Pope Francis

Posted on May 13, 2025 by jamiebrame

(a ministerial note to my congregation at the end of April, 2025)

We survived Lent. We survived Holy Week. We survived Easter.

There are so many people in the world who are not surviving. We see them daily, hear about them in the news, read about them in social media, hear ministers and politicians and friends discussing them.

One who barely survived Easter: Pope Francis, who died the day after.

I expect every minister I know as a friend has made either spoken or written comments about this Pope, a man different from any other religious leader of our, or any, time. He was the first pope ever to identify with the most unlikely saint: St Francis of Assisi. Many popes took the names of apostles: John, Mark; others, Biblical characters: Paul, Zacharias, Stephanus,; still others, great saints: Gregory, Benedict, Eugenius, Boniface, etc. Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name “Francis.”

He was a Jesuit (yes, the order formed by St. Ignatius Loyola, who played heavily in my April 13 sermon). He was from Argentina. He was not without his critics. He leaned toward doctrinal conservatism as a priest, bishop, and eventual cardinal. But his fame was mostly as a defender of the poor and marginalized in society.

As Pope, he was less formal than his predecessors. On the night of his election, he took a bus to his hotel with the other cardinals rather than being driven in the papal car. He refused to live in the papal palace but instead remained in the Vatican guest house in a suite where he received visitors and held meetings. He even wore his own brown shoes to his papal coronation rather than the famous red slippers of his predecessors.

He chose the name Francis because, as he explained, “(Francis) brought to Christianity an idea of poverty against luxury, pride, vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time. He changed history.”

His papacy was radical by modern terms. He said that all religions were a way to God. He included women in some areas of church leadership. He was an environmentalist and an ecumenist, encouraging dialogue with other religions and Christian traditions.

Francis thanked journalists for uncovering the scandal of clergy abuse of children. He visited in prisons, washed prisoners’ feet, worked for the eradication of poverty and war, began to recognize the rights of the LGBTQ community, placed women in places of responsibility in the church (although rejected outright ordination of them!), and always, always, talked of God’s mercy.

Francis had a spirit of humility about him. If I take anything away from observing him, it is what is called his “recognizable humanity.” Shortly before his death, he donated most of his personal wealth to support a pasta-making project at a youth prison in Rome.

I don’t know about you, but when I look around at the religious scene these days, there aren’t any other “Francis types” in obvious places. Perhaps that’s because true humility hides its piousness and replaces it with quiet acts of love, kindness, affirmation of human beings, peace, justice, and mercy: what some might call true Christian values.

I pray I’m one of them.

God bless you, Pope Francis. May we learn to walk in your way, which was, I think, the way of your – and our – Lord Jesus.

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Earth Day 2025

Posted on April 23, 2025 by jamiebrame

Happy Earth Day! I still remember the first Earth Day in 1970, when I was but a wee lad of 16 years, a sophomore in high school. It was a big event for our school, as many of us planted trees around the perimeter of the property (with the permission of the School Board, of course!). 

Two years later, two of my pals and I would produce a short film about pollution in our area: we were chased off properties for trespassing as we filmed raw sewage and chemicals dumped into a river about 30 miles north of our town; we were yelled at by the owner of an automobile junkyard for filming his site that had cars piled on top of each other; we recorded ourselves picking up litter from the side of roads and streets in town; and we set the film to the music of a new musical instrument, the MOOG Synthesizer (ever hear of the album “Switched-on Bach?”). Eventually, we lost some scholarship money because we showed how the local textile mill company, Fieldcrest Mills (Karastan Rugs and Fieldcrest towels and sheets) polluted the two rivers than ran through our small town. We were even featured in the  Greensboro Daily News as the lead article in the “B” section of the Sunday paper!

I wish I knew what happened to that film!

Since that time, I have tried to observe Earth Day in one day or another. When I studied Hebrew, I discovered that the King James translators translated Genesis 1: 28 to say, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” I think they had a political motive to translate the Hebrew that way: England was trying to become a world power, so having biblical permission to “have dominion” tasted better in their theology. It’s clear that the Brits wanted their Bible to give them permission to take over the world, sucking all the resources from it as they went. A better translation is, “Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,  for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.” 

These days, we know that too many of those resources take a few million years to renew. 

