Bell

Once you give it away, it’s not yours anymore: a harsh lesson often learned under duress. My congregation, through its governing board, gave away an old bell to a neighboring new congregation. The bell was not made as a church bell. It was made as a bell for a locomotive, and when you rang it, it sounded like the train was on its way. We hadn’t used it for years. It had hung in a decrepit and long demolished structure that people who had not been to church for 20 or 30 years remembered but many of the current congregation had never seen, and they had never heard the bell ring. It languished outside the Sunday school rooms in a utility closet for some time. When the neighboring congregation with its new house church building was looking for a bell, we gave it to them. So that pastor and I lifted it, put it in the truck and moved it to its new home, where it was rung, especially to the delight of children. Several years later that congregation folded, its property was dispersed, and I do not know what happened to the bell. But I do know that some long, long, long time parishioners of my own church still resented its loss. They had lost something they had given away. When you give something away, it’s not yours anymore: a painful lesson whether it’s an old dresser, an old book, a car or a bell. I suppose there’s a sermon in here somewhere about what has been given away for us, what has been given away by us, in a spirit of love, or of housecleaning, and what has been given away to us. Given away, largely by one we have never seen in the flesh. As I say this, I can see from my porch the vultures circling over something that has lost any chance of being given away or received as a gift, but only taken. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb long enough to do more than begin to stink, as Martha and Mary had said of his friend Lazarus. He had been alive long enough for the vultures to have been circling in anticipation for years, and then he went ahead with it. He went ahead with giving away his love, his life and the gifts of love and life that he gave to others; gifts that we never recovered, but only passed on. Perhaps we should do as well to let go of the things that we have given away, and not attempt to recover them, or to resent their departure.

 Bell : an essay for the Buechner writing project of the Christian Century.

Benedict, Gregory, and we

View from a Hermitage

There is one word omitted from a sentence in “Learning to pray while cloistered: Benedict, Gregory, and me” by M. Craig Barnes (Christian Century, June 3, 2020, 13). The sentence reads: “We join 1,500 years of cloistered monks who brought the world’s laments before God in search of a vision of salvation.” The missing word is “have” - have brought. 

Don’t count us out! A few years ago the Camaldolese community celebrated our first thousand years since the founding of the original monastery in Italy. (The American first foundation was in 1958.)

Benedict, Gregory, and we, contemporary contemplatives, carry on the monastic contemplative prayers begun over 1500 years ago with Anthony in the Desert, Benedict in Nursia, … in Tours, Enda in Ireland, Columba in Scotland, and so many more. 

What is different today is that the cloistered monks are joined by hundreds of friends, associates, and Oblates, in a rhythm of daily prayer and practice, including witness, hospitality, and contemplation. 

Before reading the article I had been in a monthly call with fellow Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates. After the call I received an invitation to the annual gathering of oblates, this year to talk about “new wineskins” - how we were part of a new monastic adventure outside the walls, or as Suzanne Guthrie has put it, “at the edge of enclosure.” 

Some years ago, before that thousand-year mark, my wife and I were on retreat at Incarnation Monastery in the Berkeley hills. After a week or so, she remarked that the psalms were chanted particularly slowly. Fr Thomas replied, “Yes, someone else mentioned that - in the 13th Century.”  Each. word. carried. weight. “By the end of the retreat,” my wife observed, “I could hear the prayer running constantly in my heart.”

Now, in the current situation, she and I are in a community of two: contemplative continuity helps us turn enforced isolation into elected solitude.

The Rev. John R. Leech, Oblate OSB Cam.

June 13th 2020.

dawn

5:35 a.m. Jerusalem. Winter. At the third time of prompting I got out of bed and pulled on my shoes. From the hotel I made my way through the souk, its stalls all shuttered, and turned left toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside I wandered alone. There was a marble slab set into the floor in front of me. Dark cavernous space to the left. On the right a small group stood talking. Around the inner circuit of the building I walked and came back to them. I had a question. The priest motioned me to wait, then I told him I didn't know what I was looking at. Well, you'll want to go up for sure. Up those stairs I climbed to two altars, with a space underneath one. Golgotha. Down again and across into a small inner chapel. Empty. I didn't go all the way inside but I looked around. There were maybe a dozen people in the whole place. That afternoon my group went together. It was packed. In a long line we waited, let through six at a time. Some people tried to rush ahead but the Slavic assistant - deacon? - motioned them back. Inside again at the end all the way in. I knelt on this marble slab covering the tomb of Jesus and rested my forehead on the cool smooth stone. It was dark. After an indeterminate period I heard an intake of breath - my own - opened my eyes, stood up, walked, crouched, slowly as newly awake, out to the larger space. "Father," the deacon motioned, and smiled, guiding me. And the next group of pilgrims went in.

January 12, 2020. For The Christian Century, Buechner Writing Project.