Posts Tagged ‘Growth’
An Ever-Widening & Expanding Circle – Br. Keith Nelson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Ephphatha. Jesus looked up, breathed out, and said: Be opened.
And the man was opened: brought back from a closed-off place where no words could get in and no meaning could get out. Let through to a wide-open place of many possibilities, where moments before there had been few, and life was merely survival.
How wide can one human heart be opened to the life of God?
This gradual opening of the heart in an ever-expanding trajectory marks the entire arc of Jesus’ life, words, and actions among us. He stood at the center of an ever-widening and expanding circle of relationships. His gospel shows the way toward an ever-widening and expanding circle of participation in the life of the kingdom: the astonishing reality that we are called to direct participation in the inmost life of God.
This is the heart of Jesus. Read More
The Rest of My Life: An Interview about Vocation
Q: Take us back to the beginning: when did you first start to have a sense of a monastic vocation, and what was it that was drawing you?
I first started going to an Episcopal church in college. I was very eager to learn more and go deeper, so I met with the priest there regularly, usually at least once a month, to ask him a bunch of questions (and leave with a bunch of books). Eventually, I approached him and said that I was interested in talking about – well, I didn’t call it this, but – vocational discernment. He was the one who suggested a monastic vocation to me, based on some of the things he’d been hearing from me and seeing in me over the previous months. And while it didn’t immediately click, something about it planted its roots in my brain.
I was thinking about it every day. Finally, after a few months, I sent that priest an email and said, “I think I need to meet with you again, because – to my surprise – this idea is just not leaving. I think about this every day now.”
I will also say that I remember even being a kid and not having much of a religious context, yet being fascinated by monks or monk-like figures that I encountered in pop culture. I loved the Jedi in Star Wars. I loved the book series, Redwall, about woodland creatures living in Redwall Abbey, a monastic setting in a forest in England. I remember I really loved watching the Disney film, the animated Robin Hood and seeing Friar Tuck. So as a child, I had these Jedi warrior monks and these monastic woodland creatures whom I just loved. I found them so fascinating, even though I had no broader context for it. But, it’s interesting that even though this vocation certainly started explicitly when I was in college, there was also just something attractive about it for me, in the ways I encountered it, from an early age. Read More
Know Limits
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
⇓ Download, print and share: Know Limits
Heat radiated off the pavement as I cycled past tree-dotted lawns. The temperature had already reached ninety degrees, and it was still climbing. My breathing was labored, tunnel vision had set in, and my thoughts were focused on just getting around one more bend in the road. One hundred more feet. One more rotation of the pedals.
This was just outside of Belmont, in northeast Mississippi, during a heat wave in August 2021. I was three days into a bike trip south on the Natchez Trace Parkway when I hit my limit.
I mean this in a very literal way. I could not make myself move forward. You may not have had a physical experience like this, but I imagine that you will have experienced something similar in another part of your life. Commitments piling up with not enough hours in the day to address them, no matter how hard you work. The red numbers staring at you on your budget sheet, with no possible way to close the financial gap. Demands on your time and attention from family or friends that you emotionally cannot meet. Your story is your own, but I would bet that something like this is, or has been, a part of it. Read More
Patience and the Crucible of Life
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
⇓ Download, print and share: Patience and the Crucible of Life
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “patience” as “the calm abiding, a quiet and self-possessed waiting for something”; however the etymology hints at the normal context, which is often very difficult. “Patience” comes from the Latin patientia, which is a “quality of suffering” – suffering with calmness and endurance, what the scriptures call “long-suffering.” And suffering you often are when you are forced to relinquish your desires, or when you are left to wait without recourse. Patience is oftentimes not pretty and may feel vapid; sometimes there is a storm before the calm. It is one thing to wait in eagerness for something delightful we anticipate will unfold. It is another thing when we must be a patient patient because we are not in control over suffering – our own suffering or that of someone else whom we carry in our heart.
Here is a disclaimer. Sometimes we should not be patient. Some things we encounter in life are urgent, and we must act now.
But in the normal gestation of life, we must often wait. Without our learning patience, we will miss being present to a great deal of life. Life entails so much waiting. When the answer is not forthcoming, when something is not being resolved, when the door is not being opened, when someone is not acquiescing, when we have lost any sense of controlling some circumstance, we may experience a certain anguish or anger. To experience the fullness of our life, we must learn to wait well. Saint Francis de Sales advises, “What we need is a cup of understanding, a barrel of love, and an ocean of patience.” Patience is a quality of waiting.
Patience does not come easily to most of us, for several reasons. Our ego, how many of us grandstand our own importance on the stage of life, can be a great impediment to patience. What I want, and when seems right, when I am entitled. It took me many years to distinguish the adoring love I experienced amongst my own family-of-origin from my true place in the world. For some of us, the context of learning about patience has very little to do with us, personally, and everything to do with others. They have their place, their needs, their hopes and desires. I must wait my turn. Sometimes there are many people in line ahead of me. The Jesuit priest, Anthony de Mello, describes the necessary shearing of the ego that can happen as we grow older: “Before I was twenty, I never worried about what other people thought of me. But after I was twenty I worried endlessly about all the impressions I made and how people were evaluating me. Only sometime after turning fifty did I realize that they hardly ever thought about me at all.” The stage on which many of us learn about patience is discovering we are seldom THE STAR and more often the extra. We have an important and unique part in life, but so does everyone else. We must learn, listen, and become patient in the waiting.
