pat loughery

I spent this weekend on an individual retreat at Mt. Angel Abbey in Mt. Angel, Oregon. The Abbey is a Benedictine men’s monastery, and they happened to have a room available on short notice for me to come visit and pray with the monks. As I’ve mentioned here previously, I feel a connection with many of the practices of Benedictine spirituality, though I have never experienced it in the flesh, outside of the books I’ve been studying. I looked forward to experiencing their prayer life in person.

The weekend was much needed. I’m in the depths of processing the closing of our church, and I find myself continuing to go through the roller coaster of grief. At times, I feel fine, hopeful for the future and for my place in it; at other times, I feel paralyzed with sadness and don’t know how to climb out.
I hoped that experiencing Christian life outside of my normal pattern would help, and especially if I were away from home and with no responsibility but to listen and to pray.

The drive to Mt. Angel took about 5 hours, give or take, which was faster than I expected. I hadn’t written down detailed directions, just figuring that if I could find the town itself, finding the abbey would be easy. It was, although I mistook St. Mary’s church (just down the hill from the Abbey) at first, and a priest gave me directions up the hill.

The Abbey is located on a hilltop in the Willamette River valley. To the north, one can see Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens and a bit of Mt. Rainier peeking past Rainier’s obliterated dome. Closer, in the river valley that surrounds this hilltop, you see some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country. Hop fields (some owned by the Benedictines but leased to area farmers), nursery shoot farms and a variety of crops make their home here.

The Benedictines place high value on hospitality, receiving guests as Christ himself. My arrival and introduction to Fr. Michael, the Guestmaster, did not disappoint. The Father and one other monk asked me if I was there for the married couple retreat or the discernment retreat; when I answered I’m flying solo for the weekend with my wife driving to Montana, they asked if I needed discernment, laughing. I didn’t realize until later that “discernment”, in this context, meant “monastic discernment”, or more precisely, “visiting the monks and sampling the lifestyle in order to determine whether I want to begin the process of becoming a monk at this monastery.”

My room was simple, a small dorm style room with shower and bathroom in it; a desk, a bed, and a south-facing window. I arrived about 20 minutes before Complin, the last prayer service of the evening, so I was just in time.

Benedictines, following the lead of their founder, Benedict of Nursia, chant or sing the psalms in community as a primary form of prayer. Benedict structures seven daily prayer sessions, although he leaves every monastery the freedom to tailor its liturgy to its own needs. Benedict asks that, in return for this flexibility, each community still pray though the Psalms weekly.

Mt. Angel’s worship schedule is (if I recall correctly) Vigils at 5:20am; Lauds at 6:20 followed by breakfast, Mass at 8:00, Midday prayers at Noon followed by lunch, Vespers at 5:20 followed by dinner, and Complin ends the evening prayer at 7:30. The structure of each prayer gathering is different, but each included psalms being sung in a simple form that traded verses back and forth between the monks on two sides of the choir area; some Scripture readings, and liturgical hymns and call-and-responses.

A trio of bells rings to call the monks and surrounding community to these worship gatherings, and it is a sight to see black robed monks in full habit purposefully returning to the Abbey Church for prayer.

My main interaction with Mt. Angel’s monks came during this time as I prayed with them from the pews of the church along with a dozen to fifty others – some visitors, some seminary students at Mt. Angel Seminary. The monks go about their work in quiet and are semi-cloistered, meaning that they live most of their lives on that mountaintop, except for short breaks every year.

I did have some interaction with three or four of the monks, however, outside worship liturgy, and that came at mealtimes as the guests ate together with a few of the monks who were working the retreats or guest house (the rest of the monks continue to eat in their own area of the Abbey, and keep silence at meals as is prescribed in Benedict’s Rule).

Besides the guestmaster, Fr. Michael, who was unfailingly polite and welcoming, I met Brother Ephraim, a native of Vancouver, WA (and former tank inhabitant in the US Army); Brother Ralph, who left the tech world in Texas to join his biological brother here at the monastery; and Father Joseph, the monk in charge of the discernment retreat and in charge of vocations (wanna be a Benedictine monk? He’s your guy). All were genuinely good people. Brother Ephraim in particular was happy to share the finest details of monastic life with my tablemates who were all part of the discernment retreat, or “discerners”, they were called in shorthand. I asked some questions to maintain polite conversation, but mostly listened to what I heard and let my curiousity be satisfied at the others’ pace. I wasn’t here to see if this particular life was my call; I was just hear to see what my next call might be.

Brother Ephraim, a young man – I’d judge him to be mid- to late- 20s, and by far the youngest of the monks I interacted with, was quick witted, very engaging, and highly committed to his lifestyle. He described Mt. Angel Abbey as one of the most “authentic” monastic communities, wherein the community lives as close as possible to the intentions of Benedict’s monastic rule. I spent one morning over a looong breakfast listening to no fewer than a dozen citations of “authenticity”, and heard myself speaking, and many of my friends who want to express as authentic a Christlike faith as possible, whatever the cost. That word, it seems, doesn’t just resonate with the emerging, missional, incarnational church. It also reverberates with the Catholic monastics as well; in fact, Ephraim claims that the fastest growing religious orders in Catholicism were also generally the strictest, and the most “lax”, not growing as much, or not at all.

The other guests that I sat with were all Catholics, and I was interested to hear their stories (I didn’t spend any time with the married couples on retreat).

My favorite parts of the weekend were undeniably the community prayers. It took a while to get into the rhythm (who sings when, what page are we on, when do we bow and kneel), but my sense from the first moment of worship, in that Friday night Complin, was of a great sense of the Sacred. As an avowed Charismatic, my sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit was as tangible as anything I’ve experienced in a healing service (at least while I was still standing upright :-)). There is a deep, reverential beauty to the songs, all simple chants, each psalm sung the same way and each hymn traditional and simple, each alleluia a beautiful chorus.

It struck me as intriguing at first that no monk stifled a yawn in early morning prayer (they just let ‘er rip), and while they were solemn they weren’t overly serious while at prayer. They weren’t concerned with “putting on a good show” for the guests.

For my own interests, the weekend was a mixed bag. I heard the voice and the encouragement of God in profound way while at prayer in the chapel in the guest house, and I journaled what I heard. At this moment, I felt that I’d received what I came for and was content. A short while later, while searching my laptop hard drive for an electronic copy of the Rule of Benedict, I came across a set of notes that I kept from a series of prophetic words that I received a year and a half ago regarding evangelism in our local church; I blogged a quick note about that here. It was hard reading these words – they came from trustworthy people, but not a single one came to fruition (to my understanding). This moment, this discovery opened wounds and angered me. It reminded me again of my most difficult issue at this time: to deal with my understanding that the promises of God regarding our church didn’t come to pass. Yes, good things happened; yes, people were touched; yes, I learned more about leadership in the Kingdom, but we saw nothing even close to the level of fruit that these words indicated.

I believe in Christ, in His work in my life, in his work in my past, and in his guidance of me into the future. I trust Him; but I am greatly confused about some of the details.