Cultivation Blog

There is one thing I ask of the Lord; only this do I seek: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. 

All this week at Mass, the monks have led us in chanting this verse from Psalm 27 after Communion.

For someone like me, who is always asking God for things (usually with the thinly veiled conviction that I really know best…) this is a pretty striking prayer. Seeking, asking one thing only.

Circumventing my usual inventory of anxious requests, the prayer itself prods me to consider the way I pray. I know that it’s good to bring my hopes, my fears, and my desires to God with total honesty, no matter how small or how large they might be. But sometimes I also need to look at these requests, to reflect on my priorities and to question whether I’m allowing my awareness of my own need to outstrip my awareness of God’s goodness or the incomparable riches He offers in a life with Him. It’s something I struggle to recall, somehow, even though I’m surrounded by reminders. It’s why I need this prayer.

Is this really the only thing I seek, to live in the house of God?

Asking it can remind us of Jesus’ words to Martha in the Gospel of Luke’s, when she complained about being left alone in her work, caught up in the bustle of serving and the frustration that Mary hadn’t come to help her. Most of us could imagine ourselves in her place. Jesus could be addressing any one of us when he says, so gently, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. One thing alone is necessary.” One thing.

Christ has prepared a place for you, for me, in His Father’s house. We know that this is true, and it is a profound source of hope and joy that we will find a real and personal space prepared in eternal life with God. But that life doesn’t begin only after we die. We can live in the house of the Lord all our lives. We can seek and ask that one thing, make our home in Him – in the Church that is His Body – and trust that He will take care of everything else.

God inspired the psalmist’s prayer. Christ assured Martha that only one thing – one Person, who is Love – is necessary. If I tell a child that they only need to focus on one thing, I intend to take care of everything else.

This weekend, let’s ask God for one thing in particular… May we live in the house of the Lord, make our home in His love, all the days of our lives.

For better or worse, as Americans we live in a highly mobile society. Whether moving for work or family or school, fewer and fewer of us can afford to remain in the same place for long, and even the simple question “Where are you from?” becomes difficult to answer. Less and less likely to stay in the communities where we grew up, it starts to feel like the ground is always moving under our feet. I think that’s one of the reasons I find the Benedictine hallmark of stability so beautiful and so necessary.

As Benedictines, the monks of Belmont Abbey make a vow of stability, committing themselves to love God in this place and this community, here and now. In a sense, the Abbey itself, the college, and even the local region, all play an essential part in the story of these faithful vocations.

By their prayers and work, the monks continually choose and love this place. They always have. During the Great Depression, the monks of Belmont Abbey fed the local people from the produce of their farm. Two decades earlier, Abbot Leo Haid even took on the pastoral care of all North Carolina as bishop, maintaining this for the western half of the state between the creation of the Raleigh and Charlotte Dioceses. His service continually strengthened the region that the Abbey calls home. And throughout the 150 years of its history, Belmont Abbey has welcomed and stewarded this corner of the world in countless ways.

The monastic community of Belmont Abbey embraces a level of stability beyond what most of our concrete circumstances may allow. But even at times of great change or movement in our lives, the monks’ prayerful and faithful way of life can remind us that the source of our true stability is ultimately Christ. Pilgrims in a changing world, we can always plant our feet on solid rock. We can always love those around us.

When our monks pray the Hours or attend Mass in the Abbey Basilica, when they work on the grounds or inside the monastery, or when they walk under the old trees along Abbey Lane, they do so with grateful care for their home, but they also know that they, too, are pilgrims. When we love our homes and the people in them, likewise, we embrace hope in our ultimate stability, eternal life with God.

This weekend, let’s ask God for the grace to see in our homes and our communities the rich ground of our vocations. Let’s remember, too, that God has an eternal place prepared for us. And as we observe Memorial Day this coming Monday, let’s pray for all those enlisted men and women who gave their lives to safeguard our freedoms. They, too, remind us of the stability that springs from sacrificial love of home.

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 vocation: that we are called to die to self in order to live, giving up our own self-regard and pouring ourselves into the love of God and the good of others before we can become fully and authentically ourselves.

But the other side of this unity is the symphonic variety of our lives within it, a variety by which we encounter and access tradition, community, and eternal truth. The Way, the Truth, and the Life is a person, after all, and it is always through some particular person or persons that we come to know and love what is true, good, and beautiful. In a way, Truth always has a face.

This is why I’m grateful to know that the rooms holding Belmont Abbey’s collective memory include not only the reminders of those unchanging and faithful vows in which each new monk participates – but also the distinctive character of each hand, as an expression of the way these men committed their particular gifts, histories, and personalities to loving and serving God.

From across our history, we remember Br. Gilbert, the boatwright who designed the basilica ceiling; Fr. Hintemeyer, with his genius for lifting up others and promoting the Abbey; Fr. Pascal, the historian, playwright, and archivist; Fr. John Oetgen, Director of the Abbey Players and cherished mentor to so many students; Fr. Pilz, artist; Fr. McInerny, architect. And among the monks of today, we recognize our beloved brothers, teachers, spiritual directors, and friends. Through their faithful individuality, all express a shared trust that God will bring their lives – laid down for His sake – to a profound and unrepeatable splendor.

Someday we will see this, too: on the day when we “know fully, as [we are] fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). In the meantime, I invite you to join me in celebrating the visible and invisible ways that God brings our particularity to fruition, always by teaching us to dedicate ourselves to the Good that is more than ourselves. By His grace, we make this Good real to others in a joyful echo of the Incarnation.

The monks of Belmont Abbey still hand write their vows, signing them on the altar during their Solemn Profession. And God knows the specific form of every letter, the slant of every line. He knows and loves the signature of our lives.

Thank you for being part of the Belmont Abbey College family. May God bless you. Happy Founders’ Day, and happy 150th!

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.