“God, we have received your mercy in the midst of your temple.” (Ps 47:10, RB 53.14)
This is the prayer Benedict puts on our lips as we receive a guest. Receiving guests is indeed mercy for us, no less than for the guests. Why? Because giving and receiving hospitality, rooted as it is in the gospel and the life of the early Church, helps us to feel the reality of family life in Christ and so brings about communion.
The book of Acts, which we hear from daily during the Easter season, is bursting with activity, with trips and travels and visits. We hear that they went to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, passed through Pisidia and reached Pamphylia, then from Perga they went down to Attalia and finally back to Antioch. What a ride! The epistles, while alluding to Paul’s life on the road, give a complementary perspective, in that each letter allows us to rest awhile with the community under consideration, with its particular flavor, its gifts and its challenges. These past two weeks, we have received travel-worn emissaries from, not Pamphylia, Perga and Attalia, but Conyers, Gethsemani, Guadalupe, Mepkin, Spencer and Vina. And we, the church of Wrentham, while remaining in one place, received them as our brothers and enveloped them in our life for a time.
Of visitors it is said in the book of Acts:
“They strengthened the spirits of the disciples and encouraged them to persevere in the faith, saying, ‘It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.’” (Acts 14:22)
We have been drawn together for this purpose: to strengthen and encourage one another. As I see it, this is the root meaning and the fruit of all inter-monastic encounters. When we meet one another, we receive an impression of monastic lives lived by different people in other places. Our hearts are moved to rediscover that we are not alone. Each of us is unique in our character and history, in our monastic path. Our monasteries too are different, in schedule and customs, in climate and culture. But from the midst of these variables, what comes to the fore is our common Cistercian monastic identity, our common worries and struggles, and our common joys and hopes. Two weeks ago, we were largely strangers to one another, but now we have come to feel that we are indeed sisters and brothers in Christ, fellow-Cistercians, in a word: family.
After the departure of our guests, we may be feeling a certain relief to be able to return to our ordinary, obscure and laborious lives. On the other hand, we may also be feeling a sense of loss – loss of the male voices which enriched our choir, loss of the youthful (and not so youthful) energy and interest, the joy of new friendships begun and old friendships rekindled. Guests have a way of bringing out the best in us, and when they leave, we wonder: why does this have to end? – why can’t we keep on enjoying this palpable sense of communion? Of course, guests do have to resume their own monastic lives in their own monasteries, just as we resume our life here at Wrentham.
But what if guests did stay? Well, I suspect that if they didn’t leave, their continued presence here would enter into the warp and weave of ordinariness with the rest of us, and their splendor would inevitably fade from before our eyes. It may be worth reflecting on how readily we perceive the beauty, the human qualities, the spiritual richness and the monastic example of those who visit us, while finding it harder to see the same in those with whom we share our everyday lives. Something similar can be said of the experience of visiting another community – the positive aspects of life in another place leap out at us, sometimes in marked contrast to the way we feel about things at home. This experience, an example of “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence,” contains within it the danger of discouragement and an erosion of our commitment to this place and these people. And the remedy? In a word: gratitude.
My prayer for the Junior Seminar was that we receive this mercy in the midst of God’s temple: strength to face the hardships we bear as individuals and as communities, and encouragement to look to the kingdom which we are drawn and invited to enter all together – as well as to have some fun along the way. I think we have been gifted with all these things, and I hope that, though we have said goodbye to our guests, we needn’t say goodbye to the strength, encouragement and joy that their presence brought us. We have much to be grateful for: our Order – that community of communities, that family of families – as well as our own community, our own family life here together. Let us take it up again with new energy, opening ourselves to the beauty God wishes to reveal to us in one another.