How to be a Monk: The Surprise of Lent

Most people probably think that being a monk is very hard.  And since most people associate Lent with a rather dour season of sacrifice and penance, it would seem that being a monk during Lent is especially hard.  Our friend Benedict seems to reinforce this picture with the first phrase from his chapter on the observance of Lent:  “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.”  So,  is anybody else depressed and ready to become a Unitarian (at least during Lent)? (RB 49:1)

Of course you have to watch out for Benedict, he can be tricky.  While his chapter on Lent has plenty of expected asceticism, with fasting, prayer and giving up, there is also a surprise.  The surprise is what underlies the reason for these Lenten practices.  Why does Benedict have his monk take on extra disciplines?

The answer is that Lent is about joy.  No, really, Benedict does have both oars in the water.  Just think about it.  Lent is a preparation for Easter, the event that is the summit and ultimate meaning of our faith, that Christ has conquered death and led us into new life.  Now that is something to be rejoice in.

So perhaps Lent isn’t about wallowing in our sins, especially since most of us don’t need a lot of encouragement to think badly about ourselves, nor is it about feeling virtuous because we managed to give up Facebook for 40 days (or at least a couple of days).  Perhaps the meaning of Lent comes from what Benedict talks about when he tells his monks “… to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.” 

The “negligences” that most of us are prone to aren’t necessarily the fact that we drink coffee, eat chocolate, forget to prayer regularly, or the other traditional areas we focus on, perhaps we are negligent in our lack of joy.  Do we feel a deep-seated, profound joy at the coming of Easter?  During this Lent we can work on what keeps us from focusing on the most important aspects of our faith life.  What keeps us from joy, from love, from wonder, from passion?

The practices of Lent are designed to re-kindle the earth shattering reality of our faith.  We are invited to re-experience the transformative power of God’s love for us.  We are challenged to be shaken to our depths that we are people who stand at the empty tomb and whose lives will never be the same.

As Benedictine monastics what practices will help us shake off our negligences and re-awaken our joy this season?

How to be a monk: Lesson Two – The Journey

Do you ever wonder what the purpose of your life is, where you are going?  At the beginning of Benedict’s Rule (his guidebook for monks) he uses the phrase: “let us set out on this way with the Gospel for our guide.”  In that brief phrase he captures a tremendous amount of wisdom.

We are all on a journey.  Many, perhaps most of us, spend a lot of time blithely putting one foot in front of the other without any real thought of destination beyond the next meal, paycheck, crisis or other immediate, concrete goal.  But often there comes a point in life when something hits us upside the head and we start to wonder about the deeper meaning and point to our life.  We wonder what life is really all about, whether there is a meaning that we have neglected to consider or that we have been oblivious to.

These are precisely the questions that Benedict answers in his Rule.  He is writing for Christians who want to follow the Gospel as a way of life, people who want their faith to inform all aspects of their life, who want their faith to be more than abstract belief or ethical behavior.  Benedict writes a guidebook for people who want the Gospel to permeate all aspects of their lives, who want to listen to what Benedict calls “God’s delightful voice.”

So what is the nature of this journey?  First we have to consciously begin, to set out.  This sounds simple enough but it is a radical step.  To set out on the spiritual journey means that we can no longer take our faith for granted, it can no longer be something that we dabble in or think about once in a while.  The journey is a journey to consciousness.  We seek to become aware of God’s presence in our life at all times and in all ways.  When we set out on this journey we can no longer compartmentalize our faith, putting it in a box that is separate from work, family, leisure and the many concerns of our life.  When we decide to set out on this way we have to look at every aspect of life from the perspective of the Gospel.

But fortunately we have support on this journey.  Benedict assumes that we don’t do this alone, we will be with others and as community we will make the journey together.  We have a road map, Benedict’s Rule, guidebook, is eminently practical and inspiring.  We don’t have to blaze our own trail we read a map that has been used by many generations.  And we walk in the company of the monks who have gone before us and shown us that the journey is possible.

Perhaps it is time: are you ready to set out on this way, the Gospel for your guide?

Benedict and the Unmentionable Topic

OK, it is time to speak of the unspeakable. When I first came to the monastery I noticed something very odd and frankly rather disturbing. I first saw it working in the archives. For a while I was working on scanning old obituaries. I noticed that it seemed like whoever wrote them had an obsession with death. The obituaries didn’t tend to say a lot about the life of the sister but rather seemed to dwell on how she died. Interestingly enough everyone apparently died a wonderful, happy death full of faith, just waiting to leap into the arms of God. Admittedly I am cynical by nature but I thought “yeah, right!” When I entered the community I certainly didn’t have much experience of death or dying but I knew that there was nothing nice about death even if you were a person of great faith. I thought these sisters were either seriously naïve or had some strange, romantic idea of death.

Well it is now fifteen years later and I have seen quite a few sisters die and even written a few obituaries (although none of them described anyone’s death). That, together with the fact that today we are celebrating the death of St. Benedict our founder, makes it seem like a good time to reflect on a subject that is unmentionable in our society, namely death.

We live in an odd society that seems to have no trouble talking about sex, the beginning of life, but seems unable to talk about the other constant in life which is death. If someone were to drop in on our planet, at least on the developed world, they would probably think we were either massively deluded, massively in denial or just plain dense. We spend huge amounts of money on health care for people in the last days of their life, as if somehow with enough extraordinary measures the person will not eventually die anyway. The industry of death, mortuaries and related services, seem to be based on a fundamental need to deny reality with making everyone seem “life-like” without any sense of irony. Even the awful trauma of violent, unexpected death of all sorts is treated with a sense that it should never happen, as if we all have a fundamental right to be free of death in general or at least certainly from violent or traumatic death.

So where does Benedict fit into all this? According to tradition Benedict died on this day, March 21st, in the year 547 which was Holy Thursday. In the only source we have about his life, by Gregory the Great, he is depicted as foreseeing the moment of his own death and then he goes to prayer one last time before “…supporting his weakened body on the arms of his brethren, he stood with his hands raised to heaven and, as he prayed, breathed his last.” This tradition then led to Benedict being a patron of a “happy death.” And to commemorate this event the modern followers of Benedict celebrate him (and his death) today with readings that talk about his glorious passing into eternal life.

So which is it? Is death something horrible, to be denied and resisted at all costs? Is there such a thing as a “happy death? Are those the only two choices, complete denial or Disney-esque romanticism?

