The Abbot’s Notebook for July 27, 2016
Blessings to you! I am writing this partially in the United States before I head to Mexico and partially in Mexico where I am at present. Always I try to find time to get my homily and my notebook written. I have been doing this for almost 20 years now. I look forward to a future day when I will go silent and retire into a life of prayer and contemplation. That is what I thought that I was doing when I arrived here in 1974. The first two years were pretty much just that: very little major responsibility and lots of time for prayer and Scripture reading and contemplation.
Life has its own way of changing us. God is always involved in our lives and at the very core of all that happens to us and in us. When we are young, we cannot even begin to imagine what our lives will be like as we get older. Lots of us don’t think about it while others do think about it and begin to plan for their lives even when they are young. I am not that way. I often joke and tell others: “I am not a person who thinks much, even though I am very capable of thinking.” My own sense is that I live much more from feelings and intuitions and sometimes must take time to think those through, rather than just responding by feelings and intuitions.
This past week in our monastery has been caught up entirely in the sickness and death of a good friend of mine and of the community, Mr. Charles Barnett. Charles showed up in the life of the monastery many years ago and always loved the beauty of our monastery and enjoyed very much meeting brothers of the community. He and I became very close friends, even though I was not able to visit him very often. As he got older, his life was more restricted because of eye problems and because of health challenges.
Lots of us know the challenges of aging, even if we are not yet in our 80s or 90s. It is not easy for us to see our strengths and gifts begin to wane. Memory often begins to fail in small ways. Our Father Luis has lost just about all of his short term memory even though he can still remember so much from years ago and can carry on a brilliant conversation about movies or books. Others of us just have the challenge of waiting a bit longer for a familiar name to return or the memory of some historic event.
Some of us have problems hearing and others have problems seeing. As these wonderful gifts of our senses fail, we can get frustrated. Eventually we begin to accept these changes. Sometimes we try surgeries or hearing aids or glasses or whatever—and they may even help for a while. For some they help a lot and for others not so much.
During the funeral Mass today my hearing aid kept saying: change batteries. I would have if I could have, but it was impossible, so I learn to put up with messages to which I cannot reply. My friend Charles had a special kind of vision loss that allowed him to drive but not to read much. My own mother lost both her hearing and her vision as she got older and it was really difficult to adjust to those losses.
We all know that much can be done today to keep a person alive. So at times a person decides that being alive is no longer worth it. The diagnosis of the illnesses of Charles when he left the hospital on July 19th to return to his own home read like a death sentence. He knew that he could fight against them, but at some point, he decided it would be better to die than to go on.
In our monastic community here, we have several brothers who are coming to this point in their lives. They will have to make decisions about how much treatment they can accept in order to keep on living. In the past, such decisions were much less complicated but today it is possible to keep people living for a long time with the help of medicines and machines. There is developing a whole body of literature on the morality of such decisions and which decisions are in accord with Church teachings and which not. At one extreme is to do everything possible to keep the person alive, even when all signs of life have gone. The other extreme is assisted suicide.
When we are young, we don’t usually spend much time thinking about these things. As we get old, often we don’t want to think about these things but daily reality can put such decisions more and more in front of us.
Living in an extended family or in a monastic community often brings a gentleness to such decisions. Today more and more people live alone or in isolation from others and these types of decisions can be truly burdensome.
In our own community, because we have a median age of about 40 with about 45 monks, there is a capacity to care for the old at home, here in the monastery. For us, this is the ideal situation because it helps a community to have both young and old living together. Our Rule of Benedict speaks quite a bit about this situation. This “young and old” together helps us develop charity and care for one another.
Personally, I reflect on this situation more as I also continue to age and cannot do all that I would like to do with the same energy as when I was younger. When one of my hearing aids quit functioning in the middle of the funeral Mass for my friend Charles, there was nothing I could do about it. At least I had remembered to put my reading glasses on the small stand near my chair because my normal bifocals are really difficult to use when I am at the altar. These are the challenges of aging!
Spiritually, for all of us, we must simply strive to live the Gospel, whether young or old. Sometimes it is relatively easy to live the Gospel. At other times, it is a huge challenge to maintain virtue and charity!
As always I will celebrate a Holy Mass this week for you and for your needs and intentions. Please also remember to pray for me personally and for the sisters and brothers of our communities. I send you my love and prayers.
Your brother in the Lord,
Abbot Philip
