A Little Fire

I’m writing this post at 5am on Tuesday, November 8, Election Day. By the time it goes live at 5am on Wednesday, we will hopefully know who our new president will be. Here at the monastery, as everywhere else in America, we have experienced a great deal of anxiety about this election. The amount of hatred and anger that has surfaced has surprised me. Or, rather, it has surprised me how openly people have let their bigotry and hatred show. It has generally not been acceptable to display openly such violence and prejudice. I realize from talking with my non-white and non-male friends that they have always seen the racism and misogyny that have been on blatant display this year. It’s a large part of my privilege as a white man that I have not, even as I have sensed it lurking in our collective shadow.

Much as I am praying and hoping that Hillary Clinton is our new president, her victory in the electoral college will not fix our common woes. The violence, bigotry, despair, and anxiety we have experienced during this election cycle is ours to own and ours to transform. And it really is ours. We are all responsible for creating and maintaining a system that feeds on division, narcissism, and blame.

We are all connected to one another, bound up in the mystical body of Christ. This statement is not mere religious trope. It is metaphysical reality. Much as we might wish to divide ourselves from what we see as malignancy in our social body, to do so is to cut off essential pieces of our own body. If there is malignancy–and there certainly is–then it is in our own hearts as much as in the hearts of those people over there.

We can never divide ourselves from one another without dividing ourselves from Christ. That is why all social and political action must first arise from a deep inner experience of God that changes and softens our own hearts. Before we confront evil in the world around us, we must first see that such evil lives within us. We are not separate from those we would condemn, nor are they separate from God.

I am reminded of a retelling of the story of St. George and the dragon. There is a town being attacked by a dragon. Moved by the plight of these townsfolk, George rushes the dragon with his lance, fatally wounding him. But before the dragon falls, its claws cut George down, killing him. The townsfolk mourn George and bathe his body with their tears, bringing him back to life. The story ends by proclaiming that the healing of the world will come when the townsfolk then mourn for the dragon and bathe his body, too, with their tears.

None of us will be saved unless and until we are all saved. The sooner we learn not to divide ourselves from one another, the sooner we will move toward the healing that our world so desperately needs.

 

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In the Name of God. Amen.

I, Aidan William Owen, desiring to consecrate myself fully and entirely to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, make to Almighty God, before the whole company of heaven, and in the presence of you, my brothers, the threefold vow of Stability, Conversion of my ways to the monastic way of life, and Obedience in the Order of the Holy Cross, steadfastly intending to keep and observe the same for the period of one year, the Lord being my helper. And I pray for the grace and heavenly assistance of the Holy Spirit, for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of our Holy Father Benedict, of James our Founder, and of all the saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

All Saints’ Day

1 November 2016

 

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful, moving day. Thank you to all of you who have offered support, encouragement, love, and challenge over the last two years. May God, who has begun good works in each of us, bring them to completion!

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You can read Br. Robert James’ beautiful sermon for All Saints’ Day and my profession here.

Don Bisson tells the story of an elderly woman who had a dream one night in which she died and went to heaven. There she met Jesus, who asked her “how well did you love?” She responded by telling Jesus that he was asking her the wrong question. She went to church; she gave money to charitable causes; she did what she was supposed to do. She was a good person. Jesus replied, “Yes, but how well did you love?”

I find it so much easier to be good than I do to love well. Because of the particular circumstances of my childhood and the constellation of my personality, I have become very good at performing. I always got good grades, set the table correctly for dinner parties, and wore a smile on my face. And often with resentment and self-righteousness simmering just below the surface. It has been and continues to be the work of my adulthood to learn to love.

The facade of goodness so many of us Christians wear is nothing more than an effort to control God and avoid the poverty of our own suffering humanity. God is not interested in our goodness, paltry and false as it generally is. God would rather have real, human companions, alive and vibrant in their imperfection.

In his extraordinary book The Human Condition, Thomas Keating writes of the need to move beyond our facades and personas of goodness.

The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound. These make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come in and heal. What prevents us from being available to God is gradually evacuated. We keep getting closer and closer to our center. Every now and then God lifts a corner of the veil and enters into our awareness through various channels, as if to say, ‘Here I am. Where are you? Come and join me.’

Like the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears (Luke 7:36-50), we must approach God from our poverty. Only then will we find what we have truly been seeking: not a self-sufficient goodness, but the deep indwelling of the love of Christ. This love, planted in our hearts, grows–often slowly–but when we can stay out of our own way, it bears fruit far in excess of our meager efforts.

