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Category Archives: Prayer

Spiritual Boot Camp

08 Aug

Francis most likely prayed more than anything else throughout his life.

The friars have always been known for the great work they do. Through their direct assistance to the poor, world-renowned Franciscan scholarship, advocacy initiatives on the local and federal levels, thriving parishes and campus ministries, foreign missions, and rejuvenating contemplative centers, to name just a few, friars make a huge difference in the world.

For many, including myself at times, the Novitiate year ahead of me seems contrary to that notion of the friars. So let me get this straight. For an entire year, all you’re going to do is pray, study, clean and cook, and go on retreat? How can you justify not working for an entire year when there’s so much to be done in the world? Because our identity as Franciscans is so often linked to the work we do, the idea of not doing great work seems like a contradiction or a letdown of expectations. How is that Franciscan?

The truth is that being Franciscan has little to do with what one does, and everything to do with the way one lives. Francis did not set out to found an order with a particular task or expertise, no matter how useful it may be, he set out to live the Gospel as perfectly as he could, imitating Christ so as to grow closer to him. Sure, Francis swept and rebuilt churches, cleaned and fed lepers, and preached any chance he got. But for him, these were not ends in themselves as much as they were expressions of his commitment to a new life and identity, one that sought to be poor and humble, fraternal, and most of all, prayerful.

At first, I think it surprised me to find out how much Francis prayed. Given the fact that he observed each liturgical hour of the day, retreated to a cave at Mount La Verna, wrote his own Office of the Passion, and organized a Rule for Hermitages, there’s little chance that he did anything as much as he prayed. Seriously. Some friars even joke that Francis wouldn’t have earned a full month’s wage in his entire life because he was constantly running away to pray. Although this might be an exaggeration, there’s truth and inspiration in the way Francis lived: he was so in love with God and wished to always be closer to God than he was at any given moment.

This is the core of our life and charism. Prayer is our source of strength, inspiration, insight, wisdom, motivation, rejuvenation, and direction. Prayer is the very thing that makes effective ministry possible. Anyone can run a soup kitchen; teach at a university; hold a sign in front of the court house; be liked by parishioners and college students; go to a foreign country; offer quiet places. But without prayer, without a love for God and a desire to be closer to God as our starting point, what motivates us to engage in ministry at all? Altruism and a sense of the “greater good” only go so far. Prayer is at the core of any truly effective ministry.

Thus, the Novitiate year. Many have called it “Spiritual Boot Camp” and I have no reason to see it otherwise. The year will challenge and strengthen us spiritually so that we may lay a solid enough foundation for any experience we may face in life. One friar told me that it was a time in which he realized that Jesus alone was enough for him, that he needed nothing else in the whole world. This is the sort of foundation we as friars in training hope to lay.

Ultimately, yes, it’s going to be difficult to remove myself from the world and almost all forms of apostolic ministry for an entire year. There is a lot I could be doing that I will not be doing. But then I ask myself: How much more effectively could I show love to people if I, myself, understood the love God shows me? How much more effectively could I be the hands of God if I knew who God was and how God’s hands wished to be used? How much more effectively could I minister if prayer actually became the centerpiece of my life? It’s going to take nothing less that Spiritual Boot Camp to find out. I’m up for the challenge (and a challenge it will be!)

 
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Posted by on August 8, 2012 in Novitiate, Prayer

 

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The Will to Believe

15 Jul

How do we deal with the doubts we experience each day?

As a religion major in college, I was taught how to look at the world in a very academic way.  This meant having a strong grasp of the historical contexts surrounding experiences of God and the literary devices used to tell about these experiences.  It meant questioning the plausibility and accuracy of religious texts against similar sources.  We were taught to assume nothing, and to deconstruct everything.

In one sense, this can be very helpful: understanding the historical context, author, audience, and genre of a religious source heightens one’s understanding of the truth about both God and humanity.  In another sense, however, the deconstruction of religion can be the start of a slippery slope of doubt that, without proper reconstruction, leads to one’s inevitable loss of faith.

