Promises, Promises, Promises

Emerging as we are from a contentious election, we are moving from the season of promises made to the season of promises kept, or so we hope.  And liturgically, poised on this final Sunday of Advent with Christmas only a few days ahead, we are following the same trajectory. 

Advent has set before us the very long story of God’s promises, first made in the creation itself, of a future when all would be brought to completion.  Since we human beings are key protagonists in the story, there have been a lot of ups and downs.  Only God has remained steadfast.  Stubborn, really, when we consider the many and quite inventive ways that we and our forebears have found to thwart the divine plan for our greatest good.

The promise has remained in place through it all, growing in depth and richness with the passage of time.  Come Christmas, we will celebrate the promise kept—but how oddly!  No sign of the victorious warrior or the glorious king of peace that the prophets have led us to expect.  Instead, a newborn cradled in his mother’s arms beside a cradle full of straw, with ox and ass looking on with interest.  Yes, there are choirs of angels out over the fields of Bethlehem, but their song is brief and apparently unheard except by a handful of shepherds.  Yes, eventually there arrive exotic foreign sages with gifts fit for a king, but they don’t stay long.  Yes, Simeon and Anna identify the six-week-old brought to the Temple by his parents as the promised redeemer, but no one seems to have paid much attention except Mary and Joseph.  Then it’s on to an unreported life of exile off in Egypt, followed by an equally unmentioned life as a village carpenter in Nazareth.  What sort of promise keeping is this?

This is God’s promise keeping, and it unfolds with God’s slow patience through Jesus’ private years and public ministry, still bearing very little resemblance to warrior or monarch.  Or so it seems.  It would take the early believers long pondering, and later believers long theological arguing, to discover that a battle really was fought during those years, a battle that came to a climactic victory in Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But, as we will see during the Easter season, it was a victory without fanfare, victory parades, ticker tape, or endless crowds gathered around the risen Savior, yelling questions and getting sound-bite answers to be broadcast all over the world.  And there was still no sign of throne or crown beyond the cross and crown of thorns whose hidden transformation is sung only obliquely in psalms whose vocabulary is as old as King David’s time and after.  Awash with political fury, murder in the streets, hints of unsettled times still to come, and all under the cloud of a worsening pandemic, we may find it hard to see how the promise has been kept.

Ah, but it has not been fully kept, not yet.  Next year, when Advent begins, we will be reminded once again that the Savior’s triumph over the forces of sin and death is still a work in progress in the history of the world, and perhaps even the cosmos.  The victory was decisive, but, in our human way of reading history, the aftermath will be an unknown time settling until Christ comes again in glory.

Fortunately, we are not called to explain this continuing paradox of the already but not yet.  Traditionally, we call it characteristic of the season of Advent, but in reality it is always with us.  We are not called to explain it, but we are called to live it, with no other light to see by than the one that burned largely unnoticed in Bethlehem, remained unrecognized in the Temple except by two oldsters, and lit the unsung lives of the first believers and all of us who have followed them since the resurrection. It shines still, even in our present darkness, visible only to the eyes of faith.

 Meanwhile, our own lives, lived in the practical ordinariness set out for us by St. Benedict, are the promise being kept.

May your Christmas be bright with God's promise!

 Copyright 2020 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

 

 

 

 

Psalm 46: An Advent Prayer

 This entry was reposted with permission from the new blog at Give Us This Day, https://blog.giveusthisday.org/.  The essay first appeared in the December 2020 issue of Give Us This Day.  New entries from Give Us This Day will be posted daily on the Give Us This Day blog. I encourage you to visit the blog, where you can sign up to receive the post daily by email.  This service is free, but of course the publishers, The Liturgical Press, would be delighted if you would subscribe to the publication itself.  A paid subscription also gives you access to the online (and downloadable) issue.  Since they publish both my essays and my books (just one so far, two more in the works), I like to support them!

Every Advent we hear: this is the season for listening quietly to God’s Word. And every Advent we remember: it is also the busiest season of the year. What to do?  

Psalm 46 offers a suggestive geography. It pictures an outside world where chaos is imagined as earthquake, tsunami, political turmoil, warfare. But there is also an inner world where God’s presence and protective power banish all turmoil. There we can sit quietly and hear ourselves think. The obvious Advent strategy is to find the way into that quiet place within while the holiday-mad world around us is in turmoil. Lucky for those who can, but many of us find it nearly impossible. Are we then shut out of the holy season’s gift?  

Maybe not. What if Advent shifts the strategy? As we prepare to celebrate God’s entry into human history as Word-made-human-flesh, perhaps we could reconsider where we might go to hear God’s Word in the midst of the season’s bedlam. Advent and its Christmas sequel remind us that God’s point of entry was never a silent sanctuary, outward or inward. After long, tumultuous years of promise, the Word arrived in a stable in Bethlehem—a town bursting with incomers who were summoned for a census, a murderous dictator hovering in the background. So wouldn’t it be appropriate to listen for the Word not just within our own hearts but also in the less-than-quiet world around us? What if we learned to recognize the Word in raucous shoppers, quarrelsome family members, and the muttering of homeless people we pass by?  

We might rather not. Our own inner sanctuary offers a quiet retreat, but the surrounding babble invites us into the chaos of real human dramas where we often don’t know how to help. Psalm 46 offers a strategy for that, too, but not the one we usually come up with. “Be still, drop that heavy fix-it toolbox, and just be there where God is.” Learn to hear God’s ever-creating Word spoken in the human voices of expectation and despair, joy and suffering, desire and anger.  

On the Advent doorstep of the Good News made flesh among us, be present, pay attention, listen, and seek to love all those speakers milling everywhere, the welcome and the unwelcome alike. Presence, awareness, listening, and love—God’s fix-it toolbox—are far more powerful than bows, spears, and shields. They are, after all, the tools that Christ, the ultimate Word, brings into the world for our salvation. Let us study them now, in this season of listening—even if only in hurried snatches—so we may learn to put them to use in doing the Gospel’s work year-round.  

Copyright Give Us This Day 2020.  Reprinted with permission.

A Lamp in Dark Places

 

The holiday season is always a patchwork of light and darkness. Some find joy in family gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas; others grieve in loneliness the memory of absent loved ones.  Some come together around tables laden with traditional foods lovingly prepared and served; others rely on cafeterias or soup kitchens staffed by strangers to serve  from a limited menu; still others eat alone. 

This year is different.  The darkness is spreading.  Today, as I write on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, our county goes on red alert and begin strict shutdowns. Last week, the authorities added a few additional restrictions to those required by level yellow security in the hopes of staving off a move to level orange before Thanksgiving.  This morning we are still on enhanced yellow.  At five o’clock, we will jump straight to red.  Personal gatherings of any kind are banned; grocery stores are confined to limited service; restaurants will offer only curbside takeout.  What will happen to the soup kitchens I do not know.  And I doubt that even restaurant and grocery stores dumpsters will have much to offer the homeless who depend on them.

 But St. John’s gospel breaks through the enveloping dark to recall us to hope:  “1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light has a name.  Jesus said“ I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12) This is not wishful piety but the deepest truth of our darkest days. 

 These times challenge us to be even more true to our Benedictine identity as people of listening hearts.  It is not so easy to hear the Word of God speaking to us when all the news around us seems bad. But that is precisely what we need to do at times like this.  A number of the psalms we pray in the Liturgy of the Hours remind us that God, not our limited selves or some malicious evil spirit, is in charge of the universe and is to be found always at work there.  See for example Psalm 95, Psalm 100, or Psalm 104.  St. John reminds us that the God whose presence and will permeate the world is not an impersonal force or, again, a destructive enemy.  “God is love,” he says, in no uncertain terms (John 4;7). 

 The times here throw down yet another challenge: how do we recognize or understand the God of love when we are all in danger, when loved ones fall ill and perhaps die, when even the promise of vaccines is darkened by the fear of too-hasty and too-untested distribution, by scientific warnings that the vaccines themselves may have serious negative side effects?  I have no comforting answer to this question. 

