Now that we have considered the rudiments of our Advent Fast, let us return to the happy celebration at hand – it’s Thanksgiving!, or it will be soon, and here in Cor Unum Abbey, we are filled with gratitude.

Please be so kind, if you feel you are not quite in that frame of mind, to trust that gratitude belongs to you, too. Thankfulness is not withheld from us, thanks be to God! Sometimes we must wait to see the answer to our prayers, at least until we learn to see them by faith and to believe that we receive what we have asked (Mark 11:24, 25)

            “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.  And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

All of this, all of life, all of destiny, has so much to do with believing that God loves us enough. If there are any cracks or fissures, we fill them in believing that God loves others just as much! If neither we nor they live up to the love of God, we give thanks all the more, because His love does not fail, it does not ebb and flow, He does not offer His love like a carrot with which to catch a rabbit.

Oh, let us look to Jesus and be glad! His was the perfect demonstration – the Father loves us! To the gift and sacrifice of His own and His only begotten Son, He loves us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us! How much more will His love prepare us and bring us into the Presence of the Living God!

Here I share with you a personal word … gratitude will change your lives, my dear ones! Gratitude can save your life. I will tell you a story next Monday, a true one at that, of how it came to be that we practice deep, daily thanksgiving here in Cor Unum Abbey. In the meantime, if it pleases you, perhaps you will see if you can fill up these last days before Thanksgiving with … thanksgiving! You will be glad you did.

“Prayer Before the Meal”

Vincent van Gogh, 1882

public domain

Funny enough, and indicative of our times and culture, we think of the Advent Season as the coming of Christmas, the advent of the holidays and all the fun and joy we anticipate. As we grow older, we calculate in the expense and the trouble, and depending upon our personalities, we give ourselves a reality check or two.

If we celebrate Advent with the lighting of candles and the reading of Scripture, it lends a certain depth to the season and creates beautiful memories for our children, those of us blessed to have them. What could be more beautiful, though, than a young woman or a young couple, living alone, lighting the first, then the second and third, candles of the Wreath and praying through the season. What could be more inspirational than an older man or woman, alone, preparing to dine alone, as he or she must night after night, lighting that fourth candle with joy that the celebration of the Birth of Christ is upon the world?

As with so many of the things we investigate here in Cor Unum, we want to see the deepest beauty and the truest purpose that can be found in the living of our lives. We don’t have to have Christmas at all, and some don’t, but if we have it, let it be pleasing to the Lord.

“Real” Advent is not about the coming of Christmas, however. Real Advent is about the coming of the Lord! When we see Him coming again, something profound takes place at the culmination of four weeks of readiness. Not a rapture theology, but a true reminder that He who was born in humility will come again in glory, a concentrated devotional season spent looking for the Return of the King, we travel with the shepherds to the stable where it all began. Like the Magi who were on their way to Him, on their way to pay homage to His Majesty, we will see the Babe as He ought to be seen, and certainly He will be far more to us than the religious ornament on our tree, the crèche in the midst of all our candy canes and sugar cookies.

Like everything else in this Abbey and everything else in life, Christmas will be what we make of it. We can subtract some things and end up with more. We can have loads and loads of fluff, but still find the One of Whom the prophets wrote and the angels sang.

Choose, if you will, your Advent fast. Let it be simple and appropriate for the season, as you must spend it. “No sweets” might be difficult; “no sweets except in company” is doable. We might read a little less to allow a little more time to watch beautiful holiday movies, although one of us reads through the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year for all the spiritual significance it evokes. Perhaps the best part of an Advent Fast would be the keeping of the Advent tradition, the lighting of the candles and the reading of Scripture from an appropriate book … many have been written for the purpose. The Abbess hopes that these daily texts will be pertinent and meaningful and memorable for all of us. Stay tuned …

The Journey of the Magi

James Tissot, by permission

public domain

We are entering the ninth fast of our Cor Unum year, the Advent Fast. The days of each year conveniently totaling 365, we enjoy nine forty-day fasts, with five days remaining at the end of December for reflection and strategizing for the New Year.

As with all things here, this is a personal matter. Forty days without food has never been attempted and isn’t on the horizon! … but we have spent forty days without television and another forty days without desserts and forty days without complaining, and we have gone forty days with extra and concentrated thanksgiving and forty days with ongoing prayer for someone in great need and forty days with increased worship and focus on a particular passage of Scripture.