Having to wait may prove to be a crucible to your soul, burning away what does not belong. You will not always get what you think you want in life. Jesus describes himself as “the gate” and “the door,” and sometimes he bars the way (John 10:1-9). As I reflect back on my own life, I teem with relief and gratitude for so many things I thought I wanted but was denied. (In my younger years I was nicknamed “Curtis Armtwist.”) I realize now that had this-and-that or such-and-such have happened, I would have ended up in a very different place.
Sometimes, by God’s grace, we are denied our dearest hopes. T. S. Eliot writes of how we often want what proves to be the wrong things, and how “the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing” (T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) in Four Quartets: East Coker, III, 11. 23-8). Patience can even mean learning to be grateful for the doors that did not open before you, and, therefore, the new direction in which you turned which has brought you to where you are.
Finding the goodness in waiting, in slowness, is quite countercultural; however our having to wait may turn out to be a great kindness of God towards us.
Finding the goodness in waiting, in slowness, is quite countercultural; however our having to wait may turn out to be a great kindness of God towards us. The scriptures consistently refer to us as “children of God” (not “adults of God”). Children are not developmentally ready to know everything at once. There is a progression in our capacity to know, which God knows. The apostle Peter awakened to this realization. He writes, “Beloved, while you are waiting, be at peace… and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation” (2 Peter 3:9, 15). Our experience of having to wait may, in actuality, be God’s experience of waiting on us until we are ready for more. Take heart. Simone Weil, the great French spiritual writer and political activist of the 1940s, writes how “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”
Here’s one more benefit. Adding the phrase “patient waiting” to your soul’s vocabulary may be a helpful intervention to the onset of anxiety. There is a freedom that can be gleaned in your being powerless to know the future. God knows. God knows what you do not know, and God knows that you do not know. In the beginning of creation, God creates an interchange of light and darkness to fill each of our days. It is as true for the sky as it is for the soul. We can only bear so much light. Light can be as blinding as darkness. The eyes of your heart will be enlightened with as much light as you can bear (“The eyes of your heart,” an evocative phrase of Saint Paul in Ephesians 1:18). When you are in the dark, God is not in the dark. The psalmist writes of God: “Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike” (Psalm 139:11. See also 1 John 1:5). If you are in the dark about something, your waiting invites patience for the dawning. The dawn will come in the fullness of time.
When you are in the dark, God is not in the dark.
Waiting patiently is not a limp submission. Waiting patiently is an active presumption that God is at work in our life in ways beyond what we could ask or imagine (See Ephesians 3:20-21). When you have no choice but to wait, open your eyes and open your heart to what you otherwise might have missed. You do not have what you are waiting for – what is next – but you do have what is now. Don’t cut in line. Be present to what is now, even if it is full of struggle. You will find the companionship of God’s real presence in the waiting, which is the fruit of patience.
I waited patiently upon the LORD;
he stooped to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the desolate pit,
out of the mire and clay;
he set my feet upon a high cliff
and made my footing sure.
– Psalm 40:1-2
Questions for Reflection
– Do you struggle with waiting? What is it about the experience that is hard for you?
– When and how have you, conversely, discovered the goodness in waiting and slowness?
– What practices help you to stay present and grounded in times of waiting?
Patience does not come easily to many of us, for many reasons. Yet in this moving reflection, Br. Curtis Almquist suggests a few of the many reasons that being forced to wait can actually be a gift. We are all invited to discover the countercultural (and surprising) goodness of waiting.
Renewed Life – Br. Luke Ditewig
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Luke Ditewig
Glorious spring is here with green popping up everywhere. Trees bud and flower with abundant, renewed life. Jesus describes himself as the true vine, us as branches, and God as the vine grower. Abide with me, Jesus says. Dwell, remain, stay connected to receive life from me. “Every branch that bears fruit [my Father] prunes to make it bear more fruit.” Pruning indeed helps bear fruit. It’s letting go in order to live.
Here’s what I was taught to look for when pruning trees. First, water sprouts, new young growth often all over a tree’s trunk and major branches. Second, branches touching or crossing each other. Third, anything growing backward toward the trunk instead of out. Fourth, branches that are actually dead. In all this, clear the center trunk, encouraging outward angled growth with space for each branch to grow.
Pruning lets go what is alive but not growing in a helpful direction. Pruning lets go what is dead but still taking up space. Pruning lets a tree more fully live and bear more fruit. Letting go is hard on trees and in our lives, yet key to living well. We Brothers say in our Rule of Life: “… we are to accept every experience which requires us to let go as an opportunity for Christ to bring us through death into life.”[i] Read More
God is Reigning from the Tree – Br. Lucas Hall
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Lucas Hall
Palm Sunday
There’s no such thing as a tree.
I’ll explain.
Biologically, we tend to group living creatures, different species, together with their closest relatives. Take birds, for example. There are many different birds, ostriches, hummingbirds, penguins, vultures, the list is vast. But every bird is more closely related to every other bird, than they are to any creatures outside of that group, “birds.” It’s a neat, tidy category.
But that’s not true of trees. When we look at plant genetics, when we look at the fossil record, we see that what we commonly call “trees” isn’t a neat, tidy category of close relatives. Instead, the development of trees, of tall, massive, woody plants, extending up above other plant life, is a strategy, a structure, a way of being, that emerges again, and again, and again, in different plant families over many years. Our much-vaunted palm trees are more closely related to grass than they are to, say, a pine tree.
But, come on. Of course trees are a thing. Of course there’s such a thing as a tree. They’re just not a neat and tidy biological category. Instead, we should think of trees as a phenomenon, a dynamic happening, bubbling up from the substrate of the natural order, erupting forth in any place where this particular mode of being can gain purchase, and thrive, and live. Read More
Knowing God – Br. David Vryhof
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. David Vryhof
Each of the gospel writers has come to know Jesus and in his gospel is trying to convey his understanding to others in order that they, too, might believe in Jesus. For Mark, Jesus is the “Son of God,” proclaiming the good news that the “kingdom of God” has come near (Mk 1:1,14). For Matthew, he is “the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). For Luke, he is the “Son of God” (Lk 1:35), the one whose miraculous birth was foretold by an angel (Lk 1:30-33). For John, he is “the Word” who was “with God” and who “was God” from before all time, and who has taken on himself our human nature (Jn 1:1-2, 14): “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John tells us.
The gospel writers declare openly what they believe about Jesus’ identity, but throughout their narratives, we see people – including Jesus’ own disciples – struggling to grasp what the evangelists have already come to believe.
In today’s gospel passage from John, the question of Jesus’ identity is, once again, at the forefront. The people of Jerusalem have heard of this teacher-healer from Nazareth in Galilee and know that the authorities are trying to kill him. They wonder aloud why Jesus is being allowed to preach so openly among them. But they also claim to know him, or at least know something about him. “We know where this man is from,” they say, “[how can he be the Messiah?]” Read More
An Ever-Unfolding Purpose – Br. Keith Nelson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Keith Nelson
St. Gregory of Nyssa
In John’s gospel we hear Jesus say: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
What does it mean for us as followers of Jesus to be taught by the guidance of the Holy Spirit? How might that guidance be felt and known in new ways during our journey through the season of Lent?
The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote: “We are pressured from within to become more. The Spirit invites us to evolve; to respond graciously to the changes that God may be inviting us to embrace.”
In this vision, the Spirit is intimately present to who and what we are in this moment. At the same time, the Spirit exerts a dynamic force – a pressure – urging each creature forward into God’s future, a further unfolding of its purpose. Unlike the day-to-day economic or social pressures that bear down upon us from the world; or even the internal pressures of our own psyche; the pressure exerted upon us by the Holy Spirit is always creative, generative, and life-giving beyond what we can anticipate or imagine. Read More
A Tree and Its Fruit – Br. David Vryhof
Br. David Vryhof
Luke 6:43-45
In our gospel lesson today, Jesus once again – as is so often his custom – draws on natural imagery to illustrate spiritual truth. Here he contrasts “good trees,” those which naturally produce figs and grapes, with “bad trees,” those which naturally produce thorns and brambles. A “bad tree” cannot produce good fruit; good fruit only comes from “good trees.” Similarly, Jesus says, one whose heart is good will naturally and without effort produce good fruit, while one whose heart is evil will naturally produce evil fruit. The point seems obvious. The metaphor is clear.
But there are two things to note: First, there is a difference between trees and people: A “bad tree” cannot stop producing thorns and brambles and suddenly begin producing good fruit. Because of the type of tree it is, it is incapable of bearing fruit; it can only bear thorns and brambles. But that is not the case with people. A person with an evil heart can be transformed into one whose heart is good. That’s a key difference. Someone whose life is oriented towards evil rather than towards God can change! The gospel is all about repentance, forgiveness, conversion of life, and reconciliation. Sinners can become saints – and they do! Read More
Life and the Living God – Br. Lucas Hall
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Lucas Hall
Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
As many of you know, when a man comes to join the monastery, he passes through a number of stages before finally taking vows for life. Before each of these transitions, he’s given some time of retreat, alone in prayer, to really listen for the call of God, to discern, to confirm his response the question and the choice he has before him.
It was a little more than a year ago when I was on one of these retreats, looking ahead to taking my life vows. I was up at Emery House, our farmhouse and woodlands up in northern Massachusetts. There were a number of things I did up there to facilitate my prayer. I prayed the daily office. I journaled. I met regularly with another brother. But what I didn’t plan to do, or expect to do, was what I still remember most about that time.