Cultivation Blog

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.

We don’t have to go far to find suffering. In fact, with so much violence and division confronting us from every media-saturated angle, sometimes it can feel difficult to focus on anything else. We know by faith that vitriol and darkness will not have the last word – that Love alone endures. But it can still seem overwhelming to face the immediate reality of our fallen world. It’s made me look again at the Cross. And in a way, it’s made me wonder anew about sympathy.

By one definition, sympathy is a kind of kinship, a fellow-feeling that arises from likeness. In this sense we might talk about sympathetic minds, or people being in sympathy with each other when their views, feelings, or understandings align. We can invite it, certainly, in deepening our capacity to recognize what we share with others, but this kind of sympathy isn’t really something we can make ourselves experience. It’s a natural response to affinity. We resonate with those who share our attitudes and beliefs, deriving strength and support from the communities we build together.

In its more familiar sense, however, sympathy is also a kind of “suffering with.” And while this often springs up innately, as when we contemplate the pain of someone we love, this particular definition does suggest a kind of charity we can choose, even without a natural impulse to kinship.

With the Greek word “pathos,” feeling and suffering are bound up in the same root. But to accompany someone else in suffering, to “suffer with” does not necessitate that we feel what they are feeling. (For that, we have the related word “empathy.”) Nor does sympathy require that the sufferer be blameless. Without denying the reality of evil, we can still exercise sympathy by remembering that sin and darkness do the greatest harm to those who perpetuate them.

No matter who or where we are, we remain connected to each other by our life in Christ. Through Him, no offering or prayer is ever in vain, even if we cannot see its fruit. In a supernatural sense, choosing to suffer with another person – to accompany their suffering in prayer or sacrifice, even where concrete gestures are impossible – participates by the grace of God in the sufferings of Christ Himself, Who took on the weight of all human sin, guilt, and pain, and Who accompanies us throughout our lives in our every private sorrow.

The deepest aim of sympathy is to see in another human face the face of Christ and to love it: to place ourselves along the Way of the Cross as Veronica or the Blessed Mother did. This weekend, let’s each try to remember someone who’s suffering – maybe someone for whom we struggle to find a sense of kinship. And in doing so, let’s renew our hope in God, Who transformed a sign of infamy and death, the Cross of Christ, into the sign of our salvation.

Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. – St. John Paul II

I first stumbled on this quotation by St. John Paul II early in the summer. It’s a striking quote, and the words seem to follow you around without losing their edge. I suspect this has something to do with our immersion in a society that – whatever else it does or claims – tends to capitalize on fear, reward consumer-driven complacency, and avoid the question of Truth with squeamish mistrust… all of which the monastic rhythms of prayer and work, ora et labora, quietly and undemonstratively counter.

In a way, the monks’ faithful example offers us an act of hope and a grounding of calm from which to attend to St. John Paul II’s exhortation. And now, at the start of a new academic year at the Abbey, it feels natural to take up these words in earnest and consider what they might mean for each of us.

Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.

There’s a reason St. John Paul II begins with Christ’s bracing exhortation, given more often than any other scriptural directive: Do not be afraid.

No matter how you approach it, the deep is frightening. It’s the place in our lives – wherever this might be for each of us – where we have to confront our human weakness. It’s the mission that’s beyond us, the need that’s more than we can fill, the question for which we have no answer.

We are all called to holiness – to the terrifying, vibrant love that empties us of illusion and pride, transforming our lives if we let it – if we let Him. We’ve heard over and over “Do not be afraid,” and we recognize that there is nothing mediocre about the sacrificial love that sets the world on fire – or the adventure of a life drawn to God, who accompanies us in so many strange, profound, intimate, and sacramental ways. We may not always recognize this quality of adventure, but whether our vision is free to perceive it or not, the world is charged with His grandeur, and the spiritual battle, with its eternal stakes and its call to heroism, is real and never limited by what the world tells us is big or important or worthy of our attention.

God calls us into the deep not to crush us but to lead us into this adventure and beyond fear – to invite us to trust Him so radically that we allow His love to fill us beyond our capacities, transforming even our limitations into His strength and accomplishing in us what we knew we could not do.

Do not be afraid.  

Those words are for you. They’re for each of us, whether or not we know which way to travel in order to “put out into the deep” at all.

Just know that whenever we find ourselves standing with the disciples, shifting uncertainly before blurting out, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” His answer to us is the same: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:5-6).

Put yourself in His presence and ask Him to lead you. Ask Him to hear the prayer you may or may not have words for. He is the Way, and He will never leave you to venture the deep alone. Follow Him. And lower your nets into the deep you can’t fathom. He will do the rest.

In the gospels this week we hear some of my favorite parables about the kingdom of God: the leavening yeast and tiny mustard seed, the buried treasure and the merchant seeking a priceless pearl. I’ve always loved those brief, irreducible story-images, but this time as I listened to the familiar parables, I realized that even though they ask us to contemplate the same mystery, I’ve never really considered the shape they make, gathered together.

If the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that leavens the dough… It takes a dense and flat substance and builds chambers of air through it, raising and lightening and filling with space. It is alive but gives its life to change the bread into a new form.

If the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that sprouts and branches to welcome all the birds of the air… It begins small, alive but seemingly inert. It contains inside itself the means to grow and make a dwelling place out of the emptiness, a place of shelter and rest for creatures both earthly and aerial. It takes root in a particular place, draws water and light and air from its environment. It makes itself into a gift of home.

If the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field… It’s something we have to seek. It’s hidden – in but not of the place we discover it – and there is no stealing it away. Though it demands everything we have, the proper response can only be to buy the field and the treasure inside it without hesitation, even if it looks to the world like we just purchased an empty field without setting aside anything to build or sow with.

If the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for pearls… It is not just the treasure but also the seeking itself, the seeker in the act of searching and finding. Here again the movement toward the good and the beautiful comes to fruition in another joyfully immediate purchase – the pearl at any cost – but the kingdom is present, already, in hope and in the active pursuit of that treasure.

Each parable taken by itself shows us something, some sliver of mystery. Taken together, they hint at layers deep enough to live our lives inside and still never exhaust the truth.

If the kingdom of God is like each and all of these things… It is treasure and search, sacrifice and new life. It’s an outward branching and an inward transformation, something rooted in and nourished by earthly experience, something that transcends and ennobles its earthly hiding place. It gives of itself to offer shelter, dwelling, rest, and is not diminished. I can only name it Love.

We find the kingdom of God in heaven, certainly, in our perfect union with God, who is Love. But the kingdom is also here with us when we seek His loving presence. This weekend, as we pray in the Our Father, “Your kingdom come,” let us embrace the words with renewed hope. May we participate ever more deeply in bringing this kingdom into our lives and our communities by loving God and one another. It is the treasure that costs everything we have, that is worth more than all the world.

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.