The Monastic Preacher

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Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

The Roman Catholic Monastery of the Holy Cross was founded in 1989 and became a Benedictine house of the Subiaco Congregation in 2000. We follow a traditional contemplative life, chanting Psalms seven times a day and singing Gregorian chant at the Eucharist. We do this in a distinctive way by living our monastic life on the South Side of Chicago. Prior Peter, the author of this blog, was appointed Prior in August of 2004.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

You are hot and I am minus one working arm. So, to preserve the bond of peace, today’s homily will be brief.

In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with the mystery of God’s overflowing generosity as well as His attention to detail. Put another way we have God’s grandeur and His economy. Both of these aspects of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence escape our attention much of the time, perhaps because they challenge the habitual human scale in which we live our daily lives. God’s generosity is a challenge for two reasons: first, it suggests that we, too, need to be generous, even when what we have clearly seems insufficient to the task at hand. We’d prefer to conserve and not take our chances that God will catch us if we extend ourselves. The second challenge of God’s generosity suggests that we stop being anxious about tomorrow and trust God. If we have eyes to see it, God lavishes everything we need for fullness of life on the world at every moment. In a strikingly beautiful image, Pope Benedict once summed up God’s generosity being shown to us in His willingness to scatter thousands of acorns in the confidence that one of them will become an oak.

Yet this brings us to another challenge from the opposite side. Is God wasteful? According to Jesus’ instructions, not at all. “Let nothing go to waste.” God’s greatness is such that He cares for all things, especially the smallest. This is a challenge to us who can only observe a few things at a time. For many of us crowds are scary things, and the sheer amount of people in the world today is frightening. Can God provide food for so many? I say yes, if humans weren’t so cruel to one another, but that is for another day. The point here is that because we can only come to know so many persons in our human capacity, we have a tendency to discount the importance of all kinds of persons whom we don’t know.

The scandal can be summed up another way. At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus calls the first disciples to follow Him. We find in today’s Gospel a whole throng following Him. Surely this can’t be the same kind of following, can it? Why not? Are these people hungering for the Kingdom of God any less than the fishermen were? So, too, we might be tempted either to discount to discipleship of the weak and weary, or to excuse ourselves from discipleship because God hasn’t called us to be a religious, or a priest, or a superior, or even just a devout person. Yet however it is that we have come to be followers of Christ, Jesus loves us and cares for us, each individually. His concern and compassion go out to us and all in need. All praise to Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.

Friday, July 28, 2006

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.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Homily for the Wedding of Mary Bellmar and Peter Olson - Dom Peter

There is a good deal of discussion today about the nature of marriage. There are many who are skeptical about entering into marriage because of the difficulties involved in staying faithful to promises in a postmodern world. Yet what we come together to witness to and to celebrate today is something greater than the promises that Peter and Mary are about to exchange. We will come to that in a moment; I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these promises are insignificant even from a natural human standpoint.

We live in an era whose default assumptions are materialistic, where we have tried to find a cause for every effect, and find these causes in nature, in the physical make-up of the universe and by extension in the human person. By such an analysis, the drive to wed is reduced to biological impulses and the decision to stay wed is often reduced to mere expediency: in a cost analysis, it is more effective for individuals to form communities to satisfy mutual needs.

What we experience in life, in making promises and struggling to keep them, is something with far more dignity than simple survival. By entering into covenants with one another, we take a disorganized universe and we give it predictability. No matter what happens to you from this day forward, Peter, Mary will be there to share it with you. And Mary, you will not have to look around for someone with whom you can share joy or sorrow: you have the certainty of knowing that God has given Peter to you for this.

And there I have slipped and brought God in already. Certainly this is the natural dignity of marriage: it is the privileged place where new life enters the world, where community is first formed by the irrevocable bond of matrimony.