What does one do upon learning that the first five books of the Bible are allegorical stories similar to the stories found in other cultures of the Ancient Near East; that there is no historical proof of anything in the Bible until David, including evidence against the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; and that Paul most likely didn’t write half of the epistles attributed to him?  For some, information like this pulled the rug out from under their faith: “If X isn’t true, something I’ve always believed, then how could Y and Z possibly be true?”

As a Catholic, the majority of these things were not troubling.  We do not read the bible as a literal, inerrant text, and so finding out that everything probably didn’t happen exactly as it was written was a non-issue for me; it’s a text written by humans, inspired by God, and so I accept the truth it reveals without needing to read it as empirical fact.

That being said, I left my undergraduate experience with many more doubts than I had before I started.  Maybe ‘God’ is a human construct created by misinformed people to explain scientific phenomenon that they didn’t understand.  Maybe our experience of miracles is simply a series of coincidence enhanced with meaning through our own confirmation bias.  Maybe our perception of God can be attributed to chemical imbalances, natural phenomenon, and blind faith. These questions began creeping into the back of my head, and I began to question every aspect of my faith. Why do I believe in something that cannot explain and cannot prove?

I began answering this question a little more critically after my powerful prayer experience at the Benedictine monastery, Mount Savior.  In my time before the eucharist, I asked myself this question, and asked that I be guided in prayer to an answer. Here are a few things I came up with:

  • I often feel an overwhelming with joy during the celebration of the eucharist, personal and communal prayer, and volunteer work.
  • My heart seeks peace and justice, humility and sacrifice, and a universal brotherhood/sisterhood that I believe is in line with my perception of the Christian God.
  • While I often doubt the existence of God, I find it very difficult to conceive of a world without an intelligent creator.  Maybe it is simply my socialization from a young age that leaves my mind rigid, but the thought seems unfathomable to me.
  • I hope that there is a God in a fundamentally different way than I hope for other things.

Through this prayer, I realized that I had strong experiential evidence and a strong desire to believe.  What was in my heart showed me clearly that God had given me the gift of Faith long ago; it was my head that was in the way.  My inability to prove my faith to others, the fear of being made a fool for irrational beliefs, kept me from accepting what I knew at the core of who I was.  I had been given the gift, but did not have the will to accept it.

It may sound weird, and certainly in a different context it sounds psychotic, but what I’ve done since is simply will myself to believe.  I’ve had to give up the useless necessity for proof, and take a chance at following what I find to be meaningful.  I’ve had to actively tell the intellectual side of me to take a risk and just believe.  Sure, I may be wrong, but what good is it to let that fear get in the way of what I feel to be right?

I still doubt many things. I imagine I always will. For now, I have to remind myself of the powerful experiences of God I’ve had over the years, willing myself to be open enough for God to grow in me. It’s certainly not easy, but my experience has been that it is entirely worth it.

 
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Posted by on July 15, 2012 in Prayer

 

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This Moment Is Sufficient

03 Apr

A simple meal, a breviary, and solitude. What more does one need to be with God?

After more than three weeks of analysis, decompression, and procrastination, I finally have a few thoughts on my hermitage experience.

***

I was a Franciscan hermit for nearly 95 hours. With the exception of an hour and a half a day for mass, dinner, and evening prayer, I was left a in a one-person cabin by myself. I was without a phone, computer, television, newspaper, and clock, leaving me with no way to know anything about the world outside of what my own senses could perceive. I was alone with myself. I was alone with God.

