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.