Still Here

Yesterday, July 11, was my 10th anniversary of profession, so this is my last blog of this series. It’s been a profound and very growthful experience for me, ordering my thoughts and feelings about monastic life. Thank you for sharing this stage of my journey.

This week, I’m asking myself these questions: “Why do I stay? What do I get out of it?” I’m finding it’s surprisingly easy to answer them. Fundamentally, despite the niggles, disappointments, losses and detours along the road, I stay because this life is shaping me into a better, more loving person. I have undoubtedly had periods where I have felt that the mystery that is God was receding from me, but if I look back over the 10 years, I can see that the setbacks were temporary. I am more immersed in God and closer to loving others unconditionally than when I started.

Why is that? Cardinal Basil Hume once said that monastic life takes place in the tension between the desert and the market place. It sounds uncomfortable and, at times, it is, but I’ve learned that it’s that tension between extremes that is the place where I am most apt to find the wordless answers to the questions that have followed me all my life: What is God? What is my place in the universe? What does it mean to live a good life? Monastic life is not all contemplation, and neither is it a full-on immersion in the material.

Sometimes, I veer more one way, sometimes more the other. It’s that constant search to find the still point, neither rejecting the world nor being dominated by it, that is the essence of being a monastic. And it is in finding the still point, or at least constantly striving to find it, that I realize the monastery is the right place for me to be.

 

Karen Rose, OSB                                                                            July 12, 2019