At the onset, I was very excited, but unsure of what was in store. I knew from my experience at Mt. Savior (Living In the Moment) that prayer did not have to be planned, systematized, well-constructed, or even articulated in an understandable way for it to be affective. Rather than seeing prayer as something that begins with the sign of the cross and ceases to exist with the final Amen, I needed to understand prayer as more of a constant act, a conscious state of being that both informs my every action and is informed by my worldly experiences. Every moment can be a prayer if I allow it to be. With this in mind, I closed the door, entered into solitude with this to say:

So what’s my plan? I have no idea. I’m afraid of the free-flowing, “do-whatever-I-feel-called-to-do” type retreat because it has the possibility of getting nothing done. On the other hand, too much planning (or even any at all) doesn’t leave room for God to operate. In that way, I’m going to err on the side of inefficiency. I’m going to let God lead.

With that said, I also knew that there was absolutely no way that my IFNJ/3 personality was going to be able to survive five days of solitude without at least a framework from which to start. Each morning I woke up with the sun around 7:00 and prayed morning prayer on my porch. After a simple breakfast, I would return to the porch to gaze at nature and contemplate a few things with God for an hour or so. When the time felt right, I would come in to shower, pray midmorning prayer (which, with midday and midafternoon, only takes about 5 minutes) and head out for a hike. After a good hike it was usually time for lunch, and so I sat an ate my humble meal (pictured above) with a prayer. By this point in the day, I started getting a little itchy and needed to actually accomplish something (or I would go crazy), so I usually sat for a while and read either from the Gospels or Francis’ writings, filling in the time before dinner with “productive things.” The bell rang sometime around 4:30, and it was off to Mass, dinner, and evening prayer with my brothers, before returning ever so soon for some more solitude. Partially because I was bored out of my mind at this point of the night, and partially because I was tired, I found myself heading to bed with the darkness, what I can only guess was about 8:30 or 9:00.

It may seem like a lot of “planning” for someone who was letting God lead, but each day was somehow entirely different. One day on my hike, I prayed my own Canticle of the Creatures in the style of the Rosary, replacing each Hail Mary with a praise of God through one of his creations, followed by Francis’ prayer before the crucifix. This was completely off-the-cuff, and to no surprise, moved me in a profound way. Similarly, I decided on another day to observe each of the hours of the Divine Office, but to use my own prayers instead of the ones in the breviary so as to be more attentive to where I was being moved at that moment.

And do you know what? Even if it does seem like a lot, it took me more than twelve hours to complete it all! Do you have any idea how quiet, quiet can be when there’s nothing to do but sit and listen? Better yet, do you have any idea how much there is to hear/feel/understand/know when you’re still enough to let it happen? It’s dangerous, I tell you!

In the stillness of the moment, I was reminded of two people that I had neither spoken to nor thought about in years. What makes these individuals special is that they hurt me in a profound way a long time ago, and I have bottled my resentment towards them ever since, never seeking to let go or to seek reconciliation. Only when my heart was still enough to hear God did I realize that my subconscious bitterness towards both of them had been stinting my relationship with God, and that it was time for me to “unclench my fist” so to speak. Was it possible for me to love God while hating my brother, I asked myself. Providentially, the Gospel that afternoon was The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21-35), a Gospel that gave me a pretty good answer. Without the openness to be still, I would have never heard in the way I needed to hear it.

Which brings me to the culminating point of this post: this moment is sufficient. Unlike in our Western, capitalistic society in which we’ve been trained to want more and to work to achieve more in the future, God offers everything that we could ever possibly want in each present moment: Himself. As C.S. Lewis correctly points out in the Screwtape Letters, “The present is the point at which time touches eternity” (#15). To be more concerned with future possibilities than with present realities is it to implicitly accept a false existence, a construct of our own imaginations that bears only a semblance of truth, over the concrete Truth presented to us by God in this moment alone. While we should always remain hopeful for the future, and plan for it in the sense that we will be open to the new possibilities that God may provide, to allow either of these to distract us from the fullness of God’s presence in our lives in this very moment is utterly useless. When I was still enough to listen, I realized that there’s nothing I need to be left wanting for. In this moment, I can know God.

