As I think about last week’s Thanksgiving holiday with its traditions of community, hospitality, and gratitude, I find myself thinking about certain aspects of monastic life: the practice of sharing meals, of serving each other, and particularly of treating “all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar,” as the Benedictine Rule directs.
“Sacred vessels of the altar.” The simile evokes one of my favorite elements of Benedictine spirituality: its steady insistence on the holiness of ordinary things, of objects that participate in the ordinary motions of life in community.
In fact, to identify “utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar” offers us a double richness since it compares the spoons and cups, brushes, pens, and shoes of everyday activity to the gold of a chalice or a ciborium – and the quiet surface of monastic life to the sacred surface of the altar.
St. Benedict’s assertion, then, does much more than caution us to be good stewards or to recognize that simple things can be made sacred if they help us to live in and for God. All of this is true. But St. Benedict also suggests that a life consecrated to Christ is a space wherein we participate in His sacrifice. Viewed in eucharistic terms, it is the space whereon we offer ourselves for the life and nourishment of our communities.
Most of us are not Benedictine monks, who make specific vows and who live in monastic communities by St. Benedict’s Rule. But each of us can emulate their prayerful dedication to God and their recognition that – in both large and small things – we participate in the Church’s sacramental, sacrificial life.
I know that Thanksgiving isn’t a day we usually associate with sacrifice, but – as the very word “eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving,” reminds us – gratitude responds with recognition to a gift, to the element of cost, of sacrifice, in its loving generosity. We learn this most powerfully at the foot of the Cross.
So as we move from Thanksgiving into the Advent season, let’s thank God for the sacredness of our own lives, for our capacity to love, which is also our capacity for gratitude and sacrifice.
