October Archives
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October 31, 2011
O.k. - maybe, at this moment, I'm being crucified. I don't like to talk that way. It sounds pious and over-dramatic. It's just a possibility I want to consider. Yeah - this moment could actually be a crucifixion. I've just initiated a conversation with Brother Charles, and it feels like my hand is being fastened to a piece of wood with a nail. I'm not in pain. Or rather, the pain is a certain profound disorientation and diffuse anxiety that I might be losing control of my life at this moment. The “floating” feeling comes from my awareness that, while Charles is open to conversation with me, he never initiates. It has been nearly ten years since he came to our community, and he has literally, (never one time!), initiated a conversation with me. I have no reason to think he dislikes me. Whenever I engage him to talk, I am always struck by the sincere attentiveness he shows me; how at ease he seems with the eye contact; the moisture in his eye as if a tear were forming. He has nothing against me. I'm clear about that. He just never, never initiates. The dialogue in my head goes something like this: “You know – if I didn't take it upon myself to begin a conversation with him, we might never speak again. Fine. But actions have consequences, and if that's the way it's going to be, then it is certainly preposterous for him to assume that I will forever after always be the one to start a conversation. Why would I do that? Monks can get divorced. It can be done discreetly. It happens. I just stop initiating. I stop doing what doesn't make any sense . . . and we never speak to each other again. Actions have consequences. That's reasonable. A “divorce” isn't going to make me happy. The thought of it makes me feel a little sick. I would do it because – well . . . it's just what makes sense.” And this is why it feels like a nail is being driven through my hand. For the upteenth time, I am now initiating a light and breezy conversation with Charles. I watch his face brighten, the attentive eyes fasten on me, the evident kindness in his face that I always forget about until we start talking . . . and that's when I feel the nail. What I'm doing doesn't make sense. Why am I doing this? I took a vow – a vow of stability. I “married” a community of monks. I guess that's why I'm doing this. And it's o.k. As a sister once said to me: “The vows are the nails. The community is the cross.” Easter is coming when men rise from the dead – and maybe that explains my feeling of disorientation.
Father Raphael
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October 28, 2011
It's about 3:45 in the morning. I'm standing in a chilly, barely illumined church reading a psalm to about thirty monks huddled in two choirs facing each other in the darkness. I am preoccupied – so completely preoccupied with one of the monks, that I have to stop reading because I just lost my place on the page. Brother Alanus is asleep. He falls asleep a lot at Vigils, but it's only when I'm the psalm reader that this irks me. By virtue of an uncanny optical effect, his brilliant white fresh laundered cowl seems to make him glow in the dark. Bent over double in his seat, head in his lap . . . he is all I can see; all I can think about. It's as if he had stood up, stepped into the center aisle, and was shouting for my attention. He's just a monk asleep in choir. What has come over me? Why am I so irritated? It is my sense that he's – not there. That's it. I want him to be present to me; I need him to be present to this prayer service his brothers and I are conducting together – and he's sound asleep! “He's gone!” The voice is imaginary, but it's louder than all my other thoughts combined. “He's not there!” His absence is affecting me like an empty booth in a diner where a friend was supposed to meet me a half an hour ago. “He's not there!” Finishing the psalm, I return to my seat. My reading is followed by an extended silence in which I'm supposed to be praying, but my eyes have fixed on the huddled figure of the man still sound asleep across from me in choir. I am glaring at him, when I hear the tiniest voice rise up from the deeps somewhere beneath my conscious thoughts. It is the smallest voice I ever heard; clear as a bell; and pitiful in its pleading: “Brother - my personality is hidden from your view by this sleep that overcomes me, so you think I am not here. Brother – I am here! I am asleep. In this condition, I cannot master consciousness of you or even of myself, and so you say I am not here . . . but I am here! Brother, I have not gone anywhere! Do you suppose that when I am asleep, and you cannot engage my personality, that I no longer exist as a person? Is that what you think?” The voice speaks as though he knew me, and says again, almost tearfully: “Brother – I am here!” Whose voice is that? But of course. I know him. It is the voice of one who represents an entire nation; millions of souls who, like the one I hear speaking, have been denied a welcome by our nation. Why is he not welcome? Because, to us, he is asleep. He has no personality, at least none we can engage and enjoy as we would prefer. Perceiving no personality to engage us, we offer him no welcome and so, at last, he expires without a name; he who remains ever after hidden from us and whose name all true believers call - “the unborn”.
