Downtown Monks
Page 1
A Benedictine Journey in the City
ALBERT HOLTZ, O. S. B.
REVISED EDITION
Illustrations by the author
Copyright © 2012 by Albert Holtz, OSB
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Quotations from the Rule of Benedict so designated are from RB1980: The Rule of Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1981).
First published in 2000 by Ave Maria Press, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556.
Revised Edition published in 2012 by:
Morehouse Publishing, 4775 Linglestown Road, Harrisburg, PA 17112
Morehouse Publishing, 445 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated.
www.churchpublishing.org
Cover design by Laurie Klein Westhafer
Typeset by Rose Design
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
To my brothers and sisters, both lay people and
religious, who are the community of
Newark Abbey
CONTENTS
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction to the First Edition
1. SEARCHING WHERE YOU ARE
Stability: Father Celestine
The Waymaker: Graduation
Hospitality: First Day of School
Getting It Right: Brother Denis
The Peaceable Kingdom: William
2. SEARCHING IN THE EVERYDAY
The God of Today: Crow Talk
The God of the Real: Vibram Sole People
The God of Forgiveness: The IBM Selectric
The God of Oneness: Stokes State Forest
The God of Faithfulness: The Dogwood
3. SEARCHING WITH THE NEIGHBORS
Letting Go: Welfare Mom
Generosity: Maritza
The Power of the Word: John
Passion: Gospel Singer
Humility: Ice Man
4. SEARCHING IN PRAYER
Waiting With the City: Vigils
Singing Your Troubles: Convocation
Near the Cross: Good Friday
Dropping Your Shield: The Honor Code
Spontaneity: Mary’s Dance
5. SEARCHING IN THE COMMON LIFE
The Courage to Belong: The Soccer Game
The Cloud of Witnesses: Solemn Vows
Peace Under Pressure: The French Quiz
Closing the Distance: Hale-Bopp
All Together: Freshman Backpacking
6. THE END OF THE JOURNEY
Hope: Advent on Market Street
Diminishment: Chuck Taylors
Traveling Light: The Appalachian Trail
The Banquet Guest: Otis
The New Jerusalem: Easter Vigil
Epilogue
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Downtown Monks is a series of personal accounts and impressions in which I describe the journey of our small community of Benedictine monks and our school, Saint Benedict’s Prep, in the center of Newark, New Jersey. When I recently re-read them for the first time in years, I was pleased to find that these stories, already twenty-five years old in 2000, have lost none of their vigor since then. In fact, they seem even more relevant and meaningful than when I first wrote them. For example, in the face of our dwindling numbers the stories about God’s mysterious loving faithfulness to our community during the very dark period of 1971–1972 are proving to be a source of optimism and encouragement to the Newark monks today.
Further, because each chapter deals with some fundamental principle of monastic wisdom, the specific situations and people described in the book have a wider message that can be of value to anyone, religious or lay, who is sincerely seeking God.
Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the 1972–1973 re-opening of St. Benedict’s Prep, this second edition of Downtown Monks is substantially the same as the first except for a few grammatical changes and the addition of citations from sacred scripture and the Rule of Benedict at the end of each chapter.
It is my hope that these reflections on the ways the Lord has guided our community may both inspire you and encourage you to watch for the same loving Lord at work in the everyday events of your own journey as well.
“Let us prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.”
—Rule of Benedict, Ch. 72
Newark, New Jersey
July 11, 2011
The Feast of Saint Benedict
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
It’s as good a place as any to look for God.
Begin in the very center of downtown Newark, New Jersey, at the intersection of Broad and Market, and walk west. Thread your way among mothers tugging toddlers, teenage boys in baggy jeans, and men and women in business suits shopping on their lunch hour. As you pass jewelry shops selling gold chains and electronics stores blasting rap music, give a nod to the man whose shiny little lunch cart gives off a delicious aroma of sausage and shish kebab, a scent that mingles with the exhaust fumes of four lanes of buses and cars.
Move on past the clothing boutiques, the sneaker stores, and sidewalk displays of folding umbrellas, red nylon knapsacks, and woolen New York Giants caps. After two long, treeless blocks, you will see the furniture store with the big yellow sign “Credito fácil y amistoso” at the corner of Market and Washington.
Here the tall buildings suddenly end, the crowds thin out, and a wide view opens westward up a long slope. Let your eye wander uphill for three or four blocks, past the Burger King to the dignified gray pillars of the courthouse. Then follow the horizon off to the left until you see the red brick church tower standing straight and tall against the sky. That’s us—Newark Abbey. To be more exact, that’s the bell tower of St. Mary’s, our abbey church, and next to it, hidden behind the buildings of St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and St. Mary’s Grammar School, is the monastery where we Benedictine monks have been working and praying since the 1850s.
This book tells of some of the ways we meet God there each day.
In his Rule for Monks (sometimes called simply The Holy Rule) St. Benedict says that the monastic task is to “seek God.” At the heart of this search is a pair of remarkable assumptions: first, that God is present everywhere, and second, that Christ is to be met in every human being in the world. Downtown Monks shows how a community of eighteen monks, relying on these two principæles, have found downtown Newark a marvelous place to meet God.
Part One, “Searching Where You Are,” is meant to be read first, since it sets the scene and gives background information for the rest of the book. Its five chapters are meditations on how a Benedictine meets God by living out the vow of stability in one particular place over a period of years. One important advantage of stability is that it allows you to reflect on the stories of a place and see how God has been acting there. The history of Newark Abbey is itself an extraordinary tale of God’s working wonders in and through the lives of a small group of monks on a hill in the heart of New Jersey’s largest city.
Part Two, “Searching in the Everyday,” reminds us that all created reality is infused with the sacr
ed, and that it is every Christian’s pleasant task to uncover that presence every day in order to find—and be found by—God. The stories in this section celebrate how God comes to us in unexpected and often challenging ways.
Part Three, “Searching with the Neighbors,” might seem a little surprising at first. With our two Ph. Ds, a bunch of Masters degrees, and the hours we spend in meditation, reflection, and reading, you might expect that the Newark Benedictines, especially in a poor neighborhood such as ours, would be in the position of teaching the people who live around us. The stories in this part show, however, that over the years we have actually learned far more from our neighbors than they have from us—even such monastic virtues as trust in God, humility, and passionate response to the Lord’s call.
Part Four, “Searching in Prayer,” shows that genuine prayer does not draw us out of the world but helps us to see more deeply into it. This basic insight holds true for any believer’s attempts to find intimacy with God, whether inside or outside the cloister. These five stories suggest that given the chance, whether in a liturgical service or in a silent prayer muttered in a classroom, God will often surprise us with some gift we never dreamed of.
Part Five, “Searching in the Common Life,” speaks to all Christians who are called to seek and be found by God within the embrace of a family, an intimate friendship, or any other loving relationship. These five meditations on community living explore the connection between loving our brothers and sisters and our final destiny, union with God.
Part Six, “The End of the Journey,” suggests some of the ways our lives can be enriched and deepened by a proper perspective on the world that is yet to come. The Christian life, and the monastic life in particular, must ultimately point beyond the present world to the Kingdom of Promise.
If you are someone who is seeking God in the seething center of a city or in the constant commotion of a houseful of children, take heart in Benedict’s two great insights: God is present everywhere, and you meet Christ in everyone. The stories in this book are especially for you. The Downtown Monks follow a way of life that is fifteen centuries old, but you may find it to be surprisingly like your own. We aren’t called to live on a quiet mountaintop nor in a desert retreat. Like you, we seek and are sought by a loving God right where we are.
“At the start of each Lent, the dogwood sends out her first green buds.” (Page 54)
1.
SEARCHING
WHERE YOU ARE
STABILITY: FATHER CELESTINE
We may like to think of ourselves as people who are seeking God, but the Bible is very clear that it is really the other way around: it is God who is constantly seeking us. Every page of sacred scripture shows a God in love, a God ardently, passionately pursuing the human heart. From the biblical point of view, then, our main task is to let ourselves be caught and wrapped up in the Lord’s loving embrace. Monastic spirituality expresses this in an apparent paradox: The quickest way to move ahead on the monastic quest is to stay in one place.
“Scratch hard enough around here, you know, and Benedictinism comes right up out of the ground.” Fr. Celestine, who is ninety, drives his point home by playfully scraping his cane on the ground a few times with both hands as if he were using a hoe. A small man with wispy white hair and a slow, soft way of speaking, he has been a monk for almost sixty years. He was already a priest when he came to the monastery at the age of thirty, and was a big help in the abbey’s parish apostolate because of his fluent German.
These days, one of us has to be with him whenever he walks outside. He stops after every ten steps, sometimes just to think, sometimes to say something to his companion. Lately he’s taken to conversing half-aloud with the unseen angels that keep him company.
We’re out for a stroll on the grounds behind the monastery, and have stopped at the big white stone statue of St. Benedict on the new brick-paved plaza. Fr. Celestine looks around and takes in the scene. Down the hill, a few blocks to the east, the buildings of downtown Newark are stacked high against the blue sky. Nearer at hand are our two new playing fields, a running track, and a tennis court. There is a hint of mischief in his twinkling eyes as he looks at the fields. Maybe he’s remembering the day, several years ago, when we were negotiating to buy those lots from the Newark Urban Development Authority. Although he was not a part of the negotiations, Fr. Celestine did his part to insure success by secretly burying Benedictine medals in the weeds. He seems delighted with the results.
