In any case, I feel I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas Aquinas loved God, because for the life of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas.
-Flannery O’Connor
Uncertainty as to life’s purpose is much in vogue today. So too are the relativistic notions that would consign life’s purpose to a matter of taste. The agony of life is uncertainty and the rationalization is that uncertainty is certain. However, the plain truth is that for all our anguish we treasure uncertainty. Doubt forestalls action. The problem with life’s purpose is that we know damn well what it is but are unwilling to face the changes in our lives that a commitment to self-transcendence, to being the best human being we could possibly be, would entail. It wearies us just thinking about it. So we rationalize that it’s all “relative,” or that we’re already doing enough and don’t have time. Worst of all we rationalize that those who do accept the challenges inherent in self-transcendence are uniquely gifted and specially graced.
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It was eight in the evening on Christmas Eve and I was waiting for Mass to begin. This was my second Christmas retreat at Mepkin Abbey monastery and my second Christmas Eve Mass. Mepkin Abbey sits on 3,132 acres shaded by towering mossy oaks running along the Cooper River just outside Charleston, South Carolina. Once the estate of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, it is now a sanctuary for thirty or so Trappist monks living a life of contemplative prayer according to the arduous Rule of St. Benedict.
Already 18 days into my retreat, I was finally getting used to getting up at three in the morning for Vigils. However I also knew that by the time this special Mass ended at 10:30 it would be well after our usual bed time of 8 o’clock. The church was hushed and dark, and two brothers began lighting the notched candles lining the walls as Gregorian chant sung by the hidden choir wafted in from the chapel. This chapel, a favorite meditation spot for the monks, sits just off the main sanctuary.
The magic of these pre-Mass rituals quickly had me feeling like I was floating just above my seat. Soon I was drifting back to my first service ever at Mepkin, when Brother Robert, catching me completely off guard, urgently whispered from his adjacent stall, “The chapel is open all night!” This man, a chapel denizen who sleeps barely three hours a night, was apparently so convinced that this was the answer to my most fervent prayer that all I could do was nod knowingly as if to say “Thank God!”
The sound of the rain pelting down on the copper roof of the church on this cold December evening drew me from my reveries, and I noticed with the trace of a smile that I was nervous. I had calmly lectured to large audiences many times, yet I was, as usual, worried that I would somehow screw up the reading that Brother Stan had assigned me for Mass. But reading at Mepkin, especially at Christmas, is such an honor.
I felt that my reading came off very well. Returning to my seat I guess I was still excited because, heedless of the breach of etiquette that speaking at Mass implied, I leaned over and asked Brother Boniface for his opinion. Brother Boniface is Mepkin’s 91 year-old statesman, barber, baker, and stand up comic. He manages these responsibilities despite a painful arthritis of the spine that has left him doubled over and reduced his walk to an inching shuffle. Swiveling his head on his short bent body in order to make eye contact, Boniface lightly touched my arm with his gnarled fingers and gently whispered through his German accent, “You could’ve been a little slower…and a little louder.”
After Mass I noticed that the rain had stopped. I headed for the little Christmas party for monks and guests in the dining hall or refectory. Mepkin is a Trappist or Cistercian monastery, and its official name, “The Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.),” is taken seriously. Casual talking is actively discouraged and even the vegetarian meals are eaten in strict silence. Parties are decidedly rare and not to be missed.
It was a fine affair consisting of light conversation, mutual Christmas wishes, and various Boniface-baked cookies and cakes along with apple cider. Mostly I just basked in the glow of congeniality that I had come to associate so well with Mepkin.
I didn’t stay long. It was almost midnight, and after a long day of eight church services, packing eggs, mopping floors, feeding logs into the wood burning furnace, and helping Father Guerric put up Christmas trees, I was asleep on my feet.
I said my good-byes and headed for my room several hundred yards away. Halfway to the refectory door I heard the resurgent rain banging on the roof reminding me that I had forgotten to bring an umbrella. Opening the door I was cursing and resigning myself to a miserable hike and a wet monastic guest habit for morning services, when something startled me and left me squinting into the night. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a dim figure standing under an umbrella outlined by the rain and glowing in the light from the still-open door. It was Brother John in a thin monastic habit, his slouched 60 year-old body ignoring the cold.
“Brother John! What are you doing?”
“I’m here to walk the people who forgot their umbrellas back to their rooms,” he replied softly.
Flicking on his flashlight we wordlessly started off sharing that single umbrella. For my part I was so stunned by this timely offer that I couldn’t speak. For in a monastery whose Cistercian motto is “prayer and work” and where there are no slackers, no one works harder than Brother John. He rises before three in the morning to make sure coffee is there for everyone, and is still working after most of his brethren have retired.
Brother John is also what might be termed Mepkin’s foreman. After morning Mass the monks without regular positions line up in a room off the church for work assignments, and with several thousand acres full of buildings, machinery and a farm with 40,000 chickens there is plenty to do. (As a daily fixture at the grading house packing and stacking eggs thirty dozen to a box, I could easily skip this ritual. I never do. Perhaps it is the way Brother John lights up when I reach the front of the line, touches me ever so lightly on the shoulder and whispers “grading house” that brings me back every morning. Perhaps it is the humility I feel when he thanks me as if I were doing him a personal favor…) Yet Brother John keeps it all in his head. Every light bulb that flickers out somewhere is his responsibility. He supervises when possible and delegates where he can, but as he is always short handed he is constantly jumping in himself at some critical spot. Throughout the monastery the phones ring incessantly with someone on the line asking, “Is John there?” or “Have you seen John?” And through it all, his Irish good humor and gentleness never fades or even frays.
Now after just such a day, four hours after his usual bed time, and forty years into his monastic hitch, here was Brother John eschewing Boniface’s baking, a glass of cider, and a Christmas break in order to walk me back to my room under a shared umbrella.
When we reached the church I reassured him several times that I could cut through to my room on the other side before he relented. But as I opened the door of the church something made me turn, and I continued to watch his flashlight as he hurried back for another pilgrim until its glow faded into the night. When I reached my room, I guess I wasn’t as sleepy as I thought. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark for what I can say with some conviction was a very long time.
