Meditation: Dedication of Our Church

On Saturday, December 1st, our community celebrated the Feast of the Dedication of Our Monastic Church, which initially happened on December 8th, 2007.  One of our brothers offered a post-communion meditation for the occasion, and we offer our brother’s reflection for your reading here:

Meditation: Dedication of Our Church: 12-01-2018

Reflecting on the dedication of our Church, back on December 8th, 2007, reminded me of how exciting that day was and especially about the whole, dramatic changes our monastery underwent.

Before our Master Plan Renovations, we had something of an Aesthetic of Functionality here, i.e. it didn’t matter how it looked, just as long as it worked!  I especially remember our U.S. Navy Urinal curtains, our artistic sense: A bare garth with a 3 stacked, cinder block meditation piece, and our old Church: baseball park fluorescent lights for Vigils and Compline … or the tiny choir stalls with the wood beam right in our backs…

Our monastery’s transformation from functionality to beauty really got me, and especially our Church … the natural light alone was stunning, not to mention the design, the views, and the better choir stalls!

The point I want to focus on though is the next transformation, when captivating beauty becomes familiar and 3 invitations this transformation opens up to us.  The experience I’m talking about here is when the light, or the Church design, or the view, or whatever stood out, slowly ceases doing so. We’ve been in this Church now for around 11 years!  This is the key movement, that passes so subtly: either to enter into meaning or to move on to the next, desired thing.

I would like to suggest that in this movement from captivating beauty to becoming familiar, a mysterious transformation is taking place: the beauty we see and experience in this Church is being assimilated within us.  The beauty that we see here, becomes who we are through this process of interior assimilation. We become more beautiful by being touched and moved by beauty.  This idea is very much in harmony with what Terryl Kinder, the Cistercian Architectural Scholar, once said: “The men make the buildings and the buildings make the men.”

To see this interior assimilation of beauty, represents the great monastic movement from the literal sense to the spiritual sense … this is the first invitation our Church offers us today: to see this Church with the eyes of the Spirit and the effect it’s had and is having on us.

But it doesn’t stop there, this church didn’t just appear, it came from the inspired imagines of our Architect, Dave Richen.  From the beautiful person that Dave is came forth this Church, so not only does this Church become part of who we are, Dave becomes a part of who we are too.  And I’d have to say, In my humble opinion, that in no small part, has a good portion of Dave’s beauty come from our beloved sister Mary Sue!

The second invitation of our Church then, is to see and enter into this unitive transformation with another person whose brought beauty to us.

But again, we mustn’t stop even there, because with spiritual vision we can see the mystery that this Church contains.  Here we come together as Church, with our Blessed Lord at the center, sacramentally present in our Eucharistic Celebration.  In this Celebration, the transformative movement of beauty towards unity is pushed to the farthest degree: we are one with all our local Churches, all the Churches in our state, in our country, in our world … ultimately the unitive movement of the Eucharist pushes forth and encompasses the entire breadth of the cosmos in Christ … In this oneness and unity with creation, we simultaneously enter the depths of participatory union with the Holy Trinity. We truly are God’s sons and daughters here, together, in this place.

Our beautiful Church, our beautiful architect, our growing beauty invites us to be what we see: Church.  As Church, let’s not go to our Lord alone, but bring every man, woman, and child, and all of creation, in our hearts with us.  A way to do this becomes our final invitation, which is shown to us by our beloved Architect Dave: this Church invites us to bring beauty into the world and to help others to be beautiful, not necessarily by building some massive structure or other, but by doing little acts of loving, Gospel kindness to everyone and everything we meet.