Mt. Calvary Monastery from Santa Barbara Sacred Spaces.
After reading The Prior's Column for the last few months, I feel more acutely the pain of his community upon the loss of their Mt. Calvary Monastery. The sudden disruption of the prior's was similar to the shock of suddenly reading the words of Chuck's wife Carren after having read his nearly-daily posts. Chuck had been badly injured in Iraq. It's the personal that is personal.
Last week, The Story aired a show (link to audio of the show and photos of the individuals) about a heart transplant. The father of the young woman who died was a surgeon himself, and it was he that laid his brain-dead daughter on the operating table to have her heart removed. As the transplant surgeon recounted his observation of the father's final act, I immediately burst out sobbing. Not tears, sobbing. Tears now, remembering the story again. The girl who received the transplant (and her sister- both had a heart disease that required them to obtain transplants) are active for transplants and blood donation. For them it is very, very personal.
Ah so, the Bill Ayers interview on Fresh Air. I didn't know anything about him, except that somehow he got himself from terrorist to intelligentsia without hardly a moment of shame. The absence of shame was primary to the interview. Ayers is quite slick. He enrages people with his slickness, and he enraged me with his misdirection of contingency. When challenged to admit that he made a poor choice, perhaps even an evil choice, in terrorizing his own nation, he turns it back on the questioner and the listener in the format of "He that is without sin among you..." But that is what Jesus said (John 8:7), and Jesus said it precisely because he was perfect. Contingency is not nihilism.
Ayers either has to justify himself, or he does not. That is for him to decide, and my argument for his sake is that he should choose the latter. But to dabble in the rhetoric of justification only to tell your audience that they are unworthy to judge both insults the audience and takes something precious away from yourself. Demanding that the audience humble themselves to the level of your own debasement reduces everyone. Asking the audience for mercy both calls them to mercy (something they cannot give without humility, as it happens) and provides you the opportunity to obtain mercy. It transforms sneaking around in the night sowing destruction into an experience of grace.
Ayers' choice not to give himself this experience is surely a more complex psychology than can be heard in one radio interview, but in the interview one way that he did break the personal link between the listener and himself is to reiterate over and over again that he did not kill. This is the point upon which he removes himself from communion, from community, with his listener. Unfortunately it is surely not even true: Ayers' over-sized home kills, the rest of his bloated Hyde Park lifestyle kills, and when Bill Ayers' bomb knocked out air support communication in Vietnam for a day it is possible that not only that did Ayers kill but that you can find exactly the names of who he killed on a big black wall in Washington, D.C.
After Ayers tells me that he is nothing like me, that to form community with me is to reduce himself to association with people less than himself, people who are murderers, he calls me to repentance. Ayers spoke of the irony of a police officer driving past his home and holding up his book about his former underground life. He didn't seem to note the irony of the officer seeking his approval from the street for reading his book while Ayers himself stood enthroned in his mansion. A mansion that exists in the American community. A community that I am a part of. Malcolm X is one of history's greatest examples of the power of repentance. Jesus is history's greatest example of communion, where God forms community with many. In these acts, they acquire a moral authority that Ayers does not have. They also acquire an ethical justification, a true peace, which Ayers denies himself.
One of the first posts I read in The Prior's Column was about a cruise ship and a certain kind of pleasure in trotting out his white habit for a dressy meal. I don't understand monks on cruises, but I do understand the pleasure of the unexpected and of being the unexpected yourself. Br. Mudge tells the story in his own joy; he is sharing, giving. Chuck, at the moment, expresses himself with an edge. His blog used to be subtitled "life and observations from the pointy end of the spear" and now he's amended to "not-so-pointy end." The experience of being a reader has been the reverse, but in the present roughness he continues to put himself out there to interact with the world as he might find it. And in doing so he also creates his own kind of grace.*
On The Story, host Dick Gordon asked heart transplant recipient Liz Carpenter directly whether she felt any guilt for being alive. Implicit in the question is whether she needs our forgiveness, as listeners, for being alive. She hadn't asked for it, because she does not need it. She said that she has never felt guilt and she attributes this to the special relationship she has with the donor family. She has mercy from the people that matter; her story that started with a young woman near death and the bodily destruction of another on a dark highway has also ended in grace.
The Mt. Calvary Monetary website currently opens to a scene of flames and the following verse:
My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)
Endurance not only by ourselves, but as these Benedictines surely know, endurance that in community truly has the ability to overcome all things and to lack nothing.
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*And gives you a chance to as well: Part of Chuck's injuries involved damage to his hands. He has become active with Project Valour-IT, a charity that provides laptops to injured soldiers, and voice-controlled laptops to soldiers with hand injuries. Donate here.