Another New Blog, Just What the World Needs, Isn't It?

It seems to me that a new blog should start off with a bang, something completely befitting the coming of an earthshaking event.  Yet, any blog that pretends to have a Benedictine flavor must avoid such pretense.  After all, when monks pray the hours, or the Liturgy of the Hours, they are consciously seeking the monumental and eternal in the mundane and ordinary.  So, I think that must happen with this blog, just start and continue to be, in the monastic spirit.  Fr Columban Heany, a Cistercian monk from Mount Melleray Abbey puts it succinctly:

In essence the monastic life is a search for God, as indeed the Christian life is. Therefore of necessity it has got to be a life of prayer, because prayer is one of the most indispensable means of seeking and finding God, or rather, of allowing oneself to be found by him. But the modern world finds it difficult to understand a way of life totally dedicated to prayer such as the monastic life. To many of our contemporaries a life that does not produce results which are visible and tangible is not worth considering. In our Western civilisation things and people are generally assessed by what they do or what they produce rather than by what they are. Hence the contemplative life appears as useless and irrelevant to many people. But they are using the wrong criterion for assessing the life. Mahatma Gandhi got it right, for he wrote: "The rose transmits its scent without a movement. I have a definite feeling that if you want us to experience the aroma of Christianity you must copy the rose. It irresistibly draws people to itself and the scent remains with them. A rose does not preach ... it simply spreads its fragrance."

It is said of Gandhi that he admired Christ but did not always admire Christians, some of whom do not appreciate the value and importance of simply being. A rose achieves its meaning by being a rose. It does nothing; it does not have to do anything apart from being itself. Gandhi was perceptive enough to realise that the essence of Christianity lies in being. A life of prayer, like the rose, spreads its fragrance in the Church and in the world; it needs no other justification.