by Albert Holtz
Do you find yourself withholding forgiveness from some individual or group? Bring that person or group to Jesus and ask him what you should do in this case. Can you offer to that person or group the same forgiving attitude that Jesus brought to the woman in the gospel story?
RULE OF BENEDICT
“Just as there is a wicked zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is good zeal which separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life. This, then, is the good zeal which monks must foster with fervent love: They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other, supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another.” (Chapter 72, “The Good Zeal of Monks,” vv. 1–6)
THE GOD OF ONENESS: STOKES STATE FOREST
The trees are a jumble of black pen strokes against the snowy slopes of Stokes State Forest. Up above the ridge line ahead, the deep blue sky seems too pretty for December. The crisp air, scrubbed clean by yesterday’s storm, is a treat for my city-dweller lungs. My breath shoots in short white puffs as I trudge toward the crest. The only sound is the steady, whispered crunch of six inches of new snow beneath my boots.
“Yeeeaiiiooow!” A heart-stopping scream careens across the ridge, shattering the icy silence into sharp splinters. It’s Alan, one of the two eighth-graders hiking ten steps ahead of me. With a loud shout, he has just tossed himself like a sack of flour into the air and over a fallen tree trunk. The scream, like the throwing of his body, is for no particular reason. His buddy, Charles, somersaults right behind and plops beside him in the deep snow drift.
I’ve invited them, two members of my Gospel Choir, to spend two days of Christmas vacation staying with Fr. Lucien and me in the monastery’s house on our sixty-seven acres in the forested mountains of northern New Jersey.
In a second, they’re out of the snow and off down the trail again, chattering to one another about some television show they saw last week.
The quiet closes around me once more. The crunch of my boots sets up its comforting rhythm again.
“This is so beautiful!” I sigh quietly to myself. The clean air, the pure snow, the quiet, the freedom of having nothing in particular to do until we go home tomorrow afternoon. Although my roots and my vow of stability call me to live in the center of Newark, the fresh air and the peacefulness this afternoon remind me of what I give up by living in the dust, fumes, and noise of the city. I come up once a month to visit the woods, hoping to bring some of its quiet wisdom home with me.
I stop to shake the heavy snow off a drooping pine branch, and watch it spring back eagerly toward the sky.
Benedictines, right from their beginning on Monte Cassino, have loved mountaintops. Up here it’s easy to see the world as the sacrament of God, and watch the Creator’s hand at work. On my long rambles, a few psalm verses come to mind over and over: “How great is your name, O Lord, our God, through all the earth!” “I lift up my eyes to the mountains, from where shall come my help.…” “Rocks and hills, bless the Lord!”
“Hey! What are these things?” Charles asks. The two of them are staring down at some animal tracks in the snow.
“Those are from a wild turkey,” I answer. “Ever seen a wild turkey?”
“Only turkeys I ever seen are cooked ones!”
“Well, they’re around in these woods,” I assure them. “They’re almost black. You may get to see one.”
“Must be some frozen turkeys if they live out here, man!” Alan says. Then the two friends are off up the trail again, sneaking from rock to rock, moving on all fours so as to keep out of sight of some imaginary prey—probably a polar bear or a man-eating wild turkey.
The snow underneath the tall pines is dotted with dark twigs and tiny cones. A set of rabbit tracks crosses the trail and disappears into the skeleton bushes. The great hunters are well ahead of me again, and the quiet closes in once more.
St. Benedict probably got his sense of the holiness and the wholeness of the universe from living in the mountains of Italy. He sees that the hills are filled with the glory of their creator. They are, therefore, sacred. He sees himself surrounded by the presence of God in hills, thorn bushes, ravens, and rainstorms. Then he takes this vision and expands it to include all of creation: everything in our daily human existence is holy, from the tools of the monastery (which are to be treated with the same reverence as vessels of the altar) to the guests (in whom Christ himself is received). Distinctions between the “spiritual” and the “material,” then, make no sense, whether you’re talking of trees or axe handles, mountains or cooking pots.
This blurring of any distinction between what is “holy” and what is “earthly” comes across in the way the various jobs in the monastery are described. The abbot, for example, who is the spiritual head and teacher of the monastery, also has the down-to-earth tasks of making sure the bell gets rung on time, assigning the daily work to the brethren, and keeping an inventory of the monastery’s tools and clothing. The cellarer, on the other hand, who has the very practical charge of distributing to the monks all the various material necessities, is to do so with the same compassion and concern for everyone’s spiritual well-being as the abbot: he should be “like a father to the whole community.” “If any brother happens to make an unreasonable demand of him, he should not reject him with disdain and cause him distress, but reasonably and humbly deny the improper request.” This monk who is in charge of the storeroom “must show every care and concern for the sick, children, guests, and the poor, knowing for certain that he will be held accountable for all of them on the day of judgment.”
