Cultivation Blog

When we talk about classical liberal arts education, it can be easy – in our enthusiasm for what is surely an antidote to so many of the ills of contemporary pedagogies – to invoke the transcendentals almost automatically. Most people are unlikely to object to the True, the Good, or the Beautiful, even if we might disagree, in practice, over what these entail, so it’s tempting to toss them around in unexamined – albeit well-intentioned – ways. But when we say that classical education seeks Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, what do we, as a Catholic and a Christian institution, mean?

By setting them as ideals and ends of education, we affirm the universal and distinctive qualities of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, while also acknowledging their necessary interrelations. For the sake of clarity – and with apologies for the reductive nature of such definitions – we might understand each as some character of the real: Truth as that to which our intellect is drawn, Goodness as that to which our will is drawn, and Beauty as that to which our appreciation – we might even say our wonder or gratitude – is drawn. We find Truth, Goodness, and Beauty at work in the world, and we can meaningfully seek them, but no worldly reality perfectly captures what they are. They belong properly only to God as the source and summit of all being.

When we say that classical education seeks the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, this is not a noble abstraction but something infinitely more urgent and profound. We mean that the aim of classical or liberal arts education in developing and exercising our human capacities – our critical thought, creativity, empathy, humility, intellectual honesty, memory, and discipline – is ultimately to seek God, our Creator. As Christians, moreover, we embrace the essential mystery of the Incarnation, whereby the Word of God takes our humanity as His own and divinizes it without effecting its dissolution. We know that God is present to His creatures in a vividly personal way, and that seeking Him – seeking Truth, Goodness, and Beauty – should absorb our entire, redeemed humanity and all of human experience, alive in sacrament and Scripture but excluding no part of the life He gives.

In fact, authentic education invites us to participate in God’s creative work by embracing our continued formation, applying our will and effort to realizing our full potential. Education is the work of a lifetime, which is the reason classical education aims to teach us how and why to learn, just as much as what.

The capacity to desire and to recognize Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is inherent to our humanity, even as natural law is written deep in our souls. Our ability to reason, to choose, and to wonder exist in us as human creatures and partake in the Creator’s light, which is why Aristotle, Plato, and other pre- or non-Christian thinkers still offer profound contributions to our search for understanding.

But when we seek the Good, the True, the Beautiful as Christians, we do so with all the resources of nature and revelation, adding to the full exercise of our human capacities the heritage of our Christian Theological tradition and the manifold gifts that come with seeking in faith. Why pursue the project of Classical Education via this Christian tradition? Because we earnestly want them in their fullness. We want the fullness of being in its – in His – authentic reality. Because we know and love the goal.

Beginning the season of Lent each year – usually with at least a little trepidation – I tend to think about it entirely in terms of preparation.

And certainly this is true. I am not, after all, fully ready to receive the graces of Easter. I need to pray and sacrifice so that I can participate more authentically in the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. We all need time in the desert to remind ourselves of what’s important and to prepare our hearts for the Lord, and this part of the liturgical year embodies that need. As the Body of Christ, in fact, it’s a way for the Church herself to experience a time of penance and prayer leading up to the Triduum: the death, burial, and resurrection we come to share through Our Bridegroom and Lord.

But this year the readings on Ash Wednesday reminded me that our preparation is also more than a period of penitential waiting. In his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes:

“We appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says: ‘In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you.’ Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

Behold. It is a word that asks us to stop what we’re doing and look. Right now. It is a word that expresses presence, rather than the anticipation we might expect. Now is the day of salvation.

Because we are creatures bound in time, living out our stories within its limitations and gifts, it’s hard to grasp the now-and-not-yet of God’s promise and presence. But Scripture reminds us – and our Sunday moments of yearlong Easter emphasize – that the time of salvation is always now. Even our penance and our Lenten preparation participate in the glory of Easter. Every effort to draw nearer to God by His grace – that is, every effort to allow Him nearer to our hearts – participates both in the suffering and in the resurrection.

May we find joy in our sacrifices, our small sufferings, by knowing that these – though real and necessary – are never cut off from the light and the peace for which we long. God’s love holds all things together and makes all things new. May we trust this, even when we cannot see it. And may we one day know this fully in the eternal Easter of heaven.

