ROBERT : According to one Divine Metronome . . . .

According to one Divine Metronome — the one known as the Calendar of the Church — the Ascension of Our Lord has now been observed and so we await our Brother’s return some day to judge the living and the dead. The Day of Pentecost has been celebrated and the Spirit has been given to us. And now we have entered the season of unbounding festivity known by the heart-stirring name Ordinary Time. Oh, ring the bells of joy, I say.
Ordinary Time is the name settled upon to refer to the twenty four to twenty nine weeks of the year for which the Church could not come up with any great celebrations for you and I to participate in.
The word ordinary and its derivatives occupy fourteen columns in the Oxford English Dictionary, a space larger than all of the words for all the other seasons of the Church year combined. ‘Let this be a sign unto you,’ I think to myself. Words like common, usual, unremarkable, settled, regular, simplest appear often in the fourteen columns. Ordinary Time, to use the words of one of the definitions in the OED, is ‘our customary fare.’
Of the 365 days given to us each year, the church has designated on average 55.6% of them as something less than festive, and not even suitable for something uplifting like putting ashes on our foreheads and remembering that we are but dust. Add together all of the days of the great seasonal celebrations of the church year, and there are still more ordinary days than festive ones.
‘Give us this day our daily bread — our customary fare,’ if you will. If we are to celebrate anything during Ordinary Time, we are largely on our own. The Church is happy to lead the celebratory charge from December until the end of April or so, and sometimes go as far as the end of May. ( Dependent, oddly enough, on the phases of the moon. ) After Pentecost, it is up to us.
The Church leads the parade for Christmas and the manifestation of Christ among us and spring and Easter and the coming of the Holy Spirit and we are assigned the dog days of summer, the back to school sales, and Labor Day. This year we also get an oil spill, floods that keep killing people, new rounds of ethnic cleansing on two continents, the noise of midterm elections, unemployment that is heartbreaking and the truth that not a single one of us has grown younger since this time last year.
According to the metronome of the calendar, our search for the balance between the borders and the margins of our lives, between the struggles with the bustle and the meaning of our daily rounds, between a way of marking time that will lead us to the Divine amid the clamor of the marching orders that would lead us somewhere else — all of that work is now up to us.

I never miss the festal parade at Easter, and I shall be beside you as always in the dark with my candles come Advent.
But just now, whether or not the deep rhythms of the Story are alive and ticking in me in late June is the real question, I am afraid. And I must answer it myself.
Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

BEN : Stealing my words . . . .

Stealing my words is much less an offense than my being haunted by the words you wrote — returning, rest, salvation, sabbath, letting go. I am terrified I will never be able to receive the gift hidden within the practice of such things.
Margin is not simply the difference between retail price and product cost these days. Margin is what’s missing in my life. At each corner, the complexity of responsibility and scheduling seem to push against any hope I might have of finding some sense of margin beyond that of a break-even or profit analysis spreadsheet.
My attempt to find margin has become an empty promise to myself and seems accompanied by a blatant disregard for the limited capacity of my human self itself. I push myself to the what seem to be my limits and dance on the edge of what seems to be an insanity. This is the life I have chosen and yet I worry it may consume me.
I have a burning need to find the News somewhere between our words and my attempts to find a kind of Divine metronome to help me pace myself at the speed of God, rather than keep dancing to a drumbeat of expectation.

O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what thou wouldest have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in thy light we may see light, and in thy straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I pray you are right that we may be closing in on the News. I need such a thing to be true.

BEN : Pentecost is the final . . . .

