Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen OHC
The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A - Sunday, March 26, 2023
In the name of the One God, who saves us and sets us free. Amen.
The summer between my second and third years of seminary, I spent two quiet weeks at the Monastery. I had just finished a ten-week CPE program at a New York hospice, and I was burned out. The guesthouse was closed at the time for the community’s summer vacation. Without air conditioning, the guestrooms were oppressively hot and humid, but I stayed on the ground floor in a room that had once been a chapel, ministered to by the cooling breeze off the river.
I spent nearly the whole of my first week in a rocking chair on the large cement porch overlooking the river, reading. I also slept a lot, seduced by the late afternoon heat. My days were largely solitary, except for the three Offices and two meals with the brothers. And an old and familiar loneliness crept up.
The second week I hardly read at all. Mostly I sat staring at the glint of the river slowly dragging itself first north and then south and then north again. I stared, not to memorize the landscape’s contours, but to situate my roaming mind and spirit against a gentle backdrop. The sway of the meadow’s golden swells lulled me into a reverie that was restful. I had become so used to all the glass and concrete of New York, that, all this space, and me the only person in it, seemed the essence of eternity.
During those hours sitting and staring into the wide-open space, I realized that my spirit and my body needed meadows and rivers and mountains and trees. I needed air and starlight. The dawning understanding that now was the time to enter the monastery came first into my body and did so as I found myself renewed and welcomed by the landscape.
Then, too, there were conversations with the community over meals and individually. Br. Andrew told me, in his lilting Scottish brogue, “You’re a monk. I don’t say that to everyone, and I’m never wrong.” He also told me he loved me, and I believed him. I could hardly sit alone with him without the unnamed longing for home and father and love welling in my eyes. Often as we talked I’d let the tears roll down the soft hills of my cheeks. Andrew wasn’t the least bit startled. He was so completely himself that, like the meadow and the river, he had space for me.
I had a similar sense of spaciousness when I ate with the community. They engaged me gently, leaving me a distance that could have seemed reticent in another context. I intuited that distance, though, to be a respectful acknowledgment of the fullness and the mystery of my humanity. It was as if the routine of hours marked by a bell, lived over a lifetime, opened you to an understanding of the true impenetrability even of your own heart and also to an unhurried spaciousness for disclosure and connection, an acknowledgement that not everything has to be told or asked all at once, that true knowledge of another, of God, of ourselves unfolds over years and decades.
One way to tell the story of how I became a monk is to say that the Monastery is the only place that had enough space for me. I didn’t want a good enough life. I wanted eternity. That summer, as I stared at the waving grass or talked quietly with the brothers, I wondered is this how Lazarus felt as his friends and neighbors slowly unwound the clothes that bound him, as he stepped from the cold damp of his tomb into the light and the air?
We don’t know, of course. The text builds and builds to its crescendo: “Lazarus, come out!” Then the gentle ebb: “Unbind him, and let him go.” And then the silence echoing out from the storm. We hear Jesus’ grief, Mary’s grief, Martha’s grief. We hear the wonder of the crowd, the beating of our own hearts in anticipation of the great arising out of the tomb. And then, silence and stillness.
When your bones have come back together, bone to its bone. When the breath of God once more buoys your chest. When the shroud is unwound and you are suddenly, miraculously set free from your grave clothes, what happens next?
Wonder, certainly. Awe, absolutely. Gratitude, of course. But also disorientation, disbelief, maybe even dismay and outrage. For those who have endured trauma or suffering, on whatever scale, it’s sometimes much harder to live than it would have been to sink into the rest of death. In fact, one of the documented features of trauma is a kind of survivor’s guilt. Those who have seen the grave from the inside and made it out again know that by any reasonable measure they should not be here.
It’s easy to say that we should feel gratitude and wonder at the ways God continually brings life out of death. And, yes, absolutely—our God is the wonder-worker, the one coming into the world every minute to save us and set us free. And also, when we’ve been shut up—sometimes for our entire lives—in the darkness of the tomb, the sun will burn our skin and eyes.
What I don’t usually tell folks, when they ask why I became a monk, is that, over the years the spaciousness of the meadow and the table have sometimes felt like a crucible. We are never fully ready for the life that really is life to come to us and make us whole and free. Because life burns away death, like the sun melts the frost. And to the extent that we are not fully alive, the breath of God filling our bodies once more, must crack the joints and free the blood.
Sometimes, we can only learn the silence, stillness, and emptiness we need for resurrection when wrapped in the darkness of the grave. Sometimes, when we’re groping in our shrouds and squinting in the dark wondering where or how God may be at work in our lives or in the world, it may be that, like Jesus waiting two more days for his beloved friend to fall asleep in the Lord, God is allowing us the spacious calm to prepare for the new life that awaits us. We aren’t ready until we’re ready. And often our hearts have to break to have enough room in them for the love and the life God intends for us.
Yet, even as we sometimes grope in the damp darkness of the grave, Jesus waits with tear-stained cheeks, like a mother in labor with her child. So let us not lose heart, even as we may groan and yearn and call out for God’s new life to be born in and through us. God is ever-faithful, and what may seem to us slowness or stopping may actually be God’s grace giving our eyes enough time to adjust to the light. Because God is good, and that is everything.
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