Cor Unum Abbey

         Let us find a quiet moment, the next opportunity we have to be as quiet as we may be, and let us seek the near Presence of God.   Stay . . . for five minutes. Let us direct no thought toward the day ahead, or even toward the effects and benefits of God’s Life and Love. There will be loads of time for that! Stay for ten minutes if it is possible; stay just to be near. Direct no thought toward peace, righteousness, sin, failure, or joy. That’s the important part. This is not a mental activity. With it we humble our minds to the love of God. Only stay in the His Presence. Let the one determination be to be with Him, to be near, and having made that determination, be near and give the matter no further thought.

         Let your heart be fully delighted in Him, but without words, without summing up. Stay for twenty minutes. For these moments, don’t pray or repent or give thanks or meditate or worry if thoughts and impulses do wander. Ignore thought and impulse of every nature; just ignore them. Direct the heart to enjoy the Lord our God in perfect stillness of soul and mind, where even imperfection is completely unimportant. Just stay.

         Stay longer; stay for half an hour.   When our time is up, we are candidates to remain, here in Cor Unum. Rest assured, there will be time, lots of time, for worship, for thanksgiving, for repentance, for prayer, but in the Presence of a king, even an earthly king, the true servant does not clamor for attention; he waits. We will learn to listen, to watch, to ask, to know, but first we delight in His Nearness for His sake, alone.

         Dear ones, we’ve been together, some of us, for years now. The new volume is underway, and it would be magnificent and magnificently helpful if you would post comments along the way, those of you who are inspired to attempt and to enjoy these practices. Please see my comment on today’s entry … I hope to see yours. Bits and pieces of what you say along the path will be included in the next book, successes and failures and queries, altogether. I’ll let you know and make sure you don’t mind if I include them. For now, if you step into these halls, please share with others the experience of it. And thank you from my heart.

Sennanque Cloister

JShapiro, Wikipedia

         The young postulant who arrives at the Abbey doors seeking peace . . . well . . . that girl is seldom invited to the Abbey doors.

         After many consultations with the Mother Prioress, the Abbess, and members of the community, carried out in observance of strict enclosure with all communication through the grille, one of the chief determinations regards the nature of the quest. The applicant must have an understanding that the nuns are not assembled to pursue peace, although they do typically find it.

         A word of explanation. The Sisters are not enclosed in order to enjoy peace and quiet, away from the business of life. The quiet they may enjoy aids their search for the fullness of Jesus Christ, but if the monastery is in Manhattan, they seek Him there, horns honking, tires squealing. It has been reported that big-city monasteries do find “quiet,” wonderfully, and as the residents achieve it, peace prevails.

         Nuns are not enclosed in order to float blissfully through life on a cloud of silence; they maintain silence whatever their surroundings in order to direct their souls more deeply into the heart of God. We in Cor Unum may experiment with “peace” day by day, if we will. Tomorrow, we’ll discover one of the single best ways to go about it.

pollobarca2, Wikipedia

“What is ‘righteousness,’ class?”

Not many of us went to that school!Every parent wants to see it in a child. Every child knows when his parent is righteousness-deficient.

Righteousness . . . is the being better than we are. Righteousness is honesty for its own sake. Righteousness is hoping where others only wish.

Righteousness is the glory of work and the safeguard of all our play, our leisure and our loves. It is living every moment within an eternal perspective. Righteousness is having in ourselves that which belongs to God alone, and having it rightfully.

Biblically, we know (although we seldom remember it in context at all) that righteousness is believing God. Now we can be honest, even if our honesty results in loss; we can win no matter how often we lose. We obtain what others never lay eyes upon.

There is a work for us in the Kingdom, and we were given it by the King and Lord thereof . . . we are assigned to righteousness, and how precious it is within these Cor Unum walls that what is asked of us is that we believe in the God Who loves us unto the sacrifice of His own Son. Indeed, this is our work here, to believe in the One Whom the Father has sent. (John 6:29)

Pleterje Monastery

public domain

  We read them everywhere . . . “No Soliciting” . . . “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service” . . . “Cashier Has Less Than $25.00 in Cash” . . . the signs of the times!  

          The sign on the door to our Kingdom reads . . . “Righteousness, Peace, and Joy Within.”

         The flag stones leading up the walkway to Cor Unum might read . . . RIGHTEOUSNESS . . . PEACE . . . JOY . . . PEACE . . . RIGHTEOUSNESS . . . JOY . . . PEACE . . . JOY . . . RIGHTEOUSNESS . . . and we might see a pattern in the outlay.

         No righteousness, no peace. No joy, no righteousness. No peace, no joy. All of that can be turned inside out as well . . . as we mean to do here in the Abbey.  We are ever reaching the perfection of maturity, and one day we will be ripe with the display of Spirit and Truth, of Fruit and Gifts, of righteousness . . . peace . . . and joy.

         Oh to be . . . fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty and more years old, and not “filled” with the disappointments we’ve endured, the slights we’ve sloughed off, and the heartaches we have lived through, but with righteousness of faith, peace that passes understanding (which is much more than mere endurance,) and joy “unspeakable and full of glory,” because, we are THAT MUCH closer to the death that is, for us, great gain.

         Oh to be crowned at twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years of life with the unwavering, undying assurance that we will see our Sovereign face to face . . . and be like Him, because of all the disappointments and slights and heartaches of life have given us reason to remain and find our refuge in our “First Love.”    Truly, our God and Father is working all things together for our good, and as we grow (and age!) we know with certainty that our best and surpassing good is the Nearness of the God we love.  (Psalm 73:28)    

“But as for me,the nearness of God is my good …” (Psalm 73:28a, NASB)

Alabaster Windows

Saint Mary la Mejor Church

Etan J. Tal, Wikipedia, by permission

         On this last day of our forty day L.U.C.I.E. Fast, we see that the list of many instructions and admonitions in Romans 12 and 13 are giving way to a detailed treatise on one subject: JUDGE NOT!

         As Francis Frangipane has so simply and eloquently said, in this kingdom, only those willing to lay down their lives for others are fit to judge. (Holiness, Truth, and the Presence of God, by Francis Frangipane)

        This is our judgment in Cor Unum: we would desire that those we love walk in truth, making love their aim, free to worship our God and King and free to love others. Nothing else will suffice, and so we judge ourselves to be kneeling warriors, fighting the good fight of faith, that none are so lost that the Good Shepherd cannot find and rescue them, bringing them back to the fold in his strong arms.

Andreas Cruz photography

         Has the Abbey moved to the Loire, to Provence . . . to Paris??

No (although the Sisters would not object to a “pilgrimage” in the region!) – those title words were first spoken in perpetuity by Edward III . . . at a dance!

He was leading his cousin, Joan of Kent, around the dance floor (or more likely up and down the reel) when her garter slipped down to her ankle and the assembled gentlefolk began to snigger. Edward took the garter and put it on over his own hosiery, saying, “Shame be to him who thinks evil thereupon.” Or “Evil be to him who evil thinks.”

For us in Cor Unum, we might profit by a little turn of phrase that turns us to the truth that is in Jesus Christ, our Lord. In Titus 1:15 we read this beautiful admonition:

To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.

On this, the next to the last day of our forty day L.U.C.I.E. Fast, we read Romans 13:14 . . .

Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Edward would have no man (or woman) think ill of Joan over a slipped garter . . . and thus was the Order of the Garter formed, a chivalrous order . . . but never so much so as one monastic heart refusing the opportunity to think evil when good may be found in the finished work of Jesus Christ, and the great privilege of knowing all men as He knows them (2 Corinthians 5:16.)

Coat of Arms of Lord Churchill,

first Duke of Marlboro

encircled by the Garter Riband

public domain

Our next, and almost next to last, word is the all-encompassing summation:
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ!

This, in Cor Unum, is most assuredly our “holy habit.”

These words are followed, in the same sentence, with the warning, “and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.”

We have seen, over the last two months, that Christlikeness can be visualized and explained, in terms of behavior and right thought; there are things we can do and STOP DOING that mirror His heart and life.

We have all seen, too, what Paul meant when he said, “Oh wretched man that I am! Who will free me from the body of this death?”

Our flesh would creep over the earth, lusting for its own selfish desires or lustily dissatisfied with all it had not obtained for the rest of our days, but for the privilege of the habit . . . the habit of putting on the Lord Jesus!

Saved and redeemed as we are, we have that privilege of choosing Christlikeness just as He chose obedience to His Father, for the love of His Father, to have no personal will BUT to do what He saw the Father doing. Very simply, quite profoundly, we have the same choice, and together, and by faith in Him, we make no other plans and provide no other opportunity today, here in the monastery of the heart.

Tremendous thanks to Andreas Cruz 

for the splendid images we’ve enjoyed 

during our L.U.C.I.E. fast!

While we were busy delving into the long list of precepts, injunctions and ordinances in the Romans 12 and 13, thirty-seven days of our L.U.C.I.E. Fast have slid by.

We have been “fasting” . . . Lethargy, Unbelief, Complaining, Excess and Idolatry . . . the L.U.C.I.E. fast!

We have been mining the gems of righteous understanding and strength, and strengthening our souls in some behavioral diligence! Practically painless!

Today’s admonition speaks of honesty, and we will need honesty to continue in what we’ve learned, not making excuses or overlooking our shortcomings.

Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. (Romans 13:13)

This is going out with a bang! Are there not at least four advisories in Romans 13:13? Yes, there are, and honesty will keep us safe in all of them. We are HONESTLY the children of God; honestly, our Father is the Lord God Almighty, and as His own, rioting and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, strife and envy have no place in us . . . and we have no need of them! Neither selfishness, nor jealousy, nor manipulation, nor fear, nor hatred, nor grasping and covetousness, nor laziness . . . are meant for us. We are meant for glory, for crowns of glory to lay at the feet of the Majesty of Heaven.

There will be majesty displayed in us, and we shall be free to live and love, and to reign with Him forever in His Kingdom! Honestly, that is our destiny!

extremely rare purple/lavendar topaz
Robert Levinsky on Wikipedia, by permission