Cultivation Blog

Happy Labor Day weekend! Like many of you, I’ve been looking forward all week to the Monday holiday, thinking about how I’ll take advantage of the extra time out of the office. But this year I’ve also been thinking about Labor Day itself, its importance, and the ways I do – or don’t – appreciate the significance and the dignity of labor in my daily life.

Labor Day may be a secular holiday, but considering the Benedictine tradition of ora et labora (prayer and work), a holiday dedicated to labor and laborers seems particularly appropriate to life at the Abbey. In a way, prayer is an expression of our relationship with God, while work is an expression, or recognition, of our relationship with others and with creation.

Given this, and the value of Benedictine hallmarks like discipline, humility, and stewardship, I’m realizing that I don’t always recognize those whose labor is actually a ubiquitous presence in my daily life.

When I get up in the morning and switch on the light, I don’t think about those at work in the power plant supplying my electricity, or the technicians who keep it running all over the county and the state. I don’t necessarily think about the manufacturing labor involved in the dress I put on or the agricultural, transportation, and service labor that brings the fruit or the coffee to my breakfast table. When you stop and reflect on it, it’s astonishing how many people we need to be grateful for as we carry out our day-to-day lives.

The monks of Belmont Abbey have taught me that work is a part of the daily rhythm of our vocations. Labor allows us to exercise patience, endurance, and generosity, and it gives us the opportunity to imitate our Creator, who is, after all, at work in the ongoing creation of the world.

As we celebrate this Labor Day weekend, let’s try to value the work we do and the work we receive as means of strengthening community and embracing responsibility for each other. Let’s remember to show our gratitude to each other and uphold the dignity of work and of workers in our words and deeds.

It’s hard to believe that August is already underway. Before we know it, students will return to campus, fall sports will gear up in earnest, and the leaves will turn Abbey Lane into a glorious riot of color. I’ve always loved fall, and I can’t wait to enjoy another new year at Belmont Abbey.

Even before season openers or student orientation, however, we actually get a foretaste of another, deeper form of glory this weekend. On Sunday we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration!

I love to imagine how Christ’s divinity radiated within and through His humanity, how St. Peter got so excited and unsettled that he started proposing an encampment, and how the New Covenant shone forth in conversation with the Old, with Moses and Elijiah, there on the mountain. And it feels particularly appropriate, here on the threshold of new beginnings at the Abbey, to contemplate the way Christ fulfills and extends the Old Testament’s promise beyond our wildest expectations, shedding new light on the past and giving us, in Himself, new and luminous hope in a future already begun.

Though He invites each of us to climb different mountains with Him, we are all called to witness, in our churches and our homes, how near and how powerful His love really is, and how vibrantly it brings our history and our hope together. We may not always understand the “how” or the “why” of past and future – of suffering and someday resurrection – but in His Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, Christ invites us to trust Him: that He, who took on our humanity without losing his divine nature, will transfigure our earthly lives with the radiance of His divine love.

So on this beautiful feast, let’s join the monks of Belmont Abbey – and Benedictines everywhere – in a joyful celebration of hope, trusting that in all things, past, present, and future, God will be glorified. That all will be well, and more than well… Alleluia!

This week we celebrated July Fourth, commemorating our first steps toward freedom with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

In the words of that Declaration: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

And for all the complicated ways the United States of America struggles with and aspires to these ideals on either side of the political aisle, I keep returning to the ways the Belmont Abbey monks and our campus home embrace these self-evident truths through hospitality, love, stability, stewardship, and all the Benedictine hallmarks that help to form our students in mind, body, and soul.

It reminds me that freedom isn’t the same as independence: that it’s the capacity to choose what is Good, True, and Beautiful – to recognize who and what we are in the sight of God. Only then can we effectively “pursu[e] happiness,” live “life,” or express our “created equal[ity]” as children of God, made in His image and likeness.

So this weekend, as we clear the firework shreds and food wrappings out of our yards and driveways, I invite you to celebrate the paradoxical rootedness of freedom, as the monks of Belmont Abbey live it. Committed to the good of the college, the local community, and the country as a whole, their prayer and guidance show us how love – which is always concrete and always rooted in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty – frees us for eternal life.