God bless you on your Lenten journey!

As some of you may know, Belmont Abbey College inaugurated our new president earlier this month. Once students returned from Christmas break, we all gathered to celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit, to meet the president, and to hear his faculty address at a special luncheon in the ballroom. Of course this was – and is – an exciting time for our campus community, as we get to know President Jeff Talley and his hopes for the college, but today I wanted to share with you something he said during his faculty address, which struck me as relevant not just to Belmont Abbey but to all of us, especially at the start of a new year. “We are small,” he said, “and that is not a weakness.”

It’s something that’s lingered with me as I’ve thought about shiny, new 2026 and the ways we tend to pressure ourselves to change all our habits at once. I suspect we’re all familiar with the temptation… to become the fitter, wiser, more productive versions of ourselves from sheer willpower, starting January 1.

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with setting goals or making resolutions, especially if we’re taking small, consistent steps that challenge us to become more fully the people God created us to be. Pray a decade of the rosary. Go for a walk at lunch. Check in with a friend or a colleague who’s struggling.

But we are not – nor will we ever be – perfect, and the perverse reality is that by expecting to make drastic changes overnight, we’re less likely even to build the good habits we need in order to grow. I might like to think I’m big and strong enough to power through a host of ambitious resolutions on my own steam – or that failing to do so is cause for paralyzing discouragement. But recognizing my humanness means recognizing my smallness and my dependence on God. It means both being patient with myself and realizing that my very smallness can invite God’s strength into places I could never fill alone.

The Benedictine hallmark of humility isn’t about self-denigration. It’s about seeing ourselves as God sees us. We are small. And that is not a weakness. Because we are loved. Already and utterly.

I recently had the chance to meet my two-month-old niece for the first time: to hold her, and rock her, and watch for those sweet, funny half-smiles babies make in their sleep. Looking down at her snug little self, I felt so much love, and I remember marveling – not just at her, at this endearing, miraculous little person small enough to fit in my arms – but also at how much her presence called me to love her. A baby doesn’t have to earn our love; we don’t think twice about giving it. She doesn’t have to do anything, make anything, prove anything. And it struck me, looking down at her, that God looks at us this way.

You’re not asked to prove yourself in feats of greatness. You’re only asked to rest your smallness in His Love, to keep your life snug in His arms and to trust in Him.

This weekend – and this year, as we inevitably face things that seem bigger than we can manage – let’s try to remember that we are small. We are small, and that is not a weakness. Because God is our strength.

This week I know many of us will gather with family or friends to share a meal, watch a parade, cheer on a favorite football team… Offices will close, kitchens will warm, and the first, furtive Christmas songs will wend their way over the radio. But whatever your Thanksgiving plans, I hope your day is full of warmth, joy, and light.

After all, Thanksgiving may not be a liturgical holiday, but it offers a festive chance to exercise that most joyful and necessary response to God’s gifts: lifting up our grateful hearts! It’s a response we recognize at Mass, that greatest feast of thanksgiving, when we acknowledge “our duty and our salvation” to thank God always. And it’s a response that feeds the very root of peace and joy throughout our lives, even – or especially – at times of difficulty and darkness. Few gifts are greater than the opportunity to express gratitude, for and with our loved ones, to the God who loves us with such infinite tenderness.

I know, of course, that Thanksgiving Day can also present challenges. For some of us, large family gatherings can raise tensions or open old wounds. For others, loneliness or hardship become a heavier than usual cross. And even for those looking forward to visits and cheerful activities, the hubbub of preparation and the frenzied rush so quick to take over this time of year can blur us out of the present, even though the present is the only place we find God and experience His love.

So, with an eye to the joys and the perils of Thursday – and to every day in which we thank God for the gift of life and love and breath – I wanted to share a quote from St. Catherine of Siena, something one of our beloved Abbey monks, Br. Edward Mancuso, shared with me when he knew I needed to hear it: “To the servant of God, every place is the right place, and every time is the right time.”

It’s something I tend to forget, equally in the face of holiday excitement or “ordinary” monotony. And it’s something to which both Benedictine stability and gratitude itself bear quiet witness. Every place is the right place, and every time is the right time. Because God is there.

