by Albert Holtz
A third help to “peace under pressure” is the habit of continuous prayer. A monastic tries to keep up a constant dialogue with the Lord no matter where he or she is. If I’m in the habit of thanking God for simple little pleasures, and offering up little sufferings, then when a really stressful situation comes along, my automatic reflex will be to hand it over to the Lord, to let it be God’s problem and not mine.
I’m standing beside him now, staring down at his Biology book. He’s obviously not reading it, but is dangling it in front of me like bait on a hook. For a moment I contemplate grabbing the book and smacking him over the head with it.
As a monk you spend a lot of time each day in lectio divina, the slow, meditative dwelling over scripture, waiting for it to speak to you about your own life. You ask yourself, “What does this verse mean for me here and now in terms of my daily living?” As you get in the habit of asking this same question all during the day about all sorts of events and situations whether good or bad, it becomes a fourth way of staying peaceful under pressure. Instead of fighting it immediately, you find yourself asking out of habit the same questions you ask during daily lectio: “What does this mean for me? What is the Lord trying to teach me here?”
Of course, you don’t always manage to take the peaceful way out. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you lose your temper with someone, or get all churned up inside because work is piling up too fast, or everything’s going wrong at once. But then you can console yourself with the idea that peace under pressure is, after all, a goal. Tomorrow will bring lots of chances to work on it again, and so will the next day, and the next.
As I stand over this angry student’s desk, I take a deep breath and clear my throat.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of food and drink, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; whoever serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by others. Let us then pursue what leads to peace and to building up one another. (Romans 14:17–19)
Notice the phrase “Let us pursue what leads to peace.” When and where do you find yourself having to find “peace under pressure”? What are some of the forces that work against peace in your life? Lift up one specific situation to the “God of Peace” (2 Thes 3:16), asking for the gift of peace under pressure. Then ask the Lord what you’re supposed to learn from this situation.
RULE OF BENEDICT
“God then directs these words to you: If you desire true and eternal life, keep your tongue free from vicious talk and your lips from all deceit; turn away from evil and do good; let peace be your quest and aim.” (Prologue, vv. 16–17)
CLOSING THE DISTANCE: HALE-BOPP
I pick my way carefully up the last tiny, steep steps, remembering to keep my head down as I duck through the low doorway onto the monastery’s roof. Six of us are hoping to get our first look at the Hale-Bopp comet, which has been putting on quite a show the past two days. Now that I’m safely out on the gravel-covered roof, I raise my head and gasp in astonishment.
“Oh! Look at that!” I exclaim.
Right in front of me, just over an apartment house to the northeast, Hale-Bopp is shining like a perfect silver tadpole swimming through the clear night sky.
“That’s incredible!” someone says.
“Beautiful!” whispers another.
We step over to the short, fat telescope that Fr. Mark has set up ahead of time.
“Take a good look, fellas!” one of the monks says as we gather around. “I read in the paper that the last time this comet came by was over 4,000 years ago, and it won’t be back for 2,400.”
I stoop and look down into the eyepiece with one eye. The silent, mysterious visitor glows brightly against a background of dozens of faint, silvery flecks. It’s streaking away from the sun at thousands of miles an hour, but in the powerful telescope it seems strangely still, like a specimen frozen on a microscope slide.
“How far away is it right now, Mark?” somebody asks.
“Actually, it’s pretty close,” he answers. “Only about 120 million miles away!”
“I don’t know, but that sounds pretty far to me!” quips another voice.
I straighten up and step aside so Fr. Theodore can look. The modern buildings of downtown Newark glow off to my right. To my left looms the modern courthouse, behind it the county jail, and beside them a sea of neat, new brick townhouses that spills down the hillside from University Hospital. Turning my back on Hale-Bopp, I can see the twelve-story housing projects, the kind that one poet called “filing cabinets of human lives.”
To be honest, the icy blob of Hale-Bopp doesn’t really look much different in the telescope, so Fr. Mark offers to move on to something more interesting. “Okay,” he says, “who wants to see a galaxy?” He swings the telescope to the right of the comet, until it points to a spot high above the Newark Museum. After peering down into the eyepiece and tweaking the fine-focus knobs, he steps back and invites Br. Francis to take a peek.
“So now what is this I’m looking at?” he asks politely, squinting into the lens.
“See the bright oval in the center?” Fr. Mark asks.
“Oh, yeah! What’s that?”
“That’s the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s our nearest neighbor galaxy.”
“Wow! That’s pretty!”
After a few moments, he steps away and motions for me to have a look. I take off my glasses, bend over the tiny lens again, and squint down into a black pool. This time there’s a miniature oval jewel floating among scores of tiny stars.
