Inefficiency

All week long at work, we monks try to be efficient at work, whatever it is- cleaning, cooking, making jam and ale, more chasubles in fewer minutes, whatever. But very soon we realize that the efficiency and discipline required for making great jelly, a great ale or the perfect vestment, all of that is not going to be much help when we go to pray. We’ll need a very different set of tools for that. Perhaps we could call them tools for inefficiency. For at prayer we have to be satisfied to be helpless and small, attentive and totally dependent on Christ’s kind favor; simply trusting his loving-kindness; ready to depend and listen, to trust our emptiness; eager to surrender. Make no mistake; this is work too, a very different kind of work- the discipline of relaxing into our powerlessness. We rejoice for Jesus comes to meet us there.

The rose window at  the west end of the Abbey church.