Cultivation Blog

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.

As a liberal arts institution grounded in such Benedictine hallmarks as community, stewardship, and hospitality, Belmont Abbey hosts a variety of public conferences, concerts, panels, and lectures throughout the academic year. If you’d never made it to one of these before, I highly recommend the experience, and since I recently had the pleasure to attend one such Honors College event, “A Day of Reflection: The Life & Thought of Joseph Ratzinger,” I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a brief glimpse of what is, after all, just one of the fruits of an almost 150 year tradition of excellence and virtue at Belmont Abbey College.

During the conference, Dr. Elisa Torres Neff’s thoughtfully selected speakers reminded me once again why the liberal arts tradition – including the theology and philosophy to which Joseph Ratzinger contributed so substantially – not only provide a formative education for Abbey undergraduates, but also invite each of us to deeper humanity throughout our lives: as we grow and thrive individually, in our families, and in our communities. 

“Why would you leave the love that has a face?” Dr. Ron Thomas asked in his opening lecture, exploring Christianity’s deeply personal and relational character: the “dynamic law of love” by which Ratzinger opposed both nihilism and materialism throughout his life. In fact, across the subsequent panels and lectures, this relational emphasis surfaced again and again. In his keynote address, for example, Dr. Richard DeClue of the Word on Fire Institute identified the Trinity and its essential communion as unifying themes across Ratzinger’s expansive theological and philosophical writings.

Ultimately, Ratzinger evokes an intricate coherence between God’s relational being – as One in Three – and our own communion with Christ and each other. In a way, this overarching connectedness transfigures the Benedictine hallmarks themselves, from community and stability, to love, prayer, and stewardship. Formed in God’s image and likeness, our earthly communion and community participate in divine life, ultimately tying the Benedictine way, itself, to the heart of our created humanness. 

The liberal arts help us to see ourselves and our world more authentically. And the questions and conversations they inspire at events like last week’s conference remind us that communion – our shared life in Christ – can permeate and illuminate our understanding. Last Saturday I certainly learned about Joseph Ratzinger, his life and thought and his extraordinary cultural influence, but by the end of the day I’d also begun to recognize my own experience – and even the Benedictine way itself – at newly lit angles. 

So today I invite you to join me in a quick prayer of thanksgiving for the Trinitarian mystery at the heart of our lives – and for the ways God invites us to know and to love Him in active, reflective communities like the Abbey family.

Today, all over the world, Christians commemorate the profound reality that Christ suffered and died for us. We say or hear it so often – He “died for us” – that the full weight of it seems to diffuse over time.

If a friend or a brother died for me, surely it would change the way I live. If someone gave Himself up to be violently tortured and killed in order to save me from the consequences of my own guilt… it should alter the whole fabric of my life. I know this. But I’ve still let so many Good Fridays slide past without really stopping to look at what it means: what it means in my own, gloriously Christ-ransomed life.

Today let’s remind ourselves that we are not simply reverent spectators to the Crucifixion. We are an intimate part of the story because what He suffers, He suffers in our place. You and I are ineffably, personally present at the heart of His sacrifice, and the love it pours out has the power to transform us beyond our understanding.

Last Tuesday we celebrated the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Abbey Basilica here on campus. All through Lauds, and later Mass, the scripture selections evoked God’s house, the temple of the Lord, and the reality of holy places, all of which has made me think about what it means for God to have an earthly “house” at all.

I know why we build houses for ourselves. They offer shelter from the elements, gathering places for our family and friends, and spaces of refuge. But God, omnipotent and omnipresent, surely has no need of a house?

Our homes, whatever form they might take, host the ordinary, unperformative motions of our lives and loves. They become almost extensions of ourselves, so that inviting a guest means more than just giving them permission to cross the threshold. It offers friendship and trust. Hospitality, which is so essential a hallmark of the Benedictine way, identifies another as belonging, as family. It makes others welcome in our lives.

The truth is, God establishes a house here on earth for our sake, rather than His: to be near us. He dwells with us – and He asks that we build and maintain places like the Abbey Basilica – not so that He’ll have a place to rest, Himself, but so that we will. He knows how much we need earthly signs and spaces – sacramental encounters with the divine. And He invites us into His house to tell us – in ways we can grasp and embrace because we recognize it as a part of our human language – that we belong as family. He gives us the opportunity to love Him by placing ourselves in His presence.

This weekend, as we prepare for Holy Week and, at the end of it, the celebration of our Easter joy, let’s take a moment to thank God, both that He comes to meet us in every place, and that He gives us a house in which to seek Him.