The Celtic Monk

From afar over the past couple of years, I've watched an acquaintance building a rickety bridge. In the name of compromise or peace-keeping she's made leadership choices hoping against hope that they'd maintain the public good, yet decisions she would never have made left to her own conscience, thoughtfulness and prayer. Each decision brought her farther out into deep water. During this season, her life has been an uneasy peace on the outside and chaos and turmoil inside. That is until recently when she decided (as I've seen people do many times before) that life is too short to do something you hate... and she walked away from the situation leaving the many people she worked with and for scratching their heads. Seeing her after the announcement, you knew the elephant had removed his foot from her chest. I tell her story compassionately because as I reflect on her 'withdrawl from the battle' it reminds me of similar leave-takings in my own life. Whether with f

I continue to work my way through my candidate year as a Benedictine Oblate of St. John's Abbey [Collegeville, MN]. While in the Rule of St. Benedict prayer is considered work the work I'm refering to is the more elusive work of discernment. One conclusion I've reached in my discernment process is that its a good thing at 56 years old to still be able to ask the parallel questions: "What do I want to do?" and "Who do I want to be?" when I grow up. That's preferable rather than slugging away for 20 or 30 or 40 years at a job or vocation one loathes (or even worse, the lukewarmness of what one will tolerate). This work of discernment asks us to look at our lives using criteria uncommon in the 21st century culture of America. Presently, I'm employing the lens of the Benedictine vow of stabilty. Should Benedict have meant by stability for his followers to dig a hole and stand in it... I would fail his criteria miserably. I now live more than 1

CHRIST’S JOURNEY and OUR OWN We walked the path from Bethany on the top of the Mount of Olives, down to the old city wall of Jerusalem. Along the way we stopped at the Church of Pater Noster – the place on the Mount of Olives where Jesus taught the disciples the “Lord’s Prayer.” Here on the walls of the shrine, the Lord’s Prayer is printed on ceramic tiles in 115 languages. Next we stopped at the Church of Dominus Flavit – where it is believed that Jesus stopped to weep on His way to the Garden to pray. The architecture of the church is tear shaped and offers a perfect view of the Temple Mount. The Garden of Gethsemane hosts a 2,500 year old olive tree that still send out shoots. As we entered the old city, we came to the Church of St. Anne, mother of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The church has perfect acoustics. A highlight of the trip for me is as we sat and sang our songs of faith and echoed a song of some pilgrims from Poland. While the Via Delarosa is more well-known to our Ca

We stood in the Garden of the Nations and listened to a Hassidic Cantor remember the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. He remembered them with the traditional mourning prayer, the Kaddish, which we had just said the day before together at the Western Wall for Glen Poston. As I read the opening remarks in the first exhibit of Yad Vashem, I could not help but draw similarities that would not be popular in the Israel of today. When I read about how the Nazi’s first began to segregate and then take away rights of the Jews in the late 1930’s and early 40’s I recalled the reduced options of those who live in Israel now behind fences and in segregated neighborhoods. I am not drawing any conclusion as to how the situation here might proceed. It’s just that when any people see other people or people groups as objects—often bad things happen. I will pray for the peace of Jerusalem and all Israel. We also visited the Museum of the Book... where the actual scroll fragments found at Qu