significantly different to a twenty-first century Christian who wants to be a monk. I do not find that holiness, closeness to God, comes from depending on a superior to organize my life. That way, for me and for others I know, leads to passive dependency, which I do not want and no religious superior in his or her right mind wants either. I do find that closeness to God comes from a fruitful interaction with an experienced, God-directed person who is first of all seeking the Kingdom. There are plenty of fine leaders in the sense of building the institutions and ministries and activities of our daily life. They are good and they do good. But they are not always, perhaps not usually, abba-material.
The abba keeps his eye on the ball, which is: How does this get us closer to God. The abba is not himself the center of that question: It is not about his desire, not his will. The monk who is seeking God is the center of the question. I count myself lucky to have encountered a couple of abba figures along my monastic road. They were usually not the people in charge. They cared about where we, which included themselves and myself and the others who were on this particular monastic journey together, where we were going in an ultimate sense. They could point the way. So, learning number two about simplicity: You have to have a direction.
So, simplicity requires at least two things -- already it is becoming complex!
First, it requires enough. Without enough, a monk simply cannot concentrate. Part of the monastic journey is to redefine enough for ourselves, and the technologies of asceticism are there to assist in that project.
Second, it requires direction. Without direction, real God-direction, the monk is caught up in an institutional and missional machine, run by good-hearted people to build a monastic future worth having. We must have institutions and all they imply. We must have mission(s). Without them we have neither the structure to provide "enough" nor the instruments to put our God-directionality into practice. But because it is a continual dialogue between what has been and what we are trying to do, monastic life, Christian life today requires a program of interpretation, a hemeneutic. We can never assume that because we have read a text we understand it and can apply it ad literam to our situation. Simply because we have read the texts does not empower legitimate obedience.
Perhaps in the paterfamilias culture of the sixth century, or the feudal culture of post-Carolingian Europe, or the authoritarian/Enlightenment culture of the post-Renaissance, the communal situation was abbot-in-community. Perhaps Benedict and others gathered communities around them as abbas because of their charismatic and Christ-filled lives and teaching. Perhaps the abbot was central because of social convention. But today most monks are drawn to the monastic life not because of an abba but because of a community that embodies the Godward direction they seek. For this reason, I think we now are much more in a position of equality in monastic community. The I-and-others, abbot-and-monks, situation has become we: the leader, usually now much more the builder of institution and mission than an abba or a feudal lord, is also a seeker after God. In our culture, obedience is mutual or it cannot be authentic.
First for the monk then, and this is what monos means, first, the direction: Where does one want to go? Whom does one seek? Are the where and the who God? Or are they displacements of less adequate goals?
Monastic simplicity is simple: The monk seeks enough so that (s)he may go looking for God.
And I'll tell you: The enough part is both necessary and doable, a reachable goal. The looking for God part is not reachable. It requires a restless heart, an adventurous spirit, because what we thought was God yesterday is not adequate today, and certainly will not be tomorrow. To be free to look for God, and to use that freedom to go where God may be: in a phrase, that is the monastic life.
At least that's what I think today!
First of all, I would say that my life is not as simple, after being here going on three months, as it was a few weeks after I arrived. I have a few more responsibilities now: breakfast dishes, picking up the mail at the post office daily, keeping an eye on maintenance and workmen from the outside. There are also other things, but they really have not changed my basic insight: That our monastic life here is actually fairly simple.
I have been pursuing the ideal of monastic simplicity for a long time. What might that mean? Does it mean less is more? This, it seems to me, plays out on two fronts simultaneously: on the front of things and externals, and on the front of the will.
For some an ideology of simplicity in the monastic/religious life definitely implies poverty of a very literal sort. Having nothing, wanting nothing, is supposed to set us free to be with God. I sometimes find this appealing in an esthetic sense. In my mind there is this sort of "Idea of the Monastic Cell": a very small room with a bare floor, an uncomfortable bed, an armless wooden straight-backed chair, not enough heat, and out of that is supposed to flourish an amazing encounter with God, bringing forth a rich interior life. Well, that's exactly what I had when I joined the Order as a postulant 40 years ago this month. The bed was rumored to be a reject from Sing Sing prison, and the metal slats overlaid with a 2-inch "mattress" caused me actual physical distress. When the winter started I discovered I had no heat and an electric heater with an extension cord was found. I did not find holiness in physical deprivation. I decided then that I am not cut out to be a desert father, at least in their life of physical austerity. It was not until I could have a decent night's sleep and enough heat that I could begin to settle down into the monastic life as OHC led it at that time. So, learning number one about simplicity: You have to have enough.
