Being Monkish

This past weekend, I visited Mount Angel Abbey for retreat. I’d been once before, for an amazing liturgy conference they gave last year. This year, I went to accompany my new godson as he spent the weekend in a discernment retreat.

The instant I arrived, I felt like my blood pressure dropped twenty points.

During the weekend, I of course joined the monks in their daily Office and Mass. I also dipped in and out of the events of the discernment retreat – particularly the tours of the seminary campus and church. But otherwise, I was on my own. I spent quite a bit of time walking, and also quite some time in the abbey church.

A couple of liturgical notes may be in order.

Rather than the modern four-week psalter or the traditional Benedictine one-week psalter, the monks of Mount Angel split the difference and sing a two-week psalter. I presume this is one of the schemas authorized under the Thesaurus Liturgiæ Horarum Monasticæ¹.

I loved praying with the monks in this way. There’s something about chanting these prayers that just seems right.

Weirdly, the Masses I attended used Eucharistic Prayer II, even on a Sunday in Easter in what was described in the schedule as a “Solemn High Mass”. It was lovely, but it was not a Solemn High Mass. Liturgical minimalism creeps everywhere these days.

Late Saturday night, about a half hour after we finished praying the (anticipated) Sunday Vigils, I went back into the church to spend some time alone with Christ. The church was dimly lit, with the only lights being at the statue of the Blessed Virgin and in the Eucharistic Chapel.

I don’t know why I expected the church to be empty. There were monks everywhere.

Monks practicing their Lectio before the tabernacle. Hooded monks sitting in the darkened pews. A monk with his rosary before the Blessed Mother.

Monks doing what they do: praying.

I was reminded of something Brother Alcuin had said during the tour he led earlier in the day. He was speaking of the monastic vow of stability when he said, “your demons follow you wherever you go, so you might as well stand and fight”.

Of course, I know why they do it. I know why they pray in the darkened church in the middle of the night. It is the same reason I did.

We chatter all the time. Typically our prayers are just us chattering to God. But there, in the silence in the cool darkness in the presence of Christ, we can listen. Only in silence can we still ourselves long enough to listen, for if we are unable to listen we cannot begin to hear the small, still voice of God in the gentle breeze (1 Kings 19:11-12).

Following Lauds each day, I typically read the day’s reading from the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict. Traditionally, a monk would have the Rule read to him in its entirety three times a year. The readings follow a specific schedule, and yesterday we finished the final chapter.

So today we begin again.

LISTEN, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away.

1. The Thesaurus Liturgiæ Horarum Monasticæ was issued in 1977 and provides that any Benedictine congregation of monasteries, or indeed any individual monastic community, may adopt the Roman Liturgy of the Hours, the traditional Monastic Breviary, or any one of three designated two-week schemas. The document itself runs about 550 pages in Latin. So far as I can tell, it has never been published in English.