I am pleased to announce that as of November 23, the Order’s scholarly journal, Doxology, is available online for anyone. This is a major shift for us and one that has significant benefits.

First, this delivery system makes the journal available to anyone on the planet who has internet access without subscription cost. Until now, the journal was available to members, and to subscribers who paid fees. We and they had to wait for it, subject to all of the vagaries of the printing system.

Second, Doxology now becomes a more accessible player in the academy. With our new delivery system, scholars and academics can access it and find articles and reviews by searching the web. This is significant because the ATLA (American Theological Library Association) does not index Doxology and so the contents have not been available to the scholarly community at large.

Third, digital journal delivery access allows the editors to publish it in a much more timely manner. The 2011 issue was out before its December 1 publication schedule. This may be a first for the 20 plus years of the journal! Br. E. Byron Anderson, Doxology editor with Sr. Heather Josselyn-Cranson, uploaded, edited and published the issue online through the OJS system, a resource many scholarly journals use. As I understand it, the online journal publication is becoming the preferred standard in the academic community.

Fourth, digital publishing saves the Order over $2300 in printing and mailing costs. This is a substantial savings for us as we seek to be good stewards of our resources and of the well-being of the planet.

Down side? Yes, this does mean a change for members who appreciate Doxology and are accustomed to it coming in a nice book form. For a few, who choose not to access the online world, it will mean no longer getting the issue in the mail. Hopefully, these members will ask a friend or family member to print articles of reviews of the issue for their use. In the January issue of the Font, we will publish the contents page for our non-web users so that they will be aware of the contents and decide if they want to print any or all of an issue.

We can take pride in this work of the Order. If fulfills, in part, our vision and care for scholarship around the sacraments and the liturgical life. I am grateful to Ron Anderson and to Sr. Dianne Tobey-Covault, Director of Publications, for shepherding this transition from print to electronic publication to completion. You can access the 2011 issue at http://www.saint-luke.net/ojs/index.php/Doxology/

You will need to register before you can access the issue. The reasons for the registration feature include notices that will come to readers and users of the publication of ensuing issues and notices of matters related to Doxology.

Thinking of the demonstrations on Wall Street and reading Clement of Alexandria's Sermon on "Who is the rich man who shall be saved", I wrote the following prayer for us.

God, rich in mercy and abundance,

we marvel that even the well-off can be saved,

even if it is more difficult for us

than the poor who go through the eye of the needle first.

We rejoice that we are not excluded.

We thank you for your great philanthropy in Christ Jesus,

who emptied himself for humanity’s poverty of love.

We thank you that for us, the well-off,

there is a school of conversion:

(With this posting, I am beginning a series of reflections on the monastic way. Not all members of the Order identify with monasticism given our dispersion. However, as abbot I find value in exploring our life together from that perspective. I welcome responses.)

In Maria Boulding’s chapter on monasticism in Gateway to Resurrection, she has much of say of relevance to religious life to all on the journey, including the Order of Saint Luke. Boulding, a Benedictine nun with terminal cancer, writes, “Most of the time life in the Body [one’s primary local Christian community] is very ordinary.” (Kindle loc. 915) She notes that this fact is not particularly “monastic,” except that there is no escape from the monastery; no time off, no holiday. She asserts, “Otherwise [monsastic life] is common human experience… [that] humanizes those who undertake it, and makes them more compassionate.” (Kindle loc. 920) She finds in the humanizing rigors of the monastic round ways the monks and nuns identify with those in daily life who share similar rigors—the millions for whom every day is a fast day, parents up in pre-dawn vigils with crying children, and those who are involuntarily celibate. None of these are considered heroic acts. Yet, she writes that it is in these rigors that “the paschal mystery becomes real.” (Kindle loc. 923)

The Benedictine coordinates of obedience, stability, and conversatio morum (conversion, sanctification) anchor the lives of members of the community. We Lukans are vowed to live the Rule of Life and Service and all that goes with it— baptismal identity and vocation, prayer, community forged even in and out of diaspora, the sacraments and sacramental life, the daily demands of shared meals/work/care of people and living spaces, stewardship of possessions and responsibilities, silence, and the contingencies and possibilities of life around us. In all of this the Spirit prods us on toward conversion of our affections, desires, attitudes, and commitments to ever begin again.

