Pre-Amblings, Part 2: A Day with the Monks

February 15, 2019

I

              Today I had opportunity to pray with the monks at Belmont Abbey. Alleluia. Amen.

I am too sporadic in my attendance at the Abbey to call such prayer one of my spiritual disciplines; but I do make the pilgrimage when time and opportunity allow.

Praying with the monks is always balm to my soul. It was especially so today. And why?

I leave Thursday for St. Louis, for the special, called General Conference of the United Methodist Church related to human sexuality and, specifically, our denomination’s polity and practices related to the marriage and ordination of gay persons. I will observe first-hand the debate and actions of delegates who have been elected from all over the world and who represent widely divergent theological convictions, growing-out of conflicting interpretations of scripture, which are accompanied by fervently-held hopes and fears.

II

In a previous post (“Pre-Amblings,” February 5) I offered an overview of the four options before us: the Modified Traditional Plan, the One-Church Plan, the Connectional Conference Plan, and the Simple Plan. In a second post (“What Are the Collaterals,” February 12), I included a link to a chart that tries to anticipate the organizational/structural changes that would result from the passage of any one of the plans: “If this, then this.”

Today, though, as I headed south on I-85, I was not thinking in such administrative or objective terms. I was grieved in spirit: wondering what is to become of us United Methodists. I knew I needed the solace that prayer alone can offer, and not just “prayer,” but the specific kind of praying the monks do at Belmont Abbey.  I needed not just solace, either, but the wisdom and guidance that my soul desperately seeks.  

              Which is to say, anticipating, dreading, hoping, despairing, most of all seeking, I made a special effort to go pray with the monks—and also to “conference” with a few UM pastor-friends who I knew would be there.

III

We never know who will show up: our little group is in constant flux due to personal and even pastoral circumstance. Geography, too, plays a part, as when a pastor is moved. We may be more or less inconsistent, but the college is constant in its generous hospitality: we are regularly granted space in the Gallagher Building to meet and talk. Specifically, to discuss common, agreed-upon reading.

Before us today was a book with, for most of us, an unpromising title: On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius. In truth it was pretty dense stuff—essays by a Church Father named Gregory Nazianzus—but we noted a spectacular line in the introductory notes by Lionel Wickham which seemed to have special relevance for us this week.

Regarding a heretical group St. Gregory opposed, Wickham writes, “Their church, though, had, like all one-issue groups, only a (weak) hold on (continuing) existence. Founded on doctrinal purity it perished on it.” (p. 17).

I sat there thinking, if our church, strives for doctrinal purity, on one side or the other—if that is our only issue at this point—either “side” may well perish on it. And at this point we have only a “infirm hold on a perduring existence” (his actual verbage).  

It seems to me that those who can hold the middle (not simply for the sake of unity, but for the sake of love and charity) have a better chance, by God’s grace and enduring hospitality, to endure.  

IV

As usual, we started at 10:30. At 11:40, we abruptly adjourned to make our way over to the “Mary, Help of Christians” basilica (https://belmontabbeycollege.edu/about/belmont-abbey-monastery/basilica-mary-help-of-christians/)—which is the big church-like building you have probably seen from I-85. We walked down the long center aisle, climbed granite steps and passed the high altar, took places prepared for us in the split choir loft.

As is always the case, monks sat in seats on both sides of the loft. We were directed to the right. We entered quietly, took our seats quietly, sat quietly till prayer begins. All the monks, and some of the visitors, waited closed-eyed. I, though, pondered the great painted-glass windows that rise above the loft: portraits of St. Patrick, St. Boniface, St. Gregory and others, each with a hand raised in blessing.

The saints keep serene vigil over those who come to the basilica to pray.  

              A monk, opposite us, stood to sing the first line of the greeting: “O God, come to our aid.”

The rest of us stood and sang, “O Lord, make haste to help us.”

The monk sang, “Glory be to Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.”

We sang, “As it was in the beginning, is now and forever amen. Alleluia.”

We remained standing as the monk started singing an acapella hymn. Then we sat. Then we prayed. There was a reading from Isaiah. There was a benediction. We were out.

The service had lasted fifteen minutes.

V

Every part of the morning—the book study, the whole service, every part of the service—spoke to me today: spoke both the comfort and truth I needed to hear.

The Greeting: it is indeed my prayer for St. Louis. I do pray that God comes to our aid, that God will make haste to help us. That God will be glorified as we seek the divine will. That the “now and forever, Amen” will be sounded again among our delegates and observers. I also believe that however our group or situation changes and for whatever reason, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will be with us all.

