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Monday morning the council of the Order, with the Superior’s consent, approved my request to make my first profession of the three-fold monastic vow of obedience, stability, and conversion of my life to the monastic way of life. God willing, I will make my profession on All Saints’ Day, taking the name Aidan, after St. Aidan of Lindisfarne.

How fitting that today is the Feast of St. Aidan, who died in 651. Aidan began his monastic life at a young age at the monastery founded by St. Columba on Iona. Of Irish descent, he is remembered as one of the great early Celtic saints. And, indeed, more so than any other, he connects the Christianities of Ireland, Scotland, and England.

The story goes that King Oswald of Northumbria sent to Iona for a missionary to convert his people to Christianity. The first monk who took the mission returned in frustration, complaining that the people of Northumbria were hard-hearted and set in their pagan superstitions. When asked how he began his mission, this nameless monk said that he told them of the need for repentance and of the fires of hell. Aidan responded that missionary work must begin with an account of the deep and abiding love of Christ for all people. He was then sent to Northumbria himself.

 

 

Aidan’s success in establishing the Christian Church in Northumbria flowed directly from his gentleness and his humility. After founding a monastery on Lindisfarne, he next set up schools for the local children that used the vernacular. He was famous for his insistence on walking his diocese rather than riding a horse as was customary for bishops and nobles. When King Oswald gave him fine horses, he sold them and purchased freedom for slaves. Oswald once reproached him for this practice, telling him that if he wanted money Oswald would give it to him, but that these horses were the finest in the land and Aidan should ride rather than sell them. Aidan rebuked him, asking “Do you care more for the child of a mare than for the child of God?” Needless to say, the king relented.

It strikes me that Aidan’s proximity to the ground was both the foundation and the reflection of his humility. “Humility,” after all, comes from “humus” (also the root of “human”). To be humble is to be earthy, rooted in the reality of our nature as created beings, a part of the earth that supports and sustains our lives. Aidan never lost sight of that connection, as his insistence on walking like a peasant underlines. It was his connection to the earth and to earthiness, that allowed his heart to remain soft to the needs of those he served, and that allowed the fire of Christ’s love to burn in his heart.

 

 

I find Aidan’s example of gentleness, humility, and ardor for the reign of God incredibly compelling. He embodies for me the hope of what a monastic life, faithfully lived, can offer. So often my own zeal for justice and for the kingdom of God can lead to self-righteousness, judgmentalism, and harshness. If justice isn’t tempered by mercy and love, it will never really lead to wholeness and healing. I pray that as I live my own life, Aidan’s example will continually return me to my own need for mercy and thereby soften my harshness.

The name Aidan is Gaelic for “little fire.” The little fire that Aidan became was an icon of the raging fire of Christ’s love for the whole creation. Like his Lord, Aidan poured out his life for his flock. Rather than consuming him, that kenosis fed the flame of his life, making it burn brighter. May we all be guided by such examples.

Blessed Aidan, breaker of chains and icon of Christ’s firey love, pray for us.

 

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Gardening demands a quality of attention rarely found outside of poetry. Perhaps that is why so many extraordinary writers have also been gardeners. The gardener, like the poet, must pay attention to the minutest details of her garden, from soil texture to the striations and cracking of tree bark. But she must also see the invisible: the total picture of what her garden can be and mean.

 

 

My work as monastery groundskeeper is teaching me this quality of attention. I have learned, for instance, that soil can be both powdery and rocky at the same time. Further, I have noticed the particular beauty of the way that water beads up on powdery soil, and also my frustration that that water never actually sinks in to slake the thirsty roots below its surface. I have come to see that the great chunks of rock I dig out of the packed earth with astonishing frequency provide the perfect platform for iris, who seem to adore twining their rhizomes every which way. This summer in particular I have come to appreciate an exuberant swath of Queen Anne’s lace (that sometimes weed) when it gives me one more year to figure out what to do with a certain spot of the perennial border. There is nothing truly good or bad in the garden. All things have their beauty and their use.

I remind myself of this axiom when I find myself feeling overwhelmed by infestations of insects, mold, and other blights on the landscape. These grounds survived without me for millennia, and if I don’t eradicate every Japanese beetle from the property, the roses will still bloom next year. Every problem is, after all, an opportunity to learn a new skill, to see in a new way.

 

 

Lately I have been learning to prune. I have found little in the gardening world that so stretches my ability truly to pay attention, as pruning trees. As such, I find the work engrossing and fulfilling. To prune, one first has to notice all the dead wood in the tree. Just when you think you’ve cut it all out, there’s more. It’s amazing to me that I could have spent many years walking past these same trees and never have looked at them closely enough to notice how many bare branches they hold.

 

 

After I have cut out the dead wood, I have to look closely at the shape of the tree. Where do branches cross? Where do limbs grow inward? What shape does the tree want to take naturally? This kind of seeing is even more difficult than looking out all the dead wood, because it requires me to pay attention at the same time to the movement of individual branches and the shape of the entire tree.