 
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Posted by on April 3, 2012 in Prayer

 

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Keeping Holy the Sabbath

05 Jan

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor, and do all your work;
but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God;
in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son,
or your daughter, your manservant,
or your maidservant or your cattle,
or the sojourner who is within your gates;
for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested the seventh day;
therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

Exodus 20:8-11

The idea of the Sabbath day is a familiar one: Jews and Christians alike, though varied in day and practice depending on the specific faith tradition, are called to observe a day of rest and reflection. For many, it is a day away from the busyness of daily life and work and a time for spiritual renewal through community worship and personal reflection.

What happens, then, in the life of a professed religious? The “busyness of daily life and work” IS the Sabbath day; though no doubt spiritually satisfying, it is nonetheless a day of great work. Is it considered “keeping the Sabbath” to spend one’s whole day working, albeit at church? If not, does one simply skip this requirement and go back to work Monday? These are important questions for which the Order doesn’t have strict answers.

At this point in my formation, I find keeping the Sabbath to be critical to the life of a friar, though I recognize that making it once a week, no more or less, is a bit arbitrary. In my time with the friars, both in discernment and now in the Postulancy, I have witnessed great examples of what it means to keep the Sabbath, as well as some examples that leave something to be desired. Each method characterized below has its obvious positive and negative aspects, but offer a unique and fruitful perspective to religious life. Because they’re not mutually exclusive ideas, I see the best solution at this point to be a combination of the three, mixing and matching based on the situation of each friar’s ministry.

Make a different day the Sabbath. There’s really no good reason that the Sabbath has to be Sunday; the bible simply dictates that it should be observed, not when it should be (Since the early church saw Christianity as a movement within Judaism, they observed the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday, and began celebrating the Eucharist on Sunday. Eventually the Saturday part was dropped.) Because of this, a good number of friars will choose a regular day of the week, usually Monday, as their “off” day, to relax and spend time in prayer. In a similar vein, friars at the St. Francis Inn (Philadelphia) take off one day a week for leisure and rest, as well as one day specifically set aside for prayer and reflection. The former allows for more work to get done while the latter doesn’t make the friar choose between leisure and prayer each week.

Cut the day in thirds. Probably as common as an alternative day off, a number of friars have told me that they cut the day into three shifts, (8-12, 12-5, and 5-10) and require themselves to rest during one of them. This method guarantees time for prayer and reduces the risk of burning oneself out, while still allows them to be “always available” if needed. The upside to this method is that everyday, in a sense, can be a partial Sabbath day, allowing an opportunity to remove oneself in the midst of great stress to be with God; the downside is that one is never “off the clock” mentally, and it can be very easy to slip back into work mode during prayer/relaxation time.

Fill up only when empty. The last method is probably the least desired but not uncommon in our province. Rather than taking a specified time or day off each week, some friars choose to work as needed, taking short breaks for prayer and rest sporadically throughout the day, going long periods of time without a “formal” break. When they feel like they’ve worked to the point of exhaustion they will take a short leave, usually in the form of a week long vacation or retreat. Healthy friars are able to see work as an additional form of prayer and remain spiritually nourished, though physically exhausted; unhealthy men begin to see work as a replacement for prayer, and will eventually find themselves not only physically exhausted, but spiritually as well.

 
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Posted by on January 5, 2012 in Discernment, Prayer

 

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We’re Baaaaack….

03 Jan

After nearly 12 days in North Carolina with my family, I find myself back in the familiar (and very cold) confines of Wilmington, Delaware, refreshed and ready for another fives months of whatever the Postulancy has to offer. While at home, I spent most of the mornings/afternoons relaxed on the couch, either in front of the t.v. watching mediocre college football games or re-runs of my favorite show, 30 Rock, or catching up on a little reading and journaling. The highlight of the break was definitely the time I got to spend with my whole family playing games such as Monopoly, Spades, Cranium, and Yatzee, winning all of them of course (except for the ones I lost).

