Cultivation Blog

With summer well underway, I know many people are already heading off on long awaited vacations – to the beach or the mountains, for cruises or family gatherings. Our Abbey campus is no different, with faculty and staff taking advantage of the comparative quiet to book travels or simply enjoy a few long weekends before classes begin again in August. But as we look forward to our various summer adventures, the prospect has made me think not just about work and leisure but more particularly about the difference between fruitfulness and productivity.

I suspect this is something many of us struggle with. In our work-oriented culture, we’ve been trained to believe that if we’re not producing something or bringing about immediately tangible results, we’re not doing enough. We need to accomplish some number of concrete objectives before we feel that we’ve justified our time. But the busier we are, the harder it is to make time for anything “unproductive”… and when we do block off a week for vacation, it can take days to reset and actually embrace the opportunity to rest.

Certainly productivity is important in the exercise of our day-to-day lives. It’s good to complete tasks and to seek to do so well: whether cooking a family dinner or drafting an email to a colleague, creating a spreadsheet or mowing the lawn, paying the electric bill or finishing a homework assignment. These are among the means by which we respond faithfully to our states in life – the places and circumstances through which God calls us in small and large ways.

But while visible productivity can be an encouraging gift, it can also be tempting to view such periods with a kind of complacency that attributes the good to our own efforts. When we can’t see the concrete result of these efforts, we’re being invited to turn to God and affirm the essential reality that all true fruit comes by His grace.

Ultimately, the Benedictine emphasis on ora et labora, prayer and work, reminds us that, as important as faithful effort is, it’s only half (and the secondary half) of the equation… and we are so much more than the sum of our productivity. We are made to love and serve, part of which is resting in conversation and in silence with the beloved.

During those periods when even making time for prayer – with so many things going on in our lives and work – is an act of trust, try to remember that placing ourselves in God’s presence, even for a moment, may not “produce” anything concrete, but by His grace it always bears eternal fruit.

No matter how much you make or how far you fall short of your own aspirations… you are deeply, eternally loved. And the God who loves you will always bring about true fruitfulness in the life that seeks Him. In the end, He’s the only one who can.

All will be well.

With the semester finished, Commencement come and gone, and the college all but empty of students, I’ve been thinking about our Abbey monks, who remain on campus throughout the year in their quiet faithfulness. These kind, holy men continually model the unsung significance of stability within our human vocations. And as I learn more every year from their example, I’ve started to wonder – strange as it sounds – if the fruits of stability and the joys of fairytales might be more akin than you’d expect.

According to J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the essential gifts of a fairy story is that it helps us to recover the ordinary. In a fairytale we escape our distractions and preoccupations not so that we transfer our allegiance to a fantasy world but so that we turn with fresh eyes to the wonder and the gift of our own: the enchantment so matter-of-factly present under our noses. 

Fairytale characters may well (though by no means always) express some initial surprise or fear when encountering wish-granting fish, eggs that spill forth jewels and silks, a talking bird, or terrible, dancing shoes. But when it comes down to it, the denizens of fairyland tend to accept the inexplicable without any interior juggling to speak of. Fairytales certainly waste no time explaining the mechanisms of magic to a skeptical princess or a rationalizing reader. If you pick this flower and tuck it in your sash, you’ll be able to fly. If you tap someone with this willow wand, they will turn to stone. That’s just what happens.

So when we return home from fairyland, each of us has the chance to rediscover how strange and remarkable a thing existence is – and how wonderfully inexplicable are the rules of our own world. Certainly we have many good, fascinating, and useful theories within the realm of science. But it’s also healthy – and pretty wonderful – to remember that there’s always a “why” beyond every explanation. As G.K. Chesterton suggests, someone from a fairytale realm might look around in astonishment at a world where trees are green rather than silver, where a dropped object falls straight to the ground, and where bees dance messages to each other and make sweet and healing nectar. If such a visitor asked us why these things are the way they are, we might mumble about chlorophyll or gravity or evolution, but at a certain point, we’d have to shrug and admit that it’s magic.

Fairytales remind us of this: that the world God created and pronounced “very good” is full of wonder, even the things we take for granted. The world in which our God comes to meet us – incarnate in human history, alive in word and sacrament, and even present in the intimacy of our personal experience – must be a world filled with wonder. We just need the occasional reminder.

