June 17, 2012

At 6:25 a.m., the tower bell rings out its call to prayer with a brightness that I relish each morning. The sun is up and joins in the jubilant song intoned by the bell. They are singing the same song, harmonizing; complimenting one another as I emerge from the second floor on to the back stairwell and draw into my lungs a fresh draught of crisp morning air. Descending the stair briskly and making my way along the walk behind the monastery I look to my right, and am dazzled by the brilliant swath of peach colored light glistening behind the looming forms of ancient pine trees. Adding to the exhilaration I feel every morning at this moment is the awareness that the distinctive darkness and solitude of the Great Silence, (which the monks practice from 3:15 a.m. to 7:45 a.m.), is giving way to its opposite: the coming of the light and the great gathering of the brothers into song and prayer that will culminate in the morning celebration of Eucharist. I could have decided to marry as a young man and the gathering about to take place would consist of my wife, my children and myself. Having risen from bed and gathered together at 6:30 in the morning, we would all be saying good-bye to each other about now: my wife on her way to work, my children setting off to school and me, heading out to my job in the city. There is an irrepressible centrifugal force that hurls the members of a family away from one another at sunrise. That is because the vocation of a family is to grow, to disperse, and to carry the good news of Christ's salvation to the ends of the earth. It belongs to the nature of a family for its members to spin out and away from one another into the world; into new relationships and projects and, while these activities usually leave intact the deep love that unites them, they will tend to each grow into greater and greater independence from one another. A community of monks is not a family and, when the bell rings at 6:30 a.m., it does not signal the time to leave home and one another and embark on the day's activities. This is not a family. We are Trappists. Trappists are cloistered monks. We're not going anywhere. At just the hour when most families are bidding one another farewell for the day, I am hastening to join my brothers in the chapel where we will join one another for the most efficacious and intensely deliberate act of communion imaginable: the liturgy of the Eucharist in which we will all together be transformed into the one body of Christ risen from the dead. We will be “commissioned”, “sent”, like any other Christian community who celebrates Eucharist, but we are sent inward; sent into spiritual warfare with forces inside us; sent to meet the ordeal of stability, unceasing prayer, the bearing of one another's burdens and crucifixion in silence and solitude and by our “hidden witness”, unleash the power of Christ's resurrection in the world.