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.
