A Monk's Diary Archive

It is Good Friday at New Melleray Abbey—an unnervingly quiet day. Mid-day meal today is bread and water. The community always has a book read to us at mid-day meal. Presently, we are reading: "The Future Church" by John Allen. But for the High Holy Days, we substitute special reading, and today's' reading affected me deeply. The author offered a meditation on the death of Christ, inviting us to look at the shadowy face on the Shroud of Turin. It doesn't actually look like the face of a dead man, but the face of a man profoundly at rest in prayer or meditation.

I noticed it when I was a novice twenty three years ago, and I notice it today: Novices (those who are brand new to monastic life) are susceptible to attacks of the giggles—and at the most inopportune moments. One day, a few months after I had entered the cloister, I suffered a "giggle-attack" in the middle of Vespers. Fr. Eutropius, the assistant cantor, who used to dearly love listening to his own voice, and worked pretty hard at singing like Mario Lanza, could make you giggle even when he got the words right.

It was really too bad . . . the interview had been so encouraging! The young man was sincere, intelligent and thoughtful, clearly someone who had "turned a corner" in his relationship with the Lord and had recently gone through some kind of conversion experience. He looked so promising—at least as well as I could judge. I did need to make a judgment because I was Vocation Director at the time and entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating as best I could this candidate's readiness to live in the cloister. He looked like "a keeper" as fishermen say . . . .

Sitting at mass this morning, the first blush of Spring appearing in the fields, the sound of birds in the air again, I hear Fr. Stephen, the gospel reader for the week, proclaim the words: "The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God" . . . and I'm thinking about that. The dead can hear God's voice. It's true. Somehow, I know those words are true. A month ago, the wind was so biting, the snow and ice so packed and steely hard, the fertile earth so "encased" in a tomb of ice, one might have despaired of ever seeing a green thing growing again.