When Rolheiser’s own friends asked him to write a book for their adult children who had left the church, this is what he came up with; and I find it speaks with joyful unfamiliarity.
At one point he says, “The God of the Incarnation is more domestic than monastic.”
Now, to one whose website proclaims that they are beginning a neo-monastic community, this causes pause. What does Rolheiser mean? Is it a threat to the mission of Benediction Farm? Good intentions aside, am I swimming the wrong way?
God becoming human, and taking on real flesh, and dwelling among us doesn’t exactly change anything – it just makes what was always true sort of undeniable.
Everything about everyday life participates in divine reality.
Mary wrapped Jesus is swaddling clothes – because newborns need to be kept warm. And, though we are tempted to think it beneath divine dignity, those cloths would need changing for the usual reasons.
Parents changing diapers throughout history were participating in God’s reality, though with God Himself needing diapers, we begin to see the real significance that was always present but hidden.
Monastic communities are fine: Rolheiser is himself part of an order, but even in those communities, God is best experienced in the everyday. We live our faith as we do the undramatic, encounter the routine, participate in the unavoidable, choose love amidst the mundane.
As one philosopher stated it: people long to prove their significance by making a heroic choice of destiny at an important moment. But, by the time that moment of choice comes our way – if it ever does – we have already chosen. Chosen by the thousands of little, everyday, unheroic decisions we make. Our destiny is made in the little, unnoticed moments. A young mother once put it well in a Sunday School class when she observed in frustration, “Listen, I’m just trying to keep the toddler from licking the cat!”
Mary had to teach Jesus not to lick the cat.
Benediction Farm is meant to be a place where the everyday and mundane of Creation becomes undeniable and unavoidable. A place where the shocking implications of the Incarnation can be seen and smelled and handled. We do this so that the people who visit and return to life elsewhere will know that their regular routines, and little irksome chores, and petty frustrations are all participating in the true Drama.
God is drawing the domestic into the eternal life.