For some, a monastic ideology of simplicity means redirecting the will through obedience. The ancient advice, enshrined most notably in the Rule of St. Benedict, is that the monk finds Christ in obeying another, which is imitating Christ's obedience to the Father. This is the basis and justification of the vow of obedience. Christ was obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Monks can at least do what they're asked to do by the head of the monastery, which is usually not as severe as what Christ was pointed toward. In fact, every Christian is called into an obedient relation with God through Christ. The tricky part, of course, is discerning what to be obedient to. In the Rule it is Christ in the Abbot. My experience is that religious superiors aren't much trained in being Christ to others. The ones who really want to be Christ to others probably don't want to take an abbot's job, not least because we really do not know, cannot know fully, and so cannot ever really successfully embody, the nature of Christ.
How can anyone be Christ to another? Without getting too abstruse, there are universes of assumptions in every Christian culture about who Christ was and is, about how his humanity manifested itself, and what the application of his example to the Christian, to the monk, might be. Most often, of course, we don't ask the question and plow right ahead as though we already have an adequate understanding of who we are, much less of who Christ might have been. In fact, we are largely mysterious to ourselves. And we have to reconstruct who Jesus of Nazareth might have been using history and literary criticism of the texts and cultural anthropology and so forth, discovering along the way that perhaps he wasn't what we think he was at all. The work of Margaret Barker, as curious and off the beaten path as her Temple theology is, has opened my eyes to this: that what we have thought was going on in the time of Jesus is as much a projection of our own cultural concerns as it is genuine insight into His world and time and character. It seems to me that one can only be Christ to another, become an abba, to the extent that one has allowed one's own life to be filled with Christ. But how do we, twenty-first century people with our own understandings of self, how do we leave self behind and follow, be filled with, in some sense become, Christ? I sometimes suspect this is the real reason why Benedict revered the hermit life: he would rather be seeking Christ himself than embodying Christ for others.
As regards monastic life as well. Things change. As with scripture, so with the historic Rules of monastic tradition: We look for our answers to a text not written for us. What it meant to a sixth century Christian who wanted to be a monk might be significantly different to a twenty-first century Christian who wants to be a monk. I do not find that holiness, closeness to God, comes from depending on a superior to organize my life. That way, for me and for others I know, leads to passive dependency, which I do not want and no religious superior in his or her right mind wants either. I do find that closeness to God comes from a fruitful interaction with an experienced, God-directed person who is first of all seeking the Kingdom. There are plenty of fine leaders in the sense of building the institutions and ministries and activities of our daily life. They are good and they do good. But they are not always, perhaps not usually, abba-material.
The abba keeps his eye on the ball, which is: How does this get us closer to God. The abba is not himself the center of that question: It is not about his desire, not his will. The monk who is seeking God is the center of the question. I count myself lucky to have encountered a couple of abba figures along my monastic road. They were usually not the people in charge. They cared about where we, which included themselves and myself and the others who were on this particular monastic journey together, where we were going in an ultimate sense. They could point the way. So, learning number two about simplicity: You have to have a direction.
So, simplicity requires at least two things -- already it is becoming complex!
First, it requires enough. Without enough, a monk simply cannot concentrate. Part of the monastic journey is to redefine enough for ourselves, and the technologies of asceticism are there to assist in that project.
Second, it requires direction. Without direction, real God-direction, the monk is caught up in an institutional and missional machine, run by good-hearted people to build a monastic future worth having. We must have institutions and all they imply. We must have mission(s). Without them we have neither the structure to provide "enough" nor the instruments to put our God-directionality into practice. But because it is a continual dialogue between what has been and what we are trying to do, monastic life, Christian life today requires a program of interpretation, a hemeneutic. We can never assume that because we have read a text we understand it and can apply it ad literam to our situation. Simply because we have read the texts does not empower legitimate obedience.
Perhaps in the paterfamilias culture of the sixth century, or the feudal culture of post-Carolingian Europe, or the authoritarian/Enlightenment culture of the post-Renaissance, the communal situation was abbot-in-community. Perhaps Benedict and others gathered communities around them as abbas because of their charismatic and Christ-filled lives and teaching. Perhaps the abbot was central because of social convention. But today most monks are drawn to the monastic life not because of an abba but because of a community that embodies the Godward direction they seek. For this reason, I think we now are much more in a position of equality in monastic community. The I-and-others, abbot-and-monks, situation has become we: the leader, usually now much more the builder of institution and mission than an abba or a feudal lord, is also a seeker after God. In our culture, obedience is mutual or it cannot be authentic.
First for the monk then, and this is what monos means, first, the direction: Where does one want to go? Whom does one seek? Are the where and the who God? Or are they displacements of less adequate goals?
Monastic simplicity is simple: The monk seeks enough so that (s)he may go looking for God.
And I'll tell you: The enough part is both necessary and doable, a reachable goal. The looking for God part is not reachable. It requires a restless heart, an adventurous spirit, because what we thought was God yesterday is not adequate today, and certainly will not be tomorrow. To be free to look for God, and to use that freedom to go where God may be: in a phrase, that is the monastic life.
At least that's what I think today!
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Simplicity, Space and Contemplation
Today is the Feast of St. Benedict. If you are into numbers, and I did grow up in Las Vegas, after all, the date is 7/11. How lucky can you get? I certainly feel lucky to have been called into the family of St. Benedict. I hope others will experience that good fortune as well, and hope that some of them will be moved to join us here in Santa Barbara.
But "luck" is really just a construct we place on reality, a projection of our desire and will onto apparently random occurrences. Dice and slot machines and card games and roulette wheels are structures of chance (unless, of course they are fixed, which god forbid should ever happen in my old home town!). It is possible to view the events of our life also as structures of chance, and many people do, not taking responsibility for choices, looking for divine or magical intervention when things don't go our way. But Christian monastic life is not a roll of the dice. It is a life choice leading a person into a relationship with God in Jesus Christ through liturgical prayer, study, work, community life, ascetic discipline and contemplation. Benedict offers a way out of lives led in the misdirected hope of luck into lives purposefully directed toward the Kingdom on God. No less.
So these reflections today are the beginning of a small series on three monastic values I have found to be especially striking here at our monastery in Santa Barbara: simplicity, space and contemplation. I want to begin in this blog entry with a bit of prologue -- after all, the Prologue of the Rule of Benedict is what frames to whole text! -- and then over the next few days comment on each of these three values I find here.
I have been at Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara, almost a full month now. And some initial impressions about our monastic life here are becoming more settled -- no longer first impressions but observations about our life as monks here. They come as something of a surprise to me.
The Holy Cross Benedictine monastic life that we lead here is different in some ways from the other monasteries of our Order. The brothers who have developed it for the last four plus years and are living it now in some ways don't see it, because it has evolved, and when you are part of an evolution you don't notice as things develop in the same way as someone might who comes in from outside the process. In some ways I feel that way, a monk from another monastic situation who has watched Mount Calvary Monastery from afar but has only recently arrived. I find that both fascinating and heartening, since I am becoming part of it now.
Monastic life is always situational. Usually when we reflect about monastic life we concentrate in a sort of abstract, nonspecific way on the personal aspect of the monk's promise of stability -- what does it mean for the inner life of a person to commit to a particular place, a particular group of people, a particular and unique form of monastic life. We stress what that means for the life of the individual monk -- how it roots and grounds and specifies and particularizes his or her life, what it does for his or her character and personality and commitments and prospects and hopes and dreams and so forth. But there is another aspect to it. Stability is always to something particular, something objective: This place, not that. This community, not that one. These people with this history and not those people with another history. Those situations will shape the monastic identity of the monk and of communities of monks. It makes a difference if you join Cluny or Citeaux, whether your monastery is near a big city or in productive agricultural land or in mountainous terrain, whether you join Collegeville or La Pierre qui Vire. Those choices are very different, and will take your life in very different directions.
So the situation in this monastery is different. The property itself is both close in -- we are right next to the Old Mission, which is the center of Santa Barbara if anything is -- and very private. It is big enough to be spacious, and enclosed in the sense that you really can't tell much about it from outside the entrance. The buildings are different from what was "up the hill": instead of a single large structure, there are five -- two large houses, two small houses and a chapel, as well as several smaller utility structures. There is a view off to the west and north through the canyon and up the hills. The grounds are fairly elaborately landscaped, with some spectacular species of trees and a small fruit orchard which is just getting going. All this shapes the space and defines our lives as a monastery. The space shapes us.
The brethren have evolved a style of living which is perhaps best described as an adequate simplicity. Nothing really necessary is lacking. The attention given to the needs of life is quiet and unobtrusive. There are some major health issues, but these are addressed without much drama. Food is excellent but understated in its presentation. We are content with normal clothing most of the time, but no big deal when habits are required. We have three cars, but there isn't a lot of dashing off to do this or that. Anxiety about things is fairly low. I suspect this is because economically our objective situation is more or less sustainable for the size of community we are. I know we will have to pay attention to its growth as we grow in size as a community, but it is an objective reality which promotes our desire for a simple adequacy.
Because we have a great staff and we let them get on with their work without a lot of looking over their shoulders, and also I suspect because we are all in what the French so charmingly call le troisième âge, there is lots of time for lectio and prayer. This leads the community to a different emphasis than I have often encountered in other situations as a monk, including my time here in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. So much in monastic life can be objectively structured to require the busyness of constant responsibility and work. Here at least the objective situation works in the other direction, leaving more time for prayer than I am used to having. Which is itself a challenge for me!
So ... the prologue. An objective situation, unique in its own ways, leads to a particular manifestation of the monastic life. More on these values of simplicity, space and contemplation, and perhaps some others as well, in the days to come.
Happy St. Benedict's Day. Oh -- and we have a flock of ravens who live in the canyon! How Benedictine can you get? Though I have yet to see them go after the bread on our table!
But "luck" is really just a construct we place on reality, a projection of our desire and will onto apparently random occurrences. Dice and slot machines and card games and roulette wheels are structures of chance (unless, of course they are fixed, which god forbid should ever happen in my old home town!). It is possible to view the events of our life also as structures of chance, and many people do, not taking responsibility for choices, looking for divine or magical intervention when things don't go our way. But Christian monastic life is not a roll of the dice. It is a life choice leading a person into a relationship with God in Jesus Christ through liturgical prayer, study, work, community life, ascetic discipline and contemplation. Benedict offers a way out of lives led in the misdirected hope of luck into lives purposefully directed toward the Kingdom on God. No less.
So these reflections today are the beginning of a small series on three monastic values I have found to be especially striking here at our monastery in Santa Barbara: simplicity, space and contemplation. I want to begin in this blog entry with a bit of prologue -- after all, the Prologue of the Rule of Benedict is what frames to whole text! -- and then over the next few days comment on each of these three values I find here.
I have been at Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara, almost a full month now. And some initial impressions about our monastic life here are becoming more settled -- no longer first impressions but observations about our life as monks here. They come as something of a surprise to me.
The Holy Cross Benedictine monastic life that we lead here is different in some ways from the other monasteries of our Order. The brothers who have developed it for the last four plus years and are living it now in some ways don't see it, because it has evolved, and when you are part of an evolution you don't notice as things develop in the same way as someone might who comes in from outside the process. In some ways I feel that way, a monk from another monastic situation who has watched Mount Calvary Monastery from afar but has only recently arrived. I find that both fascinating and heartening, since I am becoming part of it now.
Monastic life is always situational. Usually when we reflect about monastic life we concentrate in a sort of abstract, nonspecific way on the personal aspect of the monk's promise of stability -- what does it mean for the inner life of a person to commit to a particular place, a particular group of people, a particular and unique form of monastic life. We stress what that means for the life of the individual monk -- how it roots and grounds and specifies and particularizes his or her life, what it does for his or her character and personality and commitments and prospects and hopes and dreams and so forth. But there is another aspect to it. Stability is always to something particular, something objective: This place, not that. This community, not that one. These people with this history and not those people with another history. Those situations will shape the monastic identity of the monk and of communities of monks. It makes a difference if you join Cluny or Citeaux, whether your monastery is near a big city or in productive agricultural land or in mountainous terrain, whether you join Collegeville or La Pierre qui Vire. Those choices are very different, and will take your life in very different directions.
So the situation in this monastery is different. The property itself is both close in -- we are right next to the Old Mission, which is the center of Santa Barbara if anything is -- and very private. It is big enough to be spacious, and enclosed in the sense that you really can't tell much about it from outside the entrance. The buildings are different from what was "up the hill": instead of a single large structure, there are five -- two large houses, two small houses and a chapel, as well as several smaller utility structures. There is a view off to the west and north through the canyon and up the hills. The grounds are fairly elaborately landscaped, with some spectacular species of trees and a small fruit orchard which is just getting going. All this shapes the space and defines our lives as a monastery. The space shapes us.
The brethren have evolved a style of living which is perhaps best described as an adequate simplicity. Nothing really necessary is lacking. The attention given to the needs of life is quiet and unobtrusive. There are some major health issues, but these are addressed without much drama. Food is excellent but understated in its presentation. We are content with normal clothing most of the time, but no big deal when habits are required. We have three cars, but there isn't a lot of dashing off to do this or that. Anxiety about things is fairly low. I suspect this is because economically our objective situation is more or less sustainable for the size of community we are. I know we will have to pay attention to its growth as we grow in size as a community, but it is an objective reality which promotes our desire for a simple adequacy.
