Life as a Recurring Invitation – Br. Curtis Almquist

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Br. Curtis Almquist

Galatians 5:22-26
Psalm 19:1-4
Matthew 13:44-46

A college roommate and I share a monthly conversation. He recently asked me whether I remembered a place on our college campus that was particularly significant. His question evoked lots of memories; however, the most significant place for me was actually not on campus. It was off campus in a nearby park to where I frequently rode my bicycle. In the park was a particular tree I always climbed. I would sit in stillness and silence on a large, outstretched limb and look down on life. I was trying to get a perspective on life and to figure out where I belonged. Though there was every outward sign that I was thriving, on the inside I was lost.

Following my college graduation, I had had an adventurous and fulfilling life, mostly; however, what I had sought as a college student was still my presenting need: a place to belong. The psalmist says, “My boundaries enclose a pleasant land” (Psalm 16:6). And that is what I discovered here, within the enclosure of our monastic community: a very challenging, fulfilling container in which to abide as I “worked out my salvation” (Saint Paul’s words, Philippians 2:12). A place to thrive.

My quest to belong had been informed and complicated by several things. For one, my family of origin. As I had grown up, my life had teemed with love and provision, which I experienced in so many wonderful ways; however, truth be told, I did not feel that my family really understood me, try as they did. How could they? I did not understand myself.

Secondly, I have a lot of energy, interests, and abilities, too much for one lifetime, so it felt some days. Blessings can also be burdens, don’t we know? The words that were spoken by the visiting angel to the Blessed Virgin Mary seemed both poignant and personal to me. Mary is told what she is to bear in life. Her immediate response was incredulity: “How can this be?” Mary’s response articulated for me the unanswered questions about the meaning of my own life: “How can this be?”[1] Mary had her reasons, and I had mine.

Thirdly, I am gay. I knew this as a very young child, long before I had either the language or the understanding for what this would mean. In any rate, there was no one to tell. And though I say “gay,” that word did not exist in the vocabulary of my childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. But I did know this is trouble. I was growing up in a very conservative, heterosexual culture where most every adult, man and woman, was married. Which would not fit me. That was my secret.

But the greater crisis was actually spiritual. In my adolescence, I had fallen in love with God, was smitten with God, whom I knew loved me. Sort of. Yet the message I heard again and again in the church was that “thems” like me were abominations, were degenerates, were eternally damned. I remember, almost 40 years ago, repeating the very words that Job (in the Hebrew scriptures) said about his own insufferable experience of God. Job cried out, “Though [God] slay me, still will I trust [God]” (Job 13:15). I prayed those same words. “Though [God] slay me, still will I trust [God].” That was true also for me, in such a mysterious way. I loved God whom I was not sure loved me.

You might wonder whether I became a monk because I am gay? No. It’s exactly the opposite. I believe God had intention for me to become a monk. The only way I would have discovered and freely chosen monastic life, found this to be the fit for my life, was by my being created not to fully belong to the culture of my origin. There are no monks in my family lineage. I can trace back many generations. There are no monks; I am the first. My sense is that I did not choose monastic life; I was chosen for this life.

Paradoxically, it’s all about love. In the religious life we are enabled to become lovers. I’m quoting a great English religious sister from this past century, Sister Mary Edna.[2] She wrote how the boundaries and practices of the religious life “canalize” love. That is, this life creates a canal for love, the intensity of which would be a danger to ourselves and others if it were not consecrated, if it were not “canalized.” I have found monastic life such a good fit to love living and to live loving. I have experienced the truth in Jesus’ parable about “the pearl of great price.” Jesus said, “the merchant, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” Life here in the monastery has been the pearl for me.

So now I am one of the “elder brothers.” I would have never guessed I would live this long. For many decades my personal mantra has been: “Curtis, this is your life, these are the terms, what is the invitation?” Several things. I have been doing what the poet David Whyte calls “corporate downsizing”: downsizing the corpus my life.[3] All of us Brothers have a “cell,” a small, personal space in which to rest, pray, read, and enjoy life in solitude. A cell, in which to be alone with God. For several years I have been intentionally downsizing, parting with one thing after another so that I am living lighter. You might ask, “lighter,” in terms of less stuff surrounding me, or “lighter” in terms of inner light, what Saint Paul calls “the eyes of our heart being enlightened.”[4] My answer is yes.

Another invitation is the grace to hear and follow Jesus in a very fresh way. Jesus said we all are “to change and become again as children to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2-3). Becoming childlike has always seemed beyond my reach, given how strong-willed and stubborn I am. Yet now, in my aging, the gift of “childlikeness” is being handed to me as a gift. We acknowledge in our Rule of Life how some gifts of the soul may come to maturity in old age. Quite. We also acknowledge “the needs and struggles that accompany [old age].[5] Quite. I am now experiencing life, both as an old soul and as an increasingly dependent child of God. I am actually finding this last chapter of my life quite an intriguing adventure. Daily I experience such deep gratitude and freedom within my soul for being able to live life abundantly: past, present, and future.

Our Psalm we prayed today, Psalm 19, includes the phrase: “One day tells its tale to another, and one night imparts knowledge to another” (v. 2). How very true. Each day and each night have informed the next. My 38 years in the monastery have been wonderful, absolutely transformative. Using Saint Paul’s language, my experience has been “far beyond all that I could ask or imagine.”[6] It’s been spectacularly good . . . except when it has not been. Those difficult moments have also been an invitation, the grist for my ongoing conversion to Christ, and the honing my membership in our life together and the life to come.

[1] Luke 1:26-34.

[2] Sister Mary Edna was a member of the English “Deaconess Community of St. Andrew.” She graduated from Cambridge University where she studied English and Law, then graduated from King’s College, London, where she studied Theology. She is quoted here from her book, The Religious Life (Penguin, 1968), 19.

[3] David Whyte in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (Many Rivers Press, 2014), 30.

[4] Ephesians 3:14-19.

[5] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, “The Gifts and Challenges of Old Age.”

[6] Saint Paul writes: “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21).