 What I do have is a conviction that what we can and must do is what St. Benedict tells us: seek God in all things.  We are not asked to seek explanations for God’s behavior but to look for  every sign of God’s creative presence even in the most unexpected of places.  In the kindness, solicitude and generosity of others; in the courage of sufferers who do not lose faith or hope; in the care offered with consideration and competence by exhausted health care workers; in the community of the afflicted, frightened or bereaved, we look for the threads of light in the darkness.  St. Peter urged the early Christians already beset by conflicts within the community and persecution without “You will do well to be attentive to [God’s word], as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (1 Peter 1:19).  And, says the Book of Revelation, that lamp, like the light it holds, is also a person, the person we cherish above all others, the Christ who transcends all darkness: the heavenly Jerusalem the visionary saw “had no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb” (Rev 21:23).

 We would probably all much prefer an explanation, but God knows that what we need in all circumstances is not concepts too big for us to grasp, but God’s presence and loved  enfleshed in a humanity like our own, apart from sin , so Jesus told his first followers, and us, “…behold, I am with you always” (Matt 28:20).  After all, as we will soon be singing during Advent, that is his other name: “Emmanuel” (Matt 1:23).  And Emmanuel is there among us, with patients, with caregivers, with loved ones, with concerned strangers.  Always.

The Lectio Mindset

As all of us Benedictine, oblates or vowed monastics, could probably recite in our sleep, St. Benedict opens the Rule we aspire to live by with a double command:  “Listen…with the ears of your heart” and “put it into action.” It’s simple: listen to it, then do it! But St. Benedict is hardly one to advocate acting on impulse.  Nor does he intend to create an army of robots.  So something has to happen between listening and doing.

The tradition of lectio divina (prayerful reading of Scripture), which St. Benedict also mandated for us without actually using the term, supplies the answer.  You know the pattern:  (1) Listen (read); (2) ponder in conversation with God (meditate; pray); (3) act on what you’ve heard.  But this pattern is not restricted to praying with Scripture.  The monastic tradition speaks of 3 “texts” we can read, ponder, and act on:  the Scriptures of course; nature (this contribution by St. Anthony the Great refers to the mountains or the trees in the backyard,  but can also be interpreted as the human nature in those around us, of which he was himself a gifted reader);  and the “pages” of our daily life’s experience.  This is what St. Benedict means when he talks about seeking God in all things and in all people.  The regular practice of this extended version of lectio creates what I call the lectio mindset, because it is not just something we do at selected times but the way we interact with all of reality.

This mindset presumes, as St. Benedict presumed, and as Jesus taught in the gospel, that reality comes in layers.  There is the busy surface that enchants or annoys or simply absorbs in the business of everyday living.  But on this slick surface, St. Benedict might have said, you slip and slide and go no deeper into the underlying conversation for which our speaking God made us.  That requires plunging through the surface, sometimes with great effort, to get to the deeper places of reality where God is busy creating, transforming, enlivening all that is and inviting us to take part in the work.

This image suggests a two layer world, or maybe a three layer one if we assign God a separate place above and beyond us, as we often do but as St. Benedict never did.  However, reality is not a layer cake, with the chocolate carefully separated from the strawberry by a thick layer of vanilla frosting you could drown in.  The layered reality St. Benedict understood is intensely interactive: heaven and earth arein constant conversation as both God and God’s created reality work together toward a future we cannot even imagine, so the Bible simply calls it “a new heaven and a new earth.” What that might look like, we can only guess.

Really to live in this layered and interactive reality, we need to pray as St. John of the Cross would suggest (even though he wasn’t a Benedictine!): “We must … dig deeply in Christ.  He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures; however deep we dig, we will never find their end or their limit.  Indeed, in every pocket new seams of fresh riches are found on all sides” (see The Liturgy of the Hours, Office of Readings, December 14).  Here, it seems, is the place to which we must go between hearing and doing: Christ, the Wisdom of God, embedded in and speaking throughout the Scriptures and all reality.  

So to get from the listening to the doing, let us put on our miner’s helmets, turn on the brightest light they offer, and go digging into all the nooks and crannies life offers to see what God has hidden there for us.  Thus do we honor the fact that life, like a mine, is seamed with gold. Or, as I prefer to think, seamed with light, the Light of the world!

 Copyright 2020, Abbey of St. Walburga

After the Ascension

This week we stand between the Ascension and Pentecost.  It was surely an odd time for Jesus’ followers, a time of suspense between the unexpected and the unpredictable.

The Solemnity of the Ascension, which we celebrated on Sunday, seems to mark the moment of Jesus’ departure from the followers who had walked with him for what was actually a short time—one year or three, depending on which gospel calendar you follow—but a time of presence so intense that they didn’t want to see it end. We see their anxiety at the Last Supper when Jesus begins to talk about departure and return.

Certainly his most dramatic departure was his death on the cross.  He did return-- but with no drama at all.  Instead, he appeared very quietly to his followers, usually either one-on-one (Mary Magdalene at the tomb) or in small numbers (the disciples on the road to Emmaus and the breakfast at the Sea of Galilee).  He came to teach them where they would find him in the future: not by holding onto him physically, as he told Mary Magdalene, but by listening to God’s word from an Easter perspective and by breaking bread together, as he told the two who were Emmaus-bound.  And they left us those stories to teach us what they had learned.

Then, in Acts 1, he left them abruptly.  Or he seemed to.  Acts 1:16 says “he was lifted up” and then “a cloud took him from their sight.”  (The Cloud is God’s presence throughout the Old Testament.) We can imagine them standing there with their mouths upon looking at the sky in which he seemed to have vanished, until “two men dressed in white garments” (presumably a pair of helpful angels “ said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”

And he has and he does.  He disappeared quietly and he returns quietly, as he did in those post-resurrection stories.  Other biblical passages about the great cosmic drama of his final appearance at the end of time tend to draw our attention away from the quiet privacy of the here-and-now.  Jesus still comes to us one-on-one or in small groups (even a large parish gathering is small potatoes compared with the final gathering of the whole world!); he comes in the biblical Word; he comes in the breaking of bread, whether in a Eucharistic assembly or in the more intimate gatherings of family in friends.  (Yes, of course, Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and at the family table are very different in mode, but he himself told us that where two or three are gathered in his name wherever or for whatever reason, he is present as he was at that inn on the Emmaus road).  In fact, wherever we are, he is because he suggests that he has never really left when he promises the apostles gathered to see him off on the Mount of Olives in the ascension account in Matthew 28 that he will be with us always.  After all, his second name is “Emmanuel…which means ‘God is with us’” says the Angel Gabriel to St. Joseph.

So, in this long interim between the Ascension and Christ’s final return, we can do as St. Benedict says, which is to “seek God in all things” because we have been assured that Christ is in fact there to be found.  And Benedict’s Rule supplies us with many tools for meeting with him in all sorts of places:  in the word pondered in lectio divina and in the liturgical Hours, in the people who come to our door, either literally or figuratively by phone and e-mail and text, in the young, the old, the needy and the sick, and in fact in the communities to which we belong, whatever form they may take.  Some of St. Benedict’s search tools are obvious, but some are not:  obedience frees us from the clamor of the willful inner child to listen to God giving directions (Prologue and RB 5), silence (better, taciturnity) frees us from constant inward and outward noise to hear God’s voice in the depths of life (RB 6), humility frees us from the burdensome necessity of running the world as if we were God  so that we can live in communion with the One to whom responsibility for the world properly belongs (RB7).  Chapter 4 on the tools of good works in fact teaches us to construct the whole network of our relationships with self, others and God, so that we can be at peace with Christ at the center of that network.

One of the questions we might ask ourselves (and Christ) in this time between Ascension and Pentecost is: which of these many tools for seeking and finding Christ do we keep sharp and effective, and which ones have we allowed to get rusty from disuse?  When the Spirit of God blows through the world like a great wind, that force can blow away the rust and sharpen our desire to live more deeply in the ever-present Christ.

Copyright 2020 Abbey of St. Walburga

Safer-at-Home

 St. Benedict would agree.  In fact, to keep the monks at home, he directed that “The monastery should, if possible, be so constructed that within it all necessities, such as water, mill and garden are contained, and the various crafts are practiced” (RB 66:6). But his concern was not contagion of the body but contagion of the heart. He was echoing a widely circulated piece of sage advice given by an elder to a young monk seeking counsel in the desert: “Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Confinement at home, never mind in a small monastic one-room hermitage, chafes, as we have all learned during the long period of “stay-at-home.”  It chafes most when home is populated with other people, even people dearly loved, but it chafes the solitary as well.  However, God’s gifts come in strange packages.  Staying put opens a door to wisdom, should we chose to go there.  It invites us to renew our commitment to listen, and listen with the ears of our heart, to Christ who is always our true inward reality. 

But St. Benedict’s building plan suggests that we will be able really to hear if we clear out our ears by shutting the heart’s door on all the voices that clamor for our attention: the TV with 24 hours a day of pandemic news, the computer, the radio (unless music serves as a welcome wall between the heart and the racket outside!), the phone, the shelf of books that start by relaxing us and end by simply distracting us, and all the other intake with which we so often protect ourselves from the dreaded possibility of a silence in which there is nobody there.  There is never nobody there.  Jesus did say, as I often quote to myself as well as to you, “I am with you always” (Matthew 20:).  And he is God’s word forever speaking us into being as in Genesis 1 and speaking to our inmost being using the same powerful words of creative love that keep the world spinning.  As we all know, the Benedictine habit of lectio divina and praying the liturgical Hours mediates those words to us, but so does simply sitting still in God’s presence in whatever attentiveness we can muster, however long or briefly.

I am currently reading Michael Casey’s daily homilies collected into the book Balaam’s Donkey (Liturgical Press) in honor of his fiftieth anniversary of priesthood.  Today’s selection is entitled GIGO, the acronym for “garbage in-garbage out” familiar from early computer days. He warns that “The things we allow to enter our thinking also have a role to play in shaping who we are and what we will become”—that is the life of conversion to which all Benedictines, and not only Benedictines aspire.  St. Benedict didn’t put it that way, but he understood it in building walls to keep his monks from wandering all over the place physically and therefore interiorly.  It’s safe to stay at home – at appropriate times and in appropriate ways, of course—in the inner room of the heart.  But only if we are not simply taking refuge in selfishness, and only if we take care about what we carry with us into that inward cell. 

Whether it’s by means of  newscasters or journalists bombarding us with pandemic news or a relative’s gripes about all the pleasant things we no longer have access to or our own inner collection of fears and complaints, we do can cultivate deafness of heart without meaning to.  And that is sad, because, as Casey suggests, we really do become not only what we eat but also what we listen to.  And that’s not only in times of pandemic!

Of course the desert monks roamed about, sometimes quite far afield, to visit other monks, to talk with a spiritual father, to take their handmade goods to town to sell them for money to buy bread for themselves but more especially for the poor.  Of course St. Benedict’s monks traveled too, to get to the surrounding fields where they worked the harvest and no doubt to run errands for various purposes.  And of course, we all go out and about as needed, even much less often under “stay-at-home” and now “safer-at-home” regulations.

But that ancient monk’s advice, echoed by St. Benedict and by his modern disciple, Michael Casey, it remains true that it’s really necessary regularly to “stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”  As long as you’re careful about who is in there with you!

Copyright 2020 Abbey of St. Walburga

Good Friday to Easter

Abbey Church Easter

This year, amid the ravages of the pandemic, it is easier to pray with Christ “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) than to sing the Easter alleluias. 

And yet.  Our “yet” is Easter.  However hard it may be to persuade our emotions in the face of danger and loss, life really has once and for all broken through death into that unknown reality we call “eternity” through both the death and the resurrection of Christ.  Faith reiterates it over and over again in the Liturgy of the Hours during these holy days.

But how will can we even think about singing  “alleluia” when suffering death is all around us, perhaps even in our own homes, perhaps even in our own lives?

Many years ago I had occasion to attend a wake service for a little boy. He had lived only five months, much of it in pediatric intensive care, his mother holding him when she could, his father keeping anxious watch.  The doctors offered hope till hope ran out.  The child died in his mother’s arms.

The wake was conducted according to the rite of the small Eastern Orthodox Church to which the parents belonged.  The mother was the community’s chief cantor.  When it came time to chant a poignantly beautiful “Holy, holy, holy” in Greek over the little body, she was the only one who could.  Her eyes never left the small casket, her voice never missed a note. Everyone present wept.

She remains for me an icon of Mary at the foot of the cross.  An icon of how faith and love sing praise to God for life in the teeth of suffering and death.