Thursday, August 11, 2022

With Saint Clare

Jesus alone is our reward. All we do and endure is, after all, only our duty, an inestimably privileged way for us to be with Jesus, who for the joy that lay before him, endured the cross, heedless of its shame. Like Saint Clare, whom we celebrate today, we rejoice to be identified as useless because he was thought to be so, despised and ridiculed as a blasphemer by those who should have known better. Our only joy and worth are in gaining Christ and being found in him; we know that life without him would be intolerable. As Saint Paul will put it, “I have suffered the loss of all things, that I may gain Christ - indeed, I regard them all as dung…” So driven is Paul by his love and conviction that he can express it only by using this most vulgar term for filth in Greek - sku’balon - because it connotes total worthlessness and revulsion. (See Daniel Wallace.)
 

In the monastery, we live in two worlds. All day long, we try to be efficient at work, whatever it is - cleaning, cooking, making jam or chasubles. But we know that all that efficiency is not going to be of much use when we go to pray. There we need a very different set of tools - we must be satisfied to be helpless, worthless, and inefficient; totally dependent on Christ’s kind favor, his gracious mercy and loving-kindness, ready to listen, and confident in our emptiness and uselessness. And this is work too, a very different kind of work - the discipline of being at home with the loss of control, at home with wonder and unknowing. It is in this lowest place, that contemplation can happen. Finally, perhaps, we are worthless enough in our own eyes to realize we have nothing to be proud of. This is our ultimate credential in a life dedicated to incessant prayer.


Photographs of the Abbey Cottage and its gardens by Brother Brian.