Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
When I was a novice, one of my fellow novices asked the Superior why he had stayed in monastic life. The Superior begged off the question, but the next day he found the two of us and said, “I’ve stayed because I said I would.” It has to be the least sexy answer to that question. But it is also an answer that is simple, profound, and deeply faithful. This brother, as so many others have done—as I myself have done some days—stayed in monastic life because he said he would. His vow held him, and he allowed it to do so.
Today, we celebrate our Father Founder, James Otis Sargeant Huntington, who also stayed, at least in part, because he said he would. Normally we would celebrate a saint’s feast on the anniversary of their death. But the Founder died on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. It’s kind of hard to move those two. So, instead we observe his feast on the anniversary of his monastic profession, which I find rather fitting.
Father Huntington was not a great founder in the typical sense. The creation of our Order was not his work alone. Nor was he the first, or even the most enthusiastic to join himself to it. He was simply and profoundly the first to stay. Nor was Father Huntington a great mystic, a great theologian, or a great reformer. He was certainly all of those things, in part. But his genius and his holiness lie in the line of St. Joseph: quiet, persistent faithfulness to the commitment and witness to which God called him.
He was one of those rare people who, once he put his hand to the plow, did not turn back. I have to imagine he had his doubts. He was human, after all. He certainly knew turmoil. He lived through the Civil War, the First World War, and the beginning of the Great Depression—which certainly puts our own lives in perspective. And that’s not to mention conflicts internal to the Order in its early years, a well-documented hypochondria, suspected bouts of depression, and whatever other spiritual conflicts he almost certainly faced. Still, he stayed, he prayed, he loved, and he allowed himself to be loved.
His stability in monastic life mirrored God’s own faithfulness to him. That stability provided the initial foundation for others to struggle with and live into their own monastic callings, and through that struggle and commitment to see their vow through to the end. They, in turn, are enabling us to follow their example. Stability builds on stability, like a tangle of roots and mycelia in a forest that intertwine and support one another.
The vows we make, whether in baptism, marriage, monastic life, or ordination are a kind of binding, in both meanings of that word. They restrict our freedom of movement, and in so doing they allow our wounds to heal. All our rushing about from one thing to the next, all our restless searching and building only distract us from the essential movement of God’s healing love. We must, eventually, learn to be still so that God can stitch us back together.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius advises his son Laertes “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” This is great advice for the monastic life, too. Those examples of holiness you find, those virtues you come to love, bind them to yourselves with hoops of steel. I used to think this binding was meant to keep those we love close to us, but now I wonder if it isn’t just as much to keep us from running away from them. Often the closer we get to love, the harder it is to stay. Because, you see, it hurts to love. It can hurt even more to be loved, exactly as we are.
True faithfulness is only possible in the face of challenge and even despair. The vow we make—obedience, conversion of my ways to the monastic way of life, and stability in the Order of the Holy Cross—only reveals its full depth when we want to run away from it. If we are living this life fully and faithfully, we will eventually want to drop it all. The flush of our early enthusiasm will wear thin, and our monastic life will eventually begin to frustrate all of our unspoken plans for happiness, domination, and control. This is a feature, not a bug. When everything in our life starts to pick at the scabs of our self-creating, we know the monastic life is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is nothing less than to lead us into the true freedom and peace of Christ.
The poet Christian Wiman captures this dynamic beautifully in his memoir, My Bright Abyss: “What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.” (p. 29-30)
We cannot bind ourselves up, for we would make the knot too loose. But together we can surrender to the work of God within and among us. We can recommit ourselves to the vows we have made and to the common life in which we have made them. We can hold out our wounded, fractured hearts to the Crucified and Risen One, who binds up those hearts and makes them whole. He will heal us. He will bind us in and to his love. He will set us free.
Through his monastic life, through his struggles and his joys, Father Huntington came to know this truth deeply. It is what allowed him to persist in his stability, to remain obedient to the commitment he had made. His faithfulness was such that, even at his death, he chose not to be released from his vow. Like a bodhisattva, Father Huntington chose, even through and after death, to remain tied to us, his brothers, and to the whole world, promising always to intercede for us. At the end, he surrendered himself fully to the self-sacrificing love at the heart of God so that, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, he would not, apart from us, be made perfect.