Besides relaxation and fellowship, I had also mentioned before that this would be a great time for reflection and discernment as it would most definitely bring to light the differences between the life I once had and the life I’ve recently adopted. In this way, the break did not disappoint. Though I didn’t come to any earth-changing realizations, I left my house yesterday reconfirmed in my decision to join the friars and actually a bit excited to return to Wilmington (a truly preposterous statement if you’ve ever lived a block from I-95 in Wilmington!) Here are a few of the things that I came to realize that probably influenced these sentiments:

Community prayer is important to me. In the five months since I moved to Delaware, I think I missed Morning prayer, Evening prayer, and Mass a total of ten times, all but one of those times due to traveling constraints. Praying multiple times a day in community became sort of second nature to me, a “habit” if you will. It wasn’t until I went home and forced myself to restrain from praying the Office or going to daily mass that I realized, however, that it was much more than just a programmed behavior: community prayer is a critical part of my spiritual life. Sure, I went to Mass on Sunday, and I prayed frequently over break, but I knew that something was missing.

The friars have subtly become my “other” family. For all in my immediate and extended family reading this, don’t think that I’m in any way saying that there has been a replacement of feelings from you to them! Those in my family will always have that special relationship. But having lived together now for five months, praying, learning, traveling, and working with each other, it’s hard not to see that new, intimate relationships have begun to form. I found myself on break thinking, “I miss those guys,” and “I’m excited to go back and see everyone,” in a way that somewhat resembles, but feels ultimately different than the feeling I had upon returning to college each year. It took a little time away for me to realize that these guys had subtly become my brothers.

For now, I think I’ll leave it at that. I spent some time reflecting on a few other unrelated things, but in the interest of space and organization, I’ll leave those topics for another day. Our next adventure begins Thursday afternoon when we travel down to Maryland for the Formation Intercession, a meeting of all the Holy Name Province students. It should be a great opportunity to look ahead in the formation process and hear from those in years two through five about their experiences along the way.

As a last note, thanks to all those I saw over break that shared such reaffirming words about the blog. I try not to get caught up in the comments or page statistics, but it is nice to hear that it’s more than just a tool to organize my thoughts. Thank you for all of your support along the way!

 
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Posted by on January 3, 2012 in Discernment, Formation, Prayer

 

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Vocation Vacation

21 Dec

Vocation Vacation? Not what I had in mind…

Starting tomorrow, the other four postulants and I will be free to leave for Christmas break, spending the next ten days however we please, wherever it pleases us. Personally, I’ll be on my way to the airport en route for my family’s house in North Carolina where I will spend most of my time relaxing and catching up with friends and family.

There’s no doubt that this is a very typical situation for most people: many people my age (including myself for the last four years) visit home for the holidays and spend the whole time relaxing and socializing. It is a familiar, comfortable place where we fall back into old habits and remember the person we once were. Surely, this is the farthest place from discernment one can be, right? Our postulant director sees it quite differently. Here’s a section of the letter he gave us yesterday:

I have insisted that this break is important and argued for your going home (or as close as I could get you to your home). The break is only a little more than a week, not long at all. During that time I’d suggest you take your breviary and pray the Office as you find comfortable. Do the same with daily mass; don’t feel that you have to go other than on Sunday but go as you like. Do not visit friars or friaries, your break is to get away from friars and friaries (and celebrate holiday time with your family). If you do not distance yourself you cannot get a clear picture of things. Talk with your family members and friends about the choice you’ve made and the vocation you feel called to. Test it against them. Ask if they notice any change in you. Notice any changes in them or your former environment.

This break is as important as any retreat you will take; it is a time for discernment.

