Life Together
I am often struck, Brothers, by how curious our life together must appear to those who, for whatever reason, come for a time; either for a week, or a weekend, or even just a few hours, or even just wander in off the street into the middle of a liturgy. It must seem very strange at first, to watch a group of men, of a variety of ages and temperaments living together as a household, but at the same time unlike any usual household. It must seems strange to watch us go about our days, which on the one hand are very very ordinary: dishes, laundry, gardening, garbage. On the other hand our lives are anything but ordinary: worship, prayer, silence, listening, and the vows of poverty, celibacy, obedience. On some days it is not just those who watch from the outside who must think our life is strange. There are some days it even seems strange to me!
One of the reasons I think why our life is so strange, to others and perhaps occasionally even to ourselves, is that we live in a world which values commodities. The values of the world are based upon production and tangible results. As humans, and especially humans, and perhaps most especially males of the twenty-first century North America, we live in a results based culture that places value on someone based on what tangible thing they can produce. And so on one hand, our lives are very ordinary. We produce any number of things, and like the market economy we discover our value based on what observable things we have done during the course of the week, even if it is just the dishes we have washed, or the numbers of times we have taken out the garbage. We can say, I have value because of the amount of measurable work I am able to accomplish in the course of a day, or a week, or a lifetime. In that way, our life is pretty ordinary.
On the other hand, our life must appear very strange indeed, because at the end of the week, the reality is we have very little to show for all the time we have spent doing things. Except for a sermon here, a pile of dishes there, and a number of answered emails somewhere else, there is not much we can point to at the end of the week and say look what I have done! In a world which values commodities and where the value of a person is measured by the amount of tangible work they produce, our life is strange indeed.
Father Benson reminds us that the purpose of our life together is to live for God[1] and that the work of living for God is for us to sanctify ourselves by the continual surrender of our will to the will of the Father, in whatever way it is manifested.[2] The real work of our life together then is this work of sanctification, or as St. Benedict puts it, the work of conversion of life, so that we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.[3]
It is hard, if not impossible, to place a value on a life of sanctification and conversion.
One of the lines in our Rule of Life which resonates for me each time we read it comes in the chapter on Worship. There we read: worship, like play, is free from the need to produce tangible gains, but it is work.[4] In many ways, that line for me sums up our life, and thus it puts our life in stark contrast to the world. It is, I think, why so much of our life is counter-cultural. Worship, like play, is free from the need to produce tangible gains, but it is work.
Yes, there are aspects of our life which must produce results. The dishes must be done, the garbage must be taken out, guests must be welcomed, guestrooms must be cleaned, meals must be served. But we did not come here to do those things. We came here to live for God and to allow our hearts to overflow with the inexpressible delight of love and to invite others to do the same.
And we do that simply by becoming more and more a company of friends, spending our whole life abiding in [God] and giving ourselves up to the attraction of [God’s] glory.[5] It is hard, if not impossible, to see the tangible in that, especially when the ways we do that are so intangible: prayer, worship, silence, listening and the vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience.
The value of our life together then, comes not from what we do, in terms of tangible results, but from who we are, and perhaps more importantly, whose we are: a small group of men living in relationship with one another and to God. In many ways that makes our life really pretty strange.
But it is the strangeness of our life, which has the power to both puzzle and attract. It puzzles because it seems, even to us at times, so pointless. We have to remind ourselves of this in The Rule where we say that: we also need to let go of any grasping for immediate results; much of what the grace of God achieves through us will be entirely hidden from our eyes.[6]
At the same time, it can be incredibly attractive, for it is a reminder, both to ourselves, to the Church, and to the world, that humanity was created not for work, but for relationship. We were created to love and be loved. As we say in one of the Prayers after Communion in the Eucharist: And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.[7] The work God has given us to do is a work of love, of service and of witness and in a world of commodity and production that is strange indeed.
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 20 July 2017.
[1] Benson, Richard Meux, The Religious Vocation, Of the Objects of the Society, chapter 1, page 37
[2] Ibid., page 40
[3]The Rule of Saint Benedict, Prologue, line 49
[4] SSJE, The Rule of The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, Worship, chapter 16, page 33
[5] Ibid, The Call of the Society, chapter 1, page 2
[6] Ibid., The Spirit of Mission and Service, chapter 32, page 65
[7] BCP 1979, page 366