New Monastic Blog. A Benedictine oblate blog

Monastic Ponderings is new blog I enjoy reading and... well.. pondering. Here are several of the most recent blog titles:

In the Garden of the Soul
The Journey
Inner Spirit
The truth about Community life
Penthos

Every one is a clear view into the life of seeking God.

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Footnotes:

Picture is cohdranknstrmysnstjul8yr09pic24.JPG by cohdra and is subject to license.

Short Monastic-Book Pilgrimages. A Benedictine oblate blog

After my blog about buying “Word & Spirit 17 Monastic On-going Formation” for $1.95, another oblate at St. Leo Abbey sent me a link to where someone is selling “Word & Spirit 7" (an earlier journal in the series) on E-Bay for $37.69 plus $3.50 shipping.

I am learning much from the book I bought. Every few pages I read a new-to-me idea about monastic formation (how men and women are trained/learn/develop as monks/nuns/sisters). Such insights cause me to stop reading and begin thinking. I am on page 11.

Here is what I am mulling over now from pages 10 and 11 (with footnote references omitted):

“Caught up in a wave of professionalization and compartmentalization, monastic communities are subject to losing sight of the importance of the "wisdom figures" and spiritual directors without portfolio who constitute such a vital reserve of sanctity and holiness in monastic life. The "educating of the heart," so essential to generations of monastic formation, did not always find a comfortable fit in the fonts of new programs that came into being under the rubric of monastic formation.

“There was also a form of damage control that was required
when some experimental programs of monastic formation became untracked. In the name of pluralism, ongoing formation became a Procrustean bed of centering prayer and Jungian psychoanalytic theory, Meyers-Briggs and the Enneagram, twelve-step therapies and Journaling. Helpful as some of these methods may have been for individual or community spiritual development, they often had the effect of slighting the components of mainline monastic spirituality that were expected in formation programs. The discipline of lectio divina and traditional ascetical practices seemed to be overlooked by many involved in formation, replaced by a set of individualized "career" specializations and even more basic "survival" skills for human development.”

I do not know what else “Word & Spirit 17 Monastic On-going Formation” may describe, but in relation to the lay person seeking a more ascetic/monastic manner of living in the world, the heart-centered daily conversion seems to be path for me.

Both “Word & Spirit 17" and a book I got last year, "The Love of Learning and the Desire for God," by Jean Leclercq, OSB. Fordham University Press, New York, 2001, were acquired during trips to the St. Leo Abbey bookstore when I was not looking for a book or expecting to buy one. But as soon as I looked at the cover of each book, I knew I would buy it — without knowing that each was a used book or that it was the only copy at the bookstore. And as I picked up each book I thought "this is why I came today."

Both of these books have special places in my small library, like old teachers they say, "First, you must know the question."
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Footnotes:

Picture is Santiago de Compostella by jamesdale10. My blog about this pilgrimage site is here.

Here is a prior blog on the book "The Love of Learning and the Desire for God."

My Monk Myths. A Benedictine oblate blog

As a former long-time atheist, when I became a Christian, I changed my mind on several fundamental subjects. Or perhaps more accurately, I should say I came to see that my old ways of thinking were wrong because they were built upon dim assumptions. After an encounter with God, my entire life changed. I was led to the foot of the cross and a new life in Christ. That was about 25 years ago.

With such a large lesson in “I was wrong about that” out of the way, now I actually look forward to the frequent opportunities to learn something that will adjust my thinking toward a closer understanding of God’s truth.

One correction to my assumptions in the past few years has been about monks. I had gathered a mental montage of religious life from the wider culture, TV, books, and all the other sources that shrink-wrap our thinking. I had never met a monk.

Now that I know a few monks at the St. Leo Abbey in Florida, I can say that virtually every one of my previous images of monks was wrong.

The most striking change in my view is that monks are normal and regular people. They are approachable and welcoming. Gone is the stereotyped image of a person living in a false, make-believe land removed from world.

However, the most subtle change in my view is that monks are living witnesses to their vows of stability, conversatio morum, and obedience. Those are the vows from Chapter 58 of the Rule of St. Benedict.

My corrected understanding of monks is that they are people like the rest of us AND (not “but”) they live following ancient monastic principles with roots in the earliest days of Christianity — from “follow me,”(1) and “sell your possessions and give to the poor,”(2) to “pray without ceasing.”(3)

Monks are both more typical of human kind than my previous views AND are also more admirable Christian witnesses. Like nearly every more-accurate understanding I achieve, truth’s light is far brighter just below the world’s dull laminations.
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Footnotes:

Picture is "Abbot Philip of Christ in the Desert Monastery" in New Mexico, USA, by Bellagooch.

Christ in the Desert's web site is packed with monastic information. I enjoy, for example, the Abbot's Notebook. This monastery was where the 2006 TV show "The Monastery" (the USA version) was filmed.

(1) Luke 9:23-26

“Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” NIV

(2) Luke 12:33-34

“Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. NIV

Above quotes from HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

(3) 1 Thess 5:17-18

“pray without ceasing.” NASB

Above "Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, © Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 Used by permission."

Used Books. A Benedictine oblate blog

I enjoy finding used books in the Abbey bookstore.

When my wife and I were at St. Leo Abbey yesterday for the 120th anniversary of the abbey, we stopped by the abbey’s bookstore as we always do on our visits.

Being able to browse the bookstore’s new books and getting advice from the monks who run the shop is a significant part of how I learn the Benedictine way.

Advice I receive online is also good, but most of my final decisions to buy a particular book come after I read parts of the book in the St. Leo Abbey bookstore.

Yesterday I saw a journal — the cover is shown above. “Word and Spirit” was published by St. Bede’s Publications, Petersham, MA, USA. I read a trade web site containing a note that the “Word and Spirit” journal is no longer being published. I bought a used copy of volume 17, with someone’s underlining scattered on a few pages.

Without St. Leo Abbey’s bookstore I would most likely never have come across the book, but I am glad I did. At $1.95 the price was perfect and its 140 pages contains about eight articles by different authors.

I don’t yet know if the entire book will be worth the $1.95, but the first two pages are. The author of the first article wrote about the types of life-long monastic formation (how men and women are trained/learn/develop as monks/nuns/sisters).

One interesting idea from those first two pages is that in the times of the Desert Fathers, men became monks by a kind of apprenticeship program — they found a person whose type of life they wished to develop as their own. The process was not so much an education, but a conversion. Would-be monks sought a new being, not a new credential.