Oddly enough, approaching the once familiar and comfortable might be the best bit of discernment I’ll have this entire year. By distancing myself from religious life, breaking out of the new habits I’ve formed and back into the old ones, I’ll have the opportunity to test the new against the old. Will the old habits fit too well to be shaken? Will I remember the life I once had and seek to live it again?

Or will I begin to feel as Francis did, as written in The Legend of the Three Companions: ”What before seemed delightful and sweet will be unbearable and bitter; and what before made you shudder will offer you great sweetness and enormous delight.”

There’s no doubt that there is a different feel to this trip home than there was in the previous four years; something feels different. Maybe I’m different. Time to relax and reflect will certainly tell. One thing I do know for sure, however, is that I have been looking forward to seeing my family and being home for a while now, and I’m very excited to see them later today! Wish me luck on my Vocation Vacation!

No does that mean a vacation for my vocation, or from it…?

 
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Posted by on December 21, 2011 in Discernment, Prayer

 

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Living In The Moment

03 Dec

(My apologies for the length of this post, but there is a lot to say after an eight-day retreat.)

I’m not sure if everyone else is like this, but I have a very active imagination. I find myself with my head in the clouds quite often, either remembering some past experience or creating an elaborate hypothetical situation in the future, often times taking both sides of an argument or practicing eloquent dissertations. I’ve been told that this doesn’t make me crazy (really!), and that it can actually be a great form of prayer. On the other hand, it can be an escape that leaves me having never experienced the present moment; to only contemplate the past and future leaves no room for experiencing a great homily, the beauty of nature, the particularities of the mass, or most tragically, an experience of direct communication with God. My goal for this retreat was to fight the temptation to drift off and to stay focused on the present, to live in the moment.

And so we began. Ora et labora. Pray and work. St. Benedict’s great motto was our Rule for a week. Off went the cell phone, and quiet went the mouth for the majority of the day.

Each day was greatly dictated by the schedule for prayer: seven times a day, we dropped whatever we were doing and met the monks for a highly formalized prayer. This included Vigils (4:45am), Lauds (7:00am), Mass (9:00am), Sext (12:00pm), None (3:00pm), Vespers (6:30pm), and Compline (8:15pm). Though I found some of the hours to be a bit monotonous, at least intellectually I found the commitment to prayer to be quite profound. Even for minor hours such as Sext and None that lasted literally 6 minutes, no one ever missed it. Because prayer is the most important part of their life, other tasks had to work their way around the prayer schedule. This was a great witness to the rest of the world that prays as an afterthought or only in its “free time.”

Between prayers, we were free to read, go for walks, journal, pray privately, or best of all, nap extensively. With nothing required for us to do and being banned from our phones and unnecessary conversation, I saw the week as an excellent time to relax while being productive enough to catch up on some reading and writing.

To my great surprise, however, there can actually be such a thing as too much free time! And because it is very easy to forget to focus on the present and revert to a normal task-oriented way of thinking, I become restless within just a few days when there wasn’t enough to occupy my time. Without the news, music, conversation, tasks, games, or television to keep my attention, I was left in a world of which I was unfamiliar: silence. I even found myself treating prayer as something to be completed, allotting specific amounts of time for it and expecting certain results. In doing so, I inadvertently focused my attention more on how much time I had left and what my next task was than on my experience at that moment.

In the afternoon of day four, I hit a wall. I had no interest in reading. I had just taken a nap. had nothing to journal about. The thought of formal prayer didn’t entice me. I was in a state of lethargy that left me feeling apathetic, and honestly, a bit helpless. What was I going to do for another seven hours before bed and for four more days? 

Forcing myself to get up, I walked over to the chapel and sat down in eucharistic chapel with one goal: just exist. I told myself not to worry about how long I was going to be there, what I was going to focus on, how I was supposed to prayer. Just exist. Just live in the moment. Instead of closing my eyes and trying to block out the sounds around me, I embraced every one of my senses as a way to take part in the present moment. I thought to myself, “Since Jesus in his Eucharistic presence is in this specific place, I will just sit here and experience the surroundings with him.”

