For What It's Worth by Erin

A wise monk I know once said that God imprinted on the universe something so beautiful that we can’t even give names to it. He, (God), sanctified time itself and inscribed the world with this knowledge, giving us the rhythm that marks the holiness. Church gives name to it.

In the liturgical regularity the flow of the day goes like this: dusk, dark, dawn, and day. A day begins with the vigil Mass of the day before. In the Liturgy of the Hours, Church marks every hour and day so that we can follow it, and all of it is the life of Christ and His holy ones. Monks and religious live by an horarium (Latin for “of the hours”), every day carefully followed. The community lives by this.
 
Another monk I know had this holiness engraved upon his heart. When the communists threw the other monks out of China and imprisoned him for refusing to deny his faith, the cadence of the life he led and kept, connected him to that inscription. He remained in prison and was kept there for 27 years. His fellow monks lost hope and stopped searching, and Brother Peter had “only” Jesus and the Virgin Mary and the calendar he followed. That is how he marked the time.

When I talked about ‘anchor’ last week, this is who I thought of. Brother Peter, who, in a world gone wrong, had only the anchor of his faith and the vow he had professed as a Benedictine. Forgive the over simplification. Br. Peter suffered greatly for his faith and called it his vocation. Without the faith, it simply would have been meaningless suffering.
 

In Br. Peter’s words:

“To make a long story short, the past fifty years of my monastic professed life were committed to an exceptional mission and task under peculiar circumstances and conditions. I have carried out consciously or unconsciously, willingly or reluctantly, faithfully or faithlessly, the will of the Lord for me, sometimes common and sometimes uncommon, sometimes clear and sometimes unclear. To my or even to your great surprise, the will of the Lord for me should have been accomplished in my sinfulness, in my weakness and in my lowliness, with my meager strength, with my superficial knowledge. It is not hard to imagine: without the grace of God, without the support of the Blessed Virgin Mary and without the prayers and many various helps of my dear brothers and sisters, present and not present, living and deceased, this would have been completely impossible and would be simply like the Chinese saying: ‘Climbing a tree to catch fish!’”

 
May we anchor ourselves as well as Br. Peter did. +