Of all the words in all the world, only imagine which one the Benedictine nun will have to eradicate from her vocabulary?
“Gee whiz!” and “Golly!” had to be curtailed in the ’fifties, and there are some that 21st century postulants will have to forsake, to be sure, but the one that might surprise you is the word . . . “mine.”
She sleeps at night in “our cell” . . . hers and the Lord’s. If it is askew, she has to straighten “our veil,” and, on the table beside her bed, even the little Bible, of which the Lord has slight personal use, being Himself so inexpressibly familiar with the text, is “ours.”
The Benedictine nun may own nothing, may call nothing “mine” whatsoever, except her sins.
I remember a man saying once that his wife had one little habit that discomposed him: she referred to everything they owned as “mine.” “My kitchen,” “my “dining table,” and “my children.” It was a small thing, just a trifle, but he had to overlook it in order to love her freely. With Benedictine Sisters, they overcome possessiveness in order to love their Lord more freely.
Here is a practice we will not try to adopt in full. Those with whom we live and work won’t hear us refer to “our briefcase” or “our lipstick” any time soon, but it is very entertaining, not to say eye-opening, to use this plural possessive pronoun in prayer.
What’s more, it is very enlightening. Imagine saying to the Lord “our family,” meaning His and yours! “Our” bills and “our” vacation! His and ours!
It is time to return to the weight and power of our small “conversatio” practices. Perhaps we haven’t had that third cup of coffee for several weeks, or perhaps we have limited our television viewing and spent the savings on the Lord – and now, we consider and add another small transformation. Remember . . . we add to the first, choosing something that we really will (or will not) do for the next twenty-one days. We are learning to address “our” sins, meaning “mine” and “yours” alone, to vanquish them because they once were “His” on the cross of our shame, where He who knew no sin suffered and died. We don’t need to carry them, and we don’t need to perform them anymore.
There are those sins that we know we must cut away completely and immediately by the grace of God, repenting if we stumble but turning our backs on them and calling them what they are, but “conversation” helps us with those little twining selfishnesses and lazinesses and failures to love God and others and helps us take proper care of ourselves. If you didn’t give this a spin the first time, be encouraged prayerfully to consider one TINY tweak that you can apply to the not-so-beneficial habits in your life, the hurtful over-indulgences or one of the empty places where a little discipline or attentiveness belong, like the visits to a shut-in person that have been put off for too long. Go monthly if you can’t quite go weekly as yet. Be absolutely sure that you choose something you WILL DO, be it ever so small. Stop biting just one fingernail, as we say here in the Abbey. But stop biting it forever. Next time around, stop biting another. Fingernails, after all, aren’t “mine” or “yours,” they are “ours” with God. We were bought with a price, we are not our own. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 )
Maybe some of us will even stop saying “Gee whiz!” at last!
2 Corinthians 5:21 … God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (NIV)
1 Corinthians 6:19, 20 …”Ye are not your own: for ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
Changing Habits
Cor Unum Abbey photo
Cor Unum Abbey 