Cultivation Blog

I’m particularly grateful that New Year’s Day always falls at the end of the Christmas Octave. What with the pressure of ambitious resolutions and the anticipated drag of post-holiday doldrums, it can be tempting to brace for a new year as if it were a marathon, a protracted test of endurance. Of course, there’s a certain truth to this, and I’m sure 2024 will require plenty of prayerful effort, but ultimately, meeting the new year from the vantage of Christmas reminds me to take a step back from harried determination… and begin with the light.

Within the frame of our human experience, we all recognize the sunrise as a symbol of new beginnings: of hope, freshness, and rebirth. Even our biblical vision of creation – of God’s vivid, articulating love bringing the world into being – begins with an evocative “Let there be light.” 

By beginning with the light, we’re embracing the opportunity to wake up in a freshly illuminated world and to see with new vision. 

New light offers discovery and revelation, and until it dawns at the full, we can’t entirely anticipate exactly what it might reveal in the spaces around us, in our lives, and even in ourselves. The excitement we feel on December 31 is, at least in part, because we allow ourselves to sense the possibilities still hidden in the undiscovered terrain of a new year. 

Thus, with whatever the new year brings to each and all of us, I hope you join me today in a quick prayer of gratitude, hope, and trust, remembering that new light arrives to surprise and humble us, and that part of the joyful courage of a new year lies in waiting to see what God may invite us to discover. Happy New Year, and God bless you!

Thanks to the monks and their beautiful morning prayer, I’ve started learning some of the psalms a bit better over the past couple of months. I’ve even found myself looking forward to certain lines and images that recur between Lauds and Vigils. 

One of my new favorites – and a verse profoundly appropriate to our Advent journeys – comes from Psalm 24: “Oh gates, lift high your heads. Grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory.” 

At first, the images struck me as particularly strange. Instructing gates to lift their heads felt like such an odd, stubborn use of personification, and following this with an injunction to “grow higher” only compounded the oddness by commanding something impossible to effect at will, even for a living creature.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to love the way these verses invite a jubilant hope in the face of earthly limitations. Ultimately, even “ancient doors” require a miraculous intervention in order to embrace the divine. Our longest-standing and most impressive structures – those ancient doors that protect or admit, that stand as symbols of identity and culture – can’t begin to accommodate the King of Glory until He, himself, intervenes with what is otherwise impossible: “Grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory.” 

These verses resonate with an incarnational joy particularly appropriate to Advent, as we await the coming of our God and King at Christmas. We’re used to talking about God’s profound nearness to each of us, but this reality should be so staggering that it buckles the limits of rhetoric and unassisted reason. Precisely because the best that we can build or become is nevertheless too narrow and too limited to allow Him entrance, we learn how tenderly God loves us – for He adopts and transforms our very humanness, giving us access to His divine life. He intervenes to give us, within ourselves and our communities, the miraculous capacity to embrace our Creator himself.  

When I hear the monks pray these lines, I’m reminded of the Benedictine motto inscribed in the Belmont Abbey College seal by the first letter of each Latin word: Ut In Omnibus, Glorificetur Deus, That in all things God may be glorified. In a way this, too, is a prayer of audacious hope, that everything we make and do – and everything we are – may invite God’s radiant presence more deeply into the world, participating in the impossible song of praise that transforms us beyond our comprehension. 

As we approach Gaudete Sunday and the third week of Advent, together let’s rejoice in the Truth that exceeds human possibility: The King of Glory comes. Emmanuel, God with us.

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.