On days when the sanctoral cycle does not offer a commemoration from For All the Saints, Sr. MO and I read from The Monastic Way (edited Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild). The reading today is by Benet Tvedten, OSB:

"Cooking, cleaning, repairing, gardening, and farming--this is the ordinary kind of work that is done in monasteries. Benedict calls our involvement with such work an expression of love. Whenever one of the monks tells me that I've prepared an especially good breakfast on a particular Tuesday, I reply that I did it out of love. Work should be done without grumbling, without sadness, and without being overburdened. Help should be given to all who need it. These are indeed fair employment practices." 

For us as Lukan’s living in dispersion in homes in many different regions and countries, daily life calls us to do many mundane, seemingly insignificant but necessary tasks.

It is difficult not to see and play with parallels between the events in Egypt over the last two weeks and the biblical story of the plagues and the Exodus. Only in this situation instead of ten plagues and the exodus of an enslaved people it has been eighteen days of Pharoah Mubarak plagued by the voice of the people (vox populi) and the exodus was one man, Mr. Mubarak going to Sinai. Like the Berlin Wall coming down, the end to Communist rule in Poland, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the world can hardly believe what has taken place. It is a present-day exodus. Often discouraged by the status quo of national and world politics, we can rejoice to remember and be reminded anew that surprising turns come, seemingly out of nowhere.

In our secular context the plausibility structures are not amenable to God’s inbreaking in historical events. Even we Christians may be reticent to voice, "God did this.” Yet, in the realm of the Spirit and in the sense of anticipation of wrong being righted and the coming of the reign of God's just peace in the world, we want to ascribe to God the rise of the vox populi. The congealing of risk taking, the singular communal focus on one thing only—the resignation of Mubarak, the collective will of a nation has signaled something wondrous at work and something amazing to behold.

(This series of reflections on the monastic way is my invitation to you, my sisters and brothers, for a deeper reflection on our life together. Not all members of the Order self-identify with "monasticism," given our dispersion. However, as abbot I find value in exploring our life together from that perspective. I welcome your responses.)

Friday, Nov. 11, in the Order’s sanctoral cycle was the commemoration of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (For All the Saints, p. 221; see also Holy Women, Holy Men, pp. 568-569). Kierkegaard sought “to reintroduce the strangeness of the Christian faith to self-assured Denmark…those who were deluded into assuming that being Christian was an easy and automatic work.”

The office readings for yesterday (BCP, p. 992) included I Maccabees 2, the story of Mattathias’ initial act of defiance against the paganizing king, Antiochus Epiphanes. There is in our spiritual inheritance this countercultural devotion to an untamed God. God can never be contained, systematized, captivated, caged or domesticated. The “I AM” (Exodus 3 and in John’s gospel) will always break into our experience in strangeness and we must always be vigilant to the existential decentering that keeps us off balance and searching for the truth in the contingencies of the present moment.

Scripture, tradition, and reason are resources for navigating and reflecting upon our experience of this strangeness. Liturgy will always, if faithfully enacted, “play” with the poles of familiarity and strangeness that the Spirit lays open to the gathered community and to each of us as solitaries on the monastic journey.

How do we tease out the implications of this for the monastic life in our life in community and in times of desert solitude? How do we embrace the discipline of risking the move from the domesticated God to experience of the inchoate, the all, the infinite, the surplus of meaning that remains when we have sung our hymns, recited our creeds, and consumed the bread and cup?

(This series of reflections on the monastic way is my invitation to you, my sisters and brothers, for a deeper reflection on our life together. Not all members of the Order identify with monasticism given our dispersion. However, as abbot I find value in exploring our life together from that perspective. I welcome your responses.)

In the late 1980s, I remember a conversation with a prominent United Methodist pastor—a man I deeply respect still—concerning the contents of the forthcoming United Book of Worship (UMBOW). He was on the revision committee. I told him that I hoped the UMBOW would include the complete Psalter. Without a moments hesitation he replied, “Why would you want all 150 Psalms?” Perhaps he was thinking that the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal included a number of Psalms aligned with the Revised Common Lectionary so as to be sufficient for use in corporate worship. Or perhaps he was thinking that there are a number of Psalms with sentiments (as John Wesley is reputed to have said) unfit for Christian lips to speak. I confess here that I had in mind the possibility of a daily office use of the book, a purpose that I soon learned was beyond its scope. It was in fact never conceived of as “prayer book,” or even a people’s book.

