Daily Pastoral #35
It seems that we have in us an urge to escape this life. We’re quick to flee. I’ll take two extremes as an example…
Monastics (some, not all) flee the hustle and bustle of modern-day life by escaping to their monasteries and convents.
Wealthy and worldly powerful people flee the workaday world by escaping to their secluded mansions and palaces.
Jesus doesn’t lead us away from life like that. Yes, it is good to escape and retreat at times. Jesus did.
But this retreat always leads to a return.
A return to the messy, broken, and beautiful heart of ordinary life.
As Ever,
Jonas
I really love these reflections, but this one I'm going to push back on. It is a common fallacy that monastic life is an escape from the world and that those who seek out monastic life are seeking that escape. It is exactly the opposite. In monastic life there is no place to hide, not from one's self, not from your fellow monastics, not from one's interior "demons," and, most of all, not from God. If anything, monastic life is an intensification of all those things that can make life "in the world" a struggle. It's moving from the gently simmering pot to the pressure cooker. I haven't moved into the pressure cooker, exactly. As part of a dispersed community, the form of monasticism I experience is more of a tea kettle, and yet much of what is true of life in a residential monastic community is part of ours as well. Ours is a life devoted to love of God and one's neighbor in prayer, work and study, a gradual stripping away of those things we use to insulate ourselves from ourselves and one another, and of course, time to focus on those imperishable things Jesus counsels us to value above all.
I love this so much. Your timing seems to always be spot on for me. I've been using "weekends away" as a coping mechanism lately. (a coping mechanism I definitely cannot afford). Thank you for this reminder of the importance of the need to be present in ordinary life. Now that I've drove myself broke, I am officially in the "return" season of my life and was looking for hope on how to handle it. I appreciate you Jonas!!