The Monastery Diaries, Part 3

Once again, I woke up well before my alarm, but this time at the far more reasonable time of 3:45. This is my final day at Our Lady of Clear Creek monastery. I got myself ready for the day, cleaned up my room, and finished packing up my belongings. 

I was finished with all of this by 4:30, so I read for a while before heading to the Abbey church for Matins and Lauds. 

Clearly, I was a little tired this morning, as at one point I got utterly lost in Matins. Lauds soon brought me back on track.

I was struck this morning in the flurry—of back-to-back Matins, Lauds, and the serene scurrying of the monk priests and their servers to their private Masses—by just how unhurried everything was. Not lackadaisical, everything had purpose and direction, but nobody appeared to be in a hurry. Even the relatively quick chanting during Matins doesn’t feel rushed.

Everything is done with calm purpose, dignity, and reverence. 

And a thought about private Masses: why were these effectively abolished in the Ordinary Form?¹ The whispered Mass I attended this morning in a side chapel with just the monk priest, the monk server, and one other person kneeling beside me was a serene and silent moment of grace. Even a daily Mass in a sleepy parish seems bustling and noisy in comparison. Why have we done our best to abolish silence?

I tarried after breakfast and washed the guest dishes. I was immediately reminded of Saint Benedict’s admonition to care for the ordinary dishes as you would the sacred vessels. It was a weirdly joyous task, as I’m pretty sure that the last time I washed dishes for someone other than me, it was for Francine. She would have approved, and I like to think she’s laughing in heaven—her unfiltered cackle of joy. 

After Terce, it was my third high Mass in as many days. It’s interesting how many things seem to have entered the Ordinary Form of the Mass from the monastic usage, particularly in the rubrics given to the people. This was, I think, a first in the 1970 Missal. Before that, rubrics were written exclusively for ministers, as far as I know. But much of the standing and sitting required of the people these days comes from the Benedictine traditions, it appears.

Perhaps it is part and parcel of the teaching of Sacrosanctum Concilium that every Mass should be a high Mass if possible.

Francine’s candle was still burning when I left the Abbey church for the last time. 

My friend Shelly picked me up around lunchtime and drove me to the airport. Thank you, Shelly, for the transport and for all the support you gave me this week!

I will return to Clear Creek. Perhaps not next year, as I’ll be walking Francine’s Camino for several months, but when I do return, it will be for at least a week. It takes time to get into the rhythm of the monastery. Three days this time were just perfect, as they mirrored the three days prior that I had spent as a pilgrim.

As I was preparing my notes for the blogs, I mused again and again on that mirror: three days as a pilgrim and three as a guest in the monastery. I found myself posting the first half of the story on my Camino blog and the second half of the story on my amateur monk blog. Very few articles get posted to both, and this led me to reflect a bit.

The great dichotomy in my life is this: am I a pilgrim or a monk? Or to put it another way, am I a Took or a Baggins?

I have walked into Santiago de Compostela as a pilgrim on five separate occasions with the hope and promise of more, but I have also been a Benedictine oblate for twenty years. Even on my first Camino in 2013, as I walked across the great cloister of the Royal Monastery of Samos, the thought hit me that I was made for the monastery.

So which is it? The pilgrim or the monk? For me, the answer appears to be both. 

I find extraordinary spiritual solace in pilgrimage. The pilgrimage routes are places where I connect most strongly with the Sacramental nature of reality.

And yet, the routine of praying the Hours, the stability of Pistachio House and liturgical and catechetical parish ministry are things that ground me and root me in living out the Gospel.

What is the commonality? Is there even a commonality? Which is it? The wandering of the pilgrim? Or the stability of the monk?

I am somewhat heartened that Saint Benedict, in his Holy Rule, seems to make some accommodation for being both. Chapter 61 is titled “How Pilgrim Monks Are to Be Received“, and it begins this way:

If a pilgrim monk come from a distant region and desire to dwell in the monastery as a guest, let him be received for as long a time as he wishes, provided that he is content with the customs of the place as they are, and does not disturb the monastery by exorbitant wants, but is simply content with what he finds.

It is, of course, God’s own poetry that, in the triannual cycle of the reading of the Holy Rule, this chapter is read on August 15, which Francine and I used to call our “Catholic anniversary“. Perhaps that poetry, God’s poetry, is enough.

After three days on the Three Hearts Pilgrimage (which you can read about on my Camino blog), I spent three days at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Annunciation of Clear Creek. These posts are my recollections and reflections of that time.

1. Yes, I’m aware that a Mass sine populo is perfectly valid and licit in the Ordinary Form (see General Instruction, 252–272). However, the loss of side altars in modern churches and cathedrals, the promotion of concelebration, and a more general disapproval have essentially killed the practice, except perhaps on a priest’s day off in his private chapel.