Cultivation Blog

As I think about last week’s Thanksgiving holiday with its traditions of community, hospitality, and gratitude, I find myself thinking about certain aspects of monastic life: the practice of sharing meals, of serving each other, and particularly of treating “all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar,” as the Benedictine Rule directs.

“Sacred vessels of the altar.” The simile evokes one of my favorite elements of Benedictine spirituality: its steady insistence on the holiness of ordinary things, of objects that participate in the ordinary motions of life in community.

In fact, to identify “utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar” offers us a double richness since it compares the spoons and cups, brushes, pens, and shoes of everyday activity to the gold of a chalice or a ciborium – and the quiet surface of monastic life to the sacred surface of the altar.

St. Benedict’s assertion, then, does much more than caution us to be good stewards or to recognize that simple things can be made sacred if they help us to live in and for God. All of this is true. But St. Benedict also suggests that a life consecrated to Christ is a space wherein we participate in His sacrifice. Viewed in eucharistic terms, it is the space whereon we offer ourselves for the life and nourishment of our communities.

Most of us are not Benedictine monks, who make specific vows and who live in monastic communities by St. Benedict’s Rule. But each of us can emulate their prayerful dedication to God and their recognition that – in both large and small things – we participate in the Church’s sacramental, sacrificial life.

I know that Thanksgiving isn’t a day we usually associate with sacrifice, but – as the very word “eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving,” reminds us – gratitude responds with recognition to a gift, to the element of cost, of sacrifice, in its loving generosity. We learn this most powerfully at the foot of the Cross.

So as we move from Thanksgiving into the Advent season, let’s thank God for the sacredness of our own lives, for our capacity to love, which is also our capacity for gratitude and sacrifice.

I’d like to share with you something I’ve been pondering as the season changes.

There’s something urgently authentic about the fall. It isn’t just the frenetic squirrels or the birds vaunting over each other in the turning trees. And it’s not just the necessary hum of human preparations for an imminent holiday rotation. These certainly play into our experience, but the year’s turn, the planetary rotation and the chill drop in light that trigger creaturely responses, all of this seems to invite a contemplation particular to the time. 

Underneath all the activity, there’s a sense of having accepted the signs of approaching winter and, consequently, rejected the possibility of hesitation. There’s no time for anything less than the utmost of color and light and movement. There’s no time for anything less than Beauty before we die. 

Strange as it sounds, I’m realizing that a similar kind of impatience lives under the measured rhythms I witness in the monks’ morning prayer. It doesn’t negate – or even detract from – the slow, deliberate order. If anything, it bolsters the stable continuity of these forms, strengthening them in the same way that eagerness for someone’s arrival gives an added energy and firmness of purpose to the concrete necessities of preparation. 

St. Augustine famously wrote that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God],” and it is this same yearning that I see reflected in the monks’ decision to rise every morning and attend to their faithful, vigil quiet. It’s the restlessness of human hearts hungry for perfect union with God, in comparison with which nothing truly satisfies. Why occupy ourselves with anything less than Him? Our very mortality urges us to ask the question.

It isn’t that we don’t find joy in this created life. We do and should. We are both body and soul, and this very fact makes us sacramental creatures, who encounter God’s presence and grace through sensory reality. This in itself is a miraculous source of wonder. But the extraordinary outburst of joyful, autumnal color reminds us, too, of the impatience in our own hearts, the shortness of our lives, and the need for each of us to “order our days in [His] presence:” with all the radiance of anticipation that overflows in us a restless foretaste of eternal rest.

For a few months now, I’ve been sneaking into the back of the basilica during the monks’ morning prayer, and although it’s been a source of significant blessing in my life to join the monks even from a distance, I’ve only just recently taken up their gently repeated invitation to sit with them in the choir. 

To be perfectly honest, I’ve always been a little (or a lot) intimidated by the fabled complexity of the Liturgy of the Hours, but when I made my hesitant way up to the choir, I saw that Brother Edward had prepared psalter and hymnal beforehand, opening the books to their proper pages for all newcomers and guests – and even making sure that anyone unfamiliar with the Hours received a brief and welcoming explanation of the rhythms of prayer.

