How to be a monk: Lesson One – Listening

What is a monk?  Above all a monk is someone who listens.  In a world flooded with nattering, chattering, vacuous noise the monk listens deeply and responds fully.  Monastic listening is rooted and grounded in silence, in the place where we let go of the many competing voices and demands of our lives and find a place to hear the voice of God that is heard in silence.

The call to be a monk may first manifest itself in a desire to listen or a realization of how rarely most of us actually listen.  The noise of our lives is pervasive.  There are jobs to go to, children to care for, spouses to pay attention to.  If that isn’t enough the cacophony of the internet, smart phones, television, all the screens in our lives compete for our attention and scream with distractions.

And most of us are happily distracted.  We secretly glory in our busyness, we’re delighted to have one more excuse to avoid the hard work in front of us.  The hard work may be jobs or family or it may be something even deeper.  Listening is hard work but it is the foundation of soul work.

In listening we begin to hear our deepest desires, those secret hopes that we may be afraid to articulate.  In deep listening we hear our desires to be loved, to have meaning, to care for others.  In listening we hear the whispers of God beckoning us to follow our desires to the place where we can all become whole.

St. Benedict, the founder of western monasticism began his guidebook on the monastic way with these words: “Listen my child to the master’s instructions and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”  Many people are called to be monks, to seek God above all else in their lives, and listening with the ear of the heart is the first step.

Perhaps it is time: Listen.  Be silent.  Be open.  What is your heart saying?

Mary the Proto-Benedictine?

Benedictines like to point out that the first word of the Rule is “listen.” Other people like to point out that Benedictines don’t have a monopoly on listening! OK, maybe that is true, but nonetheless today, on the Feast of the Assumption, I would like to nominate Mary as the first, proto-Benedictine.

In Luke’s marvelous account of the Annunciation it is Mary’s deep listening that allows her to be present to the message of God’s unexpected, impossible action in her life. We tend to forget that Mary didn’t have to listen, didn’t have to respond. Personally I think Mary would have been quite justified in saying: “Gabriel, honey, this Holy Spirit coming upon me is all well and good, but I’ve got a wedding to plan, I have to rent a hall, pick out bridesmaid dresses, figure out what to do with my mother-in-law. Could you come back after the wedding?” Who would have blamed her for not having the time or space in her life to listen to strange messengers who probably interrupted her morning coffee?

But listening means being willing to be interrupted, to give up our agenda, to say “yes” to things that are completely, absolutely impossible. Listening means creating the open, vulnerable place in our lives where God can be born. Listening means responding to the deep hunger, the yearning for God’s presence that compels us to enter monasteries, become sisters or oblates and to live according to a Rule.

Of course when we listen to God we will hear impossible things. We aren’t used to hearing much less believing impossible things. I am always reminded of Alice in Wonderland. Alice tells the White Queen that “one can’t believe impossible things.” The White Queen looks at her pityingly and says: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The Queen would appreciate Luke’s account of the Gospel. Virgins will hear that they are to become pregnant. A peasant girl on the margins of the most powerful empire known to history will give birth to a baby who will turn the world upside down. God enters the world not in power and might but in weakness and vulnerability.

As Benedictines we will also hear impossible things when we listen. We will hear that the motley collection of people we live with are the leaven of the Reign of God in our culture. When we believe six impossible things before breakfast we will believe that God can be born in our lives like Mary. We will believe that God still speaks to marginal people in the margins of the greatest empire history has ever known. We will believe that God doesn’t work through our power, our achievement, our ability to work hard, but God comes to dwell in our weakness, our limitations, our littleness.

So today on the Feast of the Annunciation our community celebrates listening, openness and the God of impossible things. Hopefully it will be a day when all of us will take the time to be silent, still and open to the places where Gabriel still whispers. Then together we will know what Benedict said and Mary knew: “What, dear brothers/sisters, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us?” RB Prologue 19

Listen: The Journey Begins

“Listen carefully my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” RB Prol. 1:1

Listen: God whispers, shouts, begs, pleads, commands and entices. Do you hear it? In the grating shallowness of a life increasingly limited and tasteless something beckons. Something more, something unseen that flees from your direct glance. Something darts about at the edge of your mind playing “catch me if you can.” Little tendrils of longing tickle and tease your soul. More, there must be more.

Listen: Tag, you’re it! Now, bitten, smitten and longing, you’re one of the holy fools and Godstruck, you’ve joined their ranks. Something has happened. Puzzling, unexpected and unlikely the journey begins. It is a journey of the heart, not the mind, a journey whose map is ridiculous whose destination is absurd.

Listen: Strange voices echo, reverberate and pull. Old words and voices of forgotten ancestors pull you to prayer and silence and places apart. Dream figures of people who dwell apart, dwellers in the soul’s desert, they whisper and entice you.

Listen: Somewhere (which is everywhere and nowhere) God chortles, the Divine Trickster has caught you and pulled you and dragged you into the depths. This is the God whose greatest delight is to know you are seeking because God is waiting to be found, there, hiding in plain sight.

Listening

“Listen carefully my daughter, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”

RB Prologue 1

Perhaps this is the final listening.

There is a steep hill behind our monastery. Right outside the backdoor of the chapel is a road. It winds past the orchard and the grotto as you walk up through a pine forest, overlooking the wheat fields of the prairie. Along the road as you walk up there are Stations of the Cross, life size plaster statues, each in an enclosed little house. They are strategically stationed so that you can catch your breath as well as pray as you walk up the hill. When you reach the top of the hill you are greeted by two concrete angels on top of stone pillars, each facing slightly away from the other, blowing trumpets, heralding the final judgment.

This is where the listening ends and also begins. It is our cemetery.

There are probably close to two hundred women and a few men buried up there. In silence they witness to what it means to live a life of listening. They all heard God’s call, some ran eagerly to respond, others resisted, still others probably couldn’t have explained exactly what it meant to listen.

Here rest the women who heard the call in Switzerland, in 1882, to start a new monastery in the far off mission field of America. Sr. Johanna was only twenty five when she was told to leave her convent in Switzerland to start a new foundation in the American Northwest. She resisted, didn’t like the new country, had to spend her first months living over a saloon when promised housing didn’t appear. She listened and responded to a voice that pulled her where she didn’t want to go.

Here, too, are the women who listened and heard the call growing up two miles down the road, milking the cows and dreaming about life in the stone convent with the sisters. They were the farm girls, rooted in the land, in a simple faith in which spoke clearly, their response was straight-forward. Hard work, obedience, the promise of heaven was the reward of their listening.

In row on row there are women who heard the call, women humble, loving and giving, the saints among us. Here, too, are the women who listened and then called others to be saints by asking others to bear with their behavior.

They all listened, some to a still small voice, others to an incessant shout, some to a persistent tickling feeling. Here on the hill are the ones who continued to listen, two who died in accidents before they even made vows, too many others in those early years who died young, of tuberculosis or diphtheria or flu in the early days without enough money or medicine or decent food. They lie next to the sisters who lived and worked and loved and prayed into a ripe fullness of years, dying in their beds surrounded by their sisters. These are the women of Revelation, “who have come through the great ordeal,” who listened for a few months, for a few years, for sixty or seventy or eighty years.

Lined up in rows they are resting now. The seasons mean nothing anymore, the time of new grass or snow or falling leaves. Side by side they lie, the ones who ran schools and hospitals, who lead the community, with the ones who spent their lives scrubbing floors, the ones who peeled the potatoes and the ones who came home to die after years in the back wards of the state mental hospitals. Together they listened in life, together they listen in death.