A Monastic Geography of Time and Place

Vivificat! - A Catholic Blog of Commentary and Opinion ^ | 27 July 2005 | Teófilo

[Teófilo]

Folks, the Newsletter of the Oblates of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN, published an article a year ago entitled A Monastic Geography of Time and Place, which I think has many worthy thoughts. Four paragraphs impressed me most:

God's presence is indeed to be found in all the places and all the times of monastic life but especially in all the human persons who make up the daily life of a monastery. God is to be found in the young and the old, in the sick and the well, in monastic superiors, in guests, in one's work, in one's rest, in one's holy reading, in the Eucharist, and in the liturgy of the hours. This understanding of God's presence, God's grace has been emphasized in our own time by the theology of Karl Rahner.

Unfortunately much Christian spirituality has traditionally divided life into religious moments as secular or profane moments and emphasized the distance between God and the world. God has often been conceived as an individual, who is bigger, better and more powerful than we are but an individual being nonetheless. Or perhaps God has been conceived as a community of three individual beings, one of whom we tend to address in prayer, but in either case, God will always be another individual being "out there somewhere."

Two practical consequences follow from this understanding of God. First, if God is an individual being among other individual beings, another individual in the "larger household of all reality," as Rahner put it, then God will inevitably have to compete for my love and attention. My whole life will be an endless tug-of-war between the matters that demand my attention in the daily course of human affairs -- my work and my relations with other human beings -- and my religious obligations to God, such as my prayer and celebration of the liturgy.

Second, because in this view God is an individual outside my ordinary world, my encounter with God will depend on some kind of episodic intervention. I encounter God only in response to prayer or through the reception of the sacraments or some such thing. My life is construed as essentially profane and godless, punctuated by brief encounters with the sacred. In consequence, the spiritual life will be a mad attempt to insert as many "sacred" moments as possible in to the profane structure of daily life so as to sanctify that life. This "episodic" spirituality in turn leads to the objectification of grace and God's presence, the tendency to imagine divine grace as a kind of spiritual fuel, and the church and its ministers as sacramental grace dispensers.

In my own words: religious secularism--as opposed to sacralism--has resulted in the banalization of God. Religious secularism is a creature of the Protestant Reformation. With its rejection of the sanctification of space and time, Protestantism succeeded in ejecting God from all other spheres of human enterprise, confining him to a "corner" where He has become but just another date to meet or appointment to keep. Whereas for monastic contemplatives, God's grace suffuses every activity and thus every activity becomes imbued with a sacramental which turns it into a point of encounter with the Triune God. Of course, the essay doesn't mention Protestantism, I do. But I found out that coinciding truth by my own experience, over 10 years ago.

With all due respect to my Protestant brethren, I know various Benedictine Oblates who belong to different Protestant denominations, including hailing from Reformed worship traditions who have become Oblates to fill that need for antiquity, community, and that sense of belonging to a reality larger than their local church that their denominational affiliation cannot fulfill. They have become our brothers in the Benedictine tradition where they relearn to sanctify space and time and every moment of their lives for the Glory of God.

Grace has touched their lives; they appreciate the goodness of sanctifying every moment of their lives with prayer. Very few Catholics, who are members of the Household of God, seem to be aware of the urgency of communing with God at every moment. If could just but respond with generosity to God's call to meet Him in the Present, our lives and the Church's lives would be enriched, as we would live it fully in the center of Triune God's will for us.

[Teófilo]

Typos, grammar blunders, bad use of Latin, et al., are all my fault, my most grievous fault.