by Albert Holtz
We were both watching a bright red cardinal that was now alone at the bird feeder. He took two nervous pecks at the seeds and then darted away. I smelled the aroma drifting from the coffee pot, and noticed the way the early morning sun was using a thin curtain to paint patterns on the windowsill.
“Isn’t life good?” I thought half aloud. Nancy had heard the comment, though. She looked right into my eyes and smiled.
“Yup,” she said with absolute conviction, “It certainly is!”
Reflection
1. Think of an event, perhaps even an unpleasant one, that gave you a better appreciation of the things and people around you.
2. Think of some good intention you’ve had for awhile but have not acted on. Maybe now is a kairos, the “acceptable time” for you to finally put it into practice?
Sacred Scripture
Chronos is found in Matt 2:7; John 5:6; and Acts 18:20.
Kairos is found in Mark 12:12; Acts 14:17; and 1 Cor 4:5.
Rule of Benedict
Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven that every day calls out this charge: “If you hear his voice today, do not harden your hearts,” and again: “You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches.” And what does he say? “Come and listen to me, sons; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you” (Prologue, vv. 9–13).
1. Bothe (bo-ay-theh´-o), “to help, assist;” from bo, “a shout for aid,” and the, “to run.”
2. When Jesus assures him that everything is possible to one who has faith, the boy’s father cries out, “I do believe, help [bothe] my unbelief ” (Mark 9: 24).
3. The plural form of the noun botheia (bo-ay´-thi-ah), “help, assistance.”
4. In Matthew’s earlier version of the miracle, this verse reads “sit down on the green grass” (Matthew 14:19).
5. The verb anapipt (ah-nah-pip´-to), “to lean backwards, recline, dine,” comes from ana, “back, backwards,” + pipt, “fall,” and means literally “to fall backwards.”
6. This posture explains how a woman could “stand behind Jesus at his feet” during a banquet and begin to wash his feet with her tears (Luke 7:38).
7. The adjective oligopistos (ol-ig-op´-is-tos) comes from oligos (ol-ee´-gos), “few, little” and pistis (pis´-tis), “faith, trust.”
8. Chronos (khron’-os), “clock time, time as measurable, divisible into units”; it is found in such English words as “chronological” and “chronometer.”
9. Kairos (kahee-ros´), “time as an event, an occasion; season.”
10. When Jesus walked up to a fig tree, he found no fruit on it because “it was not the season [kairos] for figs” (Mark 11:13).
CHAPTER FIVE
WELCOMING MYSTERY
Our Community Grows Smaller
When I joined the monastery in 1962, monasticism—like most other religious institutions—was riding the crest of a great wave of new members. This was the era when American religious orders of both men and women launched ambitious building projects to house the scores of postulants and novices who were pouring in, and to provide more room for their thriving schools and colleges. After a consulting firm projected that our community in Newark would soon double in size, we hired an architect to make preliminary sketches of a spacious new monastery to accommodate all those new monks—a new monastery that was never to be built. Like all other American religious, we just assumed that things would keep getting bigger and better indefinitely, so no one was expecting what happened next.
The 1960s was the era of John F. Kennedy and the Peace Corps, the new thinking of the Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, and Vietnam War protests. The world was changing rapidly, and religious life along with it. Within the space of a few years, not only did the flood of new vocations dry up, but vast numbers of religious and priests both old and young began leaving their religious calling in favor of the lay state. Our monastery suffered the same dramatic losses as other institutions.
The decline in numbers started in the 1960s, and in the intervening years, despite our efforts, there have been precious few people joining our monastery—nowhere near enough to replace the members who have died or have left. The projections for the future are sobering. How my brothers and I view the present and the future of our shrinking community and how we choose to respond will certainly reveal a lot about our faith in God.
The sections that follow offer some reflections on the way we are trying to respond to and grow from the challenge.
17. The Other Side of God
WE WERE AT SUPPER IN THE REFECTORY, fifteen monks at long wooden tables. Five tall windows lining the wall to my left gave a view of the cloister garden. There was always something to see in the garden at any time of year—especially the bright yellow flowers in summer, and the muted tones of chrysanthemums in the fall. My favorite is winter when the grass and shrubs are hidden under the graceful curves of deep, drifting snow.
The brother who was table-reader for the week had just finished reading a chapter from the Rule of Benedict, and was pausing before continuing the latest table-reading book, a biography of Abbot Boniface Wimmer, who founded the first Benedictine abbey in America. Across the room two monks were sitting at a table that was set for eight. I said to myself that when I first came here in 1969, there had been no empty places; there had been well over thirty of us then. But our community had been getting smaller for years now, a combination of older members passing away and no new ones coming to take their places.
This was the down side of each Benedictine abbey being totally independent—we monks don’t get switched around to different monasteries, but stay in the same one our whole life.
A quick movement in the corner of my eye drew my attention back to the garden. The blustery winds of hurricane Floyd were causing a wild scene, whipping the shrubs back and forth and bending the taller flowers flat to the ground. Although the sky was ominously dark, it hadn’t started raining yet. But the predicted gusts of up to sixty miles an hour had started an hour ago during mass.
