SANDPAPER SPIRITUALITY

 I recently attended a three-day conference for Benedictine priors at St. Leo Abbey in Florida. The featured speaker was Dom Cuthbert Brogan, the abbot of Farnborough Abbey in England. His four talks were very down-to-earth and helpful.

Peace Among Thorns

Peace among thorns

In his very first talk he offered an insight that I found really helpful. The main idea was this: We tend, these days, to forget that at the center of the monastic life is the mystery of the cross. This sense of the cross is often missing among young people coming to the monastery today: "When things get tough, you leave."

The mystery of the cross needs to be at the center of our idea of community life. Without it our community will have no room for imperfect members or for people struggling with difficulties in their personal lives. The ideal of a ¨perfect community" will  discourage us from facing and dealing with the ugly realities of monastic life. The Benedictine motto of ¨peace" must always refer to ¨peace among thorns.¨ Difficulties in our monastic life should not surprise us.

Turning the Tables

At this point Abbot Cuthbert began using the image of sandpaper, and the fact that if a surface is in need of smoothing and polishing we set to work with the abrasive surface of sandpaper. I got ahead of his thinking, however, figuring that he was going to say that the brethren should approach a problem monk and try to fix him, smooth him out so to speak. But the Abbot turned my thinking on its head: Rather than seeing difficult monks as problems to be fixed (sanded down), I should see them as the sandpaper that improves me by requiring me to exercise patience, empathy, gentleness and so on. I am the one who is improved by facing the cross in my own life.

This is great advice for a prior in a monastery, who can easily get caught up in correcting imperfections in his brothers, in fixing wayward monks. 

From now on I will try to keep an eye out for the sandpaper that the Holy Spirit sends into my life whether in the form of a struggling brother or a painful situation.