Kitchen Monks

FR. TERRY RYAN, CSP
Luke 12: 49-53
August 19, 2007

 

This, my fourth summer at the monastery, has been the first time that I have experienced boredom and tedium in my prayer and subsequently it has overflowed into other parts of the day. I would show up for my centering time, in the morning, and just look at the tabernacle, and say, “So what now God?” With no expectations for peace or consolation, I would close my eyes and just get through the time. In the afternoon, I would say, “I have so much to do,” and think about skipping the dry prayer, to get something else done. But I would always show up in the afternoon, in front of the tabernacle, and put in my time.

Then suddenly, everything began to shift, in the prayer, and in my life in the house. Up until this shift, I had been suffering from too many monks in the kitchen when I went to make my breakfast. Everyone seemed to get in my way. I wanted to get over it, but the feeling entered my heart each morning when I entered the kitchen. We all make our own breakfast. If a monk ate the same thing every morning, eggs, then he did not bother me. He may be dying a cholesterol death, but he had a predictable pattern. So I could adjust. But if a monk was into health, he might eat something different from one morning to the next, and so he did not have a regular pattern, and I could not adjust.

Then one morning I walked into the kitchen after my chapel prayer time as usual, but everything had changed. I was suddenly at peace with the kitchen arrangement and monks going about making their breakfast. Since then I have not felt bothered at all. Nothing had changed in the kitchen, but I had changed. What happened? What I think happened is that something had died in me during all that boring prayer time. There was a fire for sure, but one that burnt something away. It is sometimes called an unloading of undigested emotional baggage. I never felt it during the prayer. I felt tedium. At the same time that I felt this new comfort in the kitchen, my prayer became much more restful. I did not try and make anything happen. I just rested in the prayer.

I had been undergoing a baptism of dying to something, in order that I might see in a new way, feel in a new way, and this dying was anguish, expressed in the boredom. What I did correctly is continue to show up for the prayer. I was dying with Jesus within, to rise with him to a bit more of a transformed life. The fire that was getting rid of stuff within me may have come through another monk praying in the house or chapel. My prayer, however dead it might have felt to me, could have been God's passing the fire through me to someone else. This is the value of having a community or group with which to pray.

I have come to realize that I am a contemplative who teaches, preaches, celebrates sacraments and does administrative things in line with my work. A painter paints. A writer writes. A baker bakes, and a weaver, weaves. Painters may shop for groceries, or clean the house, but they would not say they are grocery shoppers, and have no time for painting. If they did that, the fire would go out, and the anguish would eventually catch up with them. Shopping is peripheral to who they are, necessary, but not their true selves. If I do not pray interiorly, in the stillness and quiet, with the excuse that I am too busy, then I have given up being me, and given up being open to the fire.

If I continue to be faithful to my prayer, I will get changed. Then some people will not like that, because I may not be available to them the way they want me. Some will have gotten used to my pattern of busyness that made their lives easier. Some will celebrate change in me. So there will people divided over my own transformation. People got upset with Jesus not being who they wanted him to be, but the fire within him, to be his true self would not allow him to fulfill the wants of the religious or political culture.

Families may become divided, over one who follows the Christ fire and the others who just like the status quo. Change is difficult, but if I show up to the daily prayer practice, I will get through the anguish and become all who God meant me to be in God's image and likeness.