The final step, though, proves most challenging of all. What will the tree look like in ten or twenty years, when the small twigs protruding from its branches are branches in their own right? How will the cuts I make now, or don’t make, affect the tree–and, indeed, the entire landscape of the grounds–in the years to come? This kind of seeing requires not just attention, but imagination.

 

 

My gardening makes me a more attentive person in the rest of my life. I am quicker to see opportunity where once I would only have seen problems and slower to judge the rights and wrongs of how I or others live. Most important, though, I am more attuned to the profligate, wanton abundance of beauty in this world. And I am more apt to sing its praise.

 

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My favorite place to sit in the monastery is the little cloister, where I can pray with the white oak at the heart of our grounds. This oak is nearly 300 years old. It had been growing in the same spot for over 100 years when our community first moved to this property, and we constructed our buildings around it. When what is now the guesthouse was the monastery and the only building in the complex, the high altar faced the oak. When we constructed the Middle House and St. Augustine’s Church in 1920, we built the new buildings so that they enclosed the oak on three sides and provided a space to meditate with it. I have yet to meet a visitor to the monastery who doesn’t immediately sense the spiritual power of this incredible tree.

 

 

As I have reflected on and prayed with our oak, I have taken to calling her the grandmother oak. I cannot help anthropomorphizing. Our oak reminds me very much of my grandmother: wise, stable, strong, flexible, beautiful in her age. Her very strength and stature provide sustenance for so much other life. The squirrels eat her acorns; moss grows on her gnarled limbs; and the swallows build nests in her leafy top. I have learned a great deal from this tree about what it means to be stable in a monastic community and a Christian life. Grandmother oak has also helped me lately with my grief.

On Christmas Eve last year my grandmother died. The timing of her death was poignant and appropriate. As the world waited in vigil for the birth of Jesus, I waited in vigil by my grandmother’s bed for her rebirth and homecoming. My grandmother, who had been a powerful force for good in my life, was returning to her God, her 85 years’ labor over.

 

 

She was a woman of quiet faith. I asked her about a year before she died if she prayed. She looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question imaginable. “Of course I do,” she said. “Oh,” I said. “You never mention it.” “What’s there to say?” she asked. “It’s between me and God.” That was her: unshakable, matter-of-fact, deeply faithful.

When I remember my grandmother, the impression I have is of a woman whose strength lay primarily in her solidity and stability. She was not inflexible, but she didn’t bend with every wind that blew her way, either of spirituality or of taste or of culture. She grew with the times, but she retained what today seems an almost old-fashioned view of life, a view whose simplicity belies its depth.

In a book she gave me when I was a child, she wrote this about her ideals:

Most of all, I have tried to be truthful, even though sometimes the truth hurts. Family has always been extremely important to me. I have tried to maintain strong family ties to all our family members. I have tried to live a Christian life which I think is the most important thing a person can do. I have tried to live a life that would make my family proud of me and that makes me feel good about myself.

My grandmother rarely called attention to herself. She didn’t need to. She lived with such integrity that it ultimately didn’t much matter to her what other people thought of her. Once she had a sense of what was right, she was unwavering in her commitment to that good. It amazed me that at 80 years old, after a lifetime as a Southern Baptist, she became an Episcopalian. As she said at the time, she couldn’t bear to be a member of a church so hateful toward gay and lesbian people. The example of her integrity has profoundly impacted the way I try to live my own life.

 

 

In many ways, I can see seeds of my monastic vocation in my grandmother’s quiet approach to her faith and her life. She embodied stability, one of the components of the Benedictine vow. Like our own grandmother oak, we monks seek to grow in one place for the rest of our lives. This place is not primarily physical. Rather, it is the spiritual space of our life in the monastic community, bounded both by our threefold vow (obedience, stability, and conversion of life) and our relationship with Christ. We don’t seek rigidity, but nor are we swayed by every fad that comes along, spiritual or temporal.

Stability lends a kind of gravitas to one’s life. By gravitas I mean not heaviness, but rather seriousness, a commitment to encountering the Truth and to allowing one’s life to be changed and molded by that encounter. Stability allows the monk to point toward the truly important things in life, which is to say, to the rushing of Christ’s love and life into the world. Stability is ultimately a way of allowing the Truth to claim one’s life totally.

I pray that over the course of my life as a monk I will become more and more like my grandmother, like our oak. I pray that I will become a strong and stable pillar and a channel of Christ’s redeeming love. I pray we all will.

In loving memory of Mary Carolyn Evans Owen, 8 October 1930 – 24 December 2015.

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There is no way to escape it. Gardening is weeding.

Thomas Keller, the famous chef behind The French Laundry and Per Se, has said that if one doesn’t enjoy, or at least appreciate, the act of cutting vegetables, then one will never enjoy cooking. So it is with weeding, I’m afraid.

I say “I’m afraid,” because I really dread weeding. Of all gardening activities, it is my least favorite, the one I avoid until there is nothing else left on my to-do list. When I start, I find it actually does have a contemplative dimension to it. Like the life of conversion, if I look at the whole of our flower beds and the thousands–nay, millions–of weeds trying to out-compete the asters and iris, I feel completely overwhelmed, immobilized by the enormity of the task. But if I can focus on the weed right in front of me, and if I can ignore the high probability that next week another weed will have taken its place (despite all the mulch), the task becomes a kind of meditation.

The spirituality of weeding is one of imperfection. There is no possible way to rid the garden of weeds, no matter how much effort I put into it. Especially at this time of the year, with heavy rains followed by warm days full of sunshine, the weeds take over. I am forced at such times to confront my assumption that the garden is only beautiful if it is perfect. Really, the assumption that I need to confront is that I am only beautiful if I am perfect.

In his book on humility, A Guide to Living in the Truth, Michael Casey writes of the importance of patience to the spiritual life:

One of the qualities we find emphasized in the ancient accounts of the martyrs was their joy. There is no question of finding pleasure in pain. Rather, it is the joy that comes when everything is lost but love perdures. We always suspect that love attaches itself to our good qualities and we fear that it will be lost if they decline. In the days of our abundance we can never experience the unconditional quality of divine love. We secretly believe that something good in us attracts the love of God. It is often hard to go on believing when we discover how unlovable we are. But how great is the joy that follows the discovery that God’s love precedes and prescinds from any human love. We are not defeated; Christ’s love for us ensures the ultimate victory. (p. 123)

It is not my perfect goodness or my eradication of the spiritual weeds of greed, judgment, self-righteousness, and all the other shortcomings that plague me that earns me God’s love. Nor does my effort to create the perfect spiritual landscape somehow make me more worthy of God’s loving care than I would be without that effort. This kind of outlook, subtle as it can sometimes be, makes an idol of spiritual work. I earn God’s love from my own strength rather than relying on and celebrating God’s grace working in and through me.

If I take the garden as my evidence, I might even conclude that the distinction between weed and flower is one that I make from the limitation of my human estimation. God pours the rain down on the aster and the mugwort, just alike.

I’m not quite ready to let the mugwort take over the gardens. But, perhaps I would do well to listen to the wisdom of one of our garden volunteers who recently told me that she loves to weed because she sees in flowers the face of God. By weeding she is giving God’s face room to shine and breathe. Perhaps clearing that kind of spiritual space is the only task with which I need concern myself. I don’t have to worry about getting rid of all the weeds. I can simply pull up, for now, and with God’s help, whatever crowds out the glory of God’s light shining from my face, understanding that some other weed will soon take the place of the one I’ve just pulled, and trusting that, in the end, God will take care of the rest.

 

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During last week’s garden retreat, one of our volunteers asked me about the social aspects of gardening. The question gave me pause. I am, largely, a solitary gardener. As such, I’m in tune with the many ways that gardening bolsters my prayer life and aids in my conversion. I also give space in my reflections to the role of gardening in healing both my own wounded places and those of the wider world. But I rarely have the experience of gardening as corporate prayer.

 

 

This volunteer and his wife, who was also on the retreat, shared with our group the importance of gardening to their married life and the many ways that working the soil together draws them closer. Others on our retreat named similar experiences. Two of our group were a mother-daughter team who had come on the retreat together as a way of sharing a time of contemplative garden work. Another retreatant shared his experience gardening with indigenous people using ancient techniques, and another about gardening with juvenile convicts.

 

 

These stories enriched our time together by illuminating the sacramental force of our garden work. And they reminded me that we do not garden for or with ourselves alone. Gardening is a way of channeling our creativity, which is to say a way of inviting the Holy Spirit to flow through our bodies and to guide our hands in bringing forth beauty from the created world. This experience of openness to the Spirit is extremely intimate, and it deepens our awareness of the fundamental unity of body, mind, and spirit. When we share that experience with another or others, it nourishes a kind of intimacy that words alone cannot touch. At the same time, we grow together in relationship with one another and with God.

The healing that comes from this kind of intimacy with one another, ourselves, the land itself, and God is subtle and not immediately apparent. And yet, over time, our communal working and praying attunes us to the quiet movement of the Spirit within and among us, knitting us more and more fully together.

 

 

This conjoining of our spirits with another through the Holy Spirit was obvious on the last morning of our retreat. The seven of us gathered under our grandmother oak in the small cloister. Holding hands, we spoke aloud our thanks, hopes, praise, and awe for the work of God unfolding in and through us. We then laid hands on one another as we anointed each other’s hands with holy oil, much as we had anointed the soil with our sweat in the previous three days.

 

 

Looking into the tears in one volunteer’s eyes I could see my own soul reflected there, my own gratitude and my own need for the grace that God so freely gives to us all. Hearing the tremble of another guest’s voice as she spoke aloud her praise for the beauty of God’s creation, I could hear my own awe and reverence. I believe we were all more whole after our few days together.

As our guesthouse prepares to close for August, I offer my thanks for the support of all those who have labored to bring forth beauty on our grounds over the years, and especially to this year’s garden volunteers: Wendy, Mike, Yanick, Randy, Kelly, Jacob, Robin, Robin (there were two!), Puck, Steve, Beth (twice!), Brenda, Lorraine, Hannah, Tessa, Bo, Sunny, Stuart, Meg, and Ken.

If you’re interested in joining future garden volunteer retreats, please check our retreat listings.

 

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