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Enclosure
April 24, 2021
On several monastery doors, in critical locations, one sees the arresting sign, “Enclosure.” Is this a warning? Is it a polite way to say: “Keep Out”? Or is it the proclamation of a way of life? Perhaps it would be a good bumper sticker. For most of us, unwillingly, enclosure has over the past year become an unfortunate and inescapable sense of being. But it is indeed part of the Benedictine vocation. Columba Marmion writes that for the monk, “The Abbey is for him the Jerusalem sancta, the ‘City of peace’ where he loves to dwell” (Ideal of the Monk). We look forward this coming Saturday to a new novice taking on this enclosed vocation. I tried to reflect this week on this transformative experience of enclosure, not simply what it excludes, but what it makes possible. What it makes possible by exclusion; what it opens through enclosing. Even God chooses enclosure: God chooses to enclose Himself in human flesh. God becomes enclosed in a host, enclosed in a tabernacle, or in monstrance visible for adoration. We too become enclosed, in our life choices, each of which eliminates other life choices and narrows, opens, our path. I begin to realize that enclosure is not only a place or a path, it is a process. Enclosure is choosing the narrow path. It is a way of living; committing. And ultimately, in the hopefulness of vocation, it is a way of loving, in which one may find peace.Pax,
Blake Billings
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Besteld Brood
April 17, 2021
There is a joke circulating around Flanders about an American who goes in to order some bread. He’s been working on his Flemish language skills, and he is ready to show what he knows. He boldly steps up to the counter in this bakery, studies the labels on the variety of baked bread, gathers himself, points to the best selection he sees and loudly and distinctly tells the matron, “Besteld brood, alstublieft!” The matron stammers... “Ja, maar…” (“Yes, but…”), as he insistently repeats his order.Well, in case you didn’t get the joke, I didn’t either. I don’t know when it dawned on me that “Besteld” means “Reserved.” Yes, the story actually happened, and the joke was on me: I was the American who went in demanding, “Reserved bread, please!” – the selections always set apart on the shelf marked “Besteld” for the customers who have already ordered their bread. I realized, suddenly mortified, that I was making a complete fool of myself. I told this story to Flemish friends of mine, who laughed heartily and later told me the story was making the rounds. Flanders is not that large, after all. And Americans, well they are known to possess certain traits… So yeah, I am the Besteld Brood guy.
I was broadly smiling in recalling this the other day – as I was attending morning Mass! Not the most pious of thoughts to cross my mind at that point! I was grateful for mask-wearing, which hid my self-incriminating grin. But then it dawned on me: there we were, at the point in Mass where Brother Sixtus makes his daily visit to the tabernacle to retrieve the hosts to distribute for Communion…: The Reserved Bread! The connection did not escape me, as Sixtus made his way to the special “shelf” holding this Bread, this Finest Wheat, this Bread foreordained, already purchased by Someone else. I paused and retraced my story: am I still that clueless American who believes Reserved Bread is for him? Am I all swagger and self-confidence, and so out of touch with reality? As I approach the altar, do I even realize what it is that I am asking? But I also saw a strange reversal. Now I am the one that feels unworthy to even request this Bread. But He is the one who says, as only He can, “Ja, maar… take and eat.” For He has purchased it – for me. He has reserved it, for me to take. He has blessed it, for me to eat. And He has the last laugh here, it seems, as I realize in a new way, gratefully and unexpectedly, I really am the Besteld Brood guy.
Pax,
Blake Billings
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One Last Piece of Advice
April 10, 2021
My desire this Easter season, the prayer request to which I have dedicated this Easter season, has been to learn what it means to actually believe in Easter. To have an Easter faith. Paul says: “Believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead.” This, for him, is salvation: “in your heart” – not “in your head.” Confession on the lips is excellent, he says, and this must be corroborated by belief in the heart. That belief is a grace I have set about more deliberately to seek this Easter season.
I had a rather Benedictine revelation about this today. As an oblate, I am called to consider how my life should best be shaped by the Rule of Saint Benedict. This may be a little harder for an oblate than for a monk, in that we have a bit more liberty to not do so, at least objectively speaking. One personal technique I have developed has been to use modern technology to the Rule’s advantage. I have entered into the calendar on my phone, day by day, each of the “tools of good works” from Chapter 4 of the Rule. There are 72 of these. I figured out that when you enter an event on your calendar, you can also set it to repeat after “x” number of days. I set each “tool of good works” to repeat after 72 days – so I now am good to go forever. My phone cycles through the tools for good works, with a little piece of Benedictine advice and guidance popping up on my phone each day.
