16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

July 23, 2006
We are listening to that part of Mark’s Gospel in which Jesus’ ministry has begun to feel like a three ring circus: a boat trip across the sea of Galilee to the pagan territory of the Gerasines where Jesus exorcises a demoniac at the expense of a herd of pigs, then back to Galilee where he is mobbed by a huge throng of people as he inadvertently heals a woman of an incurable flow of blood and raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, a quick visit to Nazareth where he teaches in the synagogue and is rejected by his kinsfolk, followed by the sending out of the Twelve on mission, meanwhile Herod’s dinner party goes terribly wrong when Herodias’ daughter demands John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and finally, the Twelve return from preaching the Kingdom to Israel.

All this activity takes place within two tightly written chapters. And you think you’ve had a busy week! By this point it comes as a relief for the listener, as it undoubtedly was for the disciples, to hear Jesus say: “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while”

This text first opened itself up for me 30 years ago this Sunday. I was studying theology in Washington D.C. and asked for permission to spend six weeks of the summer in a small Benedictine monastery in northern New York because I too wanted to get away by myself to a deserted place and rest a while. After much hemming and hawing, hand wringing and foot dragging and the Seminary formation team reluctantly granted my request.

The monastery was an 8 hour bus ride north of New York City in a quiet corner of the Adirondack mountains. The life was similar to the schedule we have here: up at 4:15 am, vigils at 5, followed by lectio, lauds, and manual labor, midday prayer, mass, vespers, dinner and ending with Compline at 8 pm after which I walked the 1 and a half miles down an isolated dirt road to the guesthouse where I was staying.

It was a formative experience and it confirmed for me monastic vocation I had felt myself resisting. Thirty years later here I am a Benedictine monk what I did then. Except of course I am not doing it the quiet countryside but in a hot, noisy, restless city: this is proof for me that God does has a sense of humor.

I sometimes encounter people who are shocked to hear that we are a contemplative monastery in the city. One young man who came to visit us as a candidate told me that we had a charism within a charism because, as he put it “you can’t pray in a city”. You can’t, I asked? then what was Jesus doing the last week of his life in Jerusalem?

There have always been monks and monasteries in the city of course. But in modern times we have forgotten this. At the height of the Middle Ages there were more than 10,000 Abbey’s, monasteries and priories scattered across the face of Europe. Many of them were in cities, including that most austere of orders, the Carthusians who founded Charterhouses in London, Paris, and Toulouse. The monastery in Paris occupied the present site of the Luxembourg Gardens. What the Reformation and the Wars of Religion did not destroy was virtually whipped out by Napoleon. By 1815 there were only a half a dozen monasteries left untouched in all of Europe.

The refounding of monasticism from the ruins in the 1830’s and 40’s in France, Germany and the Low Countries took place at the height of the Romantic movement. Influenced by Romanticism monastic pioneers like Gueranger at Solemns and the Wolter Brothers in Germany imagined that monasteries needed to be located in dreamy landscapes where monks could wander through the mists with their hoods up and their hands hidden behind their scapulars looking spooky and otherworldly.

But perhaps that young man I spoke to was right in implying that a life of prayer and faithfulness is especially difficult in an urban environment.

On a summer day Chicago practically throbs with noise and energy as millions of people going about their business . How do we respond to Christ’s invitation to come to a quiet place and rest a while?

There is a saying from the Desert Fathers which I have used in novitiate classes over the years. It directly addresses the plight of monks, oblates and others who have to live and prayer in the urban deserts we have created for ourselves.

The saying is about a monk who prayed to God to let him know if his life of solitude in the desert had been pleasing. An angel appeared to him and said “You have not yet become like the gardener that lives in such and such a city.” The old man said to himself “I will go to the city and see whatever it is that he does which surpasses my work and toil of all these years.” He found the man selling produce in the market and spent the day with him. At evening time the monk was invited to stay the night in the gardener’s room that was located near a tavern. The baudy songs of the drunks filtered into the room and the monk was disturbed and asked “Brother, wanting as you do to live according to God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs.” The man answered him: I tell you Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized because I tell my self “they are all going to the kingdom”. When he heard this, the monk know that he had not yet approached this standard.
The next time your neighbors have their pool party and they’re screaming past midnight, or the Ice Cream truck rides down the street playing that annoying music or the dog across the street won’t stop barking tell yourself: we are all going to the kingdom together.