It is all that simple, and while not always easy, it is never difficult beyond delightful.

Let us be reminded of a most monastic practicality: sometimes in order NOT TO DO LESS, it helps us to devote ourselves to more. Sometimes? Really, for us, that is the cloistered credo, the choice of our consecration. If we were not here, we would be doing much less outside these walls. Instead, we ever call to mind in all we do that “here” we are hidden in the quiet temple of our souls with the abiding Presence of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, and we are here to enjoy our Lord.

So, Advent begins. Its official start will be Sunday, November 30, the First Sunday of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas. Get your Advent Wreaths ready, for we will celebrate traditionally, too, as many as wish to join in, but we always start a little early, with a little preparation before the preparation. Our Thanksgiving Fast is ended, but Thanksgiving is yet to come, so we have a bit of a blending of these two most joyous seasons, these seasons of sharing, giving, of family and pleasures and great gratitude.

What would you wish your Advent fast to look like? In all the planning and making ready before Christmas, with all the baking, buying, busy-ness, and beauty of the season, how will you make sure that the Lord doesn’t go begging … for your company? Of course we know, He doesn’t. He doesn’t need us, He just wants us. We see ourselves, in hope, like the woman who “wasted” the contents of her alabaster jar on her Lord. He doesn’t need anointing for burial either, halleluiah! Heaven is fragrant without our praise! Perhaps we are perfuming Him for His next Advent, His Soon Coming, no matter the length of days beforehand.

But consider this, my dear ones … that while heaven does not require the aroma of our praise and our prayers, it is somehow, gloriously, wonderfully, MORE FRAGRANT with it! It could be truly said that it would not be the same without it! Don’t you think that this might be a moment when the Abbess could rightly say, “Enough said!”

So it came about when the command and decree of the king were heard and many young ladies were gathered to the citadel of Susa into the custody of Hegai, that Esther was taken to the king’s palace into the custody of Hegai, who was in charge of the women.  Now the young lady pleased him and found favor with him. So he quickly provided her with her cosmetics and food, gave her seven choice maids from the king’s palace and transferred her and her maids to the best place in the harem.   (Esther 2:8,, NASB)

Esther seems to have been favored from the start, chosen from among many others, and before all her graces and gifts could have been fully known. Again, we believe there must have been “something about her.”   Let’s take another look at this concept.

We know there are at least a couple of things that stand out to us. First, she was bereaved, an orphan and a captive, now twice a captive, but she put her trust in Mordecai; she respected the will and the power of her protector. We can do that!

She might have said he hadn’t done the best job protecting her – here she was in Persia and now in the harem of the king!  No.  Esther brought with her something besides fear and bitterness and recrimination, or calculating greed and lasciviousness. We have reason to suspect a certain innocence about her, and as a Jew whose sins were confessed and atoned for, that would make her a stand-out in her culture and time, more than we tend to appreciate. After all, in our world, there’s a church on every corner and evangelism 24/7 on television and radio! Not so, then and there. In her day, people carried their sin and the weight and burden of guilt and iniquity, or they offered them up to demons. Oh, we sometimes so little value so cataclysmic a salvation in the earth, but we can remedy that!

Esther’s unspoken, unmentioned God … the time came when she would fast and ask her maidens to do the same. Fasting is toward God and purposeful, that He would intervene and break through. She hoped to live, but the time came when she was willing to die for the sake of God’s people. We will do that, laying our lives down continually for those whom we’ve been given to love. “We die daily,” as the Scripture says, and yet we live. We can fulfill that honorable role. For us to live is Christ and to die, even by inches, is gain! The woman who later was willing to perish for the sake of God’s own was the woman Hegai saw and honored and trained and blessed and favored and supplied with every good thing.

We may be that … we may live now as those who lay down our lives for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Living and dying, it will set us apart.

Persian Women Playing Harps

photo by Amir85, Wikipedia, by permission

         We also have an enemy, determined beyond any other impulse or any other gain to achieve our ruin. His quarrel is not with us, primarily, but with the One who will not make way for Him, the One who saw him fall from heaven as lightning. As often happens in this kingdom, that mail has come to our address. The Court of the Women in King Xerxes’ palace in Susa was not a harem to Esther; it was a monastery. She was alone there with God. Perhaps one reason why Jehovah gets not one mention in this story is to give us a sense of what it was like for her. It was not only the Unspoken Name of God that could not be uttered, but she could not whisper Elohim or El Elyon or Jehovah Shammah or Jehovah Jireh or any of the names by which her people knew Him. It was “radio silence” in the palace.