The Hymn: words I had never sang, set to a tune I didn’t know: but even that a comfort in its own way: that the praise continues, can carry me along, even when I am ill-equipped to help. I will not be able to lend my voice this next week, either, but I believe there are those who can, and will, and God will be praised.  

The Prayers of the monks are quite unlike the praying that many of us who grew up Protestant may even recognize as prayer. The monks’ prayers are not spontaneous—monks on either side take turns reading, slowly, the verses from three pre-selected Psalms. They are not personal: at least they are not private. Benedictines all over the world were praying the very same Psalms as we in Belmont, NC.

The monks prayers are not emotional, as if emotion demonstrates authenticity. There is almost no rise or fall in voice or emotion, beginning to end.

Now, there are long gaps of silence here and there—where the intent is for us to quieten our souls completely. But today I found myself inserting “personal” prayers into the silences: prayers for the delegates, the churches, the bishops, the pastors, the General Conference itself.

The words and the silences: whatever our concerns, spoken or unspoken, whatever we insert into the silences—the silences and intercessions are themselves bracketed by verses of scripture that are both ancient and powerfully immediate.

The Reading: today from Isaiah: the famous passage that Jesus uses as he begins his own ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind-up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed… and to announce the year of the Lord’s favor.”

May it be so! For today, there are so many in our church who feel broken-hearted and blind. So many who are captive and oppressed (and not just delegates!). What a comfort to hear, to believe, that soon and very soon there will be freedom on account of God’s anointing! That God will help us see and be healed! That we will know God’s favor!

How that will appear or be experienced, we do not know. But that very same word and hope and experience has sustained Jews and Christians for well over 2000 years. It will sustain us still.

+

The Basilica itself was a blessing.

Mary, Help of All Christians. As a United Methodist, I do not attribute it to Mary, but I do trust in the promise that there is help for all Christians on either side of conflict and even division. Remember: almost six hundred years ago, in Europe, the Roman Church split into Catholic and Protestant pieces. Five hundred years before that, the Church had split East and West. What we now call Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism are the living and vibrant offspring of cataclysmic schisms that not only did not kill the work of Jesus in the world, but, it could be argued, expanded Jesus’ work and ministry, and advanced the cause of the Gospel.   

(Full disclosure: I grew up Baptist. We were famous for church splits. And for the kind of growth that almost always resulted on the other side of it. Phyllis Tickle has noted the phenomena, too, in her The Great Emergence, that when churches move to jettison what is unnecessary, that makes them retain what is necessary, and that what emerges is more energetic and able to witness and grow.)

And Belmont Abbey’s Gallagher Room, too. As I sat there, with an Icon on one wall and a crucifix on another; I, a UM pastor and heir to the English Reformation, engaged in “holy conferencing” with other Ums, and knowing something of the violent history that has attended the Church’s (and churches’) history, I thrilled to anticipate and pray for the time when “today’s acrimony,” vitriolic as it may be, gives way to produce tomorrow’s repentance and forgiveness, to deeper cooperation and more generous hospitality. May God haste the day.

VI

At lunch, I ate with a delegate from our Conference, who is in favor of the Modified Traditional Plan (and one of the best guys I know). His father died on Tuesday, and he too felt the need to make the trip to pray at the Abbey: to be with his UM friends, and with the monks, at a place where constancy and serenity can indeed calm a frenzied, fractious spirits. Where buildings, and windows, and the long-unchanged patterns of prayer remind us that, Yes, things change.

There is life and death.

There are gatherings and partings. And there is one God—the same yesterday, today and forever.

              My friend said he expects it to get ugly. He thinks there will be protests and demonstrations, shouting and yelling—that security will have to be called and often, perhaps, as some of the observers and protesters will, he believes (and has seen) want to get arrested. As a sign of their “prophetic faithfulness,” I guess, their willingness to “suffer” for the cause.   

              I shook my head, thinking of what a poor witness to the unity and grace Jesus died to provide.

But I also found myself thinking about Father Abraham, and what he said to his nephew Lot when the “land” was not able to sustain them both: “If you go the right, I will go to the left. If you go to the left, I will go to the right.” They were kin, even though they no longer got along. And even after they parted company, they remained so—Father Abraham rescued his nephew in fact, from marauders.  

Likewise, my hope—and this phrasing is not original with me, though I cannot remember who said it—that God will grant to all of us a way to remain kin: “close enough to remember and recognize that we are on the same journey, but with enough administrative distance that we not vex each other’s spirit.”

Perhaps the way we take leave says as much to the world as the way we come together. As my friend said, “If your marriage is broken and there is no way to make it a Christian marriage, the best you can do is fashion a Christian divorce.”

              Pray for our General Conference.