“Wow! That’s incredible!” I mumble, dazzled by its beauty and magnificence. Even a microscopic galaxy is somehow awesome to look at. “How far away is it?” I whisper.
“Oh, somewhere over two million light years,” comes the answer. That means that the light that’s hitting my eye right now has been traveling 186,000 miles a second for more than two million years.
“Huh!” I mumble noncommittally, not knowing quite what to say under the circumstances. After a minute or two of staring across hundreds of millions of empty miles I offer, “Anybody else want a look?”
As I straighten up and roll my head around a couple of times to get the stiffness out of my neck, I think, If our nearest neighbor galaxy is over two million light years away, no wonder some people think that God must be that far away, too! It figures that the God who made the galaxies and strewed them across the universe like this is probably light years off in some distant corner, with no interest in what’s happening on our tiny planet, and with no more effect on our lives than an explosion inside the Andromeda Galaxy.
Actually, I admit to myself, there are times when I wouldn’t mind if God really were like that: safely distant, unconcerned, and undemanding.
The God of the Bible, though, is a personal God, a God who took flesh and became one of us. This tremendous Lover keeps inviting me to deeper intimacy in prayer, in sacrament, and in selfless love for my brothers in the monastery and the kids in school. The “Hound of Heaven” keeps chasing me down the corridors of time, while I, running away, pretend to be searching for God.
“The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, too. It looks something like the Andromeda, but it’s a lot smaller.” Fr. Mark is finishing his commentary as Fr. Augustine takes a turn at the eyepiece. “Andromeda is around 160,000 light years across.”
160,000 light years across! These distances are starting to make me nervous. The whole idea of the Christian calling is to close the distances that divide us from one another. In the monastery you work constantly at overcoming things that separate you and God, you and your superior, you and your brothers or sisters. You can’t retreat to the safe, impersonal distances of deep space by replacing intimacy in your life with, say, efficiency or effectiveness at work, or mastery of some skill. That would be to quit the quest for God.
If we are frightened by the vast, overwhelming distances of space, we as Christians ought to be just as frightened by the distances we put between ours
elves and God, and the spaces that we carefully arrange between ourselves and our sisters and brothers.
I glance up at the glowing pinprick of the Andromeda galaxy, surprised that I can actually see it without a telescope. But 2,000,000 light years is still far away. I need the comfort of something closer. I turn toward the Hale-Bopp comet, a mere 120 million miles off. Still too far. In a space between two buildings of Newark’s skyline, the Empire State Building glows fourteen miles off in Manhattan. That’s better! My eye is drawn to the right, to Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood where I was born, just a mile from here. Even better! Then I look around me on the roof at my brothers Mark, Ted, Ed, Augustine, and Fran, all staring up at the stars and chatting quietly. We know each other inside out, and have shared each other’s fears and foibles, tragedies and victories for years. Tonight, they seem closer than ever.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God. (Ephesians 2:19–22)
Paul reminds us that we are no longer strangers and aliens, but members of God’s household. Can you think of specific individuals in your family, community, or circle of friends who are “distant” from you emotionally or psychologically? Is this distance their choice? Yours? Do you want to go about closing this distance, or just let it take its course? Is it possible that you are being called by the gospel to close that distance?
RULE OF BENEDICT
“The abbot must exercise the utmost care and concern for wayward brothers, because it is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick. Therefore, he ought to use every skill of a wise physician and send in senpectae, that is, mature and wise brothers who, under the cloak of secrecy, may support the wavering brother, urge him to be humble as a way of making satisfaction, and console him lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” (Chapter 27, “The Abbot’s Concern for the Excommunicated,” vv. 1–3)
ALL TOGETHER: FRESHMAN BACKPACKING
“What’s the worst thing that can happen to a backpacking team when you’re in the woods?” the teenage instructor asks his class.
“Getting lost?” answers a timid voice from the back of the classroom. The desks are arranged by teams: four circles of eight students each.
“Somebody gets hurt real bad?” suggests another. He’s wearing the white baseball cap of a captain. The logo on the front shows that he’s the elected captain of the “Hawks.”
It’s the first day of the Freshman Backpacking Project. Each May all the freshmen—divided into teams of eight—hike fifty-three hilly miles of the Appalachian Trail, between High Point and the Delaware Water Gap.
More ideas start popping up:
“Rain?” “Bears?” “You get bit by a rattlesnake or something?”
“Nope!” The junior who is running the session and who is going to be in charge of these four groups when they’re on the Trail, cuts the list short. “Listen to me. Write this in your notebooks, ‘cause we’re gonna expect you to know the right answer from now on. The most important rule on the Trail is ‘Stay together.’ The worst thing that can happen to you in the woods is that you get separated from your team.”