What was I hoping to get out of it? Nothing but a shared experience with a friend.

When was I going to finish? Whenever I didn’t want to enjoy the moment any more.

That was it. Just exist, together.

Though it was my goal from the start, it took time for me to actually realize what that meant. When I finally did, it was amazing how freeing of an experience it was to just sit and enjoy the moment with him. In that moment, for however long it lasted, I was given a faith that hadn’t been there before, connected in a way unlike any other in the past. It was unexpected. It was life giving. It shaped the rest of the week.

And yet, it was only the first wall I had to break through. No sooner did I have this revelation did I fall into the comfort of complacency: Now that I’ve had such a great experience, I’m good for a while. It was as if it gave me a free pass to stop seeking, to stop wanting more experiences, to be comfortable in the current state.

Had the retreat of lasted three days, I would have never gotten to the point of desperation that forced me to let myself go; had it of lasted six days, I would have never had to deal with the complacency that followed. Even though a life following St. Francis doesn’t exist in a cloister and focus entirely on prayer, it is clearly the first way of life described as “contemplative in action.” Without a fruitful foundation in prayer, our life is simply not possibile.

As a final note, there are no pictures from this week. Keeping with the goal of living in the moment, I was inspired by the words of John Mayer in his song 3×5:

Didn’t have a camera by my side this time
Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes
Maybe I will tell you all about it
When I’m in the mood to lose my way with words

Sometimes I can be so focused on capturing the perfect picture (angle, settings, lighting, etc) that I forget to see the world around me as it is. I was taken aback by the lush rolling hills, the open fields in such vastness, the multiplicity of shades of blue in one sky, and the quiet of the human-free world.

 
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Posted by on December 3, 2011 in Prayer

 

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Shhh!

24 Nov

This is going to be difficult...

After almost 12 days in Wilmington, we’re off again on another adventure! This one, however, will be quite unlike the rest. Whereas the others were collaborated efforts with other orders or provinces, this one is strictly the six of us; whereas the others were usually workshops or educational trips, this one is a retreat; whereas the others were fairly causal, this one will be require us to be silent, abide by a strick and extensive prayer schedule, and most different of all, cut ourselves off completely from the outside world for one week.

Tomorrow morning we’ll be heading up to near Elmira, NY where we’ll find Mt. Saviour Monastery, home to a community of Benedictine Monks in the American Cassinese Congregation. For one full week, we will join them for prayer seven times a day (the first at 4:45am, the last at 8:00pm), and three silent meals a day, while spending the rest of our time in quiet contemplation. With the exception of a short period of time each day to discuss an assigned book, the entire retreat will be silent. This also means shutting off my cell phone and computer, refraining from listening to music or watching the news, and truly being present to silence.

Part of me is quite overwhelmed. The lack of technology will definitely be a shock for someone who grew up in the technology age, and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to cope without the news, email, Facebook, ESPN, my favorite music, and the general power to search the internet. It’s become normative, and I don’t look forward to that sort of change. What’s much more unsettling, however, is knowing that I might find something much deeper when I actually listen. What does one think about for ten hours in a day? What sorts of examinations of conscience, reflections of self, experiences in prayer are possible with that much time set aside? There’s quite a bit of uncertainty is such a vastness of contemplation.

On the other hand, what an incredible chance this is to begin the Advent season! Each year I complain that I’m too busy with papers, tests, work, shopping, and so on, and Christmas comes before I’m ready. I love that I’ll have intentional time set aside for prayer and relaxation to truly prepare for the celebration of the birth of our Lord. I don’t know how that could be much better!

Obviously, I won’t be able to post until we get back, so take the chance for your own personal internet hiatus, and spend some time in solidarity with me, praying and reflecting! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and I thank all of you who read and/or comment for your support!

 
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Posted by on November 24, 2011 in Prayer, Trips

 

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