Well taken care of by Brother Edward’s warm and considerate hospitality and, as a consequence, suddenly much less nervous than I’d expected to be, I waited for Lauds with a growing sense that the evenly segmented stalls – their ordered continuity in stepped rows – echoed a deeper reality of Benedictine life and community.

Each stall is distinctly marked, but each belongs, too, within the unity of the whole: of the full monastic community praying together and face to face. In parts of the Liturgy, they join in one, layered voice. In other parts, the measured alternation of one side, then the other, marks a slow and lovely pacing through the psalms, evoking community in relation – almost as an echo of God’s perfect, trinitarian unity of relation, which is Love. 

It’s reminding me of what community itself can mean, not only when we physically gather together in prayer, but also when we join our prayers to those rising always from the Body of Christ, the Church, in their patient, familiar rhythms across time and space.  

If you’ve never prayed one of the Hours with a monastic community (as I hadn’t until about a week and a half ago), I encourage you to seek out opportunities to do so. And if this simply isn’t possible in your area – or in the daily exercise of your state in your life – I’d invite you to draw on the Psalms this weekend. Pray them slowly; let the silences hold and frame the words. I didn’t appreciate what a remarkable gift that can be until my brothers and fathers, the monks of Belmont Abbey, showed me, with characteristically Benedictine hospitality and kindness.

May God draw us closer in community through prayer.

Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross. It’s a day that reminds us, as Christians, that God can make even the consequences of our fallenness into a means of glory and an opportunity for recognizing His unfailing Love. It reminds us that, no matter where we go or what we suffer, Christ is there before us, in His triumph, and with us, in our suffering as members of His body, the Church.

On the back of Benedictine medal we find the abbreviated prayer “Crux sacra sit mihi lux! Nunquam draco sit mihi dux.” which translates “May the holy cross by my light! May the dragon never be my guide.” The Cross has the power to illuminate our way, even as we carry it, for Christ, who is always present in our darkness and suffering, offers unfailing light to our steps even when we struggle to see.

Often we don’t – and can’t – know what battles the people around us might be fighting, or what they might be suffering. But Christ knows, with a nearness that transcends empathy. So today, in honor of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, I invite you to pray with me for the people around us, whoever they may be, in their private sufferings. May Christ touch their lives, offering strength and comfort through us, by His inexhaustible, creative Love.

Dear Jesus,

You suffered death to open the gates of Heaven. In the triumph of Your Holy Cross, heal and strengthen us, that we may share in Your redemptive work and rejoice forever with You.

Be near to those who are hurt and suffering. Reminds us, by Your grace at work in and through each of our lives, that we are never alone.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Happy Blessed Mother’s birthday!

As much as I enjoy my own birthday (and I do), there’s something particularly exciting about celebrating the birthday of someone you love, especially someone to whom you owe more than you can comfortably articulate.

Her resounding “yes” to God’s plan both participated in salvation history and modeled the trust and generosity needed to embrace our own vocations in each moment – no matter what God may be asking of us or how veiled His plan might seem. And long after this pivotal moment of assent, our Blessed Mother showed her attentive care and trust when she interceded for the newlyweds at the Wedding Feast of Cana: placing them in the hands of her Son, the true Bridegroom, who would – she knew – provide what they lacked.

No one – of all our friends, the saints – better embodies the love, generosity, and attentiveness God wills us each of us to practice better than Our Lady.

In fact, in true Marian fashion, the Blessed Mother seems to enjoy requesting special, particular gifts and graces, large and small, for all of us on her own feast days. At least, this always seems to be the case when I’m not too distracted to notice, or to appreciate the myriad blessings God sends to us through His little mother. Whenever I walk into Mary Help of Christians Basilica on the Belmont Abbey Campus, I’m reminded of just how tenderly she, as our patroness, cares for us.

So today, as we celebrate her birthday, let’s thank God for the way He invites us to participate – as Mary did and does – in His plan of salvation and His inexhaustible generosity to each of us.

Happy birthday, Blessed Mother!