I think what we’re truly afraid of is not that God will abandon us if we aren’t good enough, but rather that, despite all of our efforts, hurts, and fears, despite everything that has sought to draw us away from God, ourselves, and one another, God has been there all the time, filling us beyond our imaginings with the abundant life of Christ. To let in such knowledge would truly annihilate our false self that with Milton’s Satan would rather “reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

I think we’re terrified to look down and see that really Christ is bathing our own feet with his tears, drying them with his hair, anointing them with kisses. What then?

As I prepare for my first profession on All Saints’ Day, I find myself facing into an unexpected challenge: allowing people to celebrate God’s work in me. The response to my invitations has been far and away more exuberant than I would have imagined, and I have friends flying in from as far away as London and Los Angeles. I say this exuberance is a challenge for me, because I notice in myself the urge to tell these friends, “don’t come all that way just for me!” I’d feel so much more comfortable if these friends had a conference in the area and just happened to have that Tuesday free to be with me and our community.

 

 

I’ve never known a person who doesn’t struggle with intimacy in some way, and many in the same way that I do. It’s difficult to allow others to care about us, and it’s difficult to allow ourselves to care about others. We all have our ways of defending against unwanted emotional proximity. And when we begin to engage and consciously to dismantle the barriers that separate us from others, the process becomes painful. It hurts to allow others to love us.

Why should this be so? On one level it makes no sense. We all want to love and be loved, to know and be known, don’t we? Well, yes and no. It’s like Jesus asking the man lying at the Sheep Gate “do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6) Jesus is asking that man–and us–a real question. Our answer is generally ambivalent. Do we truly want to be made whole? Do we truly want intimacy?

When we begin to answer yes to that question, and to move more closely to the deepest desires of our heart, we first have to encounter all the ways that we have resisted the movement of love in our lives. This process is as much one of grieving as anything else. In order to heal from our resistance to love, we have to see all the opportunities to love and be loved that we were unable to take because of our own hurt. We have to face into all the times we chose isolation over real relationships with real human beings.

 

 

Only honest, deep self-disclosure paired with the acceptance and love of another can begin to satisfy the gnawing emptiness inside us. Self-disclosure and the letting in of other people must first be founded on the encounter with Christ within us. The movement inward through prayer and the revelation of God in scripture and spiritual practice exposes our true identity, held in the heart of Christ, hidden in God. As Jeremiah writes, God writes his Word on the tablets of our hearts (cf. Jer. 31:33), literally inscribing our godly identity at the core of our being.

When we allow Christ to reveal to us our true identity in God, the life that wells up within us overflows its bounds. We then have too much life not to share it and celebrate it with others. Life fosters life, just as love fosters love. It really is a wanton denial of God’s abundant grace not to share our Christ-selves with one another. After all, we are ordained at our baptism to be food for the world, to ignite the whole creation with the fire of longing for God, and to share the Good News of God’s abundant life in Jesus Christ. There is enough hurt and hardship in this world. When it’s time to celebrate, we owe it to ourselves to celebrate and joyfully to invite others to join us.

Earlier this summer I took a two-part vegetable workshop at our local botanic garden. The class was fun and informative, and it was wonderful to spend time with other enthusiastic gardeners. But I left the workshop thinking, “Okay, great. But why would you worry so much over an eggplant when you could have peonies?” The part of me that is still stuck in the values of “the world”–acquisition, workaholism, perfectionism, earning one’s keep–tells me I ought to grow vegetables. They’re useful, after all. They feed people, reduce our food costs, and help the environment by limiting the amount of fossil fuels needed to support our food supply. Yes, a home vegetable garden does all of that and more. The truth is, though, that vegetables don’t make my heart sing. Flowers do.

 

 

My life as a gardener began before I planted my first bulb two autumns ago. In the 18 months before I entered the monastery, I came up to visit one weekend each month. During that year a half, as I walked the monastery grounds something in me stirred. I longed to get my hands in the dirt, to clear the accumulated weeds and debris from the flower beds, and to see them teeming with beautiful life, a botanic reflection of the prayer that has filled this property for over 100 years.

My gardening life has been and continues to be inextricably woven with my monastic life. I don’t know if the one would exist without the other. Much of my conversion has been founded on the growing understanding that beauty heals.