Today’s piece of advice was actually the last in the list of the tools of good works. Benedict’s ultimate statement and his last bit of advice in the chapter. And from it, today I learned the answer to my Easter question, an answer to what it means to live a resurrection faith, to be convinced in your heart that God has raised Him. It was simply this: “72. Never despair of God’s mercy.” It was, of course, appropriate of Benedict to offer this advice last. After failing at the first 71, hearing 72 is somewhat encouraging. Almost funny, though you perhaps laugh through your tears. But I could not help but notice: it is the message of Easter. It is precisely Easter. It says so much about God, and what He is prepared to do, to be merciful. It says so much about me, and all that I seem unprepared to do, thus needing mercy. And it says so much about Christ, whose cross embraces those two very opposite poles. It is the confounding message of the cross, seen in the light of a tomb now unlocked.
I am thinking that an Easter faith carves out “in the heart” this sort of space. Easter faith is not the vision of heavenly messengers – it is in the unseen. It is not making the discovery of an empty tomb – it is in the listening to those who did. It is not an overpowering encounter on my way to Emmaus nor Damascus. For me, for now, those are a bit of an overreach. For now, I will hold on to this: 72. Never despair of God’s mercy. I will say, “Lord have mercy,” believing that it is worthwhile to ask. I will settle for Dismas, who even on his own cross somehow found in his own heart an Easter faith. And as my phone advises, tomorrow I will start over, from step 1 - “Wholly love God” - abiding in the hope that at the end of the journey in which I have failed to do so, there is always that one last bit of advice.
Pax,
Blake Billings
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The Beginning of Wisdom
April 3, 2021
There is a kind of anxiety, I have noticed, that seems to grip the monastic community during Holy Week. I have been wondering if it has to do with something that the bible, and Saint Benedict, state repeatedly: the beginning of wisdom lies in the fear of God. It is a message I seem to keep hearing around here in our Lenten homilies. I had a new insight into this, I think. New to me – probably painfully obvious to everyone else. I have been troubled by the image of a “God of fear” rather than a “God of love”, and all that business. Isn’t this Fear of God stuff so “Old Testament” and not “New Testament”?My simple and clear insight was that it seems like the one thing I do not fear is God. That is my radical and pernicious foolishness. I fear death. I fear humiliation. I fear the loss of my retirement funds. I have anxieties about all sorts of things: my creaky bones, my dwindling years, how bald I will become. It sounds like such a simple appeal, to move away from a God of Fear to a God of Love. In fact, I see that I all too readily move away from a God of Fear, and become anxious rather about my bank account, my human limitations, my reputation. Anything, it seems, literally anything becomes an object of fear – anything except the Almighty God, if there is one. People have long suggested that we humans are inevitably prone to have something as a god. What this probably means is that we inevitably have something that we fear. Maybe wisdom means learning how to fear correctly.
Hidden in the Holy Week Anxiety, I seem to discern a further insight. Yes, I am lost in my foolishness, that seemingly interminable list of anxiety-inducing matters that actually occupy my life. But there is something else here, too. The desire to offer something worthy of God. The longing that my Lenten penance has born or will bear fruit. The desire, as Benedict says, to actually become holy. The yearning that God, anxieties for God – anxieties to do good, to love wholly – take the place of all of those fruitless and foolish fears that occupy my mind. Here it comes again, the Holy Triduum: have I made any progress? This is a different sort of fear, a new-found fear that is not about what will happen to me, but of not being worthy of the Love I am offered, the Love I am reminded of again in the sacred mysteries. Well, if this other type of fear is indeed the path of wisdom, I still have quite a pilgrimage ahead of me.
Easter Peace,
Blake Billings
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About
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Blake Billings '77, Ph.D. is a graduate and current faculty member of Portsmouth Abbey School. He received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, then joining the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to assist in an inner-city parish in Oakland, California. From Oakland, he went to Leuven, Belgium, receiving degrees in theology and philosophy. He returned to the Abbey in 1987, teaching for three years before getting married and returning to Leuven to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, which he was awarded in 1995. Having taught in higher education at various schools, including St. John's University, Fairfield University, and Sacred Heart University, he decided his calling was at the secondary level, gratefully returning to Portsmouth in 1996, where he has resided ever since. He became an oblate of the Portsmouth community ten years ago. His four children were all raised on campus and graduated from the school, the youngest in 2020.
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