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June 28, 2020“Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10:39)
On the day I was accepted to make simple vows, one of the senior sisters greeted me with: “You made it, huh? Phew! Yeah, we all feel that way.” What she was alluding to, I think, is that though arriving at such a momentous decision after much deliberation and struggle and moments of doubt may seem like having “made it,” this is really only the beginning of a lifelong surrender to God’s loving, demanding plan.
The first years in the monastery are often referred to as the “honeymoon period,” and this is not inaccurate. Most newcomers receive their share of heady joy and exhilaration upon being drawn into what is both a great adventure and a great love affair. But this is not the whole story. It couldn’t be, because the monastic vocation is not a call to float on happy feelings, but rather a call to follow the Lord – the Crucified Lord – wherever he goes. St Benedict is clear that newcomers should not be left in the dark about this: “The novice should be clearly told all the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God” (RB 58.8). Being told is one thing, but the experience is never quite what one expected. And the Holy Spirit doesn’t leave it long before giving one a taste. During the postulancy and novitiate, a new and unfamiliar experience of God can coexist with a sense of loss, which comes from having set aside many good things in life – the company of family and friends, a job or career, favorite foods, clothing, hobbies, the free use of one’s time – in order to pursue “the one thing necessary” (Lk 10:42). We can feel that we have lost our life as we knew it.
Then there are the “opprobria” – trials, tribulations or humiliations (RB 58:7). This does not refer to deliberately chosen penances, punishments or demeaning practices (whether chosen by or “for the good of” of the novice). Life is quite difficult enough without trying to make it so! Opprobria, rather, are the inevitable annoyances and frustrations and pains that emerge in the context of close communal living and a disciplined way of life. They are not in any way exotic or fundamentally different from things that could bother anyone living in the world. It might be the humiliation of not singing in tune, or being physically weak or accident prone, or suffering chronic acne or back pain. It could also be stress from the demands of unfamiliar work, a difficulty with language or communication, a personality clash, a sense of inferiority beside someone else’s gifts, or harbored resentment that my gifts are not being used to the full. One might have a tendency to be drawn into petty jealousies and rivalries, or to get into battles with those in authority.
Someone once said to me of the trials St Therese describes in her writings: “But these things are so small. She must have been neurotic!” Perhaps, but aren’t we all? The goal of monastic life is to bring us face to face with the living God. The corollary of this is that we must come face to face with ourselves – not the selves we like to present to others for approval, but the selves we hide because we are too ashamed to look. The discipline of communal life and a limitation of external stimuli, combined with an intense prayer life, tend (and this is the point) to reveal inner beasts usually hidden in the context of a self-directed life. We all carry difficult memories, wounds, pressure points that, when touched, evoke excessive emotional reactions and sometimes violence. Sufferings that appear small from the outside may be huge on the inside. We can feel that we are losing our very self – the self we thought we knew.
It was an experience of the God who is selfless love and who reveals that we too are made for selfless love, which brought many of us to the monastery. After slogging through a couple of years’ training in selfless love, the novice is faced with a choice: to continue on this way of following the Crucified Lord, that elusive, frighteningly unmanageable, passionately involved and ultimately irresistible God who draws her out of her depth – or to turn back to the safety of solid ground, personal space and control over one’s life. One who makes a choice for the depths may be forgiven for thinking that the great joy and sense of identity that accompany this laying down of one’s life will be the new normal. “It’s all downhill from here!” No, it isn’t.
“Whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.” (Mt 10:38)
Monastic profession, especially solemn profession, is a conscious embrace of the cross of Christ. A sister celebrating her fiftieth jubilee a few years back made the comment: “Our life is a constant conscious exercise of patience in order to be united the Crucified Christ.” This calls to mind those key passages from the Rule of St Benedict which we return to again and again:
“Persevering in his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom.” (RB Prol. 50)
“In this obedience under difficult, unfavourable, or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering and endures it without weakening or seeking escape.” (RB 7.35-6)
Taking on weightier concerns such as managing a work area, caring for the sick or teaching the newer members, with the difficulties these involve, serves to relativize lesser trials. But annoyances, personality clashes, difficulties in communication and all the rest of it can and do persist, and they humiliate us in our own eyes, if not also before others. As one walks in the way of love, day after day, year after year, turning to those key texts from the Rule can be a great reassurance that things are in fact proceeding as they should, when everything in one’s life seems to be indicating the opposite. I try to imagine what it must be like to stand for five or six decades before the mirror of the gospel, forced to see exactly how unlike Christ I am. We can feel that we are losing our monastic life, our prayer life, our moral life, everything that we hoped for from the Lord.
It may be helpful to contrast the attitude called for by the gospel and the Rule with some of its counterfeits. One caricature of the Christian approach to suffering might be called spiritualization. In this case we take an eraser to reality, wiping out my feelings and the concrete problems and difficulties in human relationships, to replace it with piety. “This isn’t about my difficulty with such-and-such or so-and-so, but about Jesus.” Any approach that seeks to squash reality or to re-write it is suspect. This is not what the gospel or the Rule calls for. On the other hand, we can easily be carried away by a tendency to give so much attention to problems on the human level, with a certain emphasis on pointing out other people’s faults, structural inadequacies, failures all around us, that we don’t notice we are missing the full scope of reality. My blind spot is almost always the area in which I need to grow. The message of the fourth step of humility is that we need to sit still with pain long enough to allow it to reveal its heart. It is simply not enough to view situations from the point of view of human dynamics. The faith dimension of reality has to come into view. In the heart that quietly embraces suffering (not without resistance, questioning and struggle), Jesus makes his presence known.
To lose one’s life is to feel one’s fingers pried from the steering wheel of life. To gain it is to recognize this as the work of the Holy Spirit. Taking up the cross and following after is not about glorifying pain, but about allowing Jesus to make pain fruitful in our lives and the lives of others. The secret contained in the gospel, the Rule, the monastic tradition and our own experience, is that these moments of death without perceived resurrection are exactly the moments when Christ draws near, nearer than ever before. What keeps us walking, weighed down as we are, is the sense that a candle has been lit in the midst of our darkness, like a sanctuary lamp: small, silent, undramatic, but steady. And then the truth begins to dawn on us: we are walking with Jesus.