Father Raphael
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October 25, 2011
I have been surprised to hear, wafting over the walls of the cloister recently, anxious talk about “bubbles.” The U. S. economy, as I understand it, has been devastated by the bursting of a gigantic “bubble”. Economic growth in China, I hear, is producing the next really huge “bubble” . . . I am told the bursting of the bubble created by U.S. economic trends, has profoundly affected the lifestyle of millions of Americans. So – all those people . . . they were living inside a bubble? That's interesting in light of the fact that a charge often leveled at monks is that we have fled the “real world” and created a life for ourselves inside a kind of bubble. But then I'm sure I heard somebody mention a “housing bubble”, and that, when this bubble “burst”, it left thousands of American families homeless. Who's living in a bubble? I've renounced everything. I have no credit, no stock, no investments. I don't have a penny to my name. My house is still here. Don't get me wrong. I know what it's like to blow a big bubble and have it vaporize into nothing. Self-aggrandizement is the bubble every human being blows as a youth, and watches burst about age fifty – monks included. The “bubble” everyone is talking about is not economic. That bubble is just a symbol of the one people really dread: the artificial self that is inflated and grows and floats, gossamer thin through the air, all gleamy and wobbly and wiggly. A cancer diagnosis is what made my youthful bubble go “pop”. It sent me into a free fall and I could have been hurt, but God put a monastery under me and I landed with a soft “thump” in the palm of His mercy where no housing bubble can ever touch me again. Even so, here, rejoicing in the silence and solitude of my monastery, I do not fail to remember and to suffer along with those thousands of my brothers and sisters today whose “bubble” has burst and who, dazed and exhausted, are as beloved by God as any frightened cancer patient. May God bring us all to sanity in this life and home again with Him where every tear will be wiped away and where death will be no more.
Father Raphael
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October 22, 2011
“Evening Chapter”, at New Melleray, is a little like a family gathering for supper at the end of the day. Over the course of ten minutes or so, Abbot Brendan typically shares with the monks news about New Melleray or the order. Recently, Thursday Evening Chapters have been devoted to watching instructional videos about the new Roman Missal, to be implemented on November 27. I have been assigned to coordinate the showing of the videos, but Brother Severin, a novice, is the computer expert. Severin, as the youngest monk in the community, is the most proficient with technology, having actually designed and created a website as a school teacher in North Carolina before he entered the monastery. He is very gifted and I very much depend on him to facilitate these video showings because I am NOT a computer guy. There is, in my heart, a quiet rejoicing each Thursday evening at about ten after seven, when I walk into the community room to prepare for the viewing of that night's video, to find that Severin has arrived before me; has the computer “booted” up; the projector running; the sound system on, and the “menu” I need to get started already displayed on the screen. With his skills and youthful energy, he might have impressed a corporate executive and become “upwardly mobile” in an organization that would have paid him a handsome salary. Instead, he is cruising on the least upwardly mobile career track on earth where his energy now and in the future will be spent in humble service to a small and obscure community of monks. He was “Brother James” when he entered, but changed his name to “Severin” about six months ago, when he was clothed with the religious habit as a novice. This assuming of a new name signifies a mysterious transformation in him which he and his brothers anticipate: his conversion in the monastic way of life. It is already happening. The miracle has begun. It is evident, Severin has already discovered one of the “pearls of great price” Jesus promises a monk: the discovery that it is so much more gratifying and freeing to use ones gifts for the sake of others, and makes you so much happier and “richer” than using them to advance ones own cause in the world. Seeing him in his all-white religious habit, with his blond hair, slightly stooped over the computer keyboard as I enter the room, I imagine for a moment that it is Jesus I see – who came not to be served but to serve.
Father Raphael
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October 19, 2011
They are a little like “refugees”, these guys who arrive at the monastery door. Some are just on retreat; some are actually discerning a vocation to become monks. But again and again, you hear them say it is so difficult to experience and to to cultivate silence in their lives. They even talk about: “looking for silence”. People – looking for silence. This strikes a monk as odd. I want to ask them: “Have you ever found a place where you could get away from it?” I never have. Each of our human expressions is a visitor to a universe that receives it as a temporary guest. Every thought betrays in its articulation that it is incomplete and so falls backward again into silence. Every sentence ends with it. Its inevitable arrival concludes and reveals the deepest meaning of every conversation. Every minute you and I spend in conversation is drawing us nearer to eternity's “mansion” whose rooms are so many countless parlors filled with the most enchanting silence. Silence enclosed you and caressed you in the womb. It returns again to gather you after you've exhaled your last breath and your loved ones witnessing the event, stand speechless. It catches you when, dazed and exhausted, you fall into the arms of someone who loves you – loves you enough to just hold you because you need to be held and doesn't ask why. People “looking for silence”. I wonder what exactly it is they are looking for? Silence is the absolute “everywhere” of our human experience; the all embracing infinite horizon against which is set every word they have ever uttered – and they can't find it? Not to worry. It will find them.
Father Raphael
October 16, 2011
I'm standing in choir at the end of Compline last night, our final prayer service of the day chanted in semi darkness, when Abbot Brendan concludes the closing prayer; a few moments of silence follow; the “spot” over the sanctuary is turned on so that the monks can see to process out of church; I look up – and there is Steve Jobs standing in choir across from me . . . I mean – it sure looks like him. Wow. The guy on retreat in the guest section of choir looks exactly like Steve Jobs. Now, nothing occurs by accident. All that happens is ordained by God. So, this “double” of the deceased Steve Jobs I'm looking at – this means something. Good. So – Steve Jobs dies and goes to a Trappist monastery in Iowa. What is God saying? Is Jobs being punished? No. To be sure, as the charismatic visionary of the Apple Computer empire, Steve could be overbearing and maybe a little scary at moments, but, by all accounts he was a likable and basically decent guy. Well, then, perhaps he's being rewarded. Hey, why not? Let's play that out. In compensation for the enhancements to life he provided for millions of people over the course of his career, he has now been granted – a place in choir with the monks. Good. Now this is news. So – the story gets out that Steve Jobs is not dead, but was seen in the half light of this quiet Fall evening praising God in the company of the Trappist monks of New Melleray. Of course, everyone who hears it says: “That's not true”. But what if the truth were something very similar? O.k., Steve Jobs is not actually standing there in choir, but what if the appearance of his double tonight reveals something of the truth of where Steve is now and what his existence is like? Is the place his spirit now inhabits actually a place something like New Melleray Abbey at Compline? Might the reward for a life well lived be something like enjoying the company of a community of monks gathered and singing God's praises with grateful hearts at the end of a day?
Father Raphael
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October 13, 2011
No one can remember an October like this in Iowa. Temperatures between seventy and eighty degrees, clear azure skies, sudden gusts of wind making the trees shiver and cast off a multitude of yellow leaves that rain down and shimmer in the sun beams. I take my time walking to the carpenter shop and drink in the beauty. I am happy – and at the same time, my heart shrinks a little in the face of God's loving kindness manifest in the splendor of this Fall day. It is a sin remembered that is weighing on me. The sin of ingratitude is felt especially when God's smiling face draws so near as it does on this day. But He would not have my joy at this moment be lost to such brooding. That is not His will. I hear God say: “Don't fasten your thoughts on past sins – not now; not here. The evil you chose in the past was regrettable, but it is forgiven. Look! Look at the scene before you! Is it not manifest; is it not abundantly clear that my generosity toward you at this moment makes right and heals all that happened in the past?” It is true. I know it in my heart. I don't need to revisit the ugly details of past sins. It serves no purpose at all. What I am called to now, is to be present to my loving Father in heaven; to accept peacefully that I am gifted beyond anything I deserve without protest, but be humbled and grateful. My evil choice was in the past and is gone; burned up in the radiance of the blessedness of this present embrace of God. Why then, trouble myself by going back to it in memory? In the mercy I have been shown, Jesus is born again. He is here, and he is my Savior!
