A Life Offered

Something profound is happening around us. While the Presidential Election last November is a piece of it, it’s not the whole piece, and while it might be the cause, it’s not the whole cause. I am not a political analyst, so I am not the one to try to explain what did and did not happen, or what did or did not cause what happened to occur. Obviously, political scientists will be answering those questions for decades. But what I do know is that the questions people are asking me at talking meals has changed since November. Or to put it another way, people’s motives for asking me questions about our life have changed. Perhaps you have noticed this as well, brothers.

It’s not unusual for people to ask me how long I have been in the community. I am asked that quite a lot. It’s hard to believe that my answer is: nearly thirty years. I am at the point that I have spent almost half my life in the Society. But that’s not the question, nor the answer that people are really interested in. There is always a follow-up question. Why did you come? I have been asked that question countless times. In fact I was asked it twice this week alone. It seems that’s the question people have on their minds these days, as I have noticed people asking it of me more and more. But my sense is that the reason people are asking it has changed in the last several months. As I said a moment ago, a profound shift is happening, and it’s coming out in the questions people are asking. Perhaps you have noticed this as well, even in, supposedly casual conversations.

My sense is that people are indeed curious about our life. You have to admit, it’s a curious life! But I think that as curious as people are about our life, they are actually more curious about their own life. They are not asking me why I came to the Society, because they are interested in me. They are asking it because they are interested in themselves. They are asking it because they are trying to make sense of their own life. And that, I think, is a shift.

Suddenly the world we live in doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, and when the world around us no longer gives our lives meaning, then we have to make meaning the only way we can, within ourselves.

At one time people did ask me why I came to the community because they were either actually curious about my life, or they were just being polite. Now, as I explore the question, I am finding that it is not just curiosity that lies behind the question, but a desire for meaning.

So why did I come to the community nearly thirty years ago?

When I am asked that question, I tell people that I came because I desired a life of intensity. I desired a place where prayer and worship were taken seriously. I desired a place where I could live the Christian life with every fibre of my being. I desired a place where the people I lived with took seriously the same things that I took seriously. It’s not, I assure people, that you cannot live the Christian life outside these walls. Many do. But I need an intensity to life that I could not find as a parish priest.

What I don’t say, at least not directly, and not until recently, is that I needed life to be hard, not in the sense of impossibly difficult, but rather in the sense of challenging. I needed my Christian life to demand everything I had to give, not just a piece of me, and not just my 9 to 5, Monday to Friday (or Tuesday to Sunday) piece. As our hymn says: Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.[1]

Father Benson tells us in the very first sentence of The Religious Vocation that the purposes for which our Society is called together [is] to live for God, to live by rule, to work for God under those vows by which He has given special blessings to all our work.[2] Everything else Father Benson writes is simply an explanation of how we are to live for God. That, in a sense, is our motto. And that, I think, is the answer to the question people ask when they ask me why did you come? In order to live for God.

What lies behind that question is a quest for meaning. How can we make meaning of our lives when so much in the world is clearly meaningless? Is it possible to live a life that is not solely consumed with propping up the ego? Can you actually live a life of service to something that is immeasurably bigger than yourself?

Father Benson reminds us that we were formed in the image of the Blessed Trinity, with a social nature representative of the Being of [our] Creator. When [humanity] was put into the world it was said, ‘It is not good for [humanity] to be alone.’ Human society is therefore of divine appointment, for the exercise of those faculties which are in our nature, in their highest form. [Someone] who can so advance in everything as to be in any sense of the word self-sufficient, or independent, is advancing into a position at variance with the primary law of our nature. [Someone] who is so self-contained as not to be bound to the sympathies of society about [them] is violating the true law of [their] being.[3]

As human beings, we were created in the image and likeness of God. As Genesis tells us: Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind^* in our image, according to our likeness….’ So God created humankind^* in his image, in the image of God he created them; ^*male and female he created them.[4] And we can only attain our fullest self, our truest meaning, our highest joy when we come to know that to be true. For it is in sharing in the divine life of God, which is boundless love, for God is love[5], that we will discover a life rich in meaning, and thus worth living.

I came to the community nearly thirty years ago because I wanted to offer my life to God so that I might be identified and filled with the love of God.[6] It is the only thing I can do with my one wild and precious life,[7] as Mary Oliver puts it. Some days it is the most impossible thing I have ever been asked to do. But most days it is the only possible thing I can do with my life and it gives me a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of joy.

So why did I come to the community? Because I couldn’t do anything else.

 

One of a series of addresses given by James Koester SSJE to the brothers of The Society of Saint John the Evangelist at the Friday morning Eucharist in the monastery chapel. Originally given on 17 February 2017.

 

[1] Watts, Isaac, The Hymnal, 1984, When I Survey The Wondrous Cross, hymn 474

[2] Benson SSJE, Richard Meux, The Religious Vocation, Of the Objects of the Society, chapter 1, page 37

[3] Benson SSJE, Richard Meux, Instructions on the Religious Life, Second Series, Life in Community, page 19

[4] Genesis 1: 26, 27

[5] 1 John 4: 8

[6] Benson, Instructions on the Religious Life, First Series, The Religious Life, page 7

[7] Oliver, Mary, The Summer Day