Cor Unum Abbey

We do not doubt that every generation faces its own dark times and threatening scenarios; the enemy of souls has a plan of destruction for each generation.  Yet, we are not destroyed.

                  In Cor Unum, walking with God, referring all to Him and to the finished work of His Son on Calvary’s cross, measuring everything against the weight of His glory, exulting in the glory of His resurrection, we understand that when all is said and done, we shall still be found, worshiping God. When all else fails, we shall be found standing, and we are standing. We love; we forgive; we give thanks to God; we render to Him our praise and look forward to catching every glimpse of His Majesty.

                  How might His light shine through the mists and the darkness if we faithfully resist the confusions, doubts, fears, and disappointments that present themselves for our inspection and for our embrace. Darkness isn’t death and threats of destruction do not in themselves destroy . . . unless we give them that for which they ask.  We do not surrender our hope.

                  We in Cor Unum are in training, that we will not abandon the field of battle. We stand and maintain hope’s field of engagement. Those who look to see, will behold His glory.

We’ll just schedule our days! We’ll make a plan! We just need to pray more!

Sound familiar? Perhaps we have heard those words in our own hearts and heads!

The best Divine Office seems to evolve when we decide not how we can pencil God in, but when we decide that we must have more of God than what we already have!

When we evaluate the worth of God, when we determine His value in our own estimation, we make progress. When we think of it, everything else of worth pales in comparison. For all that He has given and instituted in our lives, we return to Him gratitude and love and adoration.

Still, we have to get there . . . to the place, the time, the occasion where we will close ourselves in with Him. We go to the place where He awaits us. Jesus said that place is real and that the Father is really there, waiting for us in secret, seeking worshipers. The path that leads us into the Presence of God is often the one that follows the marked path … “No More Talk Shows – THIS WAY” or “NEW PRIORITIES … NEXT EXIT”. Certainly it is the road less traveled, especially for those who will come again and again during the day, when more delights and distractions fill the landscape.

It is ever the WORTH and the FRIENDSHIP and the GLORY and the LOVE of God that prompt us, here in Cor Unum. He Himself, His incomparable value, reforms us when nothing else will. How grievous it will be to discover all that we could have had of God if we would have been content with less refuse in our lives. God help us to make that discovery now, that we may live and die, unashamed.

Having found one of great price, the merchant, who was seeking a valuable pearl, sold all that he had in order to buy it. (Matthew 13:45, 46) The part of the parable that we often overlook is in the first verse … he was looking for treasure in the first place!

The Empress Maria Feodorovna

by Ivan Kramakov, public domain

Our grown up joy is dependent upon our grown up choices.

We looked at our own “Divine Order,” early in Cor Unum, and realized that, divine or otherwise, there is an order to our days. No matter how DISORDERLY they may seem sometimes, certain patterns are in place.

We realized that we let the dog out, have our coffee, the read the paper, bring the dog in, take a shower and get ready for work. Or we turn on the radio or television and sit before it with a bowl of oatmeal, then call an early-rising friend, put in a load of laundry, and head for the gym. Or we wake up, we begin to praise our God with the first thoughts in our minds and the first words from our lips; we take up our Bibles, we practice a few moments of stillness, of waiting upon God, we give Him thanks before the newspaper is read.

When the new postulant enters the monastery, she knows she will have order to her days, she knows it will be one “office” after another, prescribed by someone else, for as long as she lives, but she wants it all. Hers is an order that gives her the greatest opportunity to make sure all the aspects of worship and prayer, meditation, praise, repentance and celebration are fitted into each day.   She wants both to WALK WITH GOD continually and devotedly and to APPEAR BEFORE THE THRONE OF GRACE, daily, repeatedly, purposefully, all the days of her life. She chooses to live in heaven, to live on the earth, to live cloistered with God.

Do we want other than that, here in Cor Unum? No! We want exactly that, and for those things we are come into this monastery.

Any professed nun will concede that to become a monastic in this way, in our way here in Cor Unum, is the truly HARD WAY! Without an Abbess, without a “rule,” except the one we ourselves implement, without a barrier against distractions, without extern sisters to protect our Divine Office, we must provide all those things from within, through wisdom, by way of self-discipline and devotion and persistence . . . and even through failure!   Failure that results in redirection and multiplied effort and determination is hardly failure at all!

God bless our day in Cor Unum! God bless us to bring our lives into a devotion that satisfies HIS heart!

There is tremendous privilege in the knowledge that God is good and that He does good everlastingly. To know Him as Father, to trust Him as the Father Whom Jesus revealed Him to be, is a magnificent benefit, the surpassing wonder and joy of life.

Now what?

Please, Sir, we want some more.

Within this monastery of the heart, we want not only to know we are loved, but also to return love. We want not only the blessings of God and the intangible sweetness and pleasures of faith, but also to take part in the life and love of the Lord. Jesus knew we would. After all, it was not enough for Him to sit at the right hand of the Father and soak up the majesty and goodness of that place of honor and eternal glory. He ever knows and ever has known His Father’s heart, and the Father had ordained an epoch in which the glory of Father and Son together would be magnified in the lives of men.

This desire to move into the circle of the will of God begins with a passion to know Him better. It moves along because we see that He is “up to something” in the earth.   We begin to want to know the joys of obedience, because we house the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the fully obedient Son of God.

