The Tent of this Kingdom

Welcome to my new blog. In the centuries before the printing press, when books were hand written, it was often the monks, striving away in scriptoriums, who kept copies of the Holy Scripture available. They were the pioneers of mass communication in their day. The blogging monks of the 21st Century are keeping this pioneering spirit alive through the instant accessibility of the Internet, the likes of which monks of the Middle Ages could never have imagined. But here we are!

Guests at the monastery are often curious about the lives of monks. Stereotypical and romanticized ideals about monks and monastic life are "archetypes" to use the Jungian term - wired into our brains from the beginning as a kind of holy other, the ones outside, the mystics and seers, contemplatives and actualized persons we may believe are out there somewhere but somehow not real. Guests come with their archetype and then encounter the reality. Much of the curiosity is around the question "Is my image real or not?"

Hopefully this blog can be one way guests and others who are curious can encounter both our differtness and our ordinariness. I've quite carefully chosen the title from the Rule of St. Benedict because it holds so much biblical and symbolic meaning: tent and kingdom. The tent, Tent of Meeting, Tabernacle, (from the Latin tabernaculo) is rich in Old Testament theological meaning. Kingdom, of course, is the word Our Lord uses to describe the inbreaking reign of God on earth through the hearts of disciplies out into the world expressed in love, mercy, justice, truth, and righteousness. St. Benedict, as he often does in the Rule, conflates the images and mixes them into what is for him the earthly striving toward the heavenly. Our transitory life in time and space is the gift with which we pursue our eternal glory in the presence of the risen and ascended Lord of glory. The Prologue to the Rule is one of the greatest pieces of inspirational theology in the monastic tradition. This verse, coming near the end, is Benedict's rousing final call to holiness; a real holiness that can be run toward today, now. As his urgency and passion pour out in a flood of words, we hear his deep desire for his communities of monks to keep that prize before them and be willing and eager to sacrifice their egos, their wills, their greed, and their status for the eternal prize.

This blog will be our journey together to exploring what it means to live in the tent of this kingdom. Through my own writing and photos as well as the words and images of others, we will face both the struggle and the celebration of the Christian life.