Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement
Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington - November 25, 2022
Let every living creature laud;
Whom by the Cross Thou dost deliver,
O guide and govern now and ever! Amen.
The former Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Confederation, Notker Wolf, had this to say about the call to monastic life:
"At first we feel called by God and attracted by him. We grow in our vocation and get the impression that God has gripped us and will never let us go. We want to withdraw from him in order to escape his grasp. But he loves us too much to allow us to fall. He holds us fast."
One of the most common and recurring motifs of Sacred Scripture is the call narrative. We hear God’s call to Abram, Moses, and Joseph; to Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah; to the Virgin Mary, Peter, and Paul. These and so many more have their lives suddenly interrupted and are overwhelmed by the sense that their lives as they know it is no longer possible because of this divine interruption. A new path opens up which wasn’t seen before and a voice beckons to follow.
And this vocation to leave all and follow continues to be heard by some people long after the pages of the Bible have come to an end. Antony, Benedict, and Romuald hear it. Francis, Clare, and Dominic hear it. And even after the vocation to religious life was discredited by the Protestant reformers, God’s voice to leave all and follow was still heard resulting in the Community of the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross, the first women’s Anglican religious order, the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the first men’s Anglican religious order, and James Huntington’s Order of the Holy Cross, the first men’s religious order of the Episcopal Church.
We’ve just heard the original and paradigmatic call narrative…the call of Abram. Abram was a wealthy man living a comfortable life. He had everything going for him. He wasn’t engrossed in sin, nor was he crying out to God to be saved from an encroaching enemy. He was simply living his life as was the custom of his day when suddenly God stepped into the routine of his life and revealed a plan for Abram that Abram could never have imagined for himself. Abram’s good wasn’t good enough for God! And in that moment, it’s as if Abram becomes so intoxicated with the vision of God that the most daring, the most reckless behavior follows: he leaves country, kindred, and home…all that defined him and all that he knew and loved…with only the voice of God as guide and the promise of God as inspiration. What results is a whole new way of being in the world that would allow for God to be revealed without the encumbrance of the old ways of Abram’s thinking and being. Now, Abram wakes up each morning not just with the day’s routines ahead but with a divine purpose and a divine mandate and the blessing of God begins to overflow in all he says and does.
St. Paul’s equally dramatic interruption accomplishes the same effect: the old man is stripped off and, impregnated with divine vision of the new creation, Paul boldly follows the call of God with faith alone as guide and reimagines what life in this world can be like lived fully united to God in Christ. And the world will never be the same because of it.
This same spirit that demands all and summons with urgency to follow possessed Antony which drove him from the comforts of life on the Nile into the solitude of the desert, possessed Benedict which drove him from the mediocrity of life as a Roman student to the meaningful life of seeking God with all his heart, and possessed Francis to strip himself of all worldly possessions and live in stark imitation of the poor Christ. And this very same spirit also possessed James Huntington to face the ridicule and opposition of a church highly skeptical of religious life to create a community of monks anyway…monks devoted to imitating the crucified Christ who bore the cross for love of the world.
Like Jeremiah experienced long ago, some people find themselves seduced by God, so overwhelmed by a beauty, so overcome with a purpose that all freedom to choose otherwise seems lost. Nothing else but obedience and faithfulness to this vision will let one find rest. “You seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced; you were too strong for me, and you prevailed.”
Each of the God-possessed founders and foundresses of new religious communities, while all daring to follow God to a place they know not and at the cost of immense sacrifice, bore their own unique expression of the Kingdom of God.
In the case of James Huntington and the Order of the Holy Cross, this aspiring member is particularly struck by one quality above all that, at least from my perspective, makes Huntington and the community he founded especially attractive. Even above his courageous spirit and fortitude is his personal love for Christ and his cross that suffuses his spirituality and the very wise rule he left for the monks in his charge and on which the Holy Cross monks of today continue to stand.
For Huntington, all the elements of the religious life point to Christ and to the cross which reveals the passion of God’s divine love for the world. The line O Crux, Ave, Spes Unica (O Cross, our one reliance, hail!) from the hymn Vexilla Regis opens his rule and situates all that is to come. The life of prayer, which forms the first part of the rule, brings one face to face with the cross…in the liturgy, in obedience, in meditation, in the pondering of Sacred Scripture. The cross is born in one’s own ascetical life as one appropriates it in the dying to self and in the service to God and one’s brothers in community, which forms the second part of the rule. And, in the third part, the fiery love encountered in this divine appropriation of the cross manifests the fruit of the cross: a love which must act and a fire which must burn and a Christ in each of us which must bring healing and salvation: Crux est mundi medicina (The cross is the medicine of the world).
Brothers, we too have heard this call from the cross. We too have left all behind to journey together with faith alone as our guide, and our hearts burn with this same fiery love. On this holy day, let us recommit ourselves to stoke this flame in each other through our daily sacrificial acts of kindness and love until each of our hearts burns with the fire that burned in the heart of our founder whose heart burned with the fire that burned in the heart of our Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment