I will spend next week at Our Lady of Grace Monastery for a week of formation toward becoming a Benedictine oblate. I often refer to it as being a "groupie" of a monastery: associating with a particular monastery, oblates live out Benedictine spirituality in our lives outside the monastery.
This isn't quite what I set out to do. I'm a former Pentecostal church pianist who came out of the closet and landed in a progressive mainline congregation. When I was elected president of my church council I couldn't imagine how I could possibly contribute. What did I know about mainline Christianity? But, reader that I am, I started reading and soon discovered that what at first seemed like metaphorically stumbling across books, books were being laid across my path. I didn’t need to know any more about mainline Christianity, church growth, or church governance. I just needed embrace the Holy alive in my life.
Benedictine spirituality and oblate kept showing up in the books—and newspapers—lain across my path. Over and again. I almost felt stalked by the Spirit.
In a sense, the ground of my life is soaked with monasticism. Every summer of my life Sister Bessie Carter, a little black preacher preached a revival at my church. Sister Carter never married and lived a life of devotion to God. She continues to touch my life in the most profound ways.
But monasticism also touched my life before I was ever born: generations of my grandfather Pa Corn's family were next door neighbors to the Kentucky Shaker community. When they speak at Shaker Village now that their singing was heard by neighbors for miles, it was my ancestors who were listening, and touched by their spirituality.
While the first thing Sister Carter, the Shakers, and Benedictine monks have in common that comes to mind for some may be celibacy—and that as a gay man I'm hardly "honoring" that—there is so much more… and I am very much honoring it. For one thing, because oblates do not profess vows, celibacy is not expected of us. But like Sister Carter, the Shakers, and Benedictine monks, we gay people live our lives in nontraditional families with a different sense of family and community.
But really, I am drawn to—stalked by—the spirituality. This past year along my oblate journey I learned to pray. After leaving Pentecostalism I didn't know where prayer fit in. Prayer was mired in a theology I no longer embraced. But over the year I discovered that prayer isn't something we do... but something that happens to us.
So next week I return to the monastery with my oblate group in anticipation of what the Holy will do in me this coming year.