Earth Day, for Christians, maybe should be about taking our responsibility as stewards of the earth – caretakers, if you will – seriously. Many of us work to maintain our yards; is it such a reach to work to maintain the rest of our environment? Small things – recycling, taking shorter showers, not running water the whole time we brush our teeth, using reusable water bottles – are not that difficult to do, and these actions can grow into larger ones as we become more and more aware of how we impact the earth negatively without realizing it. Small positive actions can grow into large ones as more and more people join in.

When I was a Boy Scout decades ago, I recall our Scout Master telling us before a camping weekend, “Guys, remember to leave things in the woods better than you found them!” I think that may be the message for Earth Day: “Let’s leave our environment better – or at least, no worse – than we found it.

At the very least, look around you and say, “Thank you, God, for this beautiful earth. May I not make things worse by the way I live in it, but find ways, even if they are small, to live responsibly with all of the natural world.”

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Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Jamie

Posted on March 25, 2025 by jamiebrame

A few more thoughts about Bible

(a few more thoughts about the March 23, 2025, sermon)

The Bible is a library, a written collection of how people understood God’s interaction with them in the world. Much of it is history: even the prophets’ writings reflect what was happening in their world.

It’s not all history, though. Stories from the earliest days were handed down from the old to the young, from religious leaders to those who followed the religion. Word of mouth was the conductor of these tales of the earliest parents of our faith, until they began to be collected in writings. Even the books attributed to Moses show signs of being tampered with somewhere along the way, with different linguistic styles and even different names for God (for example, the names for God, Yahweh and Elohim, demonstrate two different strands of origin, one being a bit more “priestly,” and the other being more “folksy,” respectively).

When it comes to the Law, or what we call the 613 commandments, we find the basis for many of our laws even today. Called the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, ideas like equity for all people under the law and punishment that fits the crime are both found in these commandments.

I don’t believe that there is any such thing as a “biblical literalist.” First, to believe the Bible literally would mean that one would have to have access to the original document(s); then, one would have to read Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic fluently enough to understand them 100% of the time; and one would also have to have a strong working knowledge of the cultures from which the biblical writings emerged. I know there are even more conditions than these, but those are nit-picky compared to these three big ones.

Our Jewish parents in faith had a much more flexible understanding of the scriptures. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School, argues that rabbis were used to approaching the scriptures from a less literal standpoint, finding explanations for questions in a creative fashion. For instance, how did Adam and Eve’s sons find wives? The rabbis said, “Well, God created this other woman, Lilith, and she gave birth to the daughters.” Of course, the rabbis argued about this, and there were other explanations as well. The thing is, biblical discussions did not hinge on absolute answers. Levine also says, “The Bible teaches us which questions to ask.”

You have heard me say many times that I believe the Bible to be a conversation between God and us. Sometimes, the conversation seems irrelevant to our lives; at others, the conversation never takes place at all, because we don’t bother with it, deciding that “the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it:” and at still others, we wonder if the Bible should be interpreted a little more loosely (or not at all).

Two examples of this: Jesus taught that we should “turn the other cheek.” I had a Sunday School teacher who actually said, “Jesus doesn’t expect us to do this.” Yikes! Jesus also taught that divorce was a sin: I still recall how upset my family was over the impending divorce of good friends of theirs, even stating that they would not be able to come back to church (and, as I recall, they didn’t). Yet over the years, because of society’s acceptance of divorce, we have, in our hearts, re-written, if not Jesus’ commandments, at least our understanding of these two sayings.

I love the Bible. Being a historian at heart, the stories themselves keep me enthralled. I’ve never been a legalist, so the Law doesn’t interest me. St. Paul says that the Law came to fulfillment in Jesus, and I was taught that he supersedes all laws (I am thankful for this, as I eat shellfish as often as possible – against the Law of Moses – and have been known  to eat swordfish as well as escargot). The example of swordfish, by the way, shows how the rabbis changed the Law when it was discovered that swordfish only had scales (scales were what defined “fish,” which were Kosher to eat) when they are young; mature swordfish don’t, which meant changing the Kosher – read “part of the 613 commandments” – to exclude the eating of swordfish.

Reading the Bible is never enough. After reading it, we consciously or unconsciously decide how then we are going to live. I believe that God allows us to expand our understanding of how we are to live rather than condemning us Sfor trying to live faithfully within whatever culture we live and work and play.

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Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Jamie

Posted on March 18, 2025 by jamiebrame

A few more thoughts about Church from the March 16, 2025, sermon

When I was in college, “church” referred to an institution whose identity and practices were pretty much set in stone. However, for many of my peers and I, “church” should not have been some of the things it had become.

When Emperor Constantine made Christianity the legal religion of the Roman Empire in 313 via the Edict of Milan, he set the stage for leaders for centuries to come: the use of Christianity for political purposes. Many scholars find Constantine’s reasons for the legalization suspect; Christians of his own time left the churches in the cities to join monasteries, especially in the north African and Palestinian deserts, because they felt that legalization would “water down” the church and cause it to compromise its more radical beliefs in order to “fit in” with the rest of society. People would become Christians not because of their convictions but because it was the thing to do.

One of the things that the church is always called to do is to speak truth to power, no matter who that power is. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other German ministers stood against Hitler in spite of the danger to their lives. Ministers in the old USSR and communist China lost their freedom and sometimes their lives as they sought to practice faith in spite of their governments’ denial of religious rights.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic book, Christ and Culture, examines five possible ways that the church has related to culture. I have “adjusted” his definitions because ultimately, “church” stands for Christ in the world. Sorry for it sounding so much like a seminary paper: it was!

1. Church against culture: loyalty to Christ and the church entails a rejection of culture and societal values. The church stands against culture to the extent that it judges it and finds it wanting, offering an alternative in keeping with the teachings of Jesu; thus, monasteries and other communal living styles developed along the lines of the early church depicted in Acts.

2. Church of culture: loyalty to culture trumps loyalty to Christ, to the point the New Testament Jesus gets replaced with an idol that shares his name. The church becomes so ensconced within culture that it creates a completely different religion from that of Jesus of Nazareth.

3. Church above culture: Niebuhr says that this is the dominant voice of church history, in which the problem is between God and humanity rather than God and the world. This is a little confusing. What it basically means is that the church deals with human sin in individuals rather than the sin of the culture and society. The downside to this view is the institutionalization of Church and gospel, as well as the tendency to make absolute what is relative, reduce the infinite to finite form, and materialize what is dynamic. In other words, church shapes itself somewhat to culture rather than standing as a separate entity all the time – there’s a synthesis of church and culture, some of it good, some of it not. 

4. Church and Culture in paradox position: humanity is living in sin, but grace comes from God. St. Paul speaks some of this, and Martin Luther and Soren Kierkegaard followed him. The two opposites, sin and grace, are found in tension with each other, although God ultimately wins. But sometimes, the church can almost go back to the “church against culture” model.

5. Church as transformer of culture: all of culture is under the judgment of God, and yet culture is also under God’s sovereign (and benevolent) rule. Emphasizing the goodness of creation, this “conversionist” approach affirms what can be affirmed in culture and seeks to transform what is corrupted by sin and selfishness.

I think it’s important to understand that the church exists in the world. How we see our relationship to worldly values depends on where we fall in one of these 5 categories. I have found myself holding almost all of these at one time or another.  The church should always be in flux, seeking ways to be faithful in the world while adhering to higher values and standards.

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Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Jamie

Posted on March 12, 2025 by jamiebrame

A Few More Thoughts about God

(This is an extension of a sermon I preached on March 9, 2025)

One of the things I usually say about God is that God is not an old, white man. God is, especially, not Santa Claus in a robe instead of in a red suit. God is not a man or a woman, for that matter. One of the ways that we can think about God in a realistic sense is to go beyond our images of people and try to consider that God is spirit. Of course, that makes God really hard to visualize, but it also frees up our concepts of God to allow them to be bigger and deeper than what we may have considered before!

God is love. Even in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), while God is sometimes portrayed in the human style of being angry, there are plenty of references to God’s love for people. God is referred to as a shepherd, for instance; it’s one of the most endearing and attractive pictures of God in the whole Bible! The prophets, admittedly, talk about God’s anger with people’s failure to treat each other with justice, fairness and kindness, but they also portray a deity who is angry because of offered love that is rejected time and again. However, forgiveness is always possible in these depictions of God.

I try to remember that God is omniscient, that God knows everything. When we pray, if we can remember that God knows what we are talking about even before we utter anything, perhaps our prayers could look more like a comfortable friendship where not many words are necessary, where just “being with God” is enough.