The full Psalter

Thomas Merton, along with others in the long tradition of monasticism, viewed the Psalms as the Christian’s school of prayer. I have long appreciated his exhortation, “We must go on plunging our leprosy, like Naaman, in this Jordan of Psalmody.” (Bread in the Wilderness, p. 63; see also 2 Kings 5: 1-19) To echo Naaman’s scorn of Elisha’s prescription, there are seemingly far more sophisticated and beneficial literary rivers than the Psalter for our prayer.

This may be true for those who pray as private individuals. For them, there is no need to take up the troubling pre-Christian and non-Christian sentiments in the Psalms. See for example Psalm 63: 9-10; 69: 24-30; 137:7-9; 139: 18-21. These prayer texts are but a few of the vitriolic and hateful sentiments that occur frequently in the Psalms. Some prayer books, even the 1979 Book of Common Prayer daily office lectionary put these and other sections in parentheses to indicate that they may be skipped.

By contrast, the point I want to make here is that in the monastic tradition monks and nuns are committed by vocation to pray the whole collection of Psalms, including all of the cursing and disconcerting sections. On what basis did monasticism come to a positive answer to the question: “Can Christian’s sincerely pray, ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths…’ (Psalm 58:6 BCP) or ‘let them be food for jackals’ (Psalm 63:10 BCP) or ‘Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!’? (Psalm 137:9)”

(This is an excerpt from my Abbot’s Letter in the September-October 2011 issue of the Font.)  

     I am currently reading Maria Boulding's Gateway to Resurrection. A Benedictine nun faced with terminal cancer, she wrote the book from within that journey. It is far more than an intensely personal narrative. Her short life horizon launched her into a deep and powerful theological and biblical reflection on the mission of the Trinity and the paschal mystery embedded in the realities of living in the world as it actually is, and the weakness and brokenness that is the gateway to resurrection. Forgiveness, she asserts, both God’s and ours, is central to life as we live in community, whether the divine-human encounter, family, Order, church or larger world. Said that way, you may say, “Ho, hum. Forgiveness, yes, but I heard all that before.” Not so fast!

     What Boulding does is to give context to forgiveness. Luke's idealized poetry (Acts 2:42-47) is true, but only so alongside the prose of Monday morning disenchantments of Ananias and Sapphira’s deception (Acts 5), the squabbles of the Hebrews and the Hellenists (Acts 6), contention between Peter and Paul (Galatians 2), and the parting of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15). She says that Luke's vision haunts the imagination of the great monastic founders. Here, I would include Br Romey P. Marshall and others in the mid-1940s, and Br. Michael O'Donnell and others in the mid-1980s, when the Order took another major step toward being a religious community living out its Rule of Life and Service.

     Life in community requires embodied and enacted forgiveness.

In the hallway outside the oratory there are the usual side conversations and chats.  Jonah is griping about the nasty fate of his gourd plant that died last night and how life just isn’t worth living, especially since God spared those damn Ninevites. The Psalmist is humming his lament (Psalm 102) and occasionally muttering about how it doesn’t seem right that God goes on from age to age and he is going to croak at an early age. Someone is reminding everyone that during Lent we are to lay aside every sin and obstacle that weighs us down and be swift to persevere.  Gregory of Nyssa is whispering to someone that change is inherent in human life, but that is God’s way of insuring our capacity to grow. He says that we can always grow in love and he counsels perfection in love. I’m puttering off to the side listening to all of this and marveling at the voices of God.

Br. Abbot Daniel+

In the last church to which I was appointed in Chula Vista CA, there was a retired pastor who called himself an "ecumaniac." Earl eagerly and actively supported and participated in planning community services each day of the week for The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. While no other community in which I was pastor observed the week with such intensity, I am glad that many communities around the world host at least one ecumenical gathering during this week.

The work of Christian dialogue toward receiving Christ's gift of oneness (John 17) is ongoing, though slower than most of us want! I won't elaborate the resistances and thorny problems that hold it at bay. For this week let us simply pray, as much as possible with others of differing denominational traditions, that we be "one in the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread and prayer," (Acts 2 : 42 - 47) which is the this year's theme.

Here are some prayers which I suggest along with those available from Faith and Order World Council of Churches and Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity: