Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Br. James Michael Dowd's Life Profession - Thursday, April 24, 2011
Acts 3: 11-26
1 Peter 1: 3-9
Luke 24: 36b-48
What a great time for a Profession of the Vow for Life! The octave of Easter.
This holy time when life is at the highest point of triumph. Death has tried its best and has been defeated. One Sabbath day of rest between crucifixion and resurrection and all fear is beaten down. Life blossoms and fruits. God has said “Yes!” absolutely to life.
There’s an image that has kept coming to me as I have been praying about this sermon and I have to tell you about it… when I first started my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) residency I was on call one night. That involved making rounds on all the floors. I got to Obstetrics and checked in. “Anything going on?” The nurse said “There’s just one woman in labor… it won’t be very long now.” I remarked that I had never seen a birth. She said “Wait a minute” and left. Pretty quickly she came back with a scrub suit and said that the patient’s husband wasn’t willing to go into delivery with her and she would like the chaplain! Oh!!
I did as I was told and trembled my way to the mother’s bed. She grabbed my hand, kissed it and thanked me. “I don’t want to be alone and my husband is afraid.” I thought “you think he’s scared?” Just then they came to wheel her into the delivery room and I was dragged along ruing my bravado.
Well, she did great. I didn’t faint. The baby was born. on the 25th of September… the mother’s own birthday, the doctor’s birthday and my younger son’s birthday. So we all sang Happy Birthday and the baby responded…. He howled and then he peed all over us!
I know that’s a pretty earthy story for this solemn occasion. But so is our Gospel reading. Jesus tells the disciples to look at his tortured flesh and believe. He then asks for something to eat because ghosts don’t do that. This is a living Lord… not an ethereal concept. There is no mistaking the reality of his appearance. No chance is given to explain it away to themselves as a wishful thought or a grief conjured manifestation. Here is the Lord embodied and transformed. New life. Earthed yet transcendent.
And from Acts we read that Peter and John react to the surprise of the crowds after they had healed the crippled man by asking why the crowd is surprised. What did they expect? What else could life in Christ bring but immersion in the living of life and its restoration to wholeness?
Our faith is not a philosophy, not a finely worked out way of walking through life unscathed, sheltered and immersed in one’s own spiritual development. It is rooted in the earthiness of the Incarnation. It is humanity glorified but still human.
And although much of the world will ask why you, James, want to “bury” yourself in a monastery, we all know better. Today when you make your profession you do not die to life, you do not remove yourself from the pain of your fellow human beings; you do not become indifferent to the world God has planted us in.
Making your commitment does not mean retreating from life – dying to self, yes! Giving up your own willfulness and selfishness, yes! Monasticism is a call to enter fully into life with all its joy and all its grief. What happens today is that the labor you have been going through for fifty years will come to fruition finally. And just as that mother’s labor I spoke about was inexorable, irreversible, so is yours now.
James Michael you are being born yet again. Not into a sheltered existence but into a life that will take you deeper into the joy of your humanity and yet render you more and more vulnerable to the sufferings God’s children undergo. If you are faithful there will be no escape.
Benedict tried to escape at first. The cave at Subiaco seemed like a good idea for a while but the more he tried to withdraw the more the poor and the lost beat a path to his door. And finally, there at Montecassino his monastery guarded the road to the city he had fled from. It became a shelter and a beacon to the weary and the wanderer.
Benedict’s story is a great one. And it is the story of every monk. It is the story of being drawn by God’s love until the heart fills and overflows and the cloister cannot contain it. It’s not a story of escape or gentle piety. It’s a story of walking on into the full, messy humanness of life. It’s about perseverance and not turning back. It’s about trying to incarnate the love of Christ in this earthy mess we call life.
James, no one needs to teach you to love the poor. You are no stranger to the streets. And yet you give yourself to a life of seeking God that requires stability and labor. Today you claim a life that will be so abundant, so earthy, and so blindingly full that you will never rest again if you listen.
Today you are being born as a finally professed monk of the Order of the Holy Cross. Our roots are not genteel. Our Founder stood against the injustice which grinds down the poor. We don’t draw back. We keep our doors open, we venture out, but we always come home…home to our community, to our life together rooted in Christ.
This is your monastic day of birth. I trust you will be more circumspect in your response to the gift of life than that baby boy was those years ago! You will undoubtedly howl. But know you have come home. Alleluia!
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