Although the plaza on which we’re walking was actually Shipman Street until 1975, for Fr. Celestine it—and the playing fields his medals helped us to acquire—are now as much our home as the older part of the monastery enclosure, built here in 1857. Back in the beginning, St. Mary’s Priory was founded on High Street, as it was called at the time, on a hill overlooking the center of Newark. Gradually, over the decades, the city grew, spreading up the hill and on past, so that today the monastery finds itself in the middle of downtown.
Our neighbors were baffled, and some alumni and friends disappointed, when we didn’t just do what everyone else was doing in 1972: pack up and move to a more promising location in the suburbs. But they didn’t understand the Benedictine’s sense of place.
From the earliest days in the desert of Egypt monastic men and women have had a sense of belonging to a particular locale. Many an old Benedictine has pointed out to the novices some trees planted when he or she was a novice, or an old building that hadn’t even been built at that time. This is not just pleasant nostalgia; in the monastic tradition a sense of place is essential. Each Benedictine monastery is independent, so that we, unlike members of most religious orders, do not get transferred from one house to another, but remain in the place where we receive our first monastic training. Benedict assumes that ordinarily you will live in the same monastery your whole life.
Over the years, then, you set down roots in the place where you live and ties of affection, trust, and respect start to bind you to the others in the monastery, who are striving, as you are, to live the call as best they can. You draw strength from the elders’ example of faithfulness and predictability, and the juniors’ energy and enthusiasm. The place truly becomes “home.”
We walk about eight steps and then Fr. Celestine stops, leans both hands on the top of his cane, and looks around again at the green fields alive with grammar school children running and shouting at recess. “God is good,” he reflects aloud. “Yes. Very good. Very good.”
Geographical stability has a deeper dimension, however: it is the outward sign, the “sacrament,” of being rooted in the Lord. Benedict knows there will be times when the task seems so hard that you will start to lose heart and may be tempted to give up the monastic life, thinking that God can be found better somewhere else. When these times of difficulty and confusion come, he writes, “the monk should say nothing and hold fast to patience in his heart, enduring all without growing weary or giving up. For scripture says: ‘The one who endures to the end will be saved.’ ” The vow of stability makes you think twice: instead of just running away or transferring out of a painful situation, you go back and take another look, believing that God must be in there somewhere.
The saintly old monk takes a few more small steps and stops again, staring at a spot a few yards to his left. I know what’s coming. He’s about to say that there used to be a tavern right over there, and sometimes the police would have to come.…
“You know, there used to be a tavern back here on Shipman Street. That was years ago. Yes. Sometimes there’d be a fight and the police would have to come and break it up!” He chuckles at the humorous memories of the cobblestone street that once ran behind the monastery.
Our stability in the center of the city has a special message for our neighbors, whose lives are so often full of pessimism, weariness, and discouragement. When we stay where we are and try to be who we are called to be, we are saying to our brothers and sisters in the city, “You don’t need to move elsewhere to find the K
ingdom. Just keep looking right where you are: God is downtown!”
Too many times, though, I lose my nerve. I psychologically “move out” of the community or start searching elsewhere to fill up that inner void that cries out for God. Instead of faithfully standing my ground when times get rough, I set off in search of self-satisfaction by burying myself in work or shallow distractions, or by manipulating the people around me. Of course, none of these escapes works for long, and by God’s grace I always find myself back once more on holy ground, waiting patiently for the Lord.
Fr. Celestine starts shuffling again in his deliberate little steps, slowly enough to let the Lord catch him. He is having one of those whispered dialogues with someone I can’t see. Probably an angel who’s been living in this very spot even longer than he has.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
In Genesis 28:10–19, Jacob encounters the Lord at Bethel. During a vision, the Lord tells Jacob:
“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (vv. 15–17)
In the passage above, Jacob says, “Truly the Lord is in this spot, though I did not know it.” Take a moment to reflect on two or three of the significant places in your life. How did the Divine become present to you in each of them? You may also be able to think of a place where you have said, “God must be somewhere else, because I can’t feel the divine presence here!” If so, then take some time to revisit that place in your imagination. Ask the Lord to show you how God may have indeed been present there, too, even if it was in the midst of the mystery of evil.
WISDOM OF THE DESERT
Serapion the Sindonite traveled once on a pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life—for he himself was a great wanderer—Serapion called on her and asked, “Why are you sitting here?” To which she replied, “I am not sitting; I am on a journey.” (Benedicta Ward, ed., The Desert of the Heart: Daily Readings with the Desert Fathers [London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988], 42.)