In Mary Help of Christians Basilica on the Belmont Abbey campus, a beautiful Italian crucifix hangs over the altar. Larger than life, it shoulders the lofty scale of the church, and even in the early morning dimness between Matins and Lauds, the corpus stays faintly visible with the insistent, bodily humanness of suffering.

Suspended there, it gives an imposing reminder of the price of sin and the terrible intimacy with which God embraced our suffering. You can’t see it without realizing how heavy it must be, hanging there, and how central it is to the liturgy going on in its shadow. In fact, I’d been staring at this crucifix, off and on, for weeks, and it just seemed to get bigger and heavier and more unspeakable.

But last week during Mass, as Brother Bede assisted Father Chris at the Eucharistic table, I realized something. Full-sized humans, the monks still seemed small under the crucifix, but as they went about their quiet motions, they offered another image of Christ, one rooted in the Feast of Corpus Christi – which celebrates His Eucharistic presence in our midst: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. And as I watched, I started to realize all over again how deeply merciful God is.

Looking from the Cross to the altar and back was like suddenly seeing Christ’s answer to Peter’s cry, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” in a new light. Not depart from me, sinner but come, friend, and share my table and my life. It’s not that Peter’s fear – as a reminder of our need for humility and reverence – isn’t a natural response to God. It’s just that Christ’s reply is so much kinder, more merciful, and more tender than we have any right to expect: “Take and eat. This is my Body, which will be given up for you.” After everything He’s done, He still comes back for us, waits for us in the humblest and simplest of forms, knowing we can’t reach Him otherwise.

Not only did He sacrifice Himself for us – a fact which might easily crush us with its overwhelming responsibility – but He accompanied this terrifying, unanswerable act with the gift of Himself in a form small enough to fit on our tables and approachable enough to reach out and touch, taste, and hold.

As we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi this weekend, may Christ’s sacramental presence be a renewed source of comfort in our lives – not to replace our sense of His sacrifice, but to bring it and Him close to us in all the mercifully tender beauty of His love.

I’ve been thinking about music lately: the way it encourages and illustrates the hallmark of community so near and dear to the Benedictine way. 

There’s the well-known sentiment (often attributed to St. Augustine) that “He who sings prays twice.” By implication, music amplifies or nourishes our emotional and expressive capacities, and therefore our relationships with God and each other. If singing is “pray[ing] twice,” the beauty of a melodic line communicates more than we otherwise could, enfolding another layer of expressive form – another, nonverbal language – into our conversations with God. 

So it’s only appropriate that music should be such a fruitful part of the Benedictine monastic tradition – from the hymns and the chants of the Psalter to the transcendent, sacred compositions of Benedictines like St. Hildegard von Bingen. And by extension, it’s beautifully fitting that music – offering harmonies of interrelation and opportunities for communal expressions of prayer in all its emotional, intellectual, and imaginative range – should exercise and embody community, not only within the monastery itself, but also within the College family.

Even without an official major or minor, students express a musical sense of Abbey community in a variety of formal and spontaneous ways. They perform in exuberant productions of Guys and Dolls – or they orchestrate an evening of “Dancing in the Light,” with the arts’ invitation to community expressions of faith. They attend bonfire singalongs or simply sit and play the guitar outside Stowe Hall. They join the choir or go caroling across campus. They bring their voices, instruments, and enthusiasm to Arts at the Abbey concerts – or more recently to the Friday night bluegrass gatherings outside the Haid Theater. I love the way music brings out a shared experience of beauty in each of these examples. Those of us listening have to quiet ourselves and attend to what’s in front of us. Those of us participating have to focus, not only on the part we play, but also on its meaningful relation to the whole. There’s something self-forgetful about music, which can remind us of the way communities lead us to sing a new song to the Lord.

As a member of the Belmont Abbey family of monks, students, friends, alumni, and benefactors, you will be in my prayers this weekend: that your summer is full of literal and figurative music. And if you’ve never had a chance to attend one of our campus concerts or musical events, I hope you’ll join us next year.