Pentecost is the final big celebration in the Church calendar before we plunge into working out the details of the life of Christ as it is lived.
      There is a sense of anticipation during the season of Pentecost, a sense of a journey beginning that can mirror the excitement of leaving home for college, starting a new job, getting married, holding your first-born for the first time, or learning how to drive. In one moment there is a rush of excitement and then in the next you realize this is just the beginning.
      At the end of the fifty days of Pentecost, we begin the longest season of our year — Ordinary Time, the space we have been given to work out the Gospel in our own communities. The gift in this season is that we have been given a majority the calendar to work out our salvation with fear and trembling as St. Paul once encouraged us to do.
      Ordinary Time is our chance to go into all the world armed with the knowledge of the Gospels and the words of Christ. Pentecost empowered the Church to carry forward the earthly ministry of Christ until his ultimate return, just like he promised. That being the case, it is now time for us to find a way to put Christ’s words in motion and to incorporate a practice within our lives that shapes us as we navigate through the intersections of life.
      Pentecost is a bridge between the life of Christ and the responsibility of our faith. The more we search after the Holy in the midst of the Ordinary, the more it becomes a part of who we are and who we are becoming. And when we cannot find the Holy, we are aware of its absence. Pentecost is just the beginning. 
      Let us go forth in the name of Christ.
      Thanks be to God.

ROBERT : Whatever else you fear . . . .

Whatever else you fear on this rainy day here in what is quickly becoming the Seattle of the South, do not fear being the only one who is afraid of being insignificant or destitute. In fact, in my case, you can add in the fears of being irrelevant, unreadable, and unread, just to name a few. Not to mention my fear that the spring rains are never going to end. There are some other things I am afraid of as well but I shall not burden you with the entire list.
      The truth of the matter is that our fear — both rational and irrational, justified and unjustified — is a part of the humanity that was whispered into us when we were whispered into being in the first place. It is as much a part of who we are as is the courage to take our lives apart and examine them. It is as much a part of us as our desire to properly balance our lives around our prayer and work and community and rest, to use Benedict’s Rule as a model. It is a part of our struggle to speak with and hear from the One Who made us, to find and do good work, to love and serve those to whom we have been given, and to live a life of returning and rest, a life in which we may actually be saved from our fears after all.
      To paraphrase the One Who came among us, paraphrasing done with fear and trembling, I might add — ‘Be not afraid. In fact, do not even be afraid to be afraid.’ A life of faith is meant to be lived in the midst of questions and doubts and complexities and fears. We are called to be faithful not correct; to be who we are instead of who we are supposed to be; to be courageous rather than certain.

On his deathbed, Michaelangelo is reported to have said to his assistant who was attending to him, ‘Draw, Antonio, draw. Draw and do not waste time.’
      Make your Rule, do the work, and be not afraid. Remind yourself that one can hardly go wrong choosing between two goods anyway.

BEN : Can anyone tell me . . . .

Can anyone tell me where to find an Abbot?
      I understand that I can easily find one in the midst of the monastic communities scattered across the globe. It seems to me that this whole Rule business would be much easier if we could just take ourselves, our minds, our fears and lay them before someone who could put the pieces together for us.
      It makes sense for God to endow one individual within every community with the wisdom to lead, direct, and serve the larger community by helping each member understand their role and how their work contributes to a complete ecosystem of ministry, work, and prayer.
      Of all the elements that St. Benedict captured for us in his Rule making, this is not the one to leave out. I can do without all the rules about chewing my food so many times per bite and even a few others, but not this one. The role of the Abbot, who functions as the eye of clarity and the voice of conviction, doesn't seem to translate outside the walls that contain the small communities of people dedicated to each other and the work of prayer.
      For those of us who find our altar in the midst of the ordinary, a world of screaming toddlers, unexpected traffic jams, and unplanned expenses, who or what can we look to that can help us sort through this mess we call the American Dream?

ROBERT : You struck a chord . . . .

You struck a chord for me and for others last week. As I reflected on the things that you wrote, pairs of words kept coming back to me all week — being vs. doing; eternal vs. temporal; contemplative life vs. the active life.
      One of the bits of wisdom that you will discover within the Rule of Saint Benedict is that one’s work has to nurture who you are trying to become. The things that you do need to help you become more of who you really are; the temporal of your life needs to reflect the things that are eternal; your actions need to be shaped by your silence and your solitude.
      Such a way of seeing one’s life and work seems new in a way, probably because we do not hear it talked about much. The truth is that such a way of seeing our work is as old as life itself. I believe it is the way the One Who made us intended for us to live.