|
My dear Saint Markans,
Everyone asks me why I became a monk. Although a full answer to that question is complex and layered, I usually respond by saying that the monastery was the first place I found that had enough space for me to become myself. The same inner forces that led me into the monastery also led me out of it. After many years, a lot of healing, and a deepening of my understanding of who I am in God, the monastery began to feel like it was no longer spacious enough for me to continue becoming myself.
St. Irenaeus reminds us that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. The task for each of us is to become fully alive in Christ. God plants within us a seed of identity. Through prayer, struggle, worship, and love we tend that seed. We clear out the weeds from the soil of our heart, and water the ground with the tears of our laughter and our heartache. Over time–usually a lifetime–the seed planted within us can blossom into a beautiful witness to God’s mercy and love.
This is a poetic way of talking about vocation, which is simultaneously the gift of God’s will and of our full selves. Vocation is not primarily a matter of activity. It is a matter of identity and relationship. Our vocation reveals who we are when we are held fast in the love of God. Each of us is totally original and unprecedented. If we do not live the life God has given us, we deprive the world of our giftedness. No one else can live our life. That is both our burden and our gift: to fully and faithfully live the life we have been given.
If this dynamic is true for the individual, it is also true for the community. Over a century ago, God planted a seed that would grow into Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. We are stewards, for a time, of this particular branch of the Body of Christ. It is our responsibility and our gift to prune, water, and tend this branch so that, through our community, God can continue to nurture us and our neighbors in the Twin Cities and the Episcopal Church in Minnesota.
Our communal identity is not static. We must continue to listen faithfully to the movement of God’s Spirit among and within us. Only by listening deeply to one another and to God can we discern the shape our common vocation is to take today. To this end, our wonderful formation team has been planning our fall programming. We will explore Benedictine spirituality, which emphasizes engagement with scripture, hospitality, beauty, and the joys and challenges of communal life as the road that leads to deeper and fuller life in God. We’re calling this formation program “On Pilgrimage with Christ: Wisdom for Daily Life.”
The practices of Benedictine spirituality, rooted in the monastic wisdom tradition, offer us practical tools to listen deeply to the life of God emerging within us, within the Saint Mark’s community, and within the world around us. We will supplement these Sunday morning formation talks with monthly conversations in our Voice of Reconciliation and Healing series. We are also considering ways to expand our mid-week worship opportunities to continue to deepen our life of prayer.
My hope is that by recommitting ourselves to Christian formation, deep prayer, and service to our neighbors, we will open ourselves ever more fully to the voice of God calling us to new and deeper life. The world needs us to be Saint Mark’s Epsicopal Cathedral, fully ourselves and fully alive. That is how we give glory to God today and every day.
Your brother in Christ,
| 
