The Monastic 24-Hour Buffet in a Spiritually Hungry World

People today are spiritually hungry. That insight has almost become a cliché. We know it, we say it, but what are we doing about it? If we aren’t careful we are in danger of being like the people that the Letter of James warns about, walking by the hungry and naked while encouraging them to be warm and well fed. Monasteries especially might need to be careful to look at whether we are hoarding food in the midst of a famine.

So what is the purpose of a monastery? What are these places of prayer, silence and community doing in our increasingly fast-paced, individualistic and secular world? What is the meaning of this odd, counter-cultural place and way of life? Monasteries today are not well known or understood. People often seem to think a monastery is a place for the spiritually elite to escape from the world or simply an anachronism from the middle ages.

But perhaps the purpose of monasteries is something that both our hurting world and the declining numbers of monastics need to look at. A monastery is not just about the small number of people who live there and take vows. A monastery is salt, light and leaven in a dark, flat and tasteless world. A monastery is a dynamic center for the spiritual journey, a place of hope and prayer. The monastery is provides support and community for people who are called by God to go deeper in their faith, in their relationship with God. Today monasteries are called to be all night buffets in a spiritually starving world.

Monasteries have always been places for people who have felt a call to put God before all else in their lives. Monastic life has always been centered around God, a life of prayer and service in the context of community. Both in the past and still today this monastic way has been seen as something where only a few could dedicate their life in a company of a small group of others. Monastics have traditionally been seen as a hidden, spiritually elite few.

A monastery is a collection of people, whether sisters, monks or oblates, who commit themselves to put God at the center of their lives. They aren’t people who have perfect spiritual lives, people who don’t struggle and sometimes feel like their relationship with God is in need of some relationship counseling. Monastics are simply people who are committed to the spiritual journey above all else.

Today our ministry as monastics is changing. Monasteries have always been of service, in the Dark Ages providing hospitality and learning in the chaos of the time. More recently many monastic communities have provided services in education and health care. But today those of us who are monastics need to share not just what we do but who we are on a deep level. We need to share the banquet of our spiritual life. It is time to open the doors to our banquet table through retreats, spiritual direction, expanded ideas of membership, forming people in their relationship with God.

It is a time of famine in our land, a time of darkness when all food has lost its savor and lies flat and unleavened on our tables. Into this time of starvation the monasteries of the world need to throw open their storehouses, reveal their light and become a salty, yeasty presence on the banquet tables of the world. Where there is spiritual hunger the monasteries need to become the 24 hour buffet table to feed a world that does not always even recognize its hunger for God.

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.

Christmas: The Irritating Vulnerability of God

Christmas is the celebration of God’s willingness to risk the ultimate vulnerability. In Jesus God becomes helpless, vulnerable, at risk for all the random chaos and cruelty that defines human life. In the Nativity we see the divine stripped of power and control. So perhaps the lesson for us all is that every day is Christmas.

We often say that they key to Christmas is that God is born in our lives. God’s action and presence become real in the world through our work, our becoming the hands of Christ. This is true but there is another reality that Christ does not come in power and might but on the margins, in the rejected and powerless.

So what does this reality of the coming of the vulnerable presence of God mean in our lives? Perhaps we begin by looking around us. In our communities, whether they are families, monasteries, work places, Churches, who are the marginalized, who are the people we brush aside, the people we would rather not deal with? It is always easier to be open to the presence of God as long as God does not challenge us in real, concrete ways right in front of our eyes. The presence of God we need to see may not be the lovable people but the ones who challenge us, who we dismiss, the people we feel justified in disliking or ignoring. In his ministry the people Jesus angered the most were the good, observant, righteous, religious people of his time. These were the ones least able to see God in the form of Jesus. We need to ask ourselves if we too are missing the presence of God in our midst today.

The vulnerable coming of God also happens within as well as in the people around us. The interior birth of God in our lives, the coming of God’s power deep in our hearts can also be unexpected and unwelcome. We prefer our spiritual growth to feel good, we want prayer to be full of consolations, becoming closer to God should be a warm, comforting experience. But God comes in the flesh, comes in our lives to bring us to wholeness, to salvation, to a grace that has no price but is never cheap.

God’s presence being born in our lives often shows in the parts of ourselves that are on the margins, rejected or ignored. God comes to shake up our complacency, our easy presumption that we can be faithful to God’s call while remaining in control of our life. In the midst of our comfort God comes in the form of those parts of ourselves that we would rather not face, that we would rather deny are even part of who we are. In the depths of the anger, fear, bitterness, arrogance, laziness, or other characteristics we are loathe to admit are part of us, Jesus waits for us like the father of the prodigal son waiting on the road to embrace us in all our woundedness. The rejected parts of ourselves are embraced, anointed and welcomed and through God’s love become characteristics that are redeemed and made whole.

It is easy to reduce the Nativity to a “nice” scene, beautiful baby, beaming parents, exotic visitors and sanitized animals. But the birth of God is a radical, dangerous reality in our lives in our world. The incarnation means that God is a vulnerable new presence that turns everything upside down. God will come in the marginalized, difficult people we want to ignore but who invite us to know the deep and difficult reality of love. God is present in the rejected, broken parts of ourselves that we want to deny but that need to be recognized and incorporated for us to be who we were truly created to be.

We easily say “Come Lord Jesus” at this time of year. Perhaps this year we can say it knowing what it truly means, say it with fear, trembling and the deep hope that the Lord will truly come and make us new creations.

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?