Cultivation Blog

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!

A couple of weeks ago, the Abbey closed campus at noon so that faculty and staff could return home before the winter weather struck. For the first time in over two years, meteorologists predicted, we were likely to see real snowfall, and the roads could be treacherous.

I drove home, eyeing a sky already heavy and soberly luminous. And at some point after getting back, reheating my lunch, and sitting down to work, I looked up to find it was snowing.

As adults we’re bound to have a more fraught relationship with snow than we did as kids. Back then it was all about play and the sheer gift of a day off from school. Snow brought a kind of festival, complete with cocoa, backyard adventuring, and that unique form of flight called sledding. These days, we admittedly have heating costs, driving hazards, and interruptions to busy schedules.

But even if we can’t entirely do away with the grown-up anxieties and inconveniences that come with winter storms, watching it fall for the first time in years felt like a much needed reminder to pause and recall that wondering anticipation, and I was glad to open the door and step outside and catch a snowflake or two. It made me think how important it is to embrace those festivals that don’t fall on any calendar. And to lean into the joyful trust that inspired G.K. Chesterton to say, “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”

As kids we can’t wait to get outside in the snow. The cold is part of the fun, somehow, or at least no real deterrent. As adults we prefer to enjoy the snow from inside a well-heated house, preferably with a blanket and a mug of some toasty beverage. And to be perfectly clear, I am strongly in favor of that cozy picture, especially if it includes a good book, or good company, or both.

But there’s something necessary, too, in the willingness children naturally have to venture outside, to get tired and cold and hungry in the way of adventure. It makes the warmth of coming home even more wonderful.

This weekend, which is the first in the season of Ordinary Time since the start of this liturgical year, let’s watch for all those opportunities to rejoice, especially the ones that hide in plain sight. Thanks be to God for making us the kind of creatures who play in the snow. Let’s go out to meet the ordinary, festive adventures of our lives, small and great, and not be afraid.

When we start to approach the new year, it can be tempting to look over the top of that dividing midnight and invent some shiny, perfect version of ourselves for the other side. Of course, we probably don’t frame it that way when we’re considering what we might learn, or do, or try this year. But at least in my own experience, the more grandiose and ambitious my plans for the coming months… the more likely it is that I’ve envisioned some alternate self to stand triumphant at the end of it.

Usually I try to combat this tendency by scaling down my goals, choosing small things I can do each day – an extra prayer, a quick note, one more vegetable at dinner… Small steps to better seek the Good in my life.

But as the monks of Belmont Abbey continue to teach me – through the Benedictine prayer and work that so permeate this remarkable place – the hallmarks of stability and stewardship offer a gentle, corrective vision to my tendency to reimagine a “New Year me.”

Stability, through which the monks live out their collective and individual commitments to this Abbey, invites us all to embrace the circumstances and the space into which God has called us. It offers a discerning groundedness that clarifies who we are and where we stand. Stewardship, meanwhile, takes loving responsibility for cultivating the gifts that flourish in this very rootedness. Usually when we think of stewardship, we think in monetary or environmental terms, but really we are called to respond in active, joyful gratitude to all the blessings of our lives.

Keeping this in mind, I hope to approach my resolutions this year from a slightly different perspective: less “who do I want to become?” and more “how can I be more fully the person God made me to be?” Certainly God speaks to us in the desires and aspirations of our hearts, but sometimes we forget, too, that (as the Abbey’s chaplain, Fr. James Raber, recently reminded me) “we are God’s gift to ourselves” and to others. Already.

As we consider our new year’s goals through this Benedictine lens, let’s ask for the grace to see ourselves with God’s vision – in clarity, humility, and merciful love. Starting the year isn’t about transforming to match our own (or anyone’s else’s) idealized preference. It’s about embracing the gift of our lives with trust and allowing Christ to lead us, in the concrete circumstances of this gift, wherever He’s inviting us to go.

This weekend let’s take a few minutes to ask the Holy Spirit what invitation He’s extending to us, not just in what we want to be and do, but in what we already – albeit imperfectly – are.

What gifts has He given you in the tenderness of His wisdom, and how might you cultivate these to become ever more fully the image of God you were made to be?

Wishing you a blessed 2025!