But what does all this have to do with Benedictine stability?

Well, in its own, profound way, stability also recovers the ordinary. 

In fact, I’m growing to appreciate more and more that the wondrous character of this ordinary – its value and its participation in the stories of our lives – is something the Benedictine charism affirms with a matter-of-factness akin to fairytale. As strange as it may sound, the Benedictine emphasis on stability, on the faithfully kept, sometimes monotonous patterns of work and prayer in a particular place, approaches a different but no less real recovery of the ordinary. By adopting the ordinary almost as a part of one’s vocation, it becomes in mystery and actuality something sacred. It participates in the fullness of God’s will, by which the world is revealed in wonder, beauty, and somehow both playful and profound significance.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we’re always able to see the wonder or the significance. Some days are difficult, busy, monotonous. Sometimes we struggle with dryness or sadness, loneliness or doubt. But this is when we need stability more than ever – because stability is the love to which the romance of a fairytale points. Whereas fairytales recover the ordinary by sparking our wonder at things we might consider mundane, stability chooses to embrace the mundane even when we can’t recognize its wonder. It is an act of faith. The romance of fairytales makes us fall in love with the created world around us. Stability is the decision to remain and to tend our place in that same, beautiful world faithfully, even when the wonder lives more in memory and hope than in the feelings of the moment.

Reflecting on this, in fact, has shed new light for me on Jesus’ admonition that “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place” (Matthew 13:57). In a way, the people of Jesus’ home rejected Him because they didn’t believe that the mundane and the familiar could be sacred. They thought they knew Him, had become dulled to the possibility of wonder within an ordinary and expected appearance. Jesus worked no miracles among them because of their lack of faith – because they refused to participate in God’s miraculous action in the only way any of us can: by seeking and being open to His grace. They – like we all so often do – shut out the miraculous that could have flooded their lives because they refused to see in the familiar anything but the same-old, same-old thing. 

This month, let’s ask God for the grace of stability, of faithfulness to the ordinary wonders of our lives. Even when things feel less than wonderful, may we rest in the joyful trust that the One who made all things – and who still makes all things new – is ever ready to work in all circumstances the Love that animates and enchants with beauty beyond explanation.

Before Mass every morning in Mary Help of Christians Basilica, one of the monks crosses the sanctuary to the tabernacle lamp, draws a bright drop of flame up from the glass, and carries it back to light the candles on either side of the altar.

A tethered morsel of warmth and illumination coheres in fluid shape, and what seemed, seconds ago, to be inert wax and a braided few fibers of wick reveals itself capable of bearing flame – of offering its own substance to sustain light.

The Mass begins, and the candles burn steadily, drawing our gazes toward the table of the Lord’s Supper. But as they do, they also manage to echo the Death and Resurrection enacted – and embodied – there. Images of self-gift and generosity, which burn away without losing brightness, the candles offer a small sign of that profound, eucharistic Love by which Christ both feeds us with His incarnate Self and kindles in us the light of His undiminished divinity.

“I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). We’ve heard His words countless times. But until recently, I’d never noticed the way He links this light with the world itself, with life. Christ’s light is never purely external to our humanness, illuminating only from the outside. It permeates and transforms life because its source is God incarnate, God who became man and lived among us, who invites the candle substance of our lives to bear His illuminating gift.

As we approach tonight’s luminous Easter Vigil, when we will carry the Paschal fire back into the church and fill the waiting dark with candlelight, let’s remember this joyful reality: that as Christians we, too, are called to give ourselves in luminous acts of love – and that through the mercy of Christ who is light and candle, priest and sacrifice, God and man, we will never lose the eternal light for and in which we offer our lives.

God bless you in this holy and glorious season of Light!

With the beginning of Lent, we step into the desert. 

We all find ourselves in the desert sometimes. We all have periods of spiritual dryness or desolation, whether in connection with events in our lives or simply as part of our journey of faith – and for reasons we might or might not be able to see. But whatever the catalyst and whatever the topography of our particular desert places, we all spend time there. 

Deserts are remote, solitary spaces, where it can be hard to pick out the thread of a trail. Sometimes we have to rely on little stacks of stones left by other travelers. Sometimes we have to navigate by the sun or the stars, which burn clearer in an arid, scouring place. 