Over near the window I noticed more empty places at tables, eloquent reminders that the God who had once given us comfortable prosperity was now leading us through some trying times. That evening there seemed to be no sign of the gracious God who had smiled down on us in the boom years of the early 1960s. Or maybe, it occurred to me, we were just seeing another side of God, one that we were not so familiar with.
The wind was now whistling in violent bursts, rippling the screens outside the tightly closed windows. “The sound as of a strong, driving wind,” I said to myself, echoing Luke’s description of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
I started to think of the ways in which that story points out the other, unsettling side of God. Those tongues of fire that appear above each apostle’s head (Acts 2:3) are a good example. Fire is never used in Scripture as a symbol of peace or contentment; it is a means of purifying or even destroying. In Isaiah “tongues of fire” is an image of destructive power: “As the tongue of fire devours the stubble. . . .” (Isaiah 5:24). The fire at Pentecost warns us, the way the Letter to the Hebrews does, that “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29).1 For those of us who have ever felt the searing, purifying fire of God’s sudden and unwelcome intervention in our lives, those tongues of divine fire are hardly a soothing image!
A particularly loud gust of wind made several heads look up from their supper and glance uneasily toward the window. I smiled as I thought that this is what it must have sounded like at Pentecost: “They were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong, driving wind, and it filled the entire house where they were” (Acts 2:1–2). That wind is a clear warning that what is about to happen in that room is not going to be soothing or calming—in fact it will be anything but. The Greek says literally “And
there came suddenly out of heaven a sound as of a rushing, violent wind” (Acts 2:2). Luke uses the word “violent,” biaios,2 to evoke a sense of energy and power unleashed. He uses it later in Acts when a captain deliberately runs his ship aground during a fierce storm and the stern is shattered to pieces “under the violence [bia] of the waves” (Acts 27:41). This kind of destructive force describes the sort of wind that Luke is talking about at Pentecost: The Holy Spirit is not a gentle breeze, but a gale force wind.
Hurricane Floyd continued to howl in the background as the reader continued the story of Archabbot Boniface Wimmer. It seems that there was dissention among the monks of his monastery, Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Two monks had written to Rome to complain about the conditions in their monastery. As a result, an official letter had been sent to Wimmer from Rome:
The letter struck Wimmer like a lightning bolt. The seventy-three-year-old abbot reeled back from the blow in shock and dismay and wrote to Abbot Innocent Wolf of Kansas: “Father Maurice and Father Prior have brought accusations against me at the Vatican to the Pope. They have made charges for a hearing. The affair will probably end with my resignation.”3
Sometimes, I thought to myself as I listened to the reading, the wind of the Spirit roars into the life of a community or into an individual’s life to upset our cozy existence and uproot our favorite prejudices and assumptions about God and about everything else. Our community is certainly seeing this other side of God, and we have to keep praying that we will stay open to the work of the Spirit that troubles the waters, since that’s the same Spirit that gives new life and renews the face of the earth. As the storm continued outside, the reader continued the story of the struggles of the beleaguered archabbot and his community in 1871, and I, noticing the empty chairs again, wondered what the Spirit might be up to in our community in 1999.
Reflection
1. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters” (Gen 1:1–2 NAB). Early Christian writers were fond of interpreting the wind troubling the waters as the Spirit, God’s creative energy at work. When has God’s troubling, creative wind blown in your life? How did you react?
2. Do you agree that the present upheavals in the church are opportunities for new growth? Have you experienced this in your own dealings with the church?
Sacred Scripture
Both the noun “violence” [bia] and the adjective “violent” [biaios] are found Matt 11:12; the related verb “to apply force” is in Luke 16:16.
Wisdom of the Desert
Abba Sisoes the Theban said to his disciple: “Tell me what you see in me and in turn I will tell you what I see in you.” His disciple said to him: “You are good in soul, but a little harsh.” The old man said to him: “You are good but your soul is not tough.”4
18. Learning How to Worry
I WAS APPOINTED THE ABBEY’S DIRECTOR OF VOCATIONS, charged with both welcoming inquirers interested in joining the monastery and publicizing Newark Abbey so that people would know that there is a Benedictine abbey a few miles from New York City. We advertised, we developed a website, and we ran Holy Week retreats. As the years went on, however, we got fewer and fewer inquiries—it was clear that despite our best efforts at recruitment, the community was still getting smaller and smaller.
I used to worry a lot, not only about the lack of new candidates but also about my jobs in school: Would I get all the students entered onto the correct rosters? Would I have the schedules printed out in time? Would I be able to get my own classes prepared? Then, some years ago I was given a sabbatical year during which I traveled around Europe and South America staying in monasteries and then worked for a month in a parish in Bolivia. On the first day of this eleven-month journey, the moment I landed in Paris I felt myself begin to relax. No deadlines, no lists to be printed out, no urgent phone calls to be returned. Slowly the tight spring inside me began to unwind.
During those months away I learned what it felt like to not be worried all the time, and I resolved that when I got home I would try my best not to start worrying again. When I returned to the monastery refreshed and relaxed at the end of that year, I wasn’t sure if I would really be able to keep my resolution to stop worrying so much. Then Father Edwin, the Headmaster, told me, “This was one of the best years the school’s ever had.” That really settled it for me; if St. Benedict’s Prep could have such a great year when I wasn’t even around, then obviously things didn’t really depend on me that much and it made no sense for me to be so anxious about my work.
And so I did indeed stop worrying so much, and no longer approached every situation or task as a crisis, whether in the monastery, the school, or anywhere else.
You can imagine my bafflement, then, when I found out not long ago that Saint Paul made worrying an important prerequisite for entering the kingdom. The discovery began when I was reading the familiar story of Martha and Mary.
When I came to Jesus’ remark, “Martha, Martha, you worry and fret over many things” (Luke 10:41), I didn’t recognize either of the two Greek verbs. But since I knew the story I figured that the first one must mean, “to worry,” and I decided that as a recovering worrier I might find this word worth looking up and getting to know better. So I reached for my Greek lexicon.
The first thing I found was that the Greek word merimna, “to worry” was based on the verb meriz, meaning “to divide, to distribute.”5 Behind the New Testament idea of “worrying,” then, was the notion of “being divided”6—worrying divides our attention by steering us away from other perhaps more important concerns of life. This is what happened to Martha, the harried hostess in the gospel story: She had become distracted by so many worries that Jesus, her guest, had tried to calm her down. Since his itinerant ministry depended on the hospitality of people like Martha and Mary who took him into their homes, he was not criticizing her for making the necessary arrangements but for her attitude. The Greek says: “Martha, Martha, you are worrying and putting yourself in an uproar over many things, but only one is necessary” (Luke 10:41). Her attention was so divided by performing the many duties of hospitality that she completely forgot to accept the gift he was trying to give her: his divine presence.
I smiled ruefully when I remembered how my worrying used to divide me like that, too. I would be so busy fretting about balancing class sizes and solving schedule puzzles that I wouldn’t notice Jesus’ presence in the student who came to me to have his schedule fixed. If he needed a kind smile or a word of encouragement, he seldom got it from me—I was too preoccupied and anxious over “important things.”
But there was more to this New Testament idea of worrying. Out of curiosity I looked up the other passages where merimna, “to worry, to be anxious” is used. That was when I discovered Paul’s approach to anxiety: He taught that there is a kind of anxiousness that actually makes us better Christians. He tells the Christians of Philippi, for example, that he hopes to send them Timothy, the only one who is concerned about [merimna] them the way Paul himself is (Philippians 2:20). Then, in a list of his sufferings as an apostle, Paul proudly includes along with shipwrecks, floods, hunger, and thirst, his “anxiety [merimna] for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:28). And in a powerful passage he uses the word to indicate how we, as members of Christ’s body, should behave toward one another: “But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care [merimna] for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:24–25).
In Paul’s eyes, to be deeply concerned and even anxious about our brothers and sisters is, in fact, the way we ought to feel toward one another as Christians—it’s the only way for us to get into the kingdom!
So, when I’m having an occasional “Martha” moment, Jesus often finds a way to remind me, “Albert, Albert, you are worried and in an uproar about ma
ny things, but only one is necessary—to love me in the people around you.” And Paul adds, “You need to be concerned and anxious for all of them, especially the ones who are difficult or who demand a lot of your time and energy.”
The lack of new members coming to join our monastic community will continue to be a concern. So as my brothers and I continue living our community life by loving one another as best we can, we also keep looking for opportunities to attract new members. I suppose that there are steps that we’re missing at the moment, but worrying is not one of them.
Reflection
1. Think of one present worry of yours and reflect on how it “divides” your attention. What are the things it distracts you from?
2. In 1 Cor 12:25, Paul teaches that the members of Christ’s body should “worry about” each other. Who are the people you worry most about? How much of this worry is healthy concern, and how much is needless, distracting anxiety? Is there perhaps someone you worry about too much? On the other hand, is there another person for whom the Lord may want you to feel more concern than you do?
Sacred Scripture
In Matt 6:25–34 some form of merimna, “to worry” occurs half a dozen times, including “Let tomorrow worry about itself.”
The word “worry” appears as either a noun or a verb in Ps. 55:23; Matt 10:19; Mark 4:18–19; Luke 8:14, 12:26, 21:34; 2 Cor 11:28; and Phil 2:20, 4:6 (“Have no anxiety at all [= do not worry]”).
Rule of Benedict
Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving the poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received (Chapter 53, “The Reception of Guests,” v. 15).
19. Getting Passionate
THE MONK WHO WAS LEADER OF PRAYER for the week was bringing Morning Prayer to a close with the litany of intercessions:
“That God will bless Newark Abbey with new members we pray to the Lord.”