If jobs in the monastery aren’t divided into purely “spiritual” and “secular,” neither are the activities of the monk’s day. You bring your meditation to the way you work, your holy reading to the way you treat your brothers and sisters, your tears to your praying, and so on. In Benedict’s vision, praying, working, feeling, and thinking are all woven together into a seamless fabric. They are all part of the one most important task, the single-minded search for God.
“Can we go down there?” Alan asks. I’ve caught up with the two partners, who are looking longingly into a deep ravine that runs along the left side of the trail for the next half mile.
“Sure! Just take your time going down. And stay where I can see you.”
They start sliding and jumping recklessly down the slippery hillside, at a speed that would make their mothers shudder. I shut my eyes and turn away quickly, leaving them in the hands of their guardian angels.…
Maybe what I’ll bring back from the mountains this time is a deeper insight into the lesson Benedict learned from them—that God is present everywhere, and that life is a seamless whole, with no divisions between sacred and earthly. Lectio and lesson plans, housework and hymn singing, chapter meetings and common recreation are all part of the one quest—the search for God. Every Christian life has this same unity. Going to work, shopping, changing diapers, balancing the checkbook, chatting with your spouse: all of these are sacred activities that lead us along our path to God.
Far below me, down among the rocks that poke out of the white blanket in the bottom of the ravine, the young hikers have now stopped and are staring upward. Alan is pointing to something in the top of a tall pine tree. Maybe they’ll bring a little of the vision home from the woods, too.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
Psalm 8
How great is your name, O Lord our God,
through all the earth!
Your majesty is praised above the heavens;
on the lips of children and of babes
You have found praise to foil your enemy,
to silence the foe and the rebel.
When I see the heavens, the work of your hands,
the moon and the stars which you arranged,
What is man that you should keep him in mind,
mortal man that you care for him?
Yet you hav
e made him little less than a god;
with glory and honor you crowned him,
Gave him power over the works of your hand,
put all things under his feet.
All of them, sheep and cattle,
Yes, even the savage beasts,
Birds of the air and fish
that make their way through the waters.
How great is your name, O Lord our God,
through all the earth!
Do you ever meet God the creator? If so, when and where are you most likely to do so?
Make it a priority today to take a few moments of quiet in your kitchen, office, or some other spot where you are usually busy. Just sit down, watch, and listen. Ask yourself, “How is God most present to me in this place? How is God a part of the work I do?”
WISDOM OF THE DESERT
“A certain philosopher asked Saint Antony: ‘Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books?’ Anthony replied: ‘My book, O Philosopher, is the nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.’” (Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert [New York: New Directions, 1970], 62.)
THE GOD OF FAITHFULNESS: THE DOGWOOD
A canopy of dogwood flowers floats over my head like a great white umbrella. The petals, glowing in the spring sunlight, pick up a tinge of pink from the red brick of the church on my left. Everything is quiet in this corner of the cloister garden—the noise of the evening rush hour doesn’t reach here.
Underneath the dogwood is a good place to notice the steady, relentless passing of time. Two great cycles, the earth’s four seasons and the church’s sacred calendar, intertwine in her arching branches.
At the start of each Lent, she sends out her first green buds, and then, around the feast of new life at Easter, these white flowers. When the petals blow onto the grass and turn brown on the path, it’s time for Pentecost, for the breeze of the Holy Spirit to blow into our hearts. During Ordinary Time, just when the liturgical color changes from white to green, her branches will disappear under a lush blanket of summer leaves. Then, between the feast of the Holy Cross and the feast of St. Luke, her top leaves will start to turn a deep red-violet. That’s the official start of autumn for me. Soon afterwards her boughs will run to shades of bruised purple, bright red, even lemon yellow. Then, with the rain and wind, come the final weeks of the liturgical year. As we, along with the rest of the church, pray for all the faithful departed and meditate on the end of the world, she drops her dry leaves onto the lawn to scuttle and scratch across the slates. By the First Sunday of Advent she is in her winter sleep. Soon enough, after the long nights of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, the cycle will start all over again. She’ll wake up and send out her tiny green buds, as I’ve seen her do for thirty Lents now.
The evening Angelus starts ringing, marking off another period in the monastic day. I squint up at the bell tower through the veil of white petals bobbing in the spring breeze.
The Benedictine’s life is one of cycles within cycles: the daily round—liturgical hours of prayer, community meals, work, recreation, and rest—repeats itself with comforting familiarity each day. The cycle of the week starts every Saturday evening at 5:00 with First Vespers of Sunday, the most important day of the week, and then circles around through the weekdays, remembering the Last Supper each Thursday, and the death of Jesus on Friday, returning to the Resurrection on Sunday, where the cycle starts all over again.
Strolling on the slates of the cloister walk to watch the seasons come and go, I realize that I find here a very special side of God. Not the powerful Waymaker who drowns Egyptian chariot drivers, nor the Unsettling One who challenges me to stretch and grow by shouting “Surprise!” as my plans go out the window. No, here in the garden I meet the God of Cycles and Seasons. This is the One whose steadfast love gives the dogwood her white flowers every spring and crowns her in purple glory every autumn without fail, the Lord of our days and weeks whose love makes the sun rise on us every morning.
For all the times that I stop and gaze up into the dogwood, for all the times I’ve delighted in the circles of days and weeks and seasons in the monastery, it’s amazing how easily I forget that the God of the cycles who so faithfully watches over them is also the Faithful One who has loved me into being, sustains me at every moment, and who is always at my side watching over me. I get wrapped up in a project or a problem and become so focused on it that I start to feel overwhelmed. Maybe there’s too much work and too little time, or some misunderstanding has left me angry and upset. Suddenly—and this has happened more times than I care to remember—the thought occurs to me, “No wonder I feel stressed! I haven’t handed this over to God, who loves me so much.” Sometimes I’ll actually sit down and write out a list of the things that are bothering me, and then very deliberately hand them over, saying “Here, Lord, everything on this paper is now yours! Please just take all of this stuff and do whatever you want with it. I know you always come through.” Every single time that I do this, I feel the weight drop off my shoulders and the knot in my stomach come untied. After a while I’ll probably go and put my worries back on my own shoulders once more, and get myself all worked up again. Then, sooner or later, I’ll notice the dogwood tree and remember the God of the seasons, and hand my problems over again. It’s my own personal cycle, I guess.
I look up at the underside of the flowered umbrella as it curves down almost to the grass, and I stretch my arms lazily upward through the warm spring air. “Oh! That’s right! I almost forgot! Lord, you know I’ve got this problem next Friday afternoon when I’m supposed to be in three places at once. You know that I got into this predicament by trying to be helpful to some people, the way you ask us to. Well, now I have no idea how I’m gonna get out of this one without someone feeling hurt! So this whole mess is all yours, Lord. Let me know what you come up with. Thanks!”
Having left the problem in competent hands under the dogwood, I turn and start slowly along the worn slate path toward the back door of the monastery. Another day has come and gone. Evening is here, and it’s time for supper.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. (Ecclesiastes 3:1–5)
How many distinct “seasons” or time periods have there been in your life? How has the God of Faithfulness been present for you at each of those times?
Think of one major concern or fear you have right now. Can you hand it over to the Lord in prayer, and let God worry about it? What would keep you from doing so?
WISDOM OF THE DESERT
“They asked abba Macarius, ‘How should we pray?’ And the old man replied, ‘There is no need to speak much in prayer; often stretch out your hands and say, “Lord, as you will and as you know, have mercy on me.” But if there is war in your soul, add, “Help me!” and because he knows what we need, he shows mercy on us.’” (The Desert of the Heart: Daily Readings with the Desert Fathers [London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988], 32.)
“A fire engine roars up the William Street Hill right beside the church.” (Page 89)
3.
SEARCHING
WITH THE NEIGHBORS
LETTING GO: WELFARE MOM
The majority of our students are African-American, most of them from the city. Perhaps twenty-five percent of them live below the government’s official “poverty level.” Although most of their parents edify us constantly with their example of deep faith in God and their willingn
ess to sacrifice for their sons, one mother in particular proved to be a wonderful teacher to the monks. Her lesson is as fresh today as it was a dozen years ago.…
Fr. Edwin, the headmaster, hands me a note he has just gotten in the mail. Printed neatly with a felt pen on cheap blue paper, it reads simply:
Father Ed,
I want to try to tithe my welfare check. I don’t want my son to know. Your school has been good for both of us. Use this where it’ll help.
Sincerely,
A mom.
Enclosed with the note is twenty-seven dollars in cash.
She is a living example of what every Christian’s quest for God is supposed to be: a series of constant “leaps of faith.” True conversion can come only after you stop trying to be totally in control of your own destiny and give up trying to make people and situations bend to your will.
The next month, after the welfare checks come out, a second note, this one on a sheet of loose-leaf, appears on the monastery bulletin board:
Dear Father Ed,
I’m putting this in the envelope before I lose my nerve. Talking about tithing is easy, doing it sure is another matter. I get scared when all there is left is faith and no money. Thanks for all you’ve done for my son and for all the kids at St. Benedict’s.
A mom.
One sentence jumps off the page at me: “I get scared when all there is left is faith and no money.” Suddenly it’s 1972, and I’m sitting in the monastery recreation room. A community meeting is just ending. The heavy oak chairs are scraping loudly as everyone stands up and leaves the big oval table—everyone except me. I stay and rest my forehead on the cool tabletop and moan out loud, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. I turn my head slowly from side to side, mumbling to myself, “I can’t believe we’re going to do this. We’ve got to be crazy!” I’m not the risk-taking type. I’ve always prided myself on my logical, rational nature. But tonight, October 12, 1972, my reasonable side has taken a back seat. We have just voted unanimously to begin planning to open a school here next year despite some very ugly facts: We have very little money, but schools don’t make money; they lose it. We have no one who has had any experience in administering a school. We are in an undesirable neighborhood. We have a shaky reputation since we closed St. Benedict’s Prep just a few months ago. In the face of all these realities, however, we have just decided to take a leap and hope that God will catch us.