As I’m writing this, as you’re reading it, as each of us moves through our day, moment to moment, God is here. There are no “filler” passages in the stories of our lives. Every day is a thanksgiving feast because the root of our hope and our gratitude lies not just in knowing that God sends us gifts, but even more that He bears them personally into our lives and makes every moment a place to encounter Him, the Giver.

We may not always see it, but if we abandon ourselves to His will, which is Love, there are no times or places without meaning. Our resting, our work, our play, our projects, our interruptions, even our periods of waiting – we can live them all in Him, in gratitude that nothing we do or say escapes the redeeming beauty of a significance far beyond what we could hope or invent. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are closer to us than we are to ourselves.

We don’t have to wait for a sign or a holiday. Gratitude acts by lifting up our hearts to the God who is always with us, who makes us co-creators with Himself and fills our lives with meaning: with Love that isn’t constrained by our weakness or our limited vision. Let’s thank God that every place is the right place, and every time is the right time. And let’s allow the joy of this to fill our celebrations and continue through eternity.

God bless you this Thanksgiving!

Psalm 65 is one of my favorite psalms.

Recurring each week during the ordinary course of Wednesday Lauds, it expresses a jubilant awe at all that God has done. One of the things I love most about this beautiful prayer, in fact, is the way its very act of praise blossoms from something we owe to God in justice to something we sing joyously in overflowing hope and gratitude.

In the Grail Translation, which the monks of Belmont Abbey adopt in their psalter, Psalm 65 begins, “Praise is due to you in Sion, O God. To you we pay our vows in Jerusalem, you who hear our prayer.” The language is calm and measured, acknowledging an exercise of duty, a debt we owe to our Creator. Moreover, the next verses emphasize this creaturely dependence by articulating both our mortality and our fallenness: “To you all flesh will come. Our evil deeds are too heavy for us, but our transgressions you wipe away.”

But by admitting our guilt and our inability to bear up under the self-incurred burden of sin, the psalm opens us to more profound gratitude. And in this recognition, God’s mercy changes even the metaphor at work. From a heavy load we try to lift – and which keeps us from standing upright – our sins become a mark that God simply wipes away.

The fact that God loves and delivers us – even though we can do nothing to deserve it – lies at the root of our gratitude, and it prompts the psalmist to marvel at the sheer blessing of God’s care. As the language warms, we arrive for the first time at hope: “You are the hope of all the earth, and of far distant isles,” and the psalmist’s praise shifts more and more deeply into awe. The omnipotent God not only forms the vast and terrible mountains but also quiets the storm, brings stillness to restlessness, and order to chaos. He fills the world with enduring joy.

And here the psalm seems to blossom out in its fullness:

“…God’s ever-flowing river brims over
to prepare the grain.

And thus you provide for the earth:
you drench its furrows;
you level it, soften it with showers;
you bless its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty.
Abundance flows in your pathways;
in pastures of the desert it flows.

The hills are girded with joy,
the meadows clothed with flocks.
The valleys are decked with wheat.
They shout for joy; yes, they sing!”

In these last verses we discover a river of grace and the promise and purpose in its brimming-over. We find a vision of care that embraces the good of a future harvest from the beginning, preparing the grain by readying the soil in which it will grow. We encounter the hope inherent even in the sometimes painful realities of flood and rain, which level and soften the earth: they, too, become means of readying the ground for a promised bounty. And the very pathway of our life in God transforms, by His mercy, into a river of joy, flowing undiminished through the desert places.

I love Psalm 65 for its beautiful act of faith in the will of God. With our limited, human vision, we only see a sliver of the journey at any given moment, and it can be difficult to appreciate or even guess, sometimes, how God will and does work even in periods of darkness or uncertainty. But Psalm 65 sees with the vision of praise. And it embraces the gratitude and hope that bring past and future together under God’s eternal mercy. The plowing and watering, growth and harvest, are equally present in His loving will. It is why we can “thank God ahead of time” without presumption, as Bl. Solanus Casey urges.

This weekend, All Saints Day calls us to praise God in blessed communion, and All Souls Day reminds us to pray in hope for our beloved dead. Let’s remember that this praise and this hope unite us in Christian joy because both have their source in the eternal love of God, brimming even in the desert.