Perhaps an honest look at Benedict’s death might provide a third way. Even in the 6th century account Benedict’s death can’t be mistaken for “happy.” As soon as he predicts his death he was said to be overtaken by a terrible fever which completely sapped his strength. He had to be held up by his monks at community prayer for the last time. Death did not come easily, but in weakness and dependence. Benedict didn’t welcome death with open arms, he simply saw it coming and accepted it in faith. There was neither fear nor denial, simply an open recognition that death is no easier than life, but we are born in hope and we die in hope. Neither birth nor death is easy, they involve suffering and pain but both are enfolded in hope of new life, on earth or after this earth. For Benedict, for all believers, death is an end and a beginning. It is not to be resisted at all costs and it is not to be embraced before it is time. Death will not be easy or pain free or fair. It is simply what happens and the best we can hope for is to die in the midst of our community while praying to be received into the arms of our new community, the life-giving Trinity of love. So perhaps today we remember Benedict as the patron saint for accepting death with grace, with hope, with peace.

Lent, joy and the heebie-jeebies

Our life should be a continual Lent. Is that a scary thought? I have to admit that the idea tends to give me the heebie-jeebies. Lent often seems to be overlaid with a lot of artificial asceticism and guilt and these are not the attributes I want to characterize my life. But in the Benedictine Rule which we follow Benedict said the life of a monk should be a continuous Lent. Fortunately the idea isn’t quite as off-putting as it first sounds.

Benedict devotes one entire chapter to the observance of Lent. And while he does strongly urge giving up something for Lent, he also says something very interesting about why we should do this. The purpose of Lent is to “look forward to Easter with joy and holy longing.” (RB 49:7) Now there’s an interesting concept, Lent is about joy and holy longing, and not guilt. Frankly that’s a relief because for me giving up things often just leads to failure and guilt. Instead, Benedict implies that the extra disciplines are simply designed to sharpen my sense of anticipation, of deep longing to experience the transformative power of God in my life. Lent is like anticipating a big event by marking off days on a calendar knowing that something wonderful is coming.

These practices of Lent are reminders that Easter is not simply a given, it is not something we can take for granted or be complacent about. By setting aside Lent as a sacred, anticipatory time we will experience Easter as the always new, always unmerited, always transforming gift of God’s grace in our lives. In other words whether or not I even try to give up something this Lent the practice and the anticipation will be about joy and longing.

There is something rather innocent about this attitude toward Easter. It brings to mind the simple excitement of small children anticipating Christmas. For small children the big event hasn’t yet been overlaid with obligation, pressure and guilt, it is still just a wonderful, magical gift. But as we mature we lose our sense of wonder about Easter just as we did with Christmas. We know how the story will end. The emptiness of the tomb evokes a yawn rather than trembling and wonder. Most of us are no longer capable of the earth shattering awe that is the essence of Easter. For most adults Lent has no sense of joyous anticipation but is a rather morbid dirge of sacrifice and asceticism. Perhaps a Benedictine Lent calls forth a peeling away of the attitudes keep us anaesthetized from the true feeling of Lent. Perhaps Lent is an excited anticipation of joy, a deep, wonderful aching for the ultimate gift of new life at Easter. Perhaps life as a continual Lent is a calling that all Christians, inside and outside the monastery, can embrace as we all “look forward to Easter with joy and holy longing.”

Confession When Everybody Already Knows What You’ve Done

A weekly commentary on the Rule of Benedict: The Fifth Step of Humility (RB 7:44-48)

“The fifth step of humility is that we do not conceal from the prioress/abbot any sinful thoughts entering our hearts, or any wrongs committed in secret, but rather confess them humbly.”

In Benedict’s fifth step on the ladder of humility he says that we have to disclose our sinful thoughts and wrongs we have done to the abbot or prioress. My gut reaction whenever I read this is always “no way!” But my second reaction is to remember a quote I read from an abbot of a Trappist monastery who described community life by saying “we walk around naked.” Obviously no one was physically naked but when people live together in close proximity year after year, there are no secrets. This reality changes what it means to confess thoughts or actions to the abbot or prioress.

My first reaction may be that I don’t want to tell the prioress all the thoughts that are going through my head or the various actions that I’m not proud of but if I am honest I have to admit it isn’t likely I can tell her anything that she (and the whole community!) doesn’t already know. I tend to imagine the prioress responding: “yeah, what else you got?” when I think I am telling her some deep, dark secret. The point and purpose of this disclosure is much deeper.

Several things happen in this process of speaking out loud things that come from within. When I come before the prioress I am consciously stripped of my illusion that I have it together, my illusion that no one is going to notice my short-comings. I am also stripped of my illusion that I am alone on this journey and that everything is up to me. To say out loud what is deep in my heart, especially when it involves things that I don’t like about myself, is to create a new, transformed reality. This stripping of illusions is the basis for humility, creating room for God in my heart.

It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we have it together, that since everyone else has the same issues mine don’t really matter. I can get caught in a trap of saying that all my faults are just peccadilloes and the prioress really has better things to listen to. The reality is that one of the most profound things we can experience is to be vulnerable before someone and experience the reality that we are still loved despite what we may have done, said or thought. Without the action of actually saying what is going on in our head and having someone hear it with love, we don’t change, we simply re-run the same thoughts, actions, patterns on our mental hamster wheel without ever changing. To come before someone and say out loud what we would rather not face is the beginning of change.

This disclosure of thoughts is also a correction to the feeling that many of us have that somehow our spiritual growth is entirely up to us. Our culture tends to reinforce the idea that each of us is autonomous and responsible for our own fate. Benedict’s ladder of humility is a reminder that while we are responsible for ourselves we are also responsible for one another. This in turn means that I have support on the journey. The prioress listens not to chastise or punish but to remind each sister that she does not walk this path alone but is supported by an entire community. Benedict has his monks talk to the abbot, we talk to the prioress, to be reminded that we are not alone. When we walk this path together we all share each others burdens and the joys.

Perhaps the most profound lesson for humility in this step is how things change when we say them out loud. Reality changes when words are spoken out loud. Our deepest fears, joys, feelings of guilt or happiness, change when we express them. Joy that is shared expands in the telling. Shame that is exposed to the light of day in the telling begins to dissipate. Thoughts and actions that are shared with the prioress in love take on a new shape. They begin to form the soil of humility, the soil of transformation.

Benedict’s admonitions have an application far beyond any monastic community. We are called to share deeply of our thoughts and actions with someone we trust. It is in risking, trusting, speaking and listening that we open our hearts and cultivate the soil of humility in our lives.

Feast Days and Black Fridays

Do you sense a deep longing or emptiness deep in your heart? I suspect that most people, if they are able to be deeply still and honest have such a feeling. It’s that feeling of something missing, something incomplete deep in our being.

