Monastic Journal - Day 6

1/12

Today was another really good day. As the six of us from HU have gotten more relaxed and comfortable in this environment and the people here, we have tended to be more goofy and immature (in the silly way, not the dumb way). Sometimes I feel like the other guys in the house think we're idiots, but in a way that they still like us ( I think) and enjoy us. Which is cool.

We had two teaching sessions today, both with Mike Kramer. The first was about living single for the Lord, which is a central precept of the Servants of the Word brotherhood. Mike explained it in a really cool way. Living single for the Lord is merely one particular type of radical discipleship. It's definitely a calling, but not meant for everyone, not even for the majority of people. And if I want to give my life completely to the Lord in radical discipleship (which I do), then living single is definitely an option that I should consider (which I am). Also, Mike made the point that, according to Jesus, in heaven marriage will not exist--living single and wholly devoted to the Lord will be THE reality. So in that sense, living single now is a prophetic lifestyle, pointing toward the reality of Heaven. It tells us that marriage is not the most important thing in the world--God is. So it was cool to get these new perspectives.

This afternoon and evening we had a lot of free time, which consisted largely of playing darts with various people. Nagib was goofing off and tried to throw a dart from his desk on the other side of the basement room, a good 30 feet away at least. And he MADE IT! It was the second coolest thing I've seen in darts this week. The first was the other night when my second dart throw landed in the tail of the first dart. It was sweet.

Anyways, later this evening, the six of us sat down with Mike and Nico and just had an open forum type discussion. We talked about chanting, charismatic worship, finances, and lots of other stuff. There were two big highlights I want to mention. When we asked them why all the brothers went off to different churches on Sunday morning, we quickly delved into a talk about ecclesiology, denominational divisions, and church unity, or in this case, disunity. And after a while into the discussion, I suddenly realized that with all the differences in doctrine between denominations, the Church, as a universal whole, will probably never be united in this life. If you have a large group consisting of Catholics, Baptists, Orthodox, and Lutherans, there's no way that they could find common ground in worship, let alone share and celebrate something like Holy Communion together. And that thought made me really sad. This isn't what God wants for His Church (see John 17). Church unity and ecumenism is something I feel very passionately about and think is part of my calling in ministry. I pray that my heart is always broken for the Church, so that I will continue to work for it despite itself. As Augustine (I think) said, "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother."

Today I tried to focus on really trying to submit and surrender my moments and my situations to God. I'm still not good at setting aside time specifically for God, so I'm hoping that He continues to work in me on that front and I get better at it during the next 8 days or so we have left of our J-term.

We leave the Lansing house tomorrow afternoon for the main house at Chelsea. I'll be sad to go. It feels like we've been here a lot longer than just six days. But I know that God has a lot more in store for the rest of our time with the Servants of the Word, and I'm excited to see what that holds for us.

*SDG