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Immediately after the 10:30 Mass this morning, I will be packing my overnight bag for a short trip to go home to Mama, Beloved Mother, my Alma Mater St. Meinrad Archabbey in Southern Indiana. I have lots of beloved mothers: Emerson Grade School, Wheaton Community High School, Michigan State, UCLA, Indiana University (obviously I’m not too stable in the higher education department) and the list goes on. But like any son, I have my favorites: The Benedictines, the Sons of Benedict. I am a Benedictine baby for I spent my most formative years between the ages of 18 and 26 at Benedictine Seminaries and Monasteries, namely Conception Abbey in northwest Missouri and St. Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana. And today I go home to Mama.

Forty years ago in June I left St. Meinrad to begin my life as a deacon and then as a priest. I remember thinking at the age of 18, while a freshman in college at Conception Seminary that I’ll never be ready. There is too much to learn. This Latin is killing me. It’s hard to keep the magnum silencium (the grand silence) and reading the funny notes of Gregorian Chant is near impossible. But Mama coaxed me on. Every morning at 5:00 a.m. a cow bell would ring in a dormitory of 115 sleepy adolescents and we would walk down five flights to the basement where we would change in a hallway and wash up in a room with 50 sinks to be ready to sing Matins (morning prayer) in Latin wearing our wrinkled cassocks. As I descended those stairs for that first week my thought was constant, I’m not going to make it. I’ve got to get out of here. But I didn’t. I stayed. There was something holy and sacred about the routine. There was something solid here. There was a spirituality rooted in almost 1700 years of tradition. It was the Bennies, the Benedictines.

I often quip that when I entered seminary college in 1962, we were praying in Latin, wearing the cassocks and smoking up a storm between classes. When I left the School of Theology in 1970, we were wearing bell bottom blue jeans, hardly praying at all and smoking during class (Can you imagine doing that today?). In the eight short years, the world radically changed and the Church with it. We lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of a president, the beatniks, the hippies, the Beatles, acid rock, protests, the Vietnam War, and the goofiest haircuts (or lack thereof) that you’ve ever seen. It was the era of permanent press, polyester, double knits (my ordination vestment is a double knit, polyester Russian conical). Oh, did I fail to mention that in the Church there was something called Vatican II that went on? Good Pope John XXIII opened the windows of the Church and many managed to jump out. Not me. Oh, I sat on the ledge for a while wondering what in the world is going on in the world. But something always called me back in. It was my beloved Mother. Her voice is both steady and sure, gentle and firm, open and structured all at the same time.

Heraclitus was right, you can not step in the same river twice, the world is in constant flux. That means going forward and backwards, coming into consciousness and then losing it, falling into chaos and watching a new order come out of it. If you are not securely grounded, you are going to get lost in the whirl wind of change. Enter my Beloved Mothers, the Benedictines. They’ve lived long enough to have seen it all. Holy Father Benedict saw it in an instant, in a shaft of light. All of reality was revealed to him. He gave his monks a rule to live by and so enter into this reality. And it is all based on that which is forever and never changing, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the ultimate root. It is non ideological, goes beyond politics or the whims of culture and remains forever. What remains? Emanuel, God with us. That’s what the Benedictines not only taught, but have consistently lived. And that way of living has been infused into my bloodstream. For this, I will forever be grateful.

And so today, I make my sojourn to southern Indiana to say “thank you” to Mama. Who are your mothers in faith? The Jesuits, Vincentians, Franciscans, Dominicans, or maybe it’s even your own Parish family where you grew up. Take a moment to be grateful for what they have given you and don’t forget to say thanks.

In Jesus, the Gratitude of the Father,

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