Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Let us pray. "We give you thanks, almighty God, for the Saints of the Benedictine family; and we pray that the zeal of the holy monks and nuns of the ages may inspire us to holiness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.” Amen. In the 1999 comedy “Office Space,” Peter Gibbons, a young corporate drone working a soul-crushing job in the tech sector, has an epiphany. After years spent sludging through, doing “just enough not to get fired” from his job, he agrees to undergo hypnotherapy with his girlfriend in a half-hearted attempt to rescue his equally frustrating relationship. During the session, he begins to let go of attachments, worries, and cares associated with his job, his managers (he has eight, by the way, meaning that when he messes up, he has eight different people coming by his desk to tell him about it), his toxic relationship, and even the pointless expectations of the prevailing culture. This is, arguably, a healthy new outlook for Peter but, unfortunately, there’s a bit of a snag: the temporary trancelike state that enables him to see so clearly for the first time inadvertently becomes permanent when the hypnotherapist keels over from a heart attack before bringing Peter back out of it.
Locked now into a perpetual state of hypno-bliss, Peter begins moving through his daily life completely unconcerned about anything aside from pursuing his newfound dream of “doing nothing.” Responsibilities, consequences, money, other people’s opinions about him – none of it matters to him anymore. He does continue showing up to work, but only when he feels like it. He finally asks out the pretty waitress he’s had a crush on for ages and she says yes. Bob and Bob, a pair of “efficiency consultants” brought in by the company basically to fire people, end up becoming enamored with Peter’s aloof, relaxed confidence, and – in a move that says a lot about how much corporate culture just loves rewarding incompetence – actually plan to promote him.
Of course, the Bobs aren’t the only ones who notice Peter’s new outlook. When his burned-out work friends chide him about his deteriorating job performance and seemingly lazy attitude, he responds with surprisingly deep conviction. “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth!” he declares. “We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” It’s a really good line. And in a real sense, it’s a line that changed my life.
You see, during a particularly frustrating time in my early professional career, I began questioning whether the large financial services firm I worked for really had my best interests at heart the way they said they did. According to the HR material, I was one of their approximately 100,000 “most valued assets,” but I couldn’t help noticing that when we posted our first billion-dollar profit, their gratitude for us was mainly expressed by tabletop signs in the cafeteria exclaiming, “It takes a lot of zeros to make a billion!” Not surprisingly, none of those additional zeros managed to find their way into my paycheck.
Like Peter Gibbons, I knew I was a drone, but I also knew I was relatively safe. If I managed to numb myself enough, I could keep working for the company, pumping out tedious copy for marketing material, maybe getting a promotion, and hopefully retiring by the time I was seventy. But try as I might to just accept and bear it, I wasn’t happy. And that line, “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! Human beings weren’t meant to spend it this way,” kept going through my head more and more often, until I finally decided: If I had only limited time, I didn’t want to sacrifice it to a corporation that couldn’t care less about me. I wanted to do something worthwhile with it. The pursuit of that thing would eventually lead me on a years-long journey through numerous monasteries and houses of various religious orders. But the first one was Benedictine.
One morning at about five o’clock, in the darkened choir of a large Benedictine Abbey on the west coast, I found out for the first time what it actually takes to live a life of purpose. As the monks rose from their stalls to begin praying the office of Vigils, the precentor intoned the Invititory: “Come, let us worship Christ the Lord, we have left all things to follow him.” Then, in unison, the rest of the monks chanted the beautifully haunting line in response, repeating it several more times during the course of Psalm 95, the Venite. And I knew.
In time, I gradually came to understand that Saint Benedict’s plan for teaching his monks how to follow Christ – to give up all things and seek God alone – was to establish the monastery as a school of the Lord’s service, a place where ordinary people come to learn how to follow the Gospel in the same way as the community of Believers described in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” This is none other than the ideal Saint Benedict invites us to strive for every day, right here, in this monastery: to hear and study the Word, to be community to one another, to share the Eucharist, and to pray for each other and for the world.
Saint Benedict understands that the Believers in Acts are living the way they are because they have heard and embraced the Gospel of Jesus, and they are orienting their whole lives toward living as Jesus taught. Indeed, the Acts of the Apostles is a literary continuation of the Gospel of Luke, both written by the same person and intended to be read in sequence. So, they have, as Jesus proclaims in our Gospel reading from Luke today, heeded Jesus’ invitation and left all things to follow him. They are using the Gospel as their rule of life. Saint Benedict’s intention in writing his Rule several centuries later is by no means to replace the Gospel, but to help his nuns and monks follow it as faithfully as possible within the contexts of their own times and places. For fifteen hundred years, this has worked, because it is founded on one thing alone: the timeless desire of the human heart to seek, and to be found by, Christ.
The shared vision of the Believers and Saint Benedict of simplicity and love of God and neighbor is a far cry from the fundamentally disordered obsessions of our modern social, political, and economic structures, and it was equally counter to the decadence, chaos, and violence of Saint Benedict’s time. And so, for the sake of the salvation of souls, he makes it clear that we have a solemn duty to show forth to the world that another way is possible through lives of peace and prayer. “Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way,” he tells us in the Rule. Just imagine what a difference each of us could make if we really committed ourselves, every day, to being Jesus’ presence in the world.
As appealing as that sounds – and we should do it – Jesus himself levels with us: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” He then goes on to stress just how intentional and disciplined we must be in our quest, or else we’re sure to falter. Our towers will stand unfinished, or we’ll find ourselves making peace with oppressors to keep from experiencing persecution and ridicule. In the Rule, Saint Benedict echoes this warning in the chapter on receiving new brothers, which our community just happened to hear read yesterday: “Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry,” Saint Benedict cautions, “[if] they promise perseverance in their stability, then after two months have elapsed let this rule be read straight through to them, and let them be told: ‘This is the law under which you are choosing to serve. If you can keep it, come in. If not, feel free to leave.’” There can be no illusions, no mitigations, and no excuses when it comes to following Christ, in the monastery or anywhere else.
There’s one more thing to beware of. As I have moved from corporate zero to professed monk, I’ve learned that the decision to leave all things and follow Christ is, unfortunately, not really a one-and-done kind of thing. It’s easy to make; not so easy to keep. For my part, I certainly struggle with distractions, temptations, laziness, and selfish tendencies pretty much every day. Ask a monastic – especially an older one – when they decided to become a nun or monk and they’ll likely answer, “When I woke up today.” As with any committed way of life, if we’re serious about staying the course in the monastery, then always we must begin again. But Saint Benedict reassures us that, even in our human weakness, all things are possible in the One whom we seek: “What is not possible to us by nature,” he tells us, “let us ask to be supplied by the help of God’s grace … [while] there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things by the light of life – we must run and do now what will profit us for eternity.” That’s a mission statement we can all get behind.
So then, having heard this invitation – and what, dear friends, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us? – let us set our resolve to bear our own crosses, calculate the cost, make our plans, and get about the business of following Jesus. “May we prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.” Amen.
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