God is more than we can imagine! Theologians have argued for centuries about whether or not God changes. I don’t see what the attraction is to a stagnant being who doesn’t ever change its mind! If God doesn’t change, why do we pray? Don’t most of us at one time or another ask God to change, to ease up on us or those we love, to bring peace to the world, to help the poor?

Our understanding of God must grow with us. God is revealing things to us all the time if we are awake and aware. Go stand outside on a clear, starry night and see if you don’t experience some of the hugeness of God. Stand on a mountaintop with waves upon waves of mountains before you and realize just how big God is. Walk on a dark beach at night, with the deafening sound of waves crashing and feel what it is to be in awe of power and might. Our vision of God needs to grow and change. It’s a constant challenge in our spiritual walk.

There’s so much more to say about God than you want to read here. This Lent, one thing to give up is a limited understanding of God. If God is doing a new thing, as Isaiah 43: 19 says, then possibly, that new thing is continuing. The old has passed away, St. Paul says in 2nd Corinthians. If God is doing it, we can be part of it!

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Lenten Weekly Devotions 2023

Posted on February 22, 2023 by jamiebrame

Instead of a daily devotion, our Lenten prayer time will be spent with a theme for the week based on the scripture for the sermon the Sunday at the end of the week: thus, the devotions will begin on Monday and run through Sunday.

Monday’s devotion will be a meditation on the scripture for the next Sunday. The rest of the week will have a thought/question for the day to consider.

Week 1, February 22 (Ash Wednesday) through February 26

Matthew 4: 1 – 11

Lent is the forty days prior to Easter, not counting Sundays. It is based on the early church’s practice of preparing for Easter by walking with Jesus in his suffering. 

The temptation of Jesus is one of those events that seems to make him more like us. He was tempted in the desert in three ways: physically (hunger); spiritually (putting God to the test); and temporally (with wealth and power). In each of these temptations, Jesus used scripture to overcome his temptation.

During Lent, we make a holy observance by giving up something or taking on a religious/spiritual practice. Some people give up their favorite food, or fast for one meal daily and give the cost of that meal to an organization that feeds people. Some do a full-day fast once a week (if you have health issues, this is not recommended!) Others take on a daily practice of prayer or scripture reading or praying the Psalms or meditation. Still others choose to volunteer for a non-profit organization or try to do a daily “good deed” for someone. There are so many ways to have a holy Lent!

The temptation is that we sometimes forget. Another temptation is to brag about our success, saying, “Notice me! Notice me!” It’s easy to follow the path of the ego, wanting others to see how holy we are instead of letting go of everything except God. 

Wednesday’s Question: What do you plan to take on (a spiritual practice or a good work or a good habit) or give up (a food or a bad habit) during this Lent?

Thursday’s Question: Jesus basically went on a 40-day retreat in the desert. Many people go on retreats to strengthen their faith, yet Jesus seems to have made himself physically weaker. There is, however, nothing weak or wishy-washy about Jesus’ responses to his Tempter! Do you see your Lenten observance as a chance for being tempted or as an opportunity to strengthen your faith?

Friday’s Question: Will anything about your Lenten observances tempt you to failure? In other words, are you setting yourself up to fail by “biting off more than you can chew?

Saturday’s Question: What is the most imposing temptation you face as a Christian? 

Sunday’s Question: On this first Sunday of Lent, what are ways you can prepare yourself for the first full week of Lenten observances? Are there things you do that might set you up for failure? Do you need to adjust your observances so that they are attainable? Would you consider going “easy” on yourself at first and adding more intensity or more difficult forms of your observance (for instance, if you choose to sit quietly for 3 minutes each day, would you consider the last two weeks of Lent trying to double that time with God)?

jamie

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This Little Light of Mine

Posted on February 8, 2023 by jamiebrame

This past Sunday’s Gospel reading, Matthew 5: 13 – 16, talks simply about two things: salt and light. Being one who, along with his wife, watches salt levels constantly for health reasons, I decided to leave salt alone here as well.

Ah, but light: very important in our spiritual as well as our physical well-being!

In 2015, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, Divergie’s Disease, a skin condition that turns you bright red all over your body. Part of the treatment was with heavy doses of Vitamin A, which means my liver had to be monitored regularly via blood tests. As Renae and I studied the drug information, we learned that I needed to stay out of direct sunlight as well as indirect sunlight. Figuring out what constituted indirect sunlight was often a bit humorous!

Sidenote: Divergie’s Disease is very rare; consequently, there is very little research being done on it. By the end of my fourth month, though, I discovered that the Israelis were doing a bit of study on it and decided that what was being prescribed might not be as helpful as once thought. They suggested some time in direct sunlight every day! Still, while taking Vitamin A, I was taking a chance spending too much time outdoors, so of course, I proceeded carefully. AND began to improve.

I’d not paid much attention to how much light was in my life until then. Since that summer, though, whenever the subject of light pops up, I remember.

Jesus tells his followers not to seek light, but to BE light. Jump right over the whole “being a seeker” scene: just go be light for the world. Don’t hide it, don’t deny it, just be it. It’s as if he’s saying to them: “You’re already there; just go do the thing and don’t talk it to death!”

The light in Jesus’ time, when the sun was absent, came from lanterns kept lit by oil. We have similar (but more modern-looking) illumination in our sanctuaries: oil candles. They do not stay lit by magic, though. They have to be regularly refilled.

Same with you and me, fellow lights: we need to refill regularly. It’s why we worship. It’s why we pray (I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis: something like “I don’t pray to change God. I pray to change me!”). It’s why we meditate.

Go be light to the world. Don’t forget that you, unlike Jesus, will not shine brightly unless you refill. And by the way, Jesus certainly did refill, and regularly, when he went off to lonely places to be with God directly!

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In Memoriam, David Crosby

Posted on January 26, 2023 by jamiebrame

Last Wednesday, January 18, a friend texted to say, “I guess you heard that David Crosby died today.” For some reason, I had not.

I’ve been waiting for this one. For the past few years, Crosby has mentioned death in interview after interview. From his diabetes to his damaged health from years of drug abuse to his liver transplant, Crosby’s health had pretty much set him up for failure as a continuing-to-live human being. Yet he defied death until last week. “David Crosby dead at 81,” headline after headline announced. It was a good run.

David Crosby was one of the most talented people on earth. His voice was beautiful, his ability to find a harmony, unmatched. He heard chords on his guitar that no one else imagined. The people who admired him hired him to sing on their recordings.

Sadly, the people he should have loved the most, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills, were the most frustrated with him. The three of them formed the first “super group” in rock music, Crosby, Stills, and Nash. From 1968 until about 2016, the three of them in various mixtures, and solo, and together, made some of the most memorable music of any generation. They combined folk, rock, jazz, and country sounds and put together harmonies that had never been heard before. But they had one problem, and it was their undoing: all three of them, along with sometimes-partner Neil Young, had egos that they never thought to tame.

An ego can be a great defense mechanism, used correctly. It can also, as in this case, destroy good relationships. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young have been as destructive to their own careers as they have been creative in their various outings together.

Those of us who are fans have wished this selfishness would end, that they would one day mature and look beyond their narcissism to make more and more wonderful music. That’s what they have been doing since the end in 2016. They found others with whom to play and who would worship them. Crosby himself was amazingly creative at the end of his life. Stills shows up all over the place with his admiring musician/fans. Nash tours with one other person, making his own brand of beautiful music.

Friendships and families end sometimes. Whose fault it is cannot always be determined. Depending on the egos involved, the fault can always lie with someone other than myself. If Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young had ever learned to quit living out their relationships like the spoiled children they turned into, what a world of music would exist!

As to you, David Cortlandt Crosby, your life was lived hard. You made some incredibly memorable, beautiful music. Thank you for all the good stuff.

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Resolutions

Posted on January 5, 2023 by jamiebrame

It’s that time of year again, when we are challenged to make new beginnings in a “new” year. I could write for pages on the illusion/delusion of time measurement, probably without making any kind of meaningful impact. Suffice it to say that there’ only this moment; everything else is a memory or a hope, existing only in our heads. At least, I think that’s true!

With that said, our measuring devices assure us that another calendar is in the trash or has automatically changed both month and year to January, 2023. It’s a tradition in many of our lives to make New Year Resolutions.

Some people make seemingly superficial resolutions: to lose weight, exercise more, eat right, sleep more; but for some of us, these are hardly superficial: to do these things can significantly alter the destructive course of our life trajectory. Doing them can actually save us from early death.

Others make more intellectual choices: read a certain number of books, sign up for a class, take up a new hobby that requires learning a new skill. Again, these interests and improvements can change the quality of our lives.

What about spiritual adjustments? Because of my profession as well as my personal inclinations and interests, this is an area that gets my focus each year: meditate more, study scripture, find new ways of prayer (usually new to me, not to history, like the Jesus Prayer), journal regularly: all good things to do to deepen one’s inner life.

One of my mentors said that all of life is your spiritual life, quoting Thomas Merton’s “the spiritual life is, first of all, a life.” So, diet, education, learning skills, exercise, as well as the obvious spiritual practices, all go to improving our spirituality.

So, I’ll sit down and make a list of 10 – 15 things to work on this year. 2022 was my best year for the really good stuff: daily prayer, meditation, writing, praying the Psalms; not so good with weight loss, exercise, or getting a handle on any new skills. I did read a small pile of books, though!

Happy resolving!

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Happy New Year

Posted on January 3, 2023 by jamiebrame

Staring into the face of a new year and glancing back at the most recent one to pass away always makes me a little nostalgic, and today I turn to some years ago, when I was regularly involved in the life of a little monastery (no longer in existence) here in North Carolina.

The monks there were part of a larger monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA. Their abbot was none other than Thomas Keating (“Abbot Tom,” they called him behind his back), famous for his works written and spoken about Centering Prayer.

As I think about those guys, there are six who stand out. Sadly, I knew only a couple of last names, so for anyone who recalls them when they were alive and present here, this won’t be any kind of “official” memorial.

Brothers Jim Gorman and John Crocker, both deceased, were my main teachers. Both took very different approaches to spirituality. Jim had what I call a “free-wheeling” style, probably much more like Thomas Merton in his last years before going to Asia (and dying there). For instance, Jim taught journaling workshops along the lines of Ira Progoff; but Jim said he did not journal (“Nahhhh, no journaling for me, but I can still teach others how to do it!”). This was Jim: “Everything is holy, so don’t work so hard at trying to become what you already are!” and “It’s all prayer!” Jim made me believe I, too, might just be a mystic (I’m not so sure about that these days, nor do I worry about it – thank you, Jim).

John was more traditional. As I’ve written before, John would sit on his meditation cushion during the long, silent time after thee 3:30 AM office, staring lovingly at the Tabernacle where the consecrated host lived (as a Roman Catholic, John believed that Jesus was bodily present there, and his faith caused him to love that presence like nothing I have before or since experienced in anyone else in quite the same way). John always spoke slowly and deliberately, as though for a fraction of a second he was choosing which word to say next. John slowed me down. It still aggravates anyone on the road driving behind me.

Br. Dave taught me to love flowers and to wish I had the patience to bake. I’m a work in progress. Br. Al taught me (or tried) to see the difference between craft and art. I still don’t agree with him, but I always think of him when that debate pops up in my head! Br. Tom was the intellectual of the group (although anyone spending time with them found out that they all read, and read deeply). I watched him debate with a woman one afternoon for two hours about Woody Allen’s work; Allen was, up to that day, one of my favorite artists and comedians, but Tom took him down in one sentence, making the woman, a Ph.D. student, really angry. What fun!

The last of the group that I met was Br. Meinrad, who had started out at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky and moved to St. Joseph’s at some point (not easy to do, as Trappist monks, among others, make a vow of stability, which means they stay where they are, but the 1970’s were different even for the ancient monastic orders). My favorite Meinrad story, other than Jim’s yelling to him and John one afternoon, “Honeys, I’m home!” as he came in from the grocery store, was this one: visiting the monastery one Sunday afternoon, I met a man in the library. Usually, I didn’t want to disturb the silence of other guests, but this guy clearly wanted to talk. We started speaking of life in general, then got more specific: I was a ministerial student at Duke Divinity School. He was – gasp! – a guest of the US government at a nearby federal prison! It was a diverse conversation, to say the least.

He and Meinrad left an hour or so later. When Meinrad returned, I asked him about how a Trappist monk, who had chosen the contemplative life rather than the active, had ended up with a convicted felon for an afternoon. His humble reply: “They asked for volunteers.”

Remembering these guys and the way they still touch my life, I pray that I am strange enough, holy enough, and smart enough, to be for someone else what they were for me. They were great models, not just for all those years ago, but for this present, newly-born year.

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