Moving hermitage

Since last Friday, I have been on the go. Last week, I drove with a brother deacon from Salt Lake-to-Cedar City-to-Saint George-to-Cedar City-to-Salt Lake. This past Monday I drove from my home to Cortez, Colorado. On Tuesday I drove from Cortez, Colorado to Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery in Pecos, New Mexico (east of Santa Fe, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains). I spent Tuesday evening, all day Wednesday, and Thursday morning with my fellow directors of the diaconate from USCCB Region XIII, which includes the states of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.

We had a nice time praying together, getting better acquainted with one another, sharing our successes and challenges, listening to each other, and discerning matters that we need to make common cause on moving forward. Quite reluctantly, I was selected for a three-year term as president. While I am not the most recently ordained, I am the youngest, both chronologically and in terms of serving as deacon director. It's a great group of ministers, very dedicated to the Church, fervently serving their bishops by serving their fellow deacons and their wives, thus equipping those deacons for their threefold diakonia of liturgy, the word, and charity.

The only photo I took while in Pecos this week

Yesterday, I drove from Pecos back to Cortez, where I am composing this. When I am done, it's back in my Honda CRV and back on the road. I should be home for supper. I also think that's enough road trips for awhile! I've been in a kind of moving hermitage this week.

I didn't take a lot of photos or anything while I was at the monastery. I've needed the quiet of this week. I've needed it for a long time. While there, I began re-reading the late Fr. Charles Cummings, OCSO, Monastic Practices. Having been largely shaped by Benedictines, I find this reading fruitful. I knew Fr. Charles, who was a monk at Utah's Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah, for most of his monastic life.

Fr. Cummings writes so beautifully and accurately about the necessity of liturgical prayer:

The power of the liturgy to transform and to lead us to God depends on our ability to immerse ourselves by grace in the mystery of Christ that is the objective content of the liturgy (22)

I drive home today from Cortez. Because this week reminded me how important it is for me to retreat more regularly than I do, it was difficult to leave. I remember what my first spiritual director, a Maronite priest who later became a hermit, used to tell me when I found it difficult to leave: "Make your goodbyes short." It was a nice way of saying, "Don't cling. Take what you received here back and live your vocation."

Our traditio for this final Friday of September is the monks of Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire, England chanting the Benedictus, canticle sung by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist in Luke 1:68-79. This Canticle is sung/recited towards the end of Morning Prayer, traditionally known as Lauds: