A Long Obedience in the Same Direction 3 comments

By Brian Volck

Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart.
                      —From the Prologue to the Rule of St. Benedict

At Compline, the last canonical hour of the Divine Office, monks of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani gather in a darkened church, seeking places in the oak choir stalls. Looking like flocking gulls in their white cowls and black scapulars, they swoop from doors near the pews where retreatants sit, or emerge from crepuscular darkness at the far end, where we can just glimpse the lines of the altar. They come to sing in prayer, the center about which they mark their days.

Some have spent nearly their entire adult lives here. Others arrived late. All came seeking a life of prayer, work, and stability. They came to find the truth and lose themselves. They came to live vowed lives of obedience (from the Latin, oboedire, "to listen attentively, give ear,") and community (from communis, "common, shared"). They came for their own reasons, each as peculiar as the man himself.

I’ve met in my life two groups of people who—if they are faithful, mind you—consistently prove among the most honest, the most real, perhaps because they have failed so often they’ve at long last run out of reasons to dissemble. The first are recovering alcoholics; the other, monks.

Monks, I’ve learned, generally know how to laugh at themselves and when not to. Monks fail again and again, which is why they live together. When one falls, the others, especially the ones they find most annoying, are there to pick them up.

Everything a monk hoped to leave behind in the world comes with him. If they intended to flee their sins, their failings, they quickly learn otherwise. If they sought an easy life free from distractions, they chose poorly. A monk once told me his second greatest obstacle to a holy life was other monks: “You have no idea how unbearable someone’s loud chewing becomes after fifteen years eating at the same table.”

The greatest obstacle, he said, was himself.

The monks arrive for Compline one by one or in small groups. In their habits, they may be difficult to distinguish from each other. Quickly enough, though, one learns distinctive marks and behaviors much the way one identifies wild birds. Years of communal prayer, work, contemplation, and obedience paradoxically render monks unique, more themselves than most of us on the outside, frantically displaying our individualism and autonomy.

Brother Paul—poet, photographer, cook, and cantor—strides in, his white chevron of a beard supporting a lean face, dark eyebrows tilted in bemusement. He entered Gethsemani when he was seventeen, more than fifty years ago. He seems much too lively, too hale to be a man nearing seventy.

Brother Paul will sleep outside after Compline, as he’s done for years, the “open sky as dormitory,” so that he can find “nature in all her moods.” In the winter, a hay-bale keeps snow from drifting over his sleeping bag. His poetry increasingly attends to the natural world around the Abbey, the ubiquitous wonder in these fields and woods of perpetual praise. Knotty and gnomic, his poems brim with keen observation and gentle humor.

Father Damien, the former abbot, enters from the side, his gait at once sturdy and tired. He entered the monastery after a working as a community organizer, something he admits to having been good at. But he finally tired of angry, adversarial campaigns, of having to do—even for the best of reasons—what Saul Alinsky advised in his Rules for Radicals: “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Alinsky had harsh words for organizers who left his cause for lives of contemplation, but Fr. Damien found a home in Gethsemani. He says he came here for a different kind of activism: to pray for the world. Yet his fellow monks elected him abbot in 2000, a position I can’t imagine anyone wishing upon themselves. Even if all the monks pledge obedience, the abbot’s job looks rather like herding not just cats, but large, feral ones. Small wonder abbots are entrusted, as sign of their office, with a long, heavy stick.

If Father Matthew already rolled in on his scooter, as he did at the last moment last night at Vespers, I’ve missed him. At 94, Fr. Matthew looks rather like the old, slightly dotty emperor Derek Jacobi portrayed in the BBC’s I, Claudius. Three years ago, Fr. Matthew asked the abbot to relieve him of his longtime position as community homilist, but his pithy observations are still available online, evidence of a sharp mind and poetic soul.

When the monks who can come are settled in the white oak stalls, Compline (from complere, "to fill up, complete”) begins. As the last liturgy of the day the order of worship is simple, varying little.

The monks sound appropriately tired from a long day’s work; their singing closes a day of labor and contemplative prayer. It is the sound of lived obedience, not a performance.

In addition to psalms, they chant familiar words from Luke’s gospel:

Now Lord, you will let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your saving deed which you have set before all: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for the glory to your people Israel.

After final prayers and a last hymn to Mary, all the assembled—monks, retreatants and visitors—file forward for a blessing from Abbot Elias. Then it’s off to bed.

The monks will awake at three a.m. to sing Vigils, but I will sleep long past that. Even so, as I lay down and speak my day’s last words from my pillow, I’m grateful to the point of tears that there are such men in this aimless world, men who have given up so much I take for granted for lives of long obedience in the same direction.