Cor Unum Abbey

The new postulant, having knocked upon the abbey door and been admitted by the Mother Abbess and a number of her counselors, is taken through the corridors and directly into the life of the monastery.

Her arrival will often be scheduled to coincide with a period of recreation, when the Sisters are permitted to speak for an hour’s time, so that she can be made welcome by all, and because the superiors of the house must not be absent from the Divine Office, except in cases of emergency.

The new postulant will be led through seemingly endless corridors in some houses, and through the parlor and down the hall in others, trying to take in every detail that her eyes can cover.  She finds herself at last in the midst of the entire community and participates in the remainder of the hour, and then she is led to the cell that has been made ready for her.  There she will change into her postulant’s habit.  This used to be a blouse and skirt, a very long skirt until at least the middle of the last century, and a short veil, and when she reappears before the community, she is as “arrived” as ever she needs to be, if she will stay and take the rule of the house as her own, for love’s sake.

When recreation comes to a close, the Sisters file into the chapel to offer to God the praises and prayers of the next Office.  The newcomer is with them.  She will certainly be lost among the page turnings, the kneeling and rising, the bows, the proclamations and the chant, but THIS is that for which she came.  She can look around her and see that what is to be learned can be learned, and what is given can be received: the monastic vocation she seeks.  To the newest little sister, no matter her age, she believes she has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.

For all of us in Cor Unum Abbey, nothing that we lavish on our Savior will ever be stripped from us.  The devotion of time for prayer or worship will enclose us in His Presence and His faith as days go by.  Our gifts  of daily thanksgiving on the way to work or a song of worship with the children  before they leave for school or quiet meditation on the Lord Himself before the computer turns on in the morning . . . as we learn to do what we can, we will take our designated places among those who have time for more, and it will be enough.

The robust love of God will become our practice, for we will advance by inches of unseen, unheralded conversion, rather than halting on the miles of good intentions.   What has worked wherever others would not turn back, will not fail to be for us, too, a “change of habit.”

by permission, Felipe Ribeiro, Wikipedia

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

For the true monastic, entrance in the cloister is not at all a departure, but an arrival.  The new postulant steps over the threshold of the monastery and into the life she has chosen. 

For some, the wait has been long and the testing has been severe.  The Mother Abbess and her council are quick to recognize  and reject those who would come into their midst in order to hide from the world outside. 

For the cloistered, monasticism is a calling, above all. A contemplative nun lives her life trading distractions for devotion and pleasures for the privilege of pleasing God in all love and obedience. 

Will that leave us out?  Most of us cannot, probably none of us ever will, cross that threshold, but is there not a door through which we may pass into a life of unbroken fellowship with the Lord we love?

We look to Him.  He told us that the gate of life was very small, and the way very narrow and constraining. He said, too, that the way that leads to destruction is broad.  When children say, “But she gets to go!” or “But he has one!”, they only amplify the grievances of our lives without discipline and devotion.

In the Abbey, our calling is not to escape death or deprivation.  We are called to life, and that life is eternal, and it has begun!  Jesus ever lived the narrow-ness of a life dedicated to the Father.  He said, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working . . . Truly, truly, I say to  you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing . . .”  (John 5:17 and 19)

There is no door so small or any way so narrow as is this one, but it is open to us.  We may learn to do as Jesus did, to enter life through faith and obedience . . . to watch and pray and wait upon our Father until we only do those things that originate in His life and love.  This is the small door through which life … Jesus’ life … comes into the world.

In most houses of monasticism, decorations are kept at a minimum.  The eyes are curious, says the Novice Mistress, and they will feast on many things rather than humbling themselves to let the heart gaze upon the Lord.

There was, at one time, in every Carmelite refectory, at the head table where the Abbess sits, a very distinct knickknack.  The Abbess’s table was “decorated” by a human skull.  Vatican II changed many things, and this practice may have gone the way of some of them, but its monastic understanding is of interest to us.

This centerpiece gave most new postulants pause!  From their first meal, at every meal, and on a small table in miniature replica in their cells, the Sisters were confronted by the reminder that we are not destined to live forever on this planet.  Rather than a grim representation of the worm of death, the skull served to help the postulant begin to think in terms of the shortness of life in comparison with the length of eternity.  The fleeting glory of the earth and of the flesh would begin to be subject to the nearness of the kingdom of heaven. Her mind would begin to transform, to have an eternal perspective, and transformation is the rule of every day and every custom.

In many traditional refectories, meals are eaten in silence.  There is no chatty atmosphere to obfuscate the cranial stare.  One nun observed that she waited in vain for a special feast when talking would be permitted, only to find that those events come on no other occasions than the Jubilee Anniversaries of the professed nuns!

The refectory isn’t completely without voice throughout mealtime, however.  An “hebdomadaria” is assigned who, at times and in a strong, clear voice, reads pages from uplifting texts and homilies.  It isn’t The Shopping Network, on in the background, but the nuns grow to love and appreciate this inspiriting accompaniment to their meals.

The staring head was there to remind each Sister that the day would come when her place would be taken by another.  The communal silence would continue, the meals might remain much the same, the reader would still clear her voice and begin, but each nun would vacate her seat one day, and vacate her flesh as well.

To the nuns, they think heaven is monastic in this regard, that every intention and every act of every moment is for and toward the Lord God.  With that in mind, even as they feed their bodies in life, they travel in silence toward the real joys they will know after death.

Few if any of us have a skull we can use as a centerpiece, but as we sat down to a meal with the Lord yesterday, let’s see if today we can dine on these words at least once.

2 Corinthians 5:8 … ” . . . we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. (NASB)

Cor Unum Abbey, photo