The Abbot’s Notebook for June 29, 2016
Blessings to you! Last Friday we celebrated the Birthday of Saint John the Baptist. He is the principal patron of our Monastery of Christ in the Desert because our founders arrived in New Mexico on that date in 1964. Always we keep the solemnity with great ceremony and rejoicing. It is not easy to believe that we have been here 52 years now. That is a very short time in monastic history, but for an individual monastery, it is a good amount of time.
As we processed to the Church on that day, I reflected on God’s love and mercy on our community. I have been here for 42 of those 52 years and remember so keenly at times the sufferings through which we have gone. Yet, today we are a relatively strong community with a very strong monastic observance, lots of vocations, enough money and buildings and so many friends who support us with love, prayer and financial help. The challenge for our community is to be faithful in seeking God and not get sidetracked by the comfortable things of this world.
There have been so many things happening this week. On Sunday, June 19th, Thumper the beagle was bitten by a rattlesnake. He was perfectly fine and back in good health by Thursday of that same week. Incredible. Then on Friday of that week, I killed a rattlesnake in my office. Because I am deaf, I could not hear him, but Brother Noah had come in to speak with me and told me: Father Abbot, there is a rattlesnake here. So we moved furniture and killed the rattlesnake. This is surely going to be a high rattlesnake year. Some people have visited our monastery for years and years and never seen a rattlesnake. But some years, they seem to be everywhere. The good thing about Thumper being bitten is that dogs very, very rarely get bitten twice. That is not because they all died, but even those who survive rarely get bitten again because snakes put out an odor and the dog now identifies that odor with a lot of pain. So I hope!!!
Archbishop John Wester came to spend a couple of days with us on Sunday, arriving in the late afternoon. He returned to Albuquerque on Tuesday. What a joy it is for us to receive the Archbishop of our Archdiocese. We asked him to share with us about his experiences and his vocation. And we shared our life with him.
Spirituality is about perceiving God in every situation and about living with God in every situation. This is not always easy. Sometimes it is the situation itself that draws our attention and forget about God. Or, perhaps at other times, at least for monks, we get caught up in God and forget to pay attention to what is happening around us. True spirituality demands that we pay attention both to God and to what is happening around us. It is not easy. But it is possible.
One of the goals of monastic life—and really of all Christian life—is continual prayer. The early monks even gave alms to others so that they could pray for them while they were sleeping, in order to pray continually. The practice of The Jesus Prayer is about continual prayer. Perhaps some of us were brought up to think that there are times of prayer and times when we do other things. This seems the reality for most of us and yet it is not the ideal for which we should strive. Rather, we must listen to those early monks and seek to pray always.
I have mentioned before the image of a young mother coming home with her newborn child and then developing an acute awareness of the child at all times. That mother is practicing continual prayer in one sense: all of her senses are attuned to the child, even when she, the mother, is asleep. This is what we can strive for in our life of prayer. A mother who gets too anxious about her child damages herself. A Christian who gets anxious about prayer only damages himself or herself. Instead, the challenge is to remain totally in peace and tranquility, aware of God’s ever present love, and still strive with all of our force to be in continual prayer with God. A new mother learns how to be attentive to so many other things—and still maintain her inner focus on her child. You and I must learn to be attentive to all that is around us—and still maintain our inner focus on the Lord.
We cannot do what the early monks did and hire people to pray for us, although giving alms is always a good practice. God wants us and not substitutes. From personal experience, I know that it is possible to keep my heart in the Lord and also give all my attention to what is happening in my life right now. I don’t do it consistently, but I have struggled enough with this to know that it is possible. It is like anything that demands everything of me: sometimes I am faithful and sometimes not.
Should we be anxious if we are not struggling? Yes, to some extent. Should we be anxious if we are struggling but seem to get nowhere? Not at all! Truly this work of conversion is a work of God and we cannot do it by ourselves. We must keep struggling but know that it is only God who can bring this struggle to any conclusion. As we struggle, we learn to accept our broken humanity and the broken humanity of others as well. As we struggle, we become poor with the poor Christ; we become small and aware of our smallness; we are brought to humility before the Lord—and in that emptiness, God can work.
So often my brothers ask me why the spiritual struggle is difficult. The true and relatively easy answer is: because we are difficult. The struggle is to allow God to become everything within us—and we fight to maintain ourselves against God because we are uneasy about losing ourselves.
As I do every week, I will celebrate Holy Mass for you and for your needs and intentions. I ask you to pray for me and for all of the sisters and brothers of our communities. This bond of prayer unites us daily and draws us into the Kingdom of Jesus. I send you my love and prayers.
Your brother in the Lord,
Abbot Philip
