blue cloud abbey blue cloud abbey
VOL. 22 NO. 1 MARVIN SD 57251 WINTER 2011
Resolutions made on New Year’s Day might mean a change in eating or drinking habits. A resolution might also be made to reduce the amount of one’s smoking or quitting altogether. Suppressions or cutbacks of other kinds are also included among New Year’s resolutions. All of these changes or disciplines are made in order to improve the quality of our lives. A resolution may also be made to improve our relationships within the family or among the people with whom we work. This is a resolve to change one’s attitude.
St. Benedict likes seeing people make an effort to change. He calls this conversion of manners. In Latin
it is conversatio morum. Benedictine men and women vow themselves to the practice of conversion, an ongoing daily effort to improve one’s behavior. Some people may think they will become holy simply by joining a monastery. There is an aura of holiness in the monastery that will absorb them. Father Cyprian Smith, an English Benedictine, predicts that those of us who have entered one are “sooner or later going to be faced with what are called negative emotions: fear, anger, frustration, boredom, hate, lust—the list is endless. It makes a monk think that he has not the necessary qualities for living monastic life; he is not a good enough person.”
So why do any of us bother with monastic life? St. Benedict tells us “our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.” We still have time for conversion, time to change. Faithfulness is allied to conversion. We are faithful to being where we are supposed to be and faithful in doing what is expected of us. We remain faithful to prayer and the practice of hospitality and the sharing of love for one another. Be converted all your lifetime, St. Benedict urges us. Conversion calls us to constantly change our behavior, our attitudes, our lives.
Conversion means never having to say, “But we’ve always done it that way.” St. Benedict tells the abbot to bring out what is new as well as to retain what is validly old. Long after St. Benedict, the same thing was decreed for all religious by Vatican II.
Throughout history we have seen monasteries perish because they refused to change, to be converted. Families have fallen apart because one or other member has refused to change, to pursue a conversion. Recovering alcoholics write about themselves in the AA Big Book. “Our stories disclose what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.” What happened was a change, a conversion.
St. Benedict says in his Rule, ‘What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Lord to supply by the help of his grace.” On the other hand, there is the reality that some things simply cannot be changed. After St. Paul’s conversion, he was plagued by a certain problem. He prayed three times for its removal. The response was: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” The Lord did not take away whatever that burden was because Paul probably needed it. Perhaps he became more humble and patient as a result. “Let them support one another in their weaknesses of body or behavior,” St. Benedict recommends in his chapter on Good Zeal.
Does this get us off the hook? Should we even try changing our behavior of just learn to accept what cannot be changed? St. Benedict says some people have to be taken just as they are. We are to bear with them patiently. Nevertheless, he also encourages us to strive in becoming the kind of people we ought to be. “The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.” An opportunity for conversion occurs every day. But, realistically, on some day nothing much happens. Even so, we are bound to make progress. “Let us do now what will profit us for eternity,” St. Benedict advises.
Very few people want to enter monasteries these days, but it seems more and more people want to visit them. Of course there has never been a time when callers to the monastery were lacking. In chapter 53 of the Rule, “The Reception of Guests,” St. Benedict says “monasteries are never without them.” One day and at the same time, we had fifty grade school children and fifty senior citizens visit us. That evening, around fifty oblates were on hand to join us for vespers, followed by supper with the monks, and a conference afterwards. The previous week I had helped conduct a tour and answer questions for one hundred college students.
Monastic men and women are accustomed to the traffic flow through their monasteries. A newcomer to monastic life, though, is sometimes baffled. An associate who was considering entering our abbey explained to one of us why he was leaving after one month instead of sticking out the whole two months of the program. This monastery was not the tranquil place he had thought it would be. “There are people under your feet all the time,” he observed. Sometimes when one of us visits a Benedictine house that operates a school the comment is what a relief it is not to belong to a community like that because “there are always students under your feet.”
Students on tour of the abbey watch Brother Sebastian making a stole in the vestment studio. One of them asked how much a set of vestments would cost. Upon being informed, he said, “I’d never be able to afford that on my allowance.”
Poets Sharon Chmielarz (seated) and Margaret Hassee retreated here in the fall and had a reading for us and the public one night. Both were born in South Dakota and now live in Minnesota. You can take the poet out of a South Dakota but you can’t take the poetry out of him or her. Several of their poems referred to their place of origin.