The question is what we do with that feeling. Recently I spent a little while in a shopping mall. I’ve never been big on shopping, the walls seem to start to close in after about 15 minutes, but something new struck me this time. In this temple of consumerism there was a palpable energy. Large numbers of people were busy, milling about, searching as they plowed through the infinite variety of things they could buy. And all of these people were looking for some kind of satisfaction. Maybe it was something very simple, a new pair of slippers or the fun of watching a movie, maybe it was the more complicated shopping list of Christmas presents, but they all wanted something here at the mall. They all came with some need.

The foundation of our contemporary society is then based on the fulfillment of these sorts of needs. We are told over and over that the economy will not improve until people start to spend. Soon, the day after Thanksgiving, will be “black Friday.” This is the key barometer of our economy, the beginning of the Christmas season. If consumers spend enough on this key shopping day then the stores will be in the “black” and all will be well in the global market place. We live in a world in which we think that our most important needs can be satisfied by spending and consuming.

Before I had gone into the mall I had been reflecting, or maybe worrying, that our monastic life isn’t really that different from anyone else’s. Contrary to popular mis-conception we don’t float around all day smiling beatifically and doing nothing but praying. We work too hard, we aren’t always nice to one another, we may watch too much TV or read trashy books and yes, go to the mall once in a while. So I’d been worrying that our monastic way wasn’t monastic enough.

But today I can see that there really is something different about our way of life. Today is the Feast of St. Gertrude the Great our patroness here at the monastery. We celebrate with a special liturgy, festive meals and decorations and we remember Gertrude, a Benedictine nun in 13th century Germany. Gertrude was above all a mystic, her experience of God was deep, personal and sustaining. Gertrude knew that the need longing of her heart was for God and that in God alone would her longing be satisfied. She expresses this in her writings. “Although my heart distracts itself with perishable things, I must add that even after hours, days or weeks, when I returned to my heart, I always found you there…. My you forever find me living in you as you live in me.”

Today we celebrate a woman who knew the depths of her longing, her sense of incompleteness, her desire to be fulfilled and complete. But she had entered deeply into the source of her need. Gertrude knew that all the things that distract us cannot satisfy us. Even in a 13th century convent there were distractions and temptations, other people to gossip about, food to complain about, work schedules to be overwhelmed by, off-key liturgies and material goods to desire. But unlike most of us Gertrude had a gift of cutting through the illusions of her desires to enter into the reality that her deepest hunger is for God and God alone will satisfy the vague, persistent longing of our hearts.

This is the essence of monastic life whether lived by those in monasteries, oblates living in the “world” or by people everywhere with monastic hearts. To be a monastic is to recognize that what we want cannot be found at the mall, that a healthy society cannot be built on consumption, that in God alone do we know our rest, our belonging, the satisfaction of our desires.

In one of her books Gertrude addressed her readers: “Almighty and most generous God of all goodness, deign to nourish us sufficiently along the way of our exile, until we look upon the glory of the Face of the Lord, no longer veiled and going from glory to glory transformed by your most sweet spirit.” May this be our prayer too as we celebrate this amazing woman and anticipate celebrating Advent in a way that satisfies our deepest heart’s needs.

Monastic Prayer: For the World

What happens when monks pray? It is easy enough to simply say: that is what we do. We gather multiple times a day to pray in common because that is what Benedictines have been doing for over 1500 years. But of course that begs the question. What does this prayer mean? What is happening as we come together several times a day, day after day, year after year, with the same Psalms, the same prayers? Benedict isn’t much help. He outlines precisely which Psalms and other readings to prayer at precisely what hours of the day, but he doesn’t do too much to explain what is happening when monks pray.

Maybe it is helpful to simply start with the experience of praying. Multiple times a day a bell rings and the world shifts. When the bell rings the world no longer revolves around me and my needs. I am called to give up being the center of my own private little universe and come in silence, in openness, to a place that is only about prayer, a place where all of us come to sink into the presence of God, to open our hearts to the needs of a hurting world.

I may come into our chapel, the oratory, place of prayer, as an individual, but I become part of a community of God-centered people, a community that jokingly calls itself a “motley crew.” Together this motley crew gathers to enter into the presence of God, of one another and the world. In stillness we become present, allowing ourselves to let go of all that has come before and will come after. We enter the reality of prayer.

In this reality we strive to be one voice, our “minds in harmony with our voices.” (RB 19) The Psalms and prayers become one mind and one voice lifted together in praise, in supplication, in despair and joy. In the Psalms we pray words that that have been prayed across three thousand years, throughout our world, across religious traditions. In prayer we lift up to God words and feelings that may not be our own at the moment, but may be the words of people who have no words, people who do not know how to pray, people to engulfed in despair to pray. For these people we chant and recite words calling to God from the depths, words imploring God to act and bring about justice where there is only injustice and suffering. In the midst of our comfortable world we enter into the pain and despair of people we will never know lifting up our voices as their voices, praying for healing and justice.

In coming together in our prayer we recite the Psalms that remind us how much bigger our world and our God is than our limited ability to imagine. We come together to stretch our hearts in proclaiming the tremendous joy of the Psalmist in praising the God who is creator, sustainer, source of all life and power. The confines of our flat, gray universe are shattered as we join in a wild, exuberant dance of life and energy celebrating the God who reigns and sustains our universe. Our joy becomes the joy of all who celebrate, hope and come singing to the mountain of the Lord.

When we come together we enter into the world of prayer where the deep hurts and divisions of our community are brought to a truce. Together as we pray the Psalms, the prayers of an ancient community, and the Our Father, the prayer of our Christian community, we experience a tentative reaching out to one another, a holding of hands, the beginnings of healing. We come into prayer as broken people, as the stubborn, stiff-necked people of the desert, the Pharisees who have safely domesticated God, the people who cannot see their own limitations and lack of forgiveness. Here in prayer the people of hardened hearts are given another opportunity to receive a heart of flesh, to forgive and be forgiven. We do it for ourselves, we do it on behalf of people who have no such opportunity to come together, in community, to pray multiple times a day, to have their hearts broken open.

And so the rhythm continues, day after day, year after year. The bell rings, we drop everything, come to the place of prayer and silence. Together we pray ancient words, ancient prayers. We pray for those who cannot pray, for those who have no words. We pray for ourselves, lifting up our brokenness in order that our slow, painful healing may be offered for a hurting world. We pray in joy, present and hoped for, that the world may see a glimpse of the Reign of God breaking into the world.

Together we pray.

Adaptive asceticism for the spiritually unathletic

I have been giving a series of classes recently on the early monks of the desert. The stories of these men women are full of great feats of asceticism. They go into the desert, seek to pray without ceasing, fast, live alone, give up material possessions and fight with inner and outer demons. I point out that although the way of life of these early monastics is clearly ascetic, we need to remember that asceticism comes from the Greek root meaning to train like an athlete. In other words these people weren’t out to intentionally make themselves suffer they were training for the great spiritual journey they were on.

