Cultivation Blog

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.

On this Friday of the first full week of Lent, 2023, it just so happens that we also celebrate the Feast of St. Katharine Drexel, a twentieth-century American saint near and dear to Belmont Abbey College.

A Philadelphia heiress who dedicated her life and her fortune to serving God through His most underserved children, Katharine Drexel is the patron saint of philanthropy and racial justice. In fact, it was her contribution to Belmont Abbey’s Basilica of Mary Help of Christians which enabled Bishop Haid, not only to complete the project, but also to insist on its being a fully integrated place of worship, free from the pressures of segregation.

It seems appropriate, actually, that St. Katharine Drexel ushers us toward the second Sunday of Lent, as an example of the ways our individual gifts – whether of time, talent, or treasure – reverberate long after we are gone.

It actually reminds me of one of Dr. Thierfelder’s favorite quotations from Bishop Haid: “The work and prayers here shall spread God’s blessing over this beautiful country in years to come, when perhaps few of you who are listening to me now shall be among the living.”

When I attend Mass in our campus Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, I pray with my Abbey community in a space that community helped to form, whether through monks’ daily liturgies and stewardship, the prayers of friends and benefactors, or the financial contributions that raised those first walls, formed of local clay by the original monks’ hands. The sacredness of home is participatory and continuous in ways I don’t always appreciate, but St. Katharine Drexel and Bishop Leo Haid remind me of this.

On this Feast of St. Katharine Drexel – and at the end of this first week of Lent, as we try to build new habits of sacrifice and prayer – let’s rejoice that God is never outdone in generosity. He continues to work in and through our gifts long after we, ourselves, have gone home to Him.

St. Katharine Drexel, pray for us!

Today I’d like to share a bit about St. Walburga: a Benedictine saint about whom many of us are unfamiliar. As as someone who’s represented, not only in our campus grotto, but also in one of the basilica’s beautiful, stained glass windows, St. Walburga is actually an important presence on the Belmont Abbey campus. And since her feast day is tomorrow, February 25, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explore her life as a model of holiness.

Born in Devonshire, England around 710, Walburga was the daughter of a West Saxon chieftain, and, and her two brothers, Willibald and Winebald, are also recognized as saints. After receiving her education and becoming a nun at Wimborne Monastery, Walburga travelled to Germany as a missionary under her uncle, St.Boniface (another great Benedictine!), and later become Abbess of two separate monasteries there.

St. Walburga represents many of the 10 Benedictine hallmarks so near and dear to Belmont Abbey College. As a member, and later a servant-leader, of a religious community, she lived a life of community and stewardship. Her obedience and humility led her to put down roots – to cultivate stability – far from her original home, and her loving prayer helped to sustain her, together with her sisters and brothers in Christ.

If you’re on campus tomorrow, I invite you to stop into the Basilica and take a look at St. Walburga’s window, the first on the left. Both here, and in the Lourdes grotto behind O’Connell Hall, she is pictured holding a flask of healing oil, which represents, not only the miraculous cures attributed to her intercession, but also the way that the Benedictine life of ora et labora, prayer and work, heals and enriches us by the grace of God.

St. Walburga – patron saint of storms, sailors, and hydrophobia – pray for us!