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Reflection: Compassion - PG# 5403 (2010/2011) When you return to the Latin root of the word compassion, you find the words cum and passio, to suffer with. But I like a much simpler definition a friend of mine, a Dominican sister, once gave of compassion: to walk beside. To walk with someone assumes an equal status. It connotes being on “common ground.” It envisions perhaps exchanging places with that person for a time to better understand their perspective. To walk with someone means you don’t have to say many words. Being present is what matters, what Dr. Martin Marty has called “the communion of the coffee cup.” For the past two years, I’ve been spending regular intervals at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine Monastery in Atchison, Kansas. Living in community with a diverse group of people 24/7 makes monasteries a great boot camp for learning about compassion. In that sense, monastic life is not too different from family life or the work world. One of the things I’ve appreciated about Mount St. Scholastica is that none of the sisters within the community dies alone. The sisters keep a round the clock vigil at the bedside of the dying. Compassion, walking with, even to the end of life. There is a story of an ancient monk who chose to live and pray in a community instead of living on his own in the desert. “Wouldn’t it be easier to seek God in solitude in the desert?” he was asked. “Unless I live in community,” he answered, “whose feet will I wash?”
Reflection: Conversatio - PG# 5324 (2009/2010) If you spend any amount of time at a Benedictine monastery, you’re bound to hear the word conversatio. It refers to a specific vow that Benedictines take: conversatio morum. Literally, conversion of morals. But I like the definition given to me by one of my Benedictine mentors, Sister Thomasita Homan: conversatio as a constant turning toward, a continuous conversation with life. I like the idea of turning because it connotes change. And there are a lot of things about myself that need changing. Like my quick temper. There are times when I explode in anger even at the people I love the most. And then I’m angry at myself for getting angry. Once after arguing with my beautiful husband—a totally silly unnecessary argument—I called Sister Thomasita in frustration and said, ‘Why can’t I live conversatio in my daily life with the people I’m closest to? Her answer was simple, and a bit surprising. “You are living conversatio,” she said. “Your struggle within yourself to do better; that’s the conversatio. And with conversatio, everyday we have a chance to begin again.”
Reflection: Contemplation - PG# 5313 (2009/2010) Sister Lillian Harrington is ninety-one years old and one of my best friends at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery. When I asked Sister Lillian if she ever contemplates the end of life, she informed me, “I don’t think about death. I think about living.” Living mindfully, in the present moment. Monastic men and women refer to this as “the contemplative life.” It’s what author Joan Chittister calls “living beyond the obvious.” St. Benedict in his Rule urges us to “listen with the ear of the heart.” Contemplation asks us to see with the eye of the soul. That’s not always easy for busy professionals juggling work, family and community commitments. When I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, I’d arrive around nine in the morning. Suddenly, I’d look up from my desk, and it would be dark outside. The whole day had passed, but with my head buried in work, I’d missed it! My stays at the monastery have taught me to pay attention to the day’s natural rhythms of sunrise, sunset, moonrise; to the interesting faces, and scenes of life unfolding around me. Whether you’re in a monastery or the middle of Michigan Avenue, contemplation asks us, as Sister Imogene Baker puts it, to “be where we are, and do what we’re doing.”
Reflection: Environment - PG# 5416 (2010/2011) Whenever I visit Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Atchison, Kansas, I’m struck by the physical beauty of the place, whether the interior beauty of the stained glass, the statues and icons or the beauty of the gardens, the fields, the grapevines. Inside the dining room, every table is decorated with a centerpiece to fit the season, whether jonquils in springtime or colored beads and face masks around Mardi Gras. To surround oneself with beauty, even a simple kind of beauty, recognizes that everywhere we are is holy ground. We might not think of monasteries as vanguards of futuristic thinking, but the truth is many monastic communities practiced care of the environment long before “going green” became buzz words for businesses and municipal governments. When the sisters of Mount St. Scholastic had to tear down one of their buildings a few years back, they recycled or sold off what they could, and they buried what couldn’t be reused in their own land. No rusting hulks of metal on some municipal dump for these sisters! In the Rule of St. Benedict, the ancient guide to monastic living, Benedict writes, we must “regard even the simplest utensils and goods” as if they were “the sacred vessels of the altar.” As the writer John McQuiston says, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, our businesses, our rivers, our closest relationships, our bodies…Everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is what monastics have always understood. This is what we’ve so often forgotten.