It is with that background that I was struck by the reading of a portion of the Rule of Benedict from the other day. We read a portion of Benedict’s Rule every morning at prayer and a couple of days ago we heard that Benedict said in his monastery there should always be two kinds of cooked food at a meal, plus a generous pound of bread and fresh fruit or vegetables if available. This is important so that if someone cannot one kind of dish then they will be able to eat the other dish.

Suddenly it struck me: where is the fasting, where is the asceticism, the discipline of having to deny our food cravings, our desire for special foods or novelty at meals? Isn’t Benedict just indulging his monks weaknesses rather than demanding the spiritual asceticism demonstrated by these early saints of the desert tradition? Benedict clearly wasn’t calling on his followers to train like these early spiritual athletes. So what did asceticism mean to Benedict?

On reflecting on the contrast between the example of the desert fathers and mothers and what Benedict calls his “little rule for beginners,” an image from junior high school came to mind. Back in the days before rigorous budget cuts for public school education, we all had to take physical education every day. For kids with temporary or permanent physical limitations there was something called “adaptive PE” that was designed to accommodate limitations. Being perfectly able-bodied but completely and totally unathletic I was always somewhat envious of this option and hoped that there could somehow be physical education for us uncoordinated klutzes, some way that we could be physically active without feeling like such misfits amidst the athletes.

Now I think that this may be precisely what Benedict was doing for spiritually challenged athletes, creating an “adaptive” form of asceticism. Most of us could not begin to handle the great feats of asceticism recounted in the stories of St. Anthony of Egypt. We wouldn’t get very far in emulating the stories from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. We would fail in obedience if we were told to just sit in our cell and be silent or to go water a dry stick for weeks. And yet there are those of us who nonetheless want to seek God more deeply, more truly in our lives. This then is the way of life that Benedict sets out. He specifically calls for “nothing harsh and nothing burdensome.” He makes sure that everyone in his monastery gets what they need, enough food, enough clothes, enough support.Benedict created a spiritual way of life that average people could live, a way not for aspiring saints but ordinary people with an extraordinary desire to know God with their whole heart and their whole life.

Today, living in an intentional, celibate community with few possessions or money, a structured day, an emphasis on ministry, may seem quite ascetic to people who are used to a life without anyone imposing limits on them. But the reality is that Benedict’s way is still a way that is not designed for the spiritual athlete. Benedict’s way is for the spiritual coach potato who knows she is being called to more, not to run a spiritual marathon next week but to get up, to move, to make slow and plodding progress on the great adventure of the spiritual journey. Benedict’s way is for those who will come to know what he means when he says: “But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”

Monasteries: Schools of Middle-Age Meaning

An interesting thing happened somewhere along the line in recent monastic life. Monasteries seem to have become largely about middle-age. Most of the women who are attracted to our way of life are middle-aged. Most of our retreatants are middle-aged. Most of our oblates are middle-aged. If you throw in the employees and volunteers there might be a little more variety but it would still probably average out to middle age. What on earth is going on?

When most of our sisters entered St. Gertrude’s they were quite young, most of them teen-agers or at most young adults. A few of them still talk about being one of the “old” ones if they entered at the ripe old age of 28 or 29. Now today it is a popular topic to wonder what happened to young people entering community or participating in other ways. So what happened to our “chronological diversity?”

As with most questions it is dangerous to posit an easy or simple answer, but perhaps we have trouble seeing the possibility that just as monasteries have always done we are responding to the needs of the times. Monasteries have never been about just one type of ministry, one way of being community, one way of being monastic. The flexibility and adaptability of Benedictine life has been one of the keys to the survival of monasticism. In the Church prior to Vatican II there was a tremendous need for Catholic education. Young women came to religious life, to St. Gertrude’s, to engage in an important, clear, tangible ministry. If you were a young woman who came to our community in 1960 you pretty much knew that you would serve the Church as a teacher or a nurse. It was a commitment to a life that seemed clear, that had answers, that had a specific ministry, that was set apart from and even above that of other people. This promise would have a great appeal to young people. Youth is about certainty and answers. Heroic self-sacrifice for a common ideal is something that stirs deeply in young hearts.

So what happened? Sisters aged along with the incredible winds of change in the Church and life become less simple, the answers less clear, a depth of understanding and maturity began to be required that had not been before. Ministry became a broader concept than it had been and choices proliferated. Religious life began to speak to new needs, new callings, new hungers. And so the world needs the witness and ministry of monastic life today as much as it did fifty years ago, but witness is of a different kind.

Perhaps that is why we often seem over-run with the middle-aged. Middle-age is the fruitful, scary, disconcerting, exhilarating time of life when everything seems up for grabs. Unlike youth this is not a time of answers or trying on new identities. It is a time when the answers seem to dissolve in your hand like cotton candy on a hot day. Middle age is a time when the mountains of achievement have either been climbed or abandoned and it is time to go deeper, to go inside and look for answers that used to be outside. In middle-age is the time for reflection, questions, wondering, slowing down and evaluating. In the middle of life it is time to look for meaning.

This is where monasteries come in. What is a monastery about if not meaning: deep, profound, fundamental, essential meaning. What is my faith; how do I pray; who is God; how do I love; why do we suffer; the questions of meaning that were ignored and passed by blindly are now huge stumbling blocks that seem to loom suddenly out of nowhere and threaten to hurl us headlong into our fears. But what is the school for the middle-aged, the school of meaning?

Perhaps modern monasteries are the new schools for meaning for the middle-aged. Benedict called his monastery “a school of the Lord’s service” and this is really the same thing. When people come to a monastery they are able to ask and explore the important questions of their life. Monasteries are necessarily not about answers but they are about being able to ask and live with the questions. And wrestling with questions that have no answers is perhaps the hallmark of middle-age.
Looking around the monastery there are lots of middle-aged fellow travelers, people on a new journey to know God and their faith in a new way, people who are beginning to suspect that the old answers and certainties are never coming back. Here at the monastery we just stand by the door and welcome people to the first day at this new kind of school.

Prayer of the Monastic Elders

Recently one of our elder sisters has taken a turn for the worse and it is hard to see her become even more diminished. It struck me though, that all of our elders, despite their challenges, come to prayer with us every day, three times a day. They participate to the extent they are able and we help them participate.

They are an example of an important aspect of monastic prayer, it is prayer to the end, the prayer of endurance, the prayer that continues through diminishment, suffering and letting go. For these elders prayer has become the essence of prayer, it is simply being before God in the presence and with the support of community. For many of them it is now prayer beyond words and concepts, it is the prayer at its most simple and real.

Perhaps this kind of prayer is the ultimate fruit of monastic life. Most of us we are about being busy, priding ourselves on how much we are accomplishing and sometimes being secretly resentful of having to interrupt our day with the call to prayer. But this busyness is an illusion, we think that all this work is really accomplishing something, that we are the important people in the community. But that is the advantage of praying in the midst of community. Those of us who are (relatively!) young and active are allowed to see the example of those whose entire lives have become prayer. They don’t interrupt their days to pray, their being has become prayer.

Our culture tends not to value people who whom it considers marginal, people whose diminishment due to age or disability makes them unable to compete in our work and results centered society. But of course monasteries should be an alternative to that culture. Hopefully we can be at least a small witness to that ultimate, alternative society, the Reign of God. In this Reign of God it is not the obvious people who are central but instead the margins become the center. The people who come closest to manifesting this new society are not the ones with the most degrees, the most important titles or who get the most work done. In this little group of people struggling to make the Reign of God become manifest the people at the center are the ones who look like they are on the margins.

I have a ways to go before I really enter into this new reality. I would rather pray with all my distracted faculties, conscious and aware of what I am praying, or at least conscious of my distraction. There will probably come a time when my prayer is as simple as some of our sisters and someone else will take me to prayer as a new generation prays the same Psalms and the same prayers and someone I’ve never met will give me the Body of Christ. I’m not ready for that yet just as probably none of our sisters ever thought she would be ready. The prayer of diminishment, the prayer of simply being is something that usually comes gradually. And that is appropriate since God’s grace is something that works on us slowly and gradually and it transforms regardless of how hard we work and indeed grace transforms us at the deepest level when we are unable to either resist or cooperate with it. So this is the prayer of our elders, the prayer of presence, the prayer of simply being, the prayer of witness. And this is their gift to us, a gift that if we are all lucky, we too will one day experience.

A New Model of Politics

A couple of weeks ago we held an election here at the Monastery. But it was a very different type of election than most of people are used to. No money was spent on campaigns, there were no signs, no angry or even particularly stirring speeches and the election was over when everyone came to agreement and felt good about the process. In most elections in our country it frequently seems like the process brings out the worst in everyone but here at the monastery the process seems to bring out the best in us.

In our community the prioress is elected for a six year term and can be re-elected for another four years. Several months before the election the community begins to prepare through prayer. Every evening for at least a couple of months before the election a special prayer is said by the whole community asking for God’s grace and wisdom for the sister to be elected and for the whole community to be open to the movement of the Spirit.

The election process is formally opened in a ceremony in the chapel by the president of our federation, (a group of affiliated Benedictine monasteries that come together for mutual support and accountability.) This beginning reminds us that all decisions are rooted in prayer and the presence of God. The presence of the federation president and two sisters from other monasteries who will facilitate the election reminds us that we are part of a much greater whole, of all who live this Benedictine way of life.

The process begins with a review of the goals the community had already established in previous meetings. The process moves on to discussing the names of sisters who have gifts that may make them good leaders for the community. This discussion is done at tables, respectfully looking at the qualities of quite a few sisters and how they have gifts to serve the community. This is a process of affirmation, there is no debate about who is better, there is no discussion about why someone isn’t suited for leadership.

Out of a long list of names the sisters whose names have been mentioned most often are asked to prayerfully consider whether they would be willing to serve as prioress. This isn’t the same as asking her whether she wants to be prioress, but whether she can see herself serving in this role at this time. This small group of sisters is given time to think, reflect and pray about their decisions.
Those who are willing to serve are then invited to speak briefly about their leadership style, their gifts and limitations. The community members can then ask clarifying questions. The facilitators work with the sisters who are open to being elected and with the community so that the process is smooth, respectful and peaceful. After everyone has had a chance to speak and questions have been asked community members begin to vote. This process continues in silence until the community comes to “convergence” in selecting a particular sister.

In the final step everyone convenes in the chapel, where the process began, and a formal vote is taken. The process is again grounded in prayer, in the place that is the heart of the community, and chairs are arranged in a circle to symbolize the egalitarian nature of our life. Each sister who is mentally able is invited to submit a ballot. After the voting is finished everyone lines up to hug the newly elected prioress and to offer her their support in the days ahead.

In his Rule Benedict says that the leader should be someone elected on the basis of her “goodness of life and wisdom in teaching.” Desire for the job, ability to make grandiose promises and gifts of inflammatory rhetoric are not part of the qualifications. Being prioress is about the gift of service not the desire for power, it is a humble openness to listen, to help, to call others to be their best selves, for the community to be about the Reign of God. For the community it is a process of being open to see the gifts in one another and willingness to allow someone to exercise those gifts. Everyone in the community knows that in order for this process to work she must be her best self in order to serve as a leader or as one who supports the leader.

In a world where many people have no opportunity for any kind of choice in their governance and many others do not appreciate the choices they have perhaps the Benedictine way can be a model that calls us all to be our best selves as we serve others.

Silence

How do we feel about silence? Is it a welcome gift or something that evokes a deep uneasiness? Silence is such a rare commodity in our society and our lives it is possible that we haven’t experienced enough silence to really know how we feel about it.

Silence has always been a deeply monastic value. In the stories of the early desert fathers and mothers silence is one of the principle practices of their life, the rush of words and noise one of the things these early monastics sought to flee. They knew that silence is an integral part of the difficult journey toward transformation, the central metanoia of the Christian life.

It is clear that Benedict assumed that silence would pervade monastic practices. He taught that speech was to be the exception, that monks would speak as they needed to, mindfully, aware of what they were doing rather than unconsciously and constantly. Silence and awareness go hand in hand for Benedict. Without chatter the monks could reflect on why and how they were living their life. Silence is an antidote to unconscious and routine activity and busyness of our daily life.

In the last few months here at the Monastery we have revived the practice of “Recollection Sundays.” These are days of silence from Saturday evening Vigils to Sunday Evening Prayer there is silence in the house and a chance to open a space, a time for reflection and renewal. It can be a hard wake-up call to help us realize that even in a monastery there is an inordinate amount of chatter, noise, busyness. An occasional day of silence may simply be the invitation to awareness of how little silence we all have in our lives.

We have to be honest that silence can also be intimidating. There is a comfort in noise and activity. Silence forces to be aware of what is going on in our lives, deep in our hearts and we may not like what we see. The sharp edges, the shallowness, laziness, anger, and a host of other sharp-tongued demons have a way of manifesting themselves in the silence.

But God is also in the silence, whispering softly beneath the cacophony of our internal chatter. Perhaps God whispers in silence wanting us to stop and strain to hear. Most of us have spiritual attention deficit disorder; we can’t focus or sit still or listen without a great struggle. But fortunately God gives us the gift of silence, a gift that requires practice and patience but one that will root and blooms in our soul.

The Future of Religious Life and God’s Preferential Option for the Motley

It is popular today for people inside and outside of the Catholic Church to wring hands about the future of religious life. The number of religious is decreasing, the average age is increasing, fewer men and women are entering religious life to become sisters, brothers, priests. The word crisis is used frequently and a lot of ink is spilled about what to do and what it all means. But perhaps the lens through which we need to look at this “problem” is Scripture.

A number of years ago the Catholic bishops of Latin America said that it is clear from Scripture that God has a “preferential option for the poor.” I suspect that there is an even larger principle at work if we look deeply into how God works in history and the lives of people. God seems to have a preferential option not just for the poor, but also the motley, the unworthy and unexpected. People who seem to be at the top of the social pyramid according to the standards of the world seldom appear as key characters in salvation history.

If you look at key people in the Bible you see people like Sarah who was old and barren with some denial issues, Moses was a cowardly, stuttering murderer, David a murdering adulterer, Mary an unwed teenage mother, Peter, impetuous, cowardly and clueless, Paul had a serious anger management problem, and the list goes on. God doesn’t choose the people who have it all together to change the world. Indeed it seems that God prefers people with significant limitations through whom God can demonstrate divine power and transformation.

If this is the case then there may be hope for religious life. According to the world’s way of looking at things religious life is in trouble. But perhaps according to a divine plan this may be a time of God working to bring about something new and unexpected. Such an idea definitely seems crazy enough to work. Religious are a small group of increasingly elderly people who have intentionally given up a lot of what society thinks is important, family, money, autonomy, and chosen to live at the margins, focused on God above all, living a life of faith.

As people of the margins perhaps we can see more clearly and have something unique to offer from our vantage point. When we look around and see the motley crew that makes up each of our communities we also see that throughout history small groups of religious have made a disproportionate difference in society. Spreading the good news of the gospel, providing education, establishing health care systems, bringing about social change, demonstrating what it means to seek God in everyday life, these are all gifts of religious. These are the gifts of ordinary people who are far from perfect (a fact to which their sisters and brothers in community will readily attest) who have banded together to do extraordinary things by relying on the power of God rather than being an elite group of the powerful. Religious are people who can readily identify with the Apostle Paul who said “my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

So perhaps the reports of the demise of religious life are somewhat premature. This may be a time for a necessary demise of some aspects of religious life. This may be a time for the death of complacency, for the end of a reliance on large numbers, security and easy answers. The future of religious life may be about embracing the difficult paradox of faith, that limited, motley, unexpected people are often or even usually the one’s God chooses. The future of religious life may involve a tremendous freedom of having nothing to lose, of being able to risk new exciting things since the world seems to think we are dying anyway. Perhaps the members of religious life need to say that if everyone is so sure that we are dying then at the very least we can go out in a blaze of glory, creating new visions and new ways of building the Reign of God. Perhaps the future of religious life means embracing the reality that as religious we may finally be marginal enough, motley enough, small and powerlessness enough to truly be instruments of God’s radical healing of the world. After all, it is only through death that resurrection comes.

Advent Week Four: What Are We Willing to Risk?

What are we willing to risk in our encounter with God? When we read the Gospel for this Sunday, Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, we already know how the story ends. Like little children with a bedtime story we know by heart we’re eager to chime in with “and they lived happily ever after.” But to read the story this way is to take away both its power and its subversive application to our lives.

We forget that Joseph didn’t know how the story would turn out. He hadn’t seen the end of this movie when he had a strange dream. What Joseph had was a fiancé who was pregnant before they had been together. Here is where we tend to be oblivious or squeamish. Joseph faced a fiancé pregnant by someone other than himself. He would have assumed that he had been cuckolded. Whether today or two thousand years ago Joseph’s position would have been one of pain, shame and confusion. As a just and righteous man he didn’t want to cause any more pain than had already been afflicted so a quiet divorce would have been the only way to salvage some shred of dignity enabling both he and Mary to go on with their lives. The alternative would have been to allow Mary to be stoned for adultery.

But then, in the midst of the turmoil Joseph has a dream. This is where we like to skip ahead. Of course he will understand that the dream is of God, of course he will take Mary as his wife, of course the child born will be the Son of God. But was anything certain in those first sleep addled moments when Joseph awoke and wondered what on earth he had just dreamed?

There would have been very little risk for Joseph if he had done as most of us would have, shake his head and think “what a strange dream” and sink back into the pain of his knowledge of Mary’s pregnancy. God had sent an invitation, an invitation that entailed enormous risk for Joseph. Today or two thousand years ago the sudden, strange, incomprehensible messages of God call us to give up our well planned future. Joseph’s future would have entailed a painful divorce and sense of betrayal if he had ignored the dream. But to listen to the dream would have entailed entry into an unknown land.

If we listen to the strange, whispered invitations of God we will risk the unknown, the incomprehensible. No one would have blamed Joseph for thinking his dream was a chimera, a reassuring hope obscuring the difficult reality. Indeed how would most of us react when a friend comes to us, ready to take a huge risk based on a dream that they insist is from God?

But to listen to God is to walk blindfolded on an unknown road. For Joseph it meant facing shame and derision from those who had not heard the news, the dreams or the angels that only we know come from God. For those of us who are Benedictine it means taking the risk of committing ourselves to a way of life that makes little sense in world. Inside or outside the monastery we risk saying that there is nothing more important than to seek God. We commit ourselves to a way of life, a set of values at odds with our predominant culture. If we listen, truly listen and respond to the odd dreams, stirrings and angels that whisper, we will walk down an unknown road.

For Benedictines this risk is echoed in Benedict’s chapter on incorporation of new monastics into the community. In chapter 58 of the Rule of Benedict he describes the process whereby the new, idealist seeker comes to the monastery. Full of hope, the newcomer has probably already given up a tremendous amount to arrive at the door of this house of God. And there, instead of a warm welcome acknowledging the call and the risk to show up on the doorstep of a monastery, Benedict says the newcomer should be left for several days knocking on the door.

Benedict is saying: do you know the risk of responding to this invitation from God? Do you know the risk of entering monastic life where your life will no longer be your own but will belong to God? Benedict says: listen, are you going into this journey with full awareness, with your eyes open? The Rule requires a long period of transition, of formation in this new monastic way. When the probation is finally over and the new monastic is to be received into the community there is a final symbolic process to remind the new member of the risk of listening to God.

