A Chapter Conference for Ash Wednesday

+ It comes as no news to any of the brethren that the spiritual and monastic writings of Downside Abbey’s Dom Hubert Van Zeller (1905-1984) have been something of a new discovery these past months. I doubt therefore, that the brethren will be at all surprised that this year’s Lent books are authored by him. His sobriety and sanity (and his utterly un-self-conscious monastic perspicacity) is profoundly refreshing amidst the tide of spiritual writing that engulfs us – even if much of his work is now more than fifty years old.
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Our Lent newsletter contains an excerpt from his book Approach to Penance. At the beginning of our Lenten observance I wish to underline two fundamental principles he states therein.
 
     The first:
 
“The only kind of penitence which is worth anything is conversion. Not only conversion from but conversion to. The penitence which stops short at remorse is not a true conversion, not a complete turn. For remorse to be effective it must be supernatural; it must go on to trust. To turn your back on sin is one thing, and is a good start, but it will not help you for long unless you turn your eyes towards grace.”
 
     Each of us has much from which to turn, to be sure. But let us heed his advice carefully: conversion is a turning to God, to a new reception of His grace, to becoming what He intends me to be thereby. There is much here to ponder.
 
     The second principle:
 
“The end of penance is God, not more penances. Thus the approach to penance has to be by way of love, not by steeling the will to toughness. Penance must have its roots in charity, not austerity. Austerity may accompany its growth, but it will be a by-product rather than an essential fruit. A certain austerity will even be a sign of true penitence, but it will not be an infallible sign or the only one. The infallible signs are humility and charity.”
 
     This may sound awfully lax, even a little disparaging of corporeal penance, which as we know is writ large on the pages of monastic history. But let us be attentive to Dom Van Zeller: he is not advocating the abandonment of penitential practices; rather, he insisting is that they be planted in the fertile soil of the love of God so that they might bring forth not an outbreak of Jansenism, but a flourishing of humility and charity.
 
     My brothers, your Prior is truly humbled by the penitential practices you have proposed for yourselves this Lent – may God bless and prosper your initiatives! But Almighty God will do so all the more if you heed the counsel of Dom Van Zeller: “the approach to penance has to be by way of love.”
 
     Lent of 2019 sees us launching a major appeal for substantial help in trying to purchase a new, more suitable and permanent home for our growing monastic family. The Providence of Almighty God through the generosity of kind benefactors has never ceased to sustain us throughout these past years, and there is no reason to believe that we shall not continue to receive His blessings through the goodness of others now.
 
     But we too must consciously play our rightful part. Whilst we do not have the means of this world at our disposal, we do have those of the next. For it is our privilege and our vocation to stand daily at the portal of the world to come.
 
     Good people who daily toil in the affairs of this world and who thereby justly come to possess its riches do not give to us because of our own personalities or talents. They do not do so in order to maintain a quaint collection of individuals living a curious life which is interesting to observe from time to time, as one might sponsor an enclosure for an exotic species in a zoo. No: they support us – continually – because we carry them, their intentions, their loved ones, living and dead, to this portal, to the threshold of eternity, seven times a day and once during the night.
 
        Saint Benedict insists that Lent is a time for his monks to “expiate the negligence’s of other times” (Rule, ch. 49). We each have particular matters to which to attend, to be sure, and so we must.  But as a monastery I ask that this Lent we pay particular attention to the God given vocation and duty that is ours to pray for our benefactors and indeed for all who ask our prayers. For a monk is not enclosed so as to cut himself off from the Body of Christ. Rather, he enters the enclosure to become a truly vital cell of that Body, at its very heart, supporting by his prayer those whose vocation and mission will falter if the grace necessary is not begged for day and night, and won, by we whose God-given duty it is so to do.
 
     Let us, then, be most attentive that our participation in each Office and Mass is offered for specific intentions, including those of our benefactors, known and unknown, who must daily combat the world, the flesh and the devil in ways in which we most probably could not.
 
     It is too easy to become busy in a monastery and arrive at the Office ‘just in time’ or even late. The casualty of this is the lack of recollection it causes in the individual monk and also amongst his brethren – all the more so when the choir is small, as are we. In such circumstances it is very difficult consciously to form and maintain a particular intention before the hour commences. We are small and we work hard at all the necessary administrative and household tasks, we cook, we clean, we are diligent in our studies, we try to attend to guests as St Benedict would have us do, and the signal for the Divine Office can sometimes catch us mid-task, mid-sentence, as it were. Nevertheless, we are to put nothing before the Work of God (Rule, ch. 43). Let that truly be the case this Lent. And in doing so, let us ensure that we carry to the Work of God all those who ask our prayers and who support us, begging God’s grace that they may be faithful and zealous in the various circumstances in which they live and work and may be granted the grace of perseverance.
 
The approach to penance most certainly must be by way of love. So too must our work in Choir – or anywhere in the monastery. In heeding our Holy Father Saint Benedict’s injunction to expiate the negligence’s of other times in this sacred season of Lent, let us make this benchmark the matter of an examination of conscience. For Saint Benedict calls us to and offers us not a life of penitential misery – however much of that we deserve and may have to endure at times – no; he calls us to “run with [the] unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments” (Rule, Prologue). May all that we undertake this Lent serve that end. +

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