Reflection: Humility - PG# 5318 (2009/2010) Humility is a word that catches in the throat of most Americans. We’re taught to be assertive, to dream the impossible. And yet, after one of our loftiest achievements, the landing of a human being on the moon, astronauts returned to earth with renewed awe at the fragility of our planet, and our trifling place within the vast universe. Humility is the subject of one of the longest chapters in the Rule of St. Benedict. “Day by day remind yourself you are going to die,” Benedict says. “Hour by hour, keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you,” Benedict’s take on humility reflects the root of the word, from humus, meaning “of the earth.” Humility is not the same thing as humiliation. Humility recognizes our common humanness. It reminds us we’re not in this alone. In Benedictine monasteries, vespers service begins with the prayer, “Oh God, come to my assistance. Oh Lord, make haste to help me.” We say these words standing, facing one another, as if asking, also, for one another’s support. It’s a recognition of our own weaknesses, and a reminder to accept the limitations of others, humbly and with love.
Reflection: Peace - PG# 5418 (2010/2011) Sometimes when we think of peace, we envision grandiose efforts, like treaties to end wars, or reduce weaponry. More often than not, peace plays out in a much smaller arena, in the one–on–one relationships of our daily lives. Mine is a blended family. Bruised feelings, perceived slights are so common there’s an almost constant need for peacemaking. It’s all too easy to begin looking at members of my own family as if they were strangers. I have some friends in the Baha’i faith who bring together people of diverse backgrounds and cultures on a regular basis for a meal in their home. Another friend makes a point each year of inviting people she doesn’t know very well in her congregation to Easter Sunday breakfast at her apartment. In ancient times, the doorkeeper to the monastery would greet each person who knocked with the words, “Thanks be to God,” or else, “Your blessing, please.” It’s a way of saying, then as now, that every guest, every stranger, carries within the potential of a blessing. And where there is hospitality, there can be peace.
Reflection: Praise & Prayer - PG# 5303 (2009/2010) For over a year now, I’ve been spending about a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine Monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I went to this place in the heart of America’s heartland to see if ancient monastic traditions had anything to teach a modern professional woman like me. I’ve learned plenty. We might think of monasteries as throw-backs to the past. But, in fact, monasteries offer us a glimpse of the future, a future our world so desperately needs: one that stresses community over competition, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, simplicity over constant consumption. Like many professionals, I usually start my day by reading the newspaper and tuning in to National Public Radio. But at Mount St. Scholastica, the day begins at dawn, with prayer. The Sisters make this moving gesture of shaping the sign of the cross across their lips. And they say,“Lord, open my lips and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a commitment to make the entire day—all our words and actions—a way of praising God. I can’t tell you how many times that thought has prevented me from blowing my stack at a co-worker, or making negative comments, because if what I’m doing during the course of my work day isn’t in some way praising God, then maybe it isn’t worth doing.
Reflection: Silence - PG# 5308 (2009/2010) One of the things I appreciate most about spending time at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas, is the reverence people have for listening and for silence. One day, sitting in chapel, I noticed some Latin words from the Rule of St. Benedict written across a stained glass window: tempore and silentio. Time and silence. At the time, I’d been traveling from city to city, giving presentations on a book I had written while still working as a journalist. The words of St. Benedict’s helped me realize how “talked out” I had become. I needed the rejuvenating balm of silence and solitude. Once a month, the monastery observes a “silent Sunday.” A peacefulness seems to enter the very stones of the place. I remember eating my lunch on one of those Sundays. I looked out the window and noticed some prairie grass, just beginning to turn green. The grass, the window had been there the day before, but I was probably too busily engaged in dinner conversation to notice either of them. When I walked the grounds, it was as if the wind was speaking to me. The day became one prolonged prayer. While on a rare journey outside of his cloister, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, “I get the feeling that so much talking goes on that is utterly useless. The redwood forests, the sea, the sky, the waves…it is in all this you will find answers.” In other words, it is in the silence where everything connects.
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