The new monastic writes out lifetime promises of stability, obedience and fidelity to the monastic way of life and places the document on the altar. In this action the risk is both symbolized and made real. The monastic profession of one individual is united on the altar of Christ’s sacrifice. The action says are you willing to follow Christ in obedience and sacrifice? Are you willing to take the risk? Can you give up your comfortable, complacent life and walk the unknown road of transformation, taking on Christ in this journey that requires the cross before the resurrection?

But now it is Advent, the time of coming, the time of new birth. With birth everything will change but we stand at a crossroads, will this birth happen in our lives? Will we take the risk of the entry of God in our lives? We make the choice every day. Listen: in strange dreams, in the whispers of angels, in odd and unexpected corners of our lives God is inviting us to risk, to travel an unknown road. Are you listening?

Advent Week One: Benedictine Readiness

Benedict has a chapter in his Rule about the life of a monk being a continual Lent, but implicit in the Rule is the reality that the life of a monk should also be a continual Advent. Advent is a season of readiness, becoming prepared, alert and awake. Advent says “get ready,” “be on your toes,” “watch out.” Something amazing, earth shattering and unexpected is going to happen.

The sense of this Sunday’s Gospel is apocalyptic. The coming of God will not be nice, easy or expected. The coming of God will happen suddenly and turn our world upside down. The reading implies that the coming of God is a cataclysmic event that will happen suddenly. This is not a standing invitation, it happens quickly, unexpectedly. No one knows when it will come but everyone will look back and remember the signs, the invitations like those of Noah that were ignored until too late.

To be a monastic, in the monastery or the world, is to be girded and ready for the day of the Lord, for the sudden coming of God in our life. Benedict expects that being a monk means all aspects of life are about being awake and ready. The monastic day is designed and structured to be about constant interruption. Secular work is not the primary aim or purpose of monastic life, the real work is the Opus Dei, the Work of God. For the monk the coming of the Lord happens several times a day, in the midst of a busy schedule and the unending, hurried demands of life. Right then and there, in the midst of important demands the bell will ring. It is time for God, time for prayer, time to drop what had seemed so important just a minute ago. Communal prayer is our daily Advent, our daily readiness for the unexpected moment when God comes and our lives are forever changed.

Benedict’s monks are even to sleep in their clothes so as to be ready in the middle of the night when the bell for prayer rings. The Prologue of the Rule has multiple, urgent images of God calling out, imploring, inviting, coaxing and calling. Wake up! Listen! Respond! Come! Today is the day the Lord is calling you, right now, not next week, next month, next year, when the children are grown or after retirement or when life is less hectic. In Advent and in Benedict the time is always now. The opportunity to respond to God’s invitation is always fleeting and always present.

But in today’s first reading from the lectionary we see the purpose, the reward of our vigilance, our willingness to be awake at the times when we would rather sleep. The passage from Isaiah is a vision of people flocking to Zion, the Lord’s mountain where a new reign of peace will be ushered in. Here on the Lord’s mountain a new day will dawn, the old order has gone and a new day has dawned.

So too we as Benedictines strive to create a new reality, we invite others to become a light of a new way of life in our broken, disordered world just as we too have responded to the invitation. Together as we live the monastic life and monastic values, in our monasteries, in our homes, in our families and monastic communities. Together we become the light that shows a new way, the promise of the Lord’s coming. However we live out the Rule we are witnesses to an Advent way of life. In our lives we seek to manifest the continual invitation of Advent, the urgent summons that today is the day of God’s coming. Today is the day of inviting God deeper into our lives that we in turn may be the presence of Christ in our world. Benedict creates the structure, the values that create a new way of being in the world. Together we model what it means to be a community that is awake, ready, alert and listening. When we live as monastics, both in the world and in the monastery we support one another to be awake, ready for the coming of the day of the Lord. We encourage and support one another, knowing our weaknesses, since as Benedict says “…the sleepy like to make excuses.” (RB 22:8)

During this time of Advent may we be awake, ready to respond to the invitation of God’s coming in our life, the invitation to be light in the darkness, the invitation to the hard and life-giving work of transformation.

All Saints of St. Gertrude's

Today is the Feast of All Saints, and for us a month to remember all the saints of St. Gertrude’s. There are banners hung in the chapel with the names of all our departed sisters. Tonight we will process in statio (lined up two by two) into the chapel and celebrate the feast for another year. We will remember those among us who have departed during this past year and for the past 118 years since our founding.

It is a month when I remember we are indeed surrounded by a great “cloud of witnesses” as the author of Hebrews put it. I read somewhere that the image is meant to refer to a coliseum of cheering fans supporting the athletes competing in the games. The athletes completing their race of faith on earth, the martyrs who gave up their lives for their faith, would be able to see how many people were with them in their struggle.

It is a powerful image as I see the names and remember many of the people who have gone before us at our monastery, women who are still with us in many ways. It is good to remember that all of us indeed are saints. Most of the women whose names are on our banners this month, who are now resting on our hill, weren’t extraordinary by most standards. There are some very holy women, a few who were deeply wounded and difficult, many who lived lives of ordinary hard work and hidden faith. All Saints is a day to remind us of this, that sainthood is perhaps most about perseverance in the midst of ordinary life. It is about enduring in the struggles, continuing in the dailyness of our faith journey. For most of us the journey to sainthood will not go through the route of extraordinary feats of piety, martyrdom or holiness. Our way to sanctification will be the way of the old monk who was asked by a newcomer, “what do you do all day in the monastery? The old monk thought for a while and said, ‘well, we fall down and we get up and we fall down and we get up and we fall down and we get up.’”

The saints of monastic life are the saints of desire. The essence of monastic life is a deep desire for God, a desire that compels some of us to live a different kind of life. It isn’t that we or any of those who have gone before us are any holier, if anything we may need more structure and support to seek God than those who are juggling families, spouses and a life without monastic structure. To be a monk is to simply know that somehow the deep longing for God cannot be assuaged except in a way of life in which faith is the focus, the center, the raison d’etre.

Some of our saints left this life deeply transformed. Some seemed to depart still awaiting the transformation that will happen in eternity. But they are all still with us. The saints of the monastery have left the legacy of their desire for God, their struggle to grow into the full stature of Christ, their faithfulness to the daily joys and frustrations of this way of life. Their spirits and their memories are still with us, they whisper in the corner of our minds, we glimpse them in the fleeting dark corners of the chapel. And we know that they are still there, filling our chapel, our halls, a great cloud cheering us on as we continue our race, upheld by the great cloud of our saints.

Chores and Love

What do chores have to do with love? Unless we are talking about the occasional person who has a passion for cleaning or doing dishes the two don’t seem to naturally go together. But as is often the case Benedict in his Rule for monks understood that the most ordinary activities of everyday life have a profound significance.

In writing a chapter about kitchen servers he says that no one is to be excused from kitchen service except for a very good reason because “…such service increases reward and fosters love.” (RB 35:2) In a long chapter he explains at length how monks are to serve at meals. There is a ceremony at the beginning of the week to install the kitchen servers of the week and the ceremony echoes the way new members enter the monastery. In other words every week as they begin to take their turn serving meals the monks are reminded of why they entered the monastery, their commitment to seek God and serve one another in community life.

I have been thinking about this because last week a new chore list came out. Like every group of people living together we have to decide who does what chores to keep the place going. There are always dishes to do, rooms to clean, floors to sweep and a thousand other little tasks. Everyone except the most infirm has a job or usually several jobs to do. The chores are changed periodically as peoples schedules change, they move or simply can’t do the job any more.

Of course today or in Benedict’s time probably no one ever came to enter monastic life because they were drawn by the spiritual significance of being a kitchen server or a dish washer. Most of us came with lofty expectations of how we would find God through prayer and ministry. But if we stay here long enough we eventually realize the wisdom of Benedict. It isn’t hard to find God in the chapel and the daily prayer, but the real trick is to find God in the pots and pans, the vacuuming, the common work that makes up daily life.

We don’t have a ceremony anymore at the beginning of the week to designate who will be doing what service. Perhaps that’s too bad, it is easy to lose sight of the purpose of common work. Benedict was certainly worried that the soup would be served hot and on time but he was more worried that the monks realize that by mundane acts of service they were demonstrating their love for one another. The point wasn’t to hurry up and get through the chores, it was do the chores in a way that each monk was serving his brothers as Christ would.

In our chores we are given daily chances to get past ourselves and our sense of self-importance. It is hard to get carried away with yourself while sweeping a floor, re-stocking napkins or being up to your elbows in greasy pots. And that is the way it should be. Each of those things and many more are critical to creating a place where we can be about the spiritual life, where we can be about the work of transformation. Each of the little daily chores gives us a chance to demonstrate love and service in ways that are humble, unspectacular, but necessary. The chores are a way to help us realize that no matter what we may have thought, monastic life is not about great feats of asceticism or spiritual grandeur it is about love that is demonstrated every day in my small, unnoticed ways.

Discernment: God whispers, shouts, nudges and pulls

As I settle in to my new job as vocation director for the monastery it is amazing to listen to and reflect on peoples experiences of coming to the monastery. I listen to a lot of people as they discern where God is leading them, what the next step in their life will be. This can be a confusing, exciting, difficult, wonderful time. When anyone is discerning a major decision, especially regarding entering religious life, it is an adventure through what may seem like uncharted wilderness.

It is the essence of wilderness to be uncharted, but nonetheless there seem to be some patterns that I have noticed in working with people and from having done my own discernment of religious life. Some of the signs of call seem rather obvious, some are very subtle and they all require plenty of time and space and honesty to sit with them in order navigate the wilderness of God-inspired decision making.

Signs of Call

Persistence: It would be wonderful if we could just wake up one morning simply knowing what we were supposed to do next, where God wanted us to be. Sometimes that does seem to happen, but if it does it might best beware. Call is something that tends to take time to become clear and if it is right it will remain right. How many people have jumped into bad marriages because they were instantly sure and wanted to act immediately? A call is something that probably takes a while to become clear, but even if it happens suddenly, it will continue over time. Call is something that won’t let you go. Like Jonah running to Nineveh you can’t escape.

Motivation: Why do you want to make this decision, whether entering religious life or some other decision that you think is God’s call for you? This is tricky. None of us makes a conscious decision to say: “I want to do this because it will feed my ego on a deep level.” It is very difficult to be completely, totally honest with ourselves and recognize our deepest motivations. We have to take the time to keep going deeper, to keep peeling back the layers of motivation. Do I want to enter religious life because God is calling me or because I think it would be a comfortable way of life? Do I want to make this change because God is calling me or because my family always pushed me to do this? Stripping the layers to see our deepest selves and our motivation takes time and work.

Rightness: There is a deep level of recognition that often comes with vocations or other decisions to follow God’s call. On one level the decision may seem unexpected, impractical or just plain crazy, especially on a practical, rational level. But the practical, rational level is often not the level of discernment. After considerable time and searching there may come a deep, intuitive sense that the decision is right. Possibly crazy and unrealistic, but right on a deep level. The rightness does not mean that it isn’t scary, that there aren’t lots of obstacles, but that in the center of your being it is the life-giving way.

Signs to Watch Out For
There are plenty of positive signs in discerning a vocation or any other decision regarding following God’s call, but there are also some warning signs. All of us can be very skilled at deluding ourselves into thinking that we are following God rather than recognizing our own needs and desires at work.

Cost: The poet T.S. Elliot had a line that seems to summarize religious life perfectly: “a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.” One of the hardest things to grapple with in looking at religious life is what it will cost. Most people can see the simplicity, having to give up some of their belongings or having less contact with their families, but there is more. We come to a way of life that asks us to go from being an individual in control of our life, or at least feeling like we are in control, to a state of being interdependent with others and with God. We come and give up our previous life, the roles we have played, our status and accomplishments and we totally start over again. Coming to religious life will give us more than we can imagine, but it may cost more than we can imagine.

Wherever You Go There You Are: Sometimes people come to religious life thinking that they have finally found a group of people who will really love them and support them. And if anyone comes to a healthy community that will be the case. The problem is that no group of people will be able to fix the hole in your heart. Each of us comes to religious life with our patterns of relationships, our woundedness, our issues and we won’t be instantly changed when we walk through the door. A religious community is not so much a place where we will be healed as a place where we realize we are in need of healing. If your need for healing and affirmation is too great this may not be the way of life for you.

No Generic Religious Life: When discerning a vocation some people seem to think that there is a generic call to religious life. They feel God is calling them and seem ready to quickly settle on the first place that will talk to them or is willing to let them enter. This is like marrying the first person that comes along who is single and is also looking to get married. The fit of religious life is deeply personal and mutual. There is a long, elaborate dance between the community and the aspirant. Is there a match? Do I like you? Do you like me? Will this work? Religious communities are not like brands of vanilla ice cream, one is not basically the same as the others. You can’t just pull one off the shelf and expect it to be fine.

Conclusion
Maybe the bottom line in discernment is that it is God’s process, not ours. We continue to listen deeply, attentively, honestly. We learn to face our nakedness before God, our deepest wants, needs, desires. We have to face our brokenness and our goodness, our failings and our tremendous gifts. In discernment we get out of the way and listen to God pulling, pushing, nudging and coaxing us into the way of new life. It is a place where the wilderness will blossom with new life.