These days, more and more, the Pluscarden brethren are aware of our need to pray for vocations: to ask the Lord to send us men, who want to be, and will become, monks. The Feast of St. Benedict could be an occasion for us to reflect a bit on why a man might want to join a monastery; and why the professed brethren would think that the continuance of the monastery is important.
At first sight, you might think it remarkable that any candidate would ever apply. A truly honest advertising brochure might seem even designed to ensure that no one ever does.
Come and join us! we say, with an enticing smile. All we ask is that you leave your home, your family, your friends, your career, maybe even your country, and confine yourself instead, for the rest of your life, to this enclosed space, in a rather remote area of North East Scotland. In the early stages you will remain free to leave, but if you ask to stay, you must renounce marriage forever; renounce all your own property, and all possibility of ever owning anything ever again, and renounce henceforth all personal freedom. Then, according to your vow of obedience, for the rest of your life, you will be committed to the very structured daily community timetable. Every day henceforth you’ll spend long hours singing Psalms in Latin. Otherwise, for the most part, you’ll observe a rule of silence. You’ll spend a lot of time each day alone in your room, and a lot more time in close contact with the same people, whom you have not chosen. You’ll do the work that is given you, eat the food that is put in front of you, wear the clothes that are prescribed for you, get up in the morning when you are called (very early indeed!). In addition, of course, as a Benedictine, you must promise stability. That is, you firmly purpose to remain here, in this place, with these people, for the rest of your life, until you die.
So the Abbot asks the candidate for solemn vows: what do you ask of us? And he replies: I wish to serve God in your community until I die.
But actually it’s worse even than that: because the process of dying has to start straight away. The monk, we have to be clear, comes here precisely in order to die: to die to sin, to die to self, to die to the old man, to die to the world the flesh and the devil: to be crucified with Christ. Is all that even possible, in this day and age?
But on the other hand:
In the words of St. Paul: “I count all other things as loss, compared to the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” (cf. Phil 3:8). For a man who has understood the truth of this, any sacrifice for the sake of Christ is more than worth it. A life lived towards God, in God, for God, must in principle be good: peaceful, fruitful, life-giving, life-transforming. One who gives himself wholeheartedly to the monastic project drinks from a permanently flowing well-spring of joy. His life is full and rich, beyond measure. Like St. Benedict himself, as our monk blesses the Lord all day and every day, he is constantly aware of being blessed in return, super-abundantly - and graced - and loved.
Maybe nowadays also we can hope for some help from our secular society. It strives to build a City on foundations that are in principle free from the law of God. Its own advertising brochure offers tantalising delights that are the diametric opposite of our vows: have what you like, indulge your appetites as you like, do what you like. Reject all restraint. Commit yourself to nothing, and to no one. Almost certainly, any modern monastic aspirant will have tasted the bitter fruits of that: a broken, dysfunctional, unhappy, alienating, disintegrating society, from which anyone would want to flee.
Do you see that monk over there?
He’s actually perfectly ordinary. What he does seems not particularly remarkable. He turns up in Choir; he does his reading; he comes to community recreation and drinks tea; he cooks, he cleans toilets and corridors, he hangs up laundry, he picks fruit, he mows lawns, maybe he writes duty lists, classifies library books, pays invoices, or does the weekly shopping. What’s so marvellous about that you cry? Ah, but he has a secret. He doesn’t talk about it much, and normally tries to keep it hidden from view. This secret is his prayer, his relationship with God, his union with Christ. This of course is unique to each person, and so in a sense is different for each. Often too it changes, maybe in subtle ways, over the course of a life time. For some it will be strongly Marian. All with Mary, in Mary, through Mary! For others quite penitential: Lord, be merciful to me a sinner – said round about one million times every day. For others more pleading: Lord save me, lest I sink! O God come quickly to my aid! For some, there will be a strong focus on intercession. Lord, I pray now for this person, this problem, this situation, this intention. For others, there may be a more or less permanent inner silence: a simple being in God’s presence; an attitude of wordless adoration, with a sense of deep contentment, simply to be there. Or of course for many it’s all of these, more or less, in varying degrees, and maybe according to different times or circumstances. But such a one is walking, all the time, with God; in the communion of the Saints and Angels; in the communion of love which is God’s Kingdom: and that’s a nice place to be. This monk is what St. Benedict would call a useful workman in the house of God. As for the Catholic Church as a whole: not only is our monk in deep communion with her, and in total dependence upon her: he’s also contributing mightily to her well-being in the order of grace, simply by living his life according to his vows.
What about St. Benedict himself? He also has a secret, which you don’t easily see. He prefers to keep his personality hidden, and to present himself as a rather stern legislator, and disciplinarian, and as just one more interpreter of the venerable monastic tradition which he himself has inherited, and intends to pass on. Ah, but underneath that is his burning love for Jesus Christ - and in Christ, for his brethren in the monastery. This love, as it were, leaks out through all sorts of cracks in his Rule. You see it, for example, in his Chapter on the sick (36). In the monastery, “let care of the sick rank above all and before all other things”. Why? Because in them, in a special way, we meet Christ, and have the privilege of serving, or ministering to Christ. He is what we are here for. And serving him we truly become his disciples. To him be glory praise and honour, now and forever, Amen.