The Abbot’s Notebook for July 20, 2016

Blessings to you! You know that I prefer boring weeks in which nothing much happens. Such a week is always better for monastic life in a community. Such weeks seldom happen, however, and the larger the community is, the more things happen.

Brother Anselmo left for Mexico last week, where he will complete the work on his theology degree and get it documented. Then he goes on to Costa Rica to help the Monastery of San José there. We already miss his good presence in the community here.

We took the old solar batteries in for recycling and received a good sized check, because there were so many of them! We will be doing the same in our south power house in a couple of months. Although we never pay an electricity bill, when we have to change batteries and solar panels, it costs a lot.

One of the postulants left on Saturday and an observer on Tuesday. These periods of time, which we label observership and postulancy, and even the novitiate and simple vows, are times for men to live with us and see if they can actually live our life. Our life is not difficult but it does take adjustment. The difficulty is always the monotony and the living with other imperfect monks. It is always easier to see the imperfections in the others!

I ask myself: why do I seek God? My life might be much easier if I just stopped trying to do good and avoid evil. Yet, when I think about my life, I realize that even if I did not believe, I would most likely be living the same way. The things that I see as “unhelpful” in my life are generally called “sins” in our Catholic tradition, but I think that I recognize them without the tradition telling me. The things that are good, from my point of view, are universal goods: service to others, care for the poor and the sick, care for those in prison, feeding the hungry, relationships that give me life, etc.

What faith and a spiritual life have done for me is give me a strong and personal reason to keep striving to do good and avoid evil when my desires and instincts go against that at times.

Sometimes people have a mistaken notion that once one becomes a monk, all temptations and defects of character disappear. How easy life would be if that were true! Instead we monks remain simply human beings like everyone else—with all the desires and defects that are part of human nature. It is the structure of our monastic life that sets us apart, not anything else.

Everyone, however, is invited to think about the structures of his or her life and evaluate them once again in terms of whether the structures presently at place in our lives are life giving in the best sense. Sometimes even the monastic structures have to be evaluated and sometimes changed so that our lives point to the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus.

Part of my spiritual life is always a complete accepting of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The teachings of the Church are very much like Holy Scripture in that neither one gives us a handbook of how to live with detailed instructions for every situation. Rather, we are given principles to live by and our spiritual growth often consists in making the mistakes of our lives and learning from those mistakes as well.

For me personally, I always accept the Scriptures and the way that the Catholic Church understands the Scriptures. There is so much to keep learning about Scripture and I am convinced that even as I die, I will still be learning more about Jesus and his identity.

Finally, I have also learned to accept that Christ is shown to me personally and in a wonderful way in each other human being. That has not always been easy for me, but over the years I have found that when I believe in the presence of Christ in another person, it transforms my relationship with that other person. When I think about the other person just at a human level, my relationship remains generally just at that human level.

If I fail over and over and over, why do I keep on trying? Because of my personal faith in the presence of Jesus as Lord in my life. This belief is both a gift and a choice. There have been may, many times when I have been tempted to choose not to believe and to live simply as a pagan. Until now I have resisted such temptations. Even if I give in to a temptations, my belief draws me back to the right road and to repentance for my sins.

So although my way of living most likely would remain more or less just what it is now, still I see the importance of believing and in teaching others to believe as well. My believing is what keeps drawing me back to “the way” of Jesus Christ, even when I fail in my completely gift of my life to Him.

What I propose to others is often like this: try to believe and to act as if you believe! When others actually do this, they very often find the Church herself and the joy of believing as a member of Christ’s body, the Church. It is always as if I am believing again for the first time.

Please pray for my dear friend, Charles Barnett, who is dying. Please pray for me and for all of the members of our communities, both the living and the dead. May the Lord Jesus help us be faithful! I send you my love and prayers.

Your brother in the Lord,

Abbot Philip