In his 2011 book, Dark Ages America, Morris Berman explored what he saw as the startling decline of Western society and what the “first Dark Ages” might teach us. Among his captivating ideas was that monasteries during the Dark Ages were beacons of light for people, not to hide from the realities of the day but to equip themselves for addressing them. When I first read the book, I was on staff at the Benedictine Center and came to appreciate how Berman articulated an important aspect of the Center’s role. The Monastery through its Center offers a setting where one can renew inner spiritual strength to wholeheartedly practice justice, compassion, reconciliation, and hospitality in their spheres of influence. How guests would do that was up to them. What we provided were ways to see the path before them more clearly and to encourage their commitments. This essay highlights four features of the Benedictine Center’s ministry of spiritual care from my perspective: place, beauty, tradition, and community. I believe these features endure as times change and as the Monastery itself changes.
Place
PlaceMost of us can readily call to mind a place that we can best describe with the word “sacred.” When guests enter the front doors of the monastery, they step into such a place marked by quiet serenity. This is their first impression of Benedictine hospitality. As one guest expressed it, “I feel like I am in a unique place where the God actively dwells.” An image from the natural world that captures this is an estuary. It is a sheltered coastal habitat where fresh streams and sea converge. Applied to the Benedictine Center, the “estuary effect” is how it stands as a place of nourishment and rest so that guests can engage the important questions of their lives, regain their bearings, and deepen their sense of calling. One of our retreat leaders once suggested that the trip itself to the Monastery for spiritual direction, a workshop, retreat, or day of prayer was part of the experience and could be thought of as a type of pilgrimage to a place ready to receive the pilgrim for whatever God intended.
Beauty
Any sacred place is accented by its architecture and what one author named the “poetics of space.” St. Paul’s Monastery gives great attention to these poetics in its use of beauty inside and outside to express the creative zeal of God. The art of the monastery especially reflects how beauty is an essential language for describing the Holy. When the Center began to host art exhibits in the former monastery, we learned that artists provide nuanced insight into the quest of seekers to encounter God. In fact, as the design of the new monastery evolved, the community took steps to ensure it would include space for on-going exhibits as an encounter with beauty that leads to contemplation. Visio Divina, made popular by The Saint John’s Bible, was already integral to how the Center enriched guests’ imaginations as they came to pray, study, and convene. So much of what the Center seeks to accomplish has an artistic spirit. Like art making, spiritual care ministry emerges from entering into silence and paying attention to what lies hidden in the deep folds of mystery. Visual art and creating attractive meeting spaces enhance the purposes of gathering so that the path the guest walks while at the Monastery confirms that this is indeed “a unique place where God dwells.”
Tradition
TraditionA third feature of the Benedictine Center is its deep rootedness in a tradition. Guests and visitors are beneficiaries of 1500-plus years of intense immersion in the Gospel. Retreats, workshops, presentations, and special events, while pursuing a wide variety of interesting outcomes, tap into the tradition of Benedictine spirituality that still speaks with the vibrancy and urgency it did as monastic life spiritually transformed the West. Because of such grounding, the Center can examine even controversial issues and difficult questions because such discussion happens against a background where virtue, truth-telling, and respect for persons prevail. When Berman referred to the significant role of monasteries in the Dark Ages, I wager it was this capacity to bring tradition and the issues of society into dialogue for tradition helps us pay attention to what in the end matters.
Community
CommunityThe final important feature of the Benedictine Center is the most obvious: the tangible sense of community. While the sisters model this in their vowed commitment to each other and their mission, the spirit of community pervades everything that happens here. Hospitality is a grand idea at the heart of Benedictine tradition. It is also radical. “Receive all as Christ” is not a pious sentiment but defines a reality that when people come to the monastery and participate in the Benedictine Center, they are welcome in their completeness. There are no litmus tests or secret standards that winnow our some and allow others to enter. “All” are welcome, for as St. Benedict taught, when we welcome strangers we very well may be welcoming Christ himself. In the Dark Ages, life had become brutal politically, socially, and environmentally. People scrambled to survive war, pestilence, starvation, and human cruelty. Yet, in the monasteries people experienced a different reality. They were not alone in their struggles. Life was not defined by brutishness and self-survival. In the monasteries, they could for a time breathe deeply and encounter God’s grace in the graciousness of genuine welcome. My conversations with guests, especially those who were struggling with their own dark times, confirm this bracing and embracing power of community.
Conclusion
More than ever in a digital world that increasingly mediates face-to-face presence, we need concrete, physical places like the Benedictine Center to gather us from time to time. We need a place to breathe, beauty to re-vision how we look upon the world, a tradition that enables us to stand on solid ground, and an experience of community to remind us we can live more boldly and with greater hope when we move out of our isolation.
Victor Klimoski, Ph.D. is the former Director of Lifelong Learning at Saint John’s School of Theology and former director and consultant for the Benedictine Center of St. Paul’s Monastery. He holds a doctorate in adult education from the University of Minnesota and works extensively as a group facilitator and project consultant. He is also author of a number of poetry collections, most recently Revisited, Gleanings (contributing editor), Margin Notes and Lamentation for the Written Word.