Hebrew prayers exalt the Name of God, as do the Blessings over food and worship and work. Not for Esther. When she needed Him most, she might have felt Him most distant, but when we consider her faith and her faith in action, we know she did not abandon the truth she had known from her infancy. God is the God of Israel, the God of the families of Israel, even if that family is one exiled man and his orphaned cousin. Israel was God’s chosen people, and that reality had not been cast aside in Esther’s heart. We cannot know what temptations to doubt or despair might have come her way, but we can be sure that she did not give way to those foolish and fiendish fears that would have prompted Hegai to invest his preferences elsewhere.

Haman’s downfall, as was that of his puppet master, Satan, was his overweening need for prestige and promotion, to be seen as greatest and highest. Meanwhile, Esther was content to be unknown, to conceal her identity, to do as Mordecai asked, to trust and maintain a quiet hope. Life lessons abound inside Esther’s monastery for all of us here in Cor Unum, the monastery of the heart.

Convent Garden, Quito, Ecuador courtesy of Rodney Dodig  

We are asking ourselves the question, what was it about Hadassah, Esther as she was known, that made her such a stand-out among the other maidens? We ought not to presume that she was poor, but we have no reason to suppose, as an exiled Jew, that she was rich. Certainly, if any parents or relatives were able to buy back their daughters from the king’s agents, and there is no record in the Scripture of any such thing, Mordecai did not.

We know that her secret kept her separated her from the other girls, as secrets will do, and her religion and her faith were undisclosed in the court of the women. If it was her religion that kept her apart, it stands to reason that a Jewish maiden, raised according to the laws of God and the customs of His chosen people, with as much or even the smallest bit of nearness to Him through observance of the law and the celebration of Passover and the other Hebrew feasts, that Esther did have something they did not, apart from beauty and talent. She had God, and even the aroma of true God has freshness, reality, and intrigue above those things that are as old and tired and lifeless as the earth can bring forth.

Mordecai was not actually Esther’s uncle, although that’s how we refer to him. He was her cousin. Esther 2:7 says of him:

He was bringing up Hadassah, that is Esther, his uncle’s daughter, for she had no father or mother. Now the young lady was beautiful of form and face, and when her father and her mother died, Mordecai took her as his own daughter.

It rather seems that Mordecai might have taken her for his wife, but happily for the history of the Jews, he did not. One thing Esther must have known was that she was loved and cared for, quite unselfishly it does appear. That would have to have helped form her character as well.

Can we comprehend on a day-to-day basis how vast and how significant it is upon the earth that there are a people alive and living among us who know God? Taking that greatness into the nth degree, there are a people on earth in whom He is pleased to dwell. Oh, for Jesus’ sake, Father, let it not be that the only imprint we leave upon the earth is that we were glad we escaped hell, or that we “know” some truth! We are called to walk in truth, and light, and in Christ! We are here, as Esther was, though she knew it not yet, we are here to defeat the powers of darkness, to lay them waste, to pursue spiritual enemies and not turn back until they are consumed. (Psalm 18:37)

That knowledge and that determination sets us apart even more, far more, than did Esther’s secret or her lineage. Yet we manage to fit in so comfortably, sometimes, with those around us, to blend, to use a false humility to accomplish nothing of value. We need a Hegai!

Oh, my dear ones, we have a Hegai! We have a holy Hegai, we have a Mordecai, watching, even orchestrating, and we have a King, waiting, waiting for the REAL fairest in the land to come forth.

Ester

Giuseppi di Sanctis

public domain

Why is the Book of Esther in Scripture? An entire book dedicated to a story that, in Exodus or Judges, might have been told in a few paragraphs! What if there is more to see and more to learn in this book, this Scriptural account that never mentions “God” or “Jehovah” or “Lord,” not even in context with Israel. What of the unfailing watch-care of Mordecai? What of the unsung hero, the eunuch Hegai? One king, one kinsman, a slave and a beautiful maiden. Neither the Brothers Grimm nor Hans Christian Andersen, not Charles Perault or all writers of all the myths of Greece and Rome could pen a better story of intrigue, danger, romance, and the triumph of good over evil.