Deserts are places of poverty. Traveling through them we can only carry what’s essential. In the overwhelming heat and plunging cold, unshielded extremes strip away our distractions and complacency, and we have the opportunity to learn who we are and what’s really important. 

Possibly more than any other kind of experience, the desert invites us to recognize our need for God. To stop ignoring Him or interrupting Him, deferring His life or cluttering the path of His grace. When we lose the furniture blocking the door to whatever part of our lives we thought we couldn’t bear to give Him, there is only the door left. And outside it, Christ.

This is why we need Lent. It allows us to choose the desert for a time; it teaches us how to survive when we end up in those deserts of our lives, when we feel alone and lost and so tired. The answer is always the same. Turn to Christ. He is even closer to us in the desert than at any other time because the desert has a way of removing the things we use, even subconsciously, to keep Him at a distance.

This Lent, whatever desert sacrifices you make or devotional compasses you carry with you, I invite you to join me in two particular ways: 

First, try always to remember that the desert is ultimately a place of hope: revealing the reality that God answers our poverty by coming to find us within it. He embraced and suffered this poverty, Himself, and He has not left us to travel it in isolation. God calls us into the desert because only by rejecting the illusion of our self-sufficiency and embracing our own poverty can we receive the inexpressible wealth of His life. The Way of the Cross is the road to Resurrection.

Second, although in the desert we are, in a profound sense, alone with God, our God is in fact Love, and He always invites us to participate in His love for others. By His mercy, then, we also have some share in our loved ones’ desert journeys. In the comfort of this, let’s try to find small, concrete ways to accompany each other through Lent, to leave little stacks of stones or bits of star charts for our fellow wanderers and pilgrims. An act of love from desert to desert, however small, can remind someone, by the grace of God, of the hope for which the desert itself exists. It can help us remember that the Way is Love. 

Safe journeys, friends.

In the days and even weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, we’ve heard all about love: from the movies and shows popping up across our preferred streaming channels, from the shelves of grocery stores and other shops, and even from the ads that follow us around the internet and the commercial world. It’s not really possible to miss the approaching holiday – or the suspicion that popular culture sees romance and love as effectively the same thing.

It’s made me think, lately, about how we show love to each other. About what this really looks like in our daily lives and how the Benedictine way of life sheds light on our expressions of charity, friendship, and affection. In particular, it’s brought to mind the hallmark of hospitality.

In an ineffable nutshell, Benedictine hospitality calls us to welcome each person as Christ. It’s a statement I’ve heard time and again on Belmont Abbey’s campus, but I know I’ll never exhaust the full depth of its meaning. To receive another as Christ is, in part, to see in their need the very poverty Christ embraced for our sake. But it is also to recognize the image of God in the vivid and personal particularity with which He loves them into existence, life, and relation. It is to participate in this Love.

Particularity, then, is important. It means that extending hospitality – and expressing love – for one person won’t exactly match the gestures this might require for another. Just as each vocation and each life witnesses the working of God’s will in specific and intimate ways, receiving another person as Christ depends on striving to see them in their full, created personhood and to respond in personal ways. It’s what makes our friendships and relationships so rich and wonderful.

Hospitality goes out to welcome another, to respond to their need and their particularity, but even this isn’t the whole picture. What sets hospitality apart in its loving action is that this very action invites the other person into one’s own life and space. It accepts vulnerability and sacrifices independence in order to make someone else a place of rest and consolation. Hospitality does, and should, cost us something – though it’s a joyful cost.

We can’t always play the literal host. It may not be possible to hold a game night, host a traveling friend, or invite a colleague home for a meal – though these are beautiful invitations to hospitality, and I’m always grateful to those who extend them. But we can always welcome each other as Christ by accepting into the space of our lives all those we encounter. This might mean making space in our schedules – welcoming an interruption to work, pausing to call a family member, or giving up a free evening to help a friend. It might mean lending or giving away something to someone who needs it. It might even mean having a vulnerable conversation, being present to someone by sharing something of ourselves.

In a sense, there’s an innate hospitality in any act of sacrificial love, which can’t help but disrupt what is “mine” in order to offer another person the space to live more fully in the love God has for them.

So today, wherever we are and whatever else we do, let’s find one way to offer hospitality. The opportunities will differ as much as our loved ones in their particularity – and thanks be to God for the adventure in that! Let’s all welcome someone into the space of our lives today.

Happy Valentine’s Day, all!