St. Benedict is aware that guests can upset a monastery. He requires that a separate kitchen be used for guests so that they “need not disturb the brothers when they present themselves at unpredictable hours.” Furthermore, he has the guests pray with the superior and community upon their arrival “because of the delusions of the devil.” St. Basil warned his monks about receiving guests who might be “swindlers.” These monastic patriarchs were obviously suspicious of certain guests. The Master, who lived in Italy in a time before St. Benedict, asked guests—monks and lay persons—to go to work. “If you do not so, please be on your way, because the rule limits your stay as a guest to two days.” He says the monks resent giving hospitality to “parasites and loafers.” Such guest “visit monasteries under the pretext of religion and remain idle while devouring the bread of workers.” The Master wants guests to work with his monks. St. Benedict wants his monks to avoid the guests: “No one is to speak or associate with guests unless he is bidden; however, if a brother meets or sees a guest, he is to greet him humbly, as we have said. He asks for a blessing and continues on his way, explaining that he is now allowed to speak with a guest.” The abbot and assigned brothers are the ones who tend to the guest. Both attitudes appear extreme today. We do not expect guests or retreatants, even if they stay longer than two days, to work, and we all freely converse with them.
People come here for various reasons. The college students were on a field trip. They were taking courses in sociology and anthropology, and we offered ourselves as specimens of what they termed an intentional community. The elementary parochial school children were brought here to implant in them
the idea of a religious vocation. I suspect most of them were more impressed by Gertie, our black Lab,
than they were by any of us. The senior citizens were on an all day outing that also included a stop at a tribally run casino.
That same month a Methodist parish made a weekend retreat, an oblate spent time in one of the hermitages, a diocesan priest got away for a few days; also a housewife and a Lutheran pastor came to make a private retreat. More school children were expected, but had to cancel because of the weather.
A Lutheran pastor, after making a retreat here, thanked us with these words: “Blue Cloud Abbey is an important constant in my life. When I reflect on the monastery from many miles away, it brings me back to myself and there is a great comfort knowing whatever happens in the world, the monks are still working and praying, free of fear of the death and destruction so prevalent in the world. Thank you for maintaining a spirit and climate of loving kindness among your confreres. There is a communal sense of contentment that exudes from this monastic house. No one’s zeal for holiness is so great that it pushes the non-zealous away. There is a space provided here that has been cultivated by a quiet reverence that allows a mustard seed of faith to flourish. I know that many others who enjoy the hospitality of Blue Cloud Abbey have expressed their gratitude to you. Please count me among them. The opportunities to explore my faith have been more important than any opportunities for study, travel, or work. My mind, body, and spirit are more aware of the love of God through Christ that is evident among the monks.”
In September the Milbank Fire Department was here to teach the use of a fire extinguisher and what to do in case of a fire.
This past fall, Brother Bob began working on a labyrinth between the cemetery and lower lake. Work will be resumed in the spring—after the snow melts.
A few years ago, Rita Tybor, an oblate of St. Bede’s Abbey, Peru, Illinois, spoke at a meeting of the North American Association of Oblate Directors. She credited Benedictine hospitality as a reason why people from divergent backgrounds become oblates.I suppose people become oblates for the same reason they make retreats at monasteries. They want, in their own way, to partake of what the Benedictines have. Rita discovered her Benedictine calling while being employed by them. “I learned from the Rule by watching how it played out in day to day life, in the way the monks interacted with their coworkers and with each other.
“As an oblate I seek to follow the example of the monastic community. The abbey does not provide an escape but encourages me to take the truth of the monastery to the streets of my subdivision. The Rule is not a hocus-pocus mystification. It is a sound commitment to adopt Gospel values to the here and now. To keep God first. To slug it out again and again and again.”
Abbot Denis welcoming oblates at their annual retreat this past September.
Oblates renewing their promises at vespers.
This past fall Abbot Denis conducted a visitation at our Resurrection Priory in Guatemala.
We began this New Year with a community retreat conducted by Father Patrick Caveglia, OSB of Conception Abbey in Missouri. At the end of it, we renewed our vows of stability in the community, our fidelity to the monastic way of life, and obedience according to the Rule of St. Benedict, praying that his teaching will continue inspiring us to listen to what God is saying in our lives daily.
Brother Benet Tvedten, OSB
“The concern must be whether
the novice truly seeks God.”
The Rule of St. Benedict
BLUE CLOUD ABBEY
P O BOX 98
MARVIN, SD 57251-0098
605-398-9200 Ext.101
vocations@bluecloud.org