As in many of Jesus’ parables, it is possible that this account tells a deeper story than the one that is told. Jewish children hear this story every year at Purim. It is perhaps the most elaborately staged and dramatized retelling in Hebrew families, and they love the suspense and pathos and they cheer wildly when the villain, Haman, gets his just desserts. So they ought, for their ancestors may have been among those that did not perish because of Esther’s willingness to risk her life for her people.

We won’t be able to draw perfect parallels as we search the Book of Esther, but we may be able to see some elements of truth that, like any good story, are more dramatically memorable and applicable to us than first meets the eye. We may always employ truth to teach truth when the outcome is true. Let’s begin with this reality, of tremendous importance to us and to the Jewish nation: he is a Jew who is one inwardly.

True story, historical fact, stranger than truth, and very possibly all about you and me.

The Tomb of Esther and Mordecai, Hamedan, Iran Nick Taylor, by permission

Mordecai kept watch over Haddessah outside the palace wall, and just on the other side of those walls, the king’s eunuch, Hegai, was watching, too.

One young woman stood out in the multitude. She was called Esther inside the palace, and she was different. We wish we knew, we wish we had record of those days she spent in seclusion, but it might be that the decency of the Word of God has drawn a veil over them. In our culture, we think hair and make-up, and no doubt there were hundreds of hours spent on the beautification of the maidens that had been brought into the harem of the king. More to the point, however, we may imagine that the many of the skills taught and the lessons imparted were of a delicate, sensual nature. The king’s pleasure was the one purpose and the goal of every effort, every day during a year of preparation. Then night after night, one after another, each young woman would seek to make herself irresistible and thus, unforgettable.

My dear Sisters, how can we express to the Lord our God our appreciation for His promise that He loves us now, remembers us continually, will not cast us off, will never, no never, not ever forsake us? As sobering as it is to consider the reality of Esther’s abduction and its political and historical impact, there is one further consideration for us here in Cor Unum, and we will give heed to it.

A greater than Mordecai is here, and He is looking through the lattice. The Song of Solomon depicts the Beloved looking into a boudoir, and there He found no ready response to love. May we set ourselves, stir ourselves as did the Shulamite, to open to our Beloved.

Esther had Hegai, watching, choosing her, selecting her and preferring her among the others. We have the Holy Spirit of Christ, making us ready for our Lord. We refer to Cor Unum as the monastery of our hearts, and it is, but there is One watching here, and He will perfect that which concerns us if we will be attentive and honoring toward Him. He will prepare us for that day when faith becomes sight, and the object of our LOVE takes His Bride.

The Receptioin

John Frederick Lewis, 1805-1875

public domain

What a sublime comfort it must be for the Abbess to know that the monastery does not run on her fuel!

She has probably been enclosed for decades before the responsibilities of Shepherdess come to her, and by that time she will have seen many trials swoop down upon the Abbey without seeing any substantive change in the order of things, which for monastics, is divine.

The Offices will go on, morning, noon, and night. New postulants will still be learning, training toward their novitiate, and novices toward their Clothing, no matter what befalls. The Feast Days and Fast Days remain the same. Should any of the nuns ever have to be in hospital or away for any reason, rare as that is in a cloistered monastery, she will have her own Book of Prayer with her, and she will be able to keep up, knowing what her sisters are doing virtually every moment of the day.

There was, at the Palace of King Xerxes, in the Court of the Women, one whose supervision was instrumental in the history of the King, of his new Queen, and thus, of the Jewish nation. How fascinating it would be to know WHAT WENT ON in that hotbed of feminine expectations! Who knows how much we may be romanticizing it or underestimating it or invalidating it. Whatever the days may have held, one man seems to have held Esther’s future in his hands. Let’s see if we may perhaps be able to relate to him more than we have imagined. It may be that here in Cor Unum, without Abbess or Mistress of Postulants, we might have oversight which we have hardly credited until now.

“Bar Convent Dome Detail” by Dalekyoyo (talk) – self-made. Via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bar_Convent_Dome_Detail.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Bar_Convent_Dome_Detail.jpg