I pray you, good Jesus, that as you have given me the
grace to drink in with joy the Word that gives knowledge of you, so in your
goodness you will grant me to come at length to yourself, the source of all
wisdom, to stand before your face forever.
Amen.
Today is the feast of St.
Bede the Venerable (672-735)—monk, priest, homilist, teacher, historian, poet,
and the person most responsible for popularizing the “A.D.” system of dating
things. He was a phenomenon in his own day, and his mind, character, and
achievement still stand out as a remarkable expression of human response to the
gifts and call of God. But, there is something else I am thinking about on his
feast today: his yearning for communion with God.
In his own writings, St. Bede
understood himself as a preacher, a teacher, a writer…but most of all as a
monk. For him, this meant a great deal of time spent in liturgical prayer, study,
and contemplative silence. This, I believe, is the key to opening the door of
his spectacular achievement as a disciple of Our Lord and Master—and its value
for one so much less gifted who lives today.
Monasticism, as my spiritual
director (an anchoress) likes to say, is “Christianity lived to the hilt.” In a
sense, monasticism is like the edge of the ploughshare, the part that digs into
the soil and opens it up, exposing the truth of what is there—and taking the
rocks and other obstructions head-on. It is a raw and honest form of following
Jesus. It embraces the challenge of faithfulness in this world, always going
back to basic principles.
It may also be likened to a spiritual
version of an experimental research station, where cutting-edge study on the
matters of the soul and the human spirit occurs. In such a community, the
thirst for knowledge must be deep in order to sustain the effort, the struggle,
and the privations any focused and determined study requires.
In St. Bede’s day,
Benedictine monasticism was a new and highly sophisticated phenomenon in
northern England. The monasteries at Monkswearmouth and Jarrow were rather like
space colonies, what with their ongoing connections to Rome so many miles away,
their use of then high-tech skills such as glass-making, mural-painting,
book-making, writing, and studies in apparently non-productive things like
orthography, horology, mathematics, and history. Why were these men all so
focused on things having no immediate “payoff?” In a time when sheer survival
was hard, and where each day was a struggle with starvation, warfare, disease,
why spend all of one’s life in such pursuits?
The Prayer of St. Bede gives
us an answer. This prayer tells us that for Bede and his less-famous and
less-brilliant brothers, the desire to “stand before God’s face forever” was
the supreme desire, the highest good. Thus, they ordered their lives according
to this ultimate desire. Each day, each hour was connected to the expectation
that a life lived rightly here in this world would lead to an eternity of
communion with God, where the learning, love, and increase in sacred knowledge
would never end.
For the brothers at Jarrow
and other monasteries, the call to know God deeply and then share the fruits of
that knowledge with the world around the monastery resulted in the foundation
of a society where the Gospel was brought to bear on daily life, justice enacted,
mercy shown, and beauty experienced. This simple desire for communion with God
the Holy and Undivided Trinity fueled a revolution transforming the north of
England from fringe territory in the post-Roman world to a center of world
learning and the practice of the Gospel.
For us who commemorate this
great saint today, the question remains: What is our ultimate desire? If we
know that, we will know how to order our lives.
Our own era presents us much
the same challenge as Bede’s very different world did for him. As in his day,
we are urged to focus on immediate gratification, practical accomplishments,
and measurable achievements. Yet Christians must always reject the false
reasoning that living in the world must mean worldliness, with its fixation on wealth, power, sex, youth, and
control. Rather, we are people of communion: with God, with neighbor, with all
of Creation—and with the redeemed self even now coming into being through this
relationship of love and knowledge. It is this communion, not individualism or competitive
isolation that we seek. And this colors all our doings, all our days.
As a former priest of a mission
dedicated to St. Bede, I hold him in particular reverence. His witness is not
remote or obscure to me. His gentleness in an aggressive and bitter time is an
inspiration. His commitment to daily prayer, study, and silence is a powerful
encouragement to do the same in my own day. His placing communion with God
above even the use of his own great capabilities awes me—and charms me. I, too,
want that communion. I, too, have been given the gifts of the Holy Spirit in
baptism, the call by God to follow Christ’s example, the tools of the catholic
faith, the sacraments, the holy scriptures, the witness of the saints, the life
of prayer…all these things are mine as they were his.
My responsibility is to recommit,
as he did, every day to the task. By saying his prayer, I taste once more his
own thirst, and am recalled to take up the burdens—and the blessings—of a
life founded on communion, offering it for whatever redemptive good our loving
God may have for it…if only I, too, may join the saints in drinking in the joy that comes by standing before God’s face, forever.
Holy Bede, pray for us.
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