And yet, what we claim takes place here today surpasses even this great dignity of marriage. For our Biblical tradition claims that married love is the privileged image of the love of God for the human race and more specifically the image of the love of Jesus Christ for His Church. In other words, you are each called upon to imitate the fidelity of God Himself, Peter by laying down his life for Mary and Mary by a sacrificial gift of self to Peter and both of you toward your children. By your fidelity, you will make the Good News of the gospel, a gospel of forgiveness, love, reconciliation and restoration more credible.

Such a goal would surely be impossible were it not for the fact that we believe that God is with us here and now, pledging to you His help in times of struggle. We should also note that St. Paul exhorts us to rejoice especially in hope. This echoes our Lord’s teaching that we should rejoice precisely when we suffer trials for our faith. These trials are the times when your love will be tested, purified and strengthened. To allow this work to go on, you will need faith, hope and love. Faith that God is with you, hope that God intends to see you through and love of God and each other.

From this it is clear that you must be a husband and wife of prayer, as we see modeled for us in the story of Tobias and Sarah. In order to give yourselves completely to one another, you have the responsibility to be wholly who you are, whom intends you to be. And we say with the Council of Vatican II, that Jesus Christ reveals you to yourselves. Stay with Him as you stay with each other and He will strengthen your love. While this is a time of general uncertainty with regard to marriage in our culture, but it is also a time of unprecedented resources and creative thought in the Church. Meditate frequently on the high calling you have received in this sacrament, and make friends of the Church’s great teachers in this regard, especially our late Holy Father Pope John Paul and our present Pope Benedict.

For those of us here witnessing, it is incumbent upon us to support Mary and Peter not only today by our presence, but by our continued encouragement and our own efforts to live lives of fidelity and holiness. This is a good time for each of us to renew our promises, whether they be in baptism, in marriage, in religious vows or in confirmation, either Christian or Jewish. In this spirit, we can be especially thankful for the examples of married fidelity we see in both sets of parents, and we remember especially the example of Charles Bellmar who, though not able to be with us in the body, surely is with us in spirit, both in his example as husband and father, as well as in the mystical communion we share with all the baptized whenever we gather to celebrate the sacraments of the Church.

I hope that you will all permit me, under the circumstances, to end with some musical remarks. I met Peter nearly seventeen years ago now, hard to imagine, but it was in the Motet Choir at the University of Chicago. Later, we would tour the country together in a barbershop quartet and found the first-ever avant garde barbershop ensemble along with Ben Sussman-Collins, today's Best Man. About that time, I met Mary at our parish, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park, also in choir.

Were I aiming to found a choir today, I would think of founding my bass section and my soprano section on the two of you. Not only are you excellent musicians, but you are team players. When we’ve sung together over the years, I know that you listen, that you are conscientious about the right notes and the right rhythms and about watching the conductor. Don’t ever let those skills flag! Be listeners first and foremost: to each other and to Christ. The beauty of a good marriage well-lived is not unlike the beauty of a motet well-performed; indeed, it is certainly greater. Both of them open up those around us to a greater love and zeal for life. Beautiful music stirs the heart and an open home full of life, love and hospitality is also a convincing sign that there is more to life than biological laws. May God abundantly bless you and may your lives be a song of praise in God’s service.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

Some years ago, I had a discussion with a young man who was looking into the possibility of a Benedictine vocation. He had one lingering reservation, though. As he put it, “If the Benedictines go insane, who will stop them?” I was surprised, though encouraged by this question, as he obviously did not think we had yet attained insanity, though why corporate insanity in a religious order shouldn’t affect the superior is not clear to me.

He asked this because Benedictines are technically not an order. Each house has considerable autonomy, and the highest ranking abbot of the Benedictines, the Abbot Primate, has absolutely no canonical authority over any monks whatsoever. I head Abbot Primate Notker Wolf speak last week, and his testimony to this was quite moving. “Being powerless,” he said, and I paraphrase from memory, “is a blessing. People are not afraid to talk to me. I can look at people face-to-face as a brother and equal and not look down at them as an authority.”

Of course, while on one hand we love a man such as Abbot Notker who proclaims his powerlessness, on the other, we grow impatient when the Benedictines go test the limits of sanity while he merely plays his flute.

More frustrating is when we ask God to do something about our distress and He seems not to. St. Paul asks this thorn in his flesh to be removed, and three times is denied. More distressing yet is the picture in today’s gospel, where Jesus Himself is literally powerless, ‘unable’ to do anything powerful. This points to a surprising fact about the human person. Jesus has shown absolute mastery over the demons thus far in Mark’s gospel. Jesus controls the sea, heals sickness and even has mastery over death, as we saw last Sunday. When it comes to having mastery over the human race, however, we see God’s limitations, as it were.

Can it be that we human beings, created in God’s image, are really more powerful in some way than the demons, who seem unable to resist God’s authority? Certainly as creators and artisans, the human race has shown itself to be quite masterful toward nature in recent centuries, and that mastery continues to increase at a frightening pace. As space shuttles explore far away regions, new advancements in biology make it possible to engineer human and animal life, almost to build new human beings out of the dust, the otherwise inert material of genetic molecules. We shape not only the bodies of human beings, but by the rapid flow of information, we can shape minds and hearts as well. We human beings are powerful indeed.

Yet for all our power, misery remains. Faced with the outrages of great masses of humanity starving, killing and maiming each other in wars, dying of preventable disease, or young people even in our own affluent society killing or injuring themselves in large numbers, we are right to feel a certain indignation with the promises of the powerful of the world. In fact, it is not uncommon for many in recent centuries to go right to the top. If there is a God, why can’t He fix these problems? Or if He can, why does He not? If He does not, perhaps He is not such a good God. Today’s gospel offers us a way of answering these puzzles.

We are not the first to ask these questions. Israel was a people formed by an astounding and unprecedented rescue by God of a small band of descendents of Abraham at the Red Sea. God routed the most powerful human force of the time, the army and chariots of Pharaoh in Egypt and utterly destroyed them. Despite this, within a few days, the people were complaining in the desert. Some gratitude! When new dangers would arise, coming first from the Philistines, then Assyria and Babylon, the people would cry out to God: give new signs and work new wonders! Show forth the strength of your right hand and arm! After some time, these appeals apparently stopped working. Last week, Jesus raised the dead. This week: ho-hum, here’s the carpenter: what have you done for us lately? Jesus is hardly able to work even simple cures. Such is the power of doubt, ridicule, thinking that we know all there is to know about someone already.

And herein lies our challenge. How often do we locate the agency of our sufferings in someone other person? “If only he or she would change (or better, if only God would do something about him or her), my life would be easier.” This line of thought blissfully obscures the fact that we think we know the solution. And by the power of our pre-emptive summary of the situation, we foreclose the possibility of change, healing and reconciliation. We foreclose on these possibilities because we are acting powerfully, as if defining the situation once and for all based on our own inclinations.

If we are able to grasp, at least intellectually, the necessity of loving and forgiving others, we might advance to a different but no less troubling conclusion: that no matter how hard we try, we cannot forgive, cannot bring ourselves to love. In such a case, we might lose hope. But what we are in effect saying is, “I am powerless to change myself, and what’s more, I do not really want to change because that would mean that I was wrong all along, nor do I think that God can change me.” In other words, we are unhappy about being powerless because it wounds our pride.

Why not accept powerlessness as a gift, as St. Paul and Abbot Notker suggest to us? Jesus was not able to work cures in His home town, but He retained the power to do something greater: to forgive sins and change lives. But He exercised this power by consenting to the cross, to powerlessness. And this He did not do grumbling about the state of affairs in the fallen world, angry that it had to happen to Him, but, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, heedless of its shame.” Do we take enough time to reflect on the joy that God sets before us?

Human beings are powerful enough to resist God: what will happen when we relent and trust God? If our exercising of power by rejecting Christ has been turned by the cross into our salvation, what will our embracing of powerlessness be but eternal blessedness? All praise to Jesus Christ, seated at the right of the throne of God forever and ever. Amen.