 

 

An accurate translation of the creation story in Genesis is that God created the world and called it “beautiful.” Our most natural state as human beings is to exist harmoniously with the rest of the created world as stewards and participants in the extraordinary beauty of all that God has made. More than that, we are given the unique role of helping to channel God’s work of creation, to sing the universe into being in harmony with God. When we allow ourselves to be channels of God’s creative energy (that is, grace) we become one with God’s Spirit. Such unity does not just make us more whole. It is wholeness itself.

Beauty is a kind of grace. It’s available to all, freely given, found absolutely everywhere, and far exceeds whatever effort we may put into its creation. If we have trouble finding beauty in the world, it’s because we lack the eyes to see it. When I allow myself to be poured out in the act of creation, I find that, paradoxically I am filled beyond my own capacity and ability. This is the profligacy of God’s love for us and all the world.

 

 

I plant flowers because I love everything about them. The utter implausibility and grace of economy of the tulip bulb astounds me as much as its perfect form and rich color when it blooms. I’m giddy as a child to plant bulbs in the fall and impatient throughout the winter waiting for their arrival. Despite my understanding of the life cycle of the bulb, they have never yet failed to leave me speechless in wonder when they bloom. And as soon as the tulip fades, there’s the iris and then the peony and then the rose and on and on until we reach the aster and the maple’s majestic blaze. Flower gardening leaves me grateful to be a participant in this extraordinary world that God continues to create and call beautiful. In the face of such  profligate beauty, who cares about utility?

 

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A young man recently said to me “I just like being in charge.” Recognizing something of myself in that statement, I laughed and responded, “Then it will be very hard for you to be a Christian.”

Obedience lies at the center of the Christian life, and it leads, ultimately to the Cross. Many of us squirm at the word “obedience,” because we hear in that word the curbing of our individuality and freedom of expression. But real obedience leads us to our truest selves as they live in Christ’s heart. Obedience brings us to the freedom of the children of God, a freedom that comes through seeking and following Christ before the dictates of our own, limited, wills. As our Founder writes in his rule “There is always an element of dying to self in true obedience. [… Because] real peace will be ours only when our superficial or false self has been transformed into Christ and we can say with St. Paul: ‘I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.'”

Eventually in every faithful life, we will reach a point–most likely many points–when we realize that we are desperately in need of salvation and, at the same time, totally unable to save ourselves. When this knowledge travels from the head down to the heart, it breaks that heart open. Such experiences are painful. But as we allow the weight of our poverty and need to break open our hearts, there is more room for those same hearts to be filled with Christ’s transforming light and life. As Father Matthew Wright said in his Holy Cross Day sermon, “the wound is where the light gets in.”

I had such an experience during my recent retreat. The offices at Regina Laudis are entirely in Latin, which allowed me to let the sounds of the psalms wash over me. I had been in the habit, though, of praying the Our Father silently to myself in English while one of the sisters chanted it in Latin. One evening at Vespers a small voice inside me told me to stop. I did so and as the haunting sound of the sister’s chant hit me, it broke my heart. I knew in that moment as surely as I have known anything that God was chanting the words of Jesus’ prayer in my heart, interceding, as Paul says, with sighs too deep for words. In some sense I became the prayer, and in that moment, through God’s grace, my own heart was joined with Christ’s.

As we learn to surrender this kind of dying and rising action, we allow God to turn our lives into an oblation for the healing of the world. We cannot accomplish this pouring out of our lives. We can only accede to it. In the moments when we do, we find that the crucified life that we seek draws us ever deeper in to the heart of God.

It is for this reason that Father Whittemore, the great mystic in our Order’s history, calls the religious life a love affair.

Earlier in this chapter I gave several reasons for becoming a monk or nun. Did you notice that I omitted that which many folk outside the religious life imagine to be the true one? I have the feeling that most people think that monks or nuns were “disappointed in love.”

 

Perhaps some of them were. God has many means of drawing souls to Himself. All I can say is that, though I have known a great number of monks and nuns very intimately, I never have happened to strike one who came to the cloister because he or she had been disappointed in love.

 

On the other hand, I have known very many—please God, it is true of all of them—who were successful in love beyond all dreams or imagining. For they have heard in their hearts the whispering of the perfect lover. And it has been their deepest passion and their joy to surrender themselves to Him unto death, even the death of the Cross.

May we all allow our hearts to be broken open, given to the world in a great Eucharistic feast. And may Christ gather up the fragments of our broken hearts and join them to his own.

 

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