Thirty ballpoint pens start scribbling dutifully in thirty notebooks.
“Your teams,” the junior continues, glancing down at a typed page in his loose-leaf binder, “will always have plenty of food, water purification tablets, and protection from weather. As a group you can be lost for days and have nothing to worry about. But when you’re in the woods by yourself, all sorts of things can happen.” He looks up and starts ad libbing: “Can anybody think of bad stuff that can happen to you if you’re in the woods all alone?”
“You can get hurt and have no one around to help you.”
“Okay, that’s true. Anything else?”
“You can lose your way, and then run out of food or water.”
“Sure!” the teenage teacher agrees. “People have gotten lost and wandered for days in the mountains, right in New Jersey, near where we’re gonna be hiking. The most important rule on the Trail is ‘Stay together!’”
All the freshmen are listening hard. Most of them are from the city, and will be thoroughly out of their element in the woods, where street survival skills are completely useless.
I can imagine what’s going through their heads. Older students, who have already done the hike, have spent the winter scaring the freshmen with visions of haunted swamps and quicksand pits, and tales of man-eating bears, and rattlesnakes that like to crawl into warm sleeping bags.
“Stay together” is certainly the most important safety lesson we teach during the five-week project. It is worrisome enough for the adults in charge to watch for an overdue team as darkness falls, but imagine the feeling in your stomach if an eight-man group comes filing out of the woods with only seven hikers!
The Freshman Backpacking Project is really about facing challenges and getting along as a member of a group—the camping part is secondary. From the first day of the three-week training period at school, the freshmen do everything as teams. If one member forgets his pen, his whole group marches single file back to his locker with him to get it. If one member is late for school, the other seven run laps with him. From one point of view, it doesn’t seem “fair” to make someone pay for another’s mistake, but it prepares the students for the realities of the hike. The team will walk only as fast as their slowest member. When one of them has to stop to fix his broken backpack, everybody else will stop with him. When someone is in a bad mood, the whole team is going to feel it.
American culture, with its stress on self-reliance and rugged individualism, misleads us into believing that in the “real world” the most important thing is to be independent and able to fend for yourself. The truth is, though, that in the real world we’re all interconnected, interdependent. We rely on others to grow our food, make our clothes, and provide our electricity. Our lives are affected for good or ill by the actions of people we don’t even know and will never meet. At work or in school, we need to rely on people to collaborate with us in groups and teams. Learning how to be interdependent, though, is harder than learning to just do things for yourself—and teaching teenage boys how to work together is much harder than teaching them how to compete against one other.
“Staying together” is actually a gospel ideal. Over and over, Christ challenges us to be a community. The Acts of the Apostles, in fact, is the story of the first Christians wrestling with this challenge. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul scolds them for their selfishness. He then sets out the image of the mystical body of Christ: each person is most fully herself or himself precisely to the extent that she or he is united to the body of Christ.
In his Letter to the Galatians Paul says, “Carry one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfill the law of Christ.” An image jumps into my memory from a hike many years ago, in the days before our trained first-aiders and CB radios. One student has gotten terrible leg cramps and can’t walk. So the strongest member of his team has picked him up and is carrying him piggy-back up the side of a mountain to the campsite, while the other members somehow manage to lug the two extra backpacks.
St. Benedict in his Rule calls for the monks to pray together, eat together, read and work together. We are to observe the Lenten fast not as individuals but “all together,” as a community. Chapter 72, in which he summarizes so beautifully what the monastic life is all about, ends, “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.” Even the goal of salvation itself, which seems so individual and personal, is one we are to reach “all together.” My brothers have certainly had to carry me more than once on our monastic journey, and I can on
ly hope that I’ve done my share of carrying, too.
I’m startled by the noise of chairs scraping on the floor. The freshmen are filing out of the room in their groups, on their way to team-building exercises down on the ball field.
“Captain of the Hawks,” the instructor warns sternly, “make sure your team is walking together!”
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one. (John 17:20–23)
Jesus prays at the last supper, “that they may all be one.” Reflect on a particular community in which you are called to live (family, parish, religious house, and so on). When is the “Stay together!” rule hardest for you in that community? How often do you act as a rugged individualist? Think of some specific behavior or attitude of yours that may be working against the unity of that community.
Which is easier for you: asking someone to “carry your backpack” for you awhile when you need help, or offering to help someone carry theirs? Look for the opportunity to do the one you find less easy.
RULE OF BENEDICT
“To their fellow monks they show the pure love of brothers. … Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.” (Chapter 72, “The Good Zeal of Monks,” vv. 8, 11–12)
“The big white Prudential building, the old Bamberger’s department store, and the Midatlantic building look on silently in the dark.” (Page 168)
6.
THE END