Father Raphael
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October 10, 2011
Today, I'm praying for Brother Clarence – poor guy: he just found out that the contemplative retreat he was supposed to assist with is now his baby. He will have to give the entire retreat himself. Father Jonah, who was supposed to lead the retreat, had to go to Des Moine Iowa where his mother just died. The funeral is Wednesday and the retreat begins today – Monday. I'm praying for Clarence . . . and thanking God I'm not in his shoes. For any monk, it is a discipline and a real effort of self-transcendence to come out of the cloister, stand before twenty five strangers, and share his reflections about the spiritual life. Monks live together in silence and don't have a lot of practice putting their spiritual experience into words. We are neither disposed nor trained to be “effective public speakers”. We don't generally have a lot of insight into how to “package” what we want to say in a manner that will be engaging to people we've never met. There is something a little tenuous about the very concept of a monk offering a retreat. Most monks don't do this. Once in a while, a monk appears who does this very well – so well that his words give a distinctive shape to a period of history. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the spiritual father of our order, did this as a counselor to popes and a preacher of Crusades. Clarence is unlikely to leave his stamp on history this week. Beginning tonight, at seven o'clock, he'll present himself to a room full of strangers as a simple monk who has persevered for twenty five years in the silent and hidden spiritual warfare that is the life of a monk. In trying to make himself understood, he will be challenged, no doubt, by the fact that the people he is addressing are influenced by a culture which, perhaps for the first time in human history, is embracing a purely secular view of life without any reference to God. Having conscientiously prepared his talks, he will “deliver” them according to a vague notion of how a “good” retreat director is supposed to do that, and by some marvelous dispensation of God's grace and goodness . . . Christ will be there. .
Father Raphael
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October 7, 2011
Last night, as the sun was declining, having blessed us all day with unseasonable warmth and brightness, I was descending the stair outside the rear wing of the monastery and heard the familiar rumbling of voices coming from the little chapel. Every night at seven o'clock, Giles, Paul, Placid, Kenneth and one or two others gather to pray the rosary together, the centuries old devotional prayer by which Mary is tenderly remembered and honored as the Mother of God. The soft murmuring of voices I hear through the window beside the stair have been a feature of the ending of a day for decades in this monastery. The moment I am witnessing is something distinctive to monks. Nuns, of course, pray to Mary with great devotion every day, but just as a man cannot quite duplicate a nun's surrender of herself into the arms of the “Divine Bridegroom”, (generations of monks have asked; “ . . . .o.k. - uh, how do I do that?”), so a woman cannot duplicate in her prayer the unique manner in which a man turns for solace to his mother. Receiving succor from a mother is a different experience for a man that it is for a woman. The six monks whose murmuring voices I hear are getting old now. For decades they have been coming together at this evening hour and reaching out to Mary their mother as only men can do. With the passing of years, the longing and tender affection only deepens. Actually, I believe what I am listening to on the stair is the voice, aching with desire, of Jesus himself for his mother. In the collective yearning of these faithful monks who have spent forty years on their knees praying the rosary, Jesus' own devotion and tender love for his mother is given expression. This love could be expressed I suppose by singing the “Ave Maria”, or by the heartfelt “yelp” of a Charismatic prayer group . . . What I am listening to is a song rising from hearts yearning for a lifetime. For a moment or two, as I descend the stair, there is nothing else. All nature, peoples, thoughts, feelings, and time are taken up into the mumbling prayer offered by six elderly monks invisible to the world.
Father Raphael
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October 4, 2011
Summer is now passing into Fall and I am rudely awakened to the fact that something is changing inside as well. I don't remember my baptism but, smitten by the early morning chill, I know winter is on the way, and the change I will experience is spiritual as well as natural. Winter in Iowa is something like re-living your baptism. When I was an infant, I was baptized into the death of Jesus Christ. A priest suspended my tiny body over the chilly waters of a baptismal font. I didn't die. But I was changed utterly – something like the way death changes a person. Winter in Iowa is like that. It gets so cold you find it hard to imagine that you and nature can survive the onslaught. But it does. And I will. Anyway, the ordeal is beginning now. Last night I woke up about 11:30 shivering because I'd fallen asleep without pulling the covers up. I quickly went back to sleep, sluggishly aware that a change is coming. This first midnight chill is the sign. In a way, my whole life as a monk is about bringing me to this wintry awareness. The strictness of our life, the labor involved, physical and interior – it's all about being “chilled” and “awakened” to the truth about our human situation. Sin has exercised its influence on us. A conversion is necessary, a most radical conversion . . . actually, a death. Our redemption; the fulfillment of our lives and attainment of true happiness is accomplished only through the process of a dying which we share with Jesus Christ. Baptism is the “death” that brings about this union with Christ. At this time of year, I feel again as though I were an infant being carried in my mother's arms toward the baptismal font. I shiver at the sound of the splashing water nearby, anticipating its contact with my sensitive skin. Winter is coming. The marvel is that God has made this bitter experience the means of our transformation. The chill passing through me is the realization that redemption is at the door.
Father Raphael
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