Because we have a great staff and we let them get on with their work without a lot of looking over their shoulders, and also I suspect because we are all in what the French so charmingly call le troisième âge, there is lots of time for lectio and prayer. This leads the community to a different emphasis than I have often encountered in other situations as a monk, including my time here in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. So much in monastic life can be objectively structured to require the busyness of constant responsibility and work. Here at least the objective situation works in the other direction, leaving more time for prayer than I am used to having. Which is itself a challenge for me!
So ... the prologue. An objective situation, unique in its own ways, leads to a particular manifestation of the monastic life. More on these values of simplicity, space and contemplation, and perhaps some others as well, in the days to come.
Happy St. Benedict's Day. Oh -- and we have a flock of ravens who live in the canyon! How Benedictine can you get? Though I have yet to see them go after the bread on our table!
Friday, July 5, 2013
Settling In
The trip west was mostly without incident. I spent a week at the House of the Redeemer in New York City, seeing old friends once again. Then on Monday, June 17, a United flight at noon from JFK to San Francisco. It was delayed an hour, apparently because of a paperwork mixup. That made us an hour late at SFO and so I missed the connecting flight to Santa Barbara, but that was not much of a problem as there is one every hour or two through the late afternoon and evening. I was on the next flight, and Nick Radelmiller was at the airport to meet me. We had a lovely dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara, and then up to the monastery.
I was warmly greeted by all the brethren and their welcome made all the work involved in the move worthwhile. Nick, Tom Schultz and Will Brown have held the fort for four plus years and have done a good job of it. The place looks good, the ministry is solid, and the worship life is real. More about all of that in subsequent posts.
The next five days or so were devoted to putting my room together. I carted my professional library west with me, and it needed a place to go. So much research about bookcases. I settled on the cheap of the cheap, white particle board numbers from Target that cost $32.99 each for a 6-foot, 5 shelf case. I knew from experience that you could add another shelf cut into the proper length at Home Depot, and so I set to work. I'm not the strongest or most agile laborer in the western world, but one by one they got done, and the books placed, each collection in its own section: Anglo-Saxon, Classical and Late Antiquity, monasticism, Bible, spirituality, literature, French and Spanish, music and art, church history. They all more or less fit on the shelves (some of them are double). It actually looks great! Then fitting the art and objects of a lifetime around a new room. I love the room. It has four windows, facing west and north, a door with a window to the deck outside, its own bathroom. It is in fact quite lovely and I feel quite at home in it already.
The other acclimating experience in a new monastery is, of course, the schedule. It is more relaxed, more spacious, than West Park. 7:30 Lauds, 8:00 breakfast, 8:45 OHC community chapter, then the morning is open for work or whatever. Noon is the Eucharist, 12:30 dinner, then the afternoon is open. 5:00 Vespers, 6:00 supper, 8:00 Compline. There is a lot more open time for lectio and quiet, which I am enjoying a lot.
I have charge of breakfast dishes, and have been given some maintenance tasks to do. I have been in and around Santa Barbara enough now to notice what is different from years ago.
It is beginning to feel like home.
I was warmly greeted by all the brethren and their welcome made all the work involved in the move worthwhile. Nick, Tom Schultz and Will Brown have held the fort for four plus years and have done a good job of it. The place looks good, the ministry is solid, and the worship life is real. More about all of that in subsequent posts.
The next five days or so were devoted to putting my room together. I carted my professional library west with me, and it needed a place to go. So much research about bookcases. I settled on the cheap of the cheap, white particle board numbers from Target that cost $32.99 each for a 6-foot, 5 shelf case. I knew from experience that you could add another shelf cut into the proper length at Home Depot, and so I set to work. I'm not the strongest or most agile laborer in the western world, but one by one they got done, and the books placed, each collection in its own section: Anglo-Saxon, Classical and Late Antiquity, monasticism, Bible, spirituality, literature, French and Spanish, music and art, church history. They all more or less fit on the shelves (some of them are double). It actually looks great! Then fitting the art and objects of a lifetime around a new room. I love the room. It has four windows, facing west and north, a door with a window to the deck outside, its own bathroom. It is in fact quite lovely and I feel quite at home in it already.
The other acclimating experience in a new monastery is, of course, the schedule. It is more relaxed, more spacious, than West Park. 7:30 Lauds, 8:00 breakfast, 8:45 OHC community chapter, then the morning is open for work or whatever. Noon is the Eucharist, 12:30 dinner, then the afternoon is open. 5:00 Vespers, 6:00 supper, 8:00 Compline. There is a lot more open time for lectio and quiet, which I am enjoying a lot.
I have charge of breakfast dishes, and have been given some maintenance tasks to do. I have been in and around Santa Barbara enough now to notice what is different from years ago.
It is beginning to feel like home.
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