The Abbot’s Notebook for October 12, 2016
Blessings to you! I have arrived back home once again. This past week I went to our Monastery of Thien Tam in Texas, leaving Christ in the Desert on Thursday and returning here yesterday, Tuesday. Traveling always sounds exciting but for me, it is just another obligation which I undertake for the good of our communities. For sure, when I was much younger and traveling for the first time to some exotic destination, it was exciting! Those days are long gone.
Because our Monastery of Thien Tam is preparing to ask for its independence from us, I went there to speak to the brothers, to encourage them and to adjust a few things in the community so that their independence would be a stronger gift for them. Please keep them very much in your prayers.
Back home, one of our newer candidates had to leave us because he could not live at our altitude. We are only 6,500 feet in elevation and yet there are times when guests have come and have had to leave because of the elevation. This is the first time, as far as I remember, that a monastic candidate has had to leave our community because of the elevation.
Years ago, when our community was very small and still fairly fragile, we purchased a brand new Chevrolet Suburban with a winch on the front of it to help us when we would get stuck on our road. This vehicle was only about six weeks old when I had a wreck on our road and took off the whole right fender of the vehicle. When I finally arrived at the Monastery, I tried to park the vehicle in such a way so that no one could see the damage. This is a kind of behavior that is fairly normal to us human beings: we like to hide our brokenness and the damage of our lives! The opposite extreme also happens at times: there are those who like to show off their defects in public.
In any community and in our spiritual lives, we are all invited to become women and men of wisdom. We want to be people who know how to work for what is good, what is loving and that which will help us form good families and good communities. We all know that as much as we try to be good and loving in every aspect of our lives, there are times when we fail, most of the time in small things but perhaps sometimes even in very important aspects of our lives.
For our spiritual lives, it is deeply important that we come to know ourselves in truth, so that we can acknowledge what is good and what is not good; what is helpful and what is not helpful; what is loving and what is not loving. This sounds fairly easy, but we know that it is not easy. As we live longer and mature, we recognize at times that some of our earlier actions, which we thought at the time were the right actions, now look to us to have been mistakes.
Wisdom is an art of living well. It is not intellectual understanding, although it includes intellectual understanding. Some people can understand things really well but never see the relationship of their understanding to living. Wisdom is closer to an intuitional approach to life that understands intellectually, recognizes emotionally and is able to blend all aspects of life together and understand with the whole being what is the best way to move forward in God and with others.
Wisdom is praised through the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, and in the writing of the New Testament. We hear over and over in our Scriptures: seek wisdom, live with wisdom, respect the wise person.
As I get older, people have often commented on my wisdom. For me, I mostly see my lack of wisdom, the lack of wise judgment, the lack of helping others and the lack of making wise decisions. On the other hand, I recognize that my way of living now is very different from when I was young. I do take more time to look at situations, to listen to people and to ask God for help. I try to delay making a decision until I sense that I have heard, seen and understood most of what is involved. These are surely aspects of wisdom.
One of the abbots of our Subiaco Cassinese Congregation asked me at our General Chapter: why have younot said anything in our meetings. And I replied: “I learned, finally, that if I wait long enough, almost always everything that I could contribute to a discussion is said by others.”
A wise person is known by the fewness of his or her words—this is a teaching from our monastic tradition. My own sense now, at this point in my life, is that the more I pursue living with fewness of words, the more I listen and try to understand without speaking, the better are the results in my life and in the lives of others.
Clearly I use words! I am writing this to you and I speak with others and I enjoy conversation. But in the most important decisions and discussions, it is better to be silent and still and to listen attentively. Often, when a brother does something that I dislike or that I think might be wrong behavior, I have found that I need to ask him first if he did what I think he did, why he did it and how he think that it fits into our monastic life. And I need to ask those questions in a gentle and non-aggressive manner so that I can honestly here what was happening in his life.
There is a huge difference in a brother if I tell him: “what you did was wrong and this is your penance” or if I ask him “Did you do this? If you did, I am wondering why you did it? I wonder how it fits into our monastic life?”
Be merciful as God is merciful is the theme of this year and I seek to understand how to live that mercy and still guide a strong and joyful community. This is the same lesson that anyone else must live to create strong and vibrant families or communities of any type.
Please continue to pray for me and know that I am praying for you and for your needs and intentions. I will offer Holy Mass for you, as I do each week. I send you my love and prayers.
Your brother in the Lord,
Abbot Philip
