Blessings to you! This has been a good week at the Monastery. The weather has been quite good and work on the grounds around the monastery has taken place. Our Prior, Father Francisco, has been doing a lot to make the landscaping look better. Spring seems often to bring renewed energies!

Abbot Theodore from the Abbey of Dzogbegan in Togo, West Africa, has come for a visit to our community. Our monasteries belong to the same Subiaco Congregation. Last year, as part of our work in South Africa, I visited the Abbey of Dzogbegan. This year Abbot Theodore is able to come here. Now one of the monks of Dzogbegan, Brother Honoré Elom Djilo is also helping out in South Africa at Saint Benedict's Abbey. One of the great hopes of our monastic Subiaco Congregation is to promote this kind of cooperation between monasteries.

In the monastic world, the number of monks continues to decline slowly. There is no rapid departure of monks, but rather fewer are entering and the older ones begin to die off. The Benedictine Confederation prints a Catalog of Monks every five years. Since 1965 the numbers have continued to decline. There are still vocations but some monasteries have closed and others have fewer monks.

From the point of view of faith, declining numbers mean nothing. When God wants a particular gift in the Church, God can send the vocations. Monasteries in more economically developed countries seem to be suffering the sharpest declines while monasteries in developing countries continue to increase in number of monasteries and in number of monks.

On the other hand, for most of the western countries, various studies indicate that those communities that consistently use a religious habit, that have respect and loyalty to the Holy Father, that are faithful about following all of the teachings of the Church, that pray the Divine Office together every day and that work together either in apostolate or with a contemplative contextâ€"these communities generally receive vocations in our time. This is not a religious teaching coming from some authority but simply statements that have appeared.

Probably we need to think of the statement that "grace builds on nature" when we come this kind of thing. Grace building on nature means that we must put some focus on the nature that allows grace to be present. For instance, when a man comes to me and says "I want to be a monk," I need to ask about how he has been living his life. One time, for instance, I asked "Can you live a chaste and celibate life?" And the man assured me that he could. When I ask how long he had been chaste and celibate, he replied "since yesterday." I think that anyone can see that there needs to be a stronger natural underpinning for our life that just one day of lived chaste celibacy!

It can be same by asking the question: "Do you think that you can obey a monastic superior who asks you to do something that you consider stupid?" Sometimes we superiors do ask monks to do things that seem totally stupid to the monk, but which are not immoral and only cause the necessity of intellectual humility.

Any of us can take on commitments that we think we can fulfill and then find ourselves unable to fulfill a commitment. The wisdom of the Scriptures and even the wisdom of the Greeks is to wait to make a commitment so that when one says "yes" it can remain a "yes." This is not always easy. Sometimes we are caught in a situation where we do not want to say "no" because it might cause embarrassment. At other times we say "yes" because we have an inflated ego! We need to be aware of who we are and whether we can really make a commitment and keep it.

We see in many western cultures so many problems of commitment, both in marriage and in the religious life. So many people today find it difficult to make a commitment and then keep it. That is no reason, however, to do away with commitments! Instead we want to find ways to help others make commitments that they can keep.

For some religious communities, this lack of capacity for making a commitment has lead to longer periods of formation before the possibility of making solemn vows for life. For other communities, it has meant more that those entering the community start at a more advanced age and so arrive at solemn vows at a more advanced age. Marriage, although it does not have a "trial" period, sometimes takes place at more advanced ages. Sometimes also both the bride and the groom have lived together or with others before the marriage. There used to be a statistic showing that this actually made the commitment of a stable marriage more difficult, but apparently that has changed now and living together before marriage does not affect the stability of the marriage afterwards.

I remember the first time that I presided at a wedding in Mexico and all the children of the bride and groom came for the wedding. I commented on that, because my sisters and one of my brothers and I had sat in a car outside the rectory when our parents were married in the Catholic Church! In those day, a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic was not allowed to take place in the actual Church building. Times keep changing!!

The real challenge for a monastic commitment or for the commitment of marriage is to live a sacramental reality or a quasi-sacramental reality. When a man or a woman is truly seeking God in the religious life, then the other realities fall into place. Or when a man or a woman is seeking God within marriage, the other realities fall into place. In the case of marriage, both the husband and the wife need to be seeking God. In the religious life, it is a question of the community and the individual. How important it is that we find ways to form religious communities that are deeply rooted in the mystery of Christ!

May the Lord Jesus help us all as we come to the end of this year's Easter Season and move towards Ordinary Time once again. May we know God's mercy and compassion in our lives and seek to make commitments that will last.

As always I send my love and prayers to each of you who read this letter. I will offer Holy Mass for your intentions again once this week. And I ask your prayers for me and for each of our communities.

Monastery of Christ in the Desert
P.O. Box 270
Abiquiu, NM 87510