We are His own, God’s children, actually offspring by faith sharing in the inheritance of Jesus Christ, but we are not babies. Let us endeavor today to remember back, perhaps far back, to that time when it pleased us to be obedient children, to hear a parent say, “Good job!” Let’s see if we can remember those short days when obedience brought us deep inner joy, when the “well done” of our parents filled us with good pleasure, those days when it was enough just to obey, even without commendation.

There is grown up joy in obedience to our Heavenly Father; Jesus Christ will prove this to us every day by His Spirit within us. In Cor Unum, we are finding the joy of obedience, seizing it, and making it our grown up glory.

Abbey photo

On every street in every town, behind every shade, lives a potential postulant.               

  While the tiniest fraction of the smallest percentage of those in any city or hamlet will ever remove to a convent or monastery, every curtain and blind closes a man or woman in with God.

                  Sadly, so do failures and shortcomings, depression and darkness, resentments and refusal. God draws near, and with lovingkindness draws us to faith in His Son . . . how wicked the enemies of the human soul that endeavor to bar us from the light and love of God.

                  Let us, here in Cor Unum, behind the grille of hope, give our thanks to God for the hours we have spent in the pure joy of His Presence, let us renew our commitment that, when the Father waits for us in silence, He will not be disappointed in us, for we come, and let us consider one or two others for whom we may pray, that they will spend their next . . . or their first . . . hours closeted with the One Whom the heavens cannot contain, the One Who comes to us.

 Abbey photo

            We will come back to Sister Thèrése from time to time in Cor Unum. She has much to teach us. She was a nun because she was Catholic and because the monastic way of life was highly prized in her family and because her sisters were nuns . . . but more than these, she was a nun because the love of God was the calling to which she dedicated her life. Thèrése is a nun we have come to know, whose little journal entries have come down to us, because she gave herself to the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ, the yoke of His love.

            She was not always a monastic celebrity. One of her sister nuns at the Lisieux Carmel made the observation that she could not see what all the fuss was about Thèrése. By the time of her death her “Little Way,” which bespoke a way of hard choices, humility, misunderstood motives, and loneliness for love’s sake, had begun to glisten and gleam a light of truth into the monastery. The goal of her life was to turn every opportunity to love into real love. The flame had not caught in every lamp, but when love is the genuine article, it cannot be concealed for long.

We can only imagine that Thèrése might have laughed at the Sister’s observation and said she didn’t understand the fuss either, that the way of love which demonstrates the way God has loved us is only the most sensible and normal pattern of life to be found.

            It is said that Confucius had his own version of the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you. The difference between his words and the words of Jesus Christ are the difference between being yoked to love and yoked to fatality and isolationism. We in Cor Unum will choose love, with all its tendency to ruin our plans and humble our stature and leave us standing all by ourselves.

            Then we will look around and remember that in Cor Unum, we are in the best of company!

Princess Elizabeth

with World War II Veteran, public domain

            Sister Thérèse of Lisieux knew more than a little about the discomforts of love.

            In point of fact, she often chose them.

            When no one else wanted the job, she began accompanying a crotchet-y older nun to the Refectory after choir in the evening.  Sister St. Pierre could not walk alone, but she was unable to to make her way through the monastery corridors without sharp-tongued criticisms either!  Too fast! Too Slow!  Hold me tighter!  Not so tight!

            Then Thérèse would have to get the older Sister stationed in her chair and fold her sleeves back just so, and at last she was free to leave, but Sister St. Pierre had a very difficult time handling her bread, so Thérèse began to undertake this little service as well, making sure her grouchy nemesis had everything manageable to her twisted old hands.

            Thérèse had learned what many refuse to consider, that when we conquer our lovelessness, we will rise above all our contemporaries in happiness.

            Thérèse chose the discomforts of life continually, that the “comfy yoke” of walking in step with Jesus might be hers.  For her, it was far, far better to discomfort her ego and impatience than to run ahead of God, into the sharp-needled desert of cold love, full of stinging selfishness and poisonous pride.

            Yet perhaps her greatest contribution to her Abbey and to us is that all this she did, not in order to become a saint, but that she might always turn and see the face of Jesus smiling right beside her.  This is the glory of the yoke of love . . .

 Old Woman Dozing

 Nicholaes Maes, public domain

Wikipedia

When a farmer carves a yoke for his oxen, it is a labor of woodworking love!

He may not love his cattle, but he cares enough for them and for the work they must do that the yoke will have every detail of weight and balance, every comfort of fit, and every kindness and wisdom of smooth, planed wood and waterproof finishing.

The farmer loves his family enough to do things expertly in anticipation of the best possible result.  When he loves his work, the land responds.

HOW MUCH MORE does our Father in heaven fit every yoke to our stature in Christ Jesus, His Son?  If not to the stature we maintain, then we can be sure we are yoked to the image of Jesus Christ that we are meant to OBTAIN.

We will soon again choose a small exercise for “conversatio,” for the conversion of life we seek to realize in Jesus Christ.  Some of us will take up one small practice, the decision to say something kind to a telephone solicitor or to be the first to the kitchen to put on the coffee in the morning.  Some will commit not to do one small thing that has the potential to throw off the yoke of love by which we are fitted to Jesus Christ.

If we’re quiet and still, and if we ask to know, the Husbandman will show us what we can do that will bless others and help us to change deep down inside.  When we bend our necks to it, ours is a comfy yoke, fashioned just for us.

Abbey Artwork/by Ashley