Cultivation Blog

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.

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!