Inspirit

Next week Belmont Abbey College will celebrate not only our Founders’ Day but also the beginning of our 150th Anniversary year! Those of us on campus are preparing for a day of joyful community: with Solemn Vespers and a festive gathering of monks, faculty, staff, and students, complete with beer and pretzels in honor of our founders’ German heritage! There’s a profound comfort in thinking about those first monks and tracing the unbroken continuity of prayer and work over the past century and a half – a continuity which also participates in the 1500 year Benedictine tradition. I don’t mean that the idea itself is “comfortable” in the way we usually use the word. But it goes straight to the root sense of “comfort” from the Latin “fortis,” meaning “strong.” The joyful reality of these faithful lives strengthens us when we bring it to mind. It is a galvanizing call. I’m grateful for the witness of this monastic community, its life continuing in quiet trust and stewardship. But I have to be careful, in acknowledging this truth, not to obscure something else, just as wonderful and necessary… Among a host of documents, photographs, paintings, and other artifacts, I recently learned that the Abbey archives contain the handwritten vows of every monk of Belmont Abbey, going back to its very beginning. Each man who came here to vow stability, fidelity to the monastic life, and obedience under the Rule of St. Benedict, has left the personal record of these commitments in the particular character of his hand. Sometimes there’s a temptation, when I think about the Church’s continuity, or monastic communities’ ongoing lives as institutions, to diffuse a sense of the personal or individual. And in a way, this is appropriate. It reflects a part of the paradox of our human...