“A monk’s life must be judged by all its parts, not just the end.”
I read this line in Remy Rougeau’s novel, All We Know of Heaven, which was an insightful summer read. Rougeau tells the story of nineteen year old, Antoine, who joins a Cistercian monastery in Manitoba and his experiences of being formed as a monk. An early experience Antoine has in the monastery is facing death. He is asked to sit with elderly Brother Eli who is dying. Accompanying him is another aged and sickly confrere. As he listens to Eli mumbling and the old confrere grumbling, he realizes that these men have never reconciled their differences. Each is in pain; each is grieving the finality of a lost opportunity to make peace. Antoine brings his anger and dismay at their stubbornness to the Abbot whose wise response is the line above.
The Abbot’s words struck a chord with me as my brothers and I go about setting up our new home in Brighton. As we unpack, put things in place and create a rhythm of life, we inevitably run into the differing opinions and sensibilities each of us has about how we are to live, pray and interact. A quiet tension permeates as we work to build community. As we do so, I find myself at times annoyed by another, as I am sure some of my actions must have also annoyed others.
The Abbot’s advice reminds me that our Christian way of looking at one another cannot be fixated solely on individual moments of difference, contradiction, dismay, or even mistrust. Each of us is more than these moments. Each of us is a complex mix of good and bad, of light and darkness, of kindness and selfishness, of hearts that uplift another and mouths that put down someone we dislike. These myriad aspects make up the totality of who you and I really are.
Antoine sees the truth of this at the moment of Eli’s death: the grumbling older monk holds Eli’s hand as he breathes his last. Perhaps in this moment Rougeau wants his reader to confront this truth about being human and about relating as human persons: when we interact with another, we relate to her as the totality that she is. And the sum of all her parts is always worthy of respect and love because these make up the goodness that she is.
I’d like to believe that this too is how God interacts with us. God does see the sinful, the limited, the weak that we are. But God also sees the goodness, the kindness, the compassion we are too. More significantly, God sees the hopeful promise in each of us to become better. This is the glint in our humanity that seizes God’s gaze and warms his heart. God delights in the human potential to transcend our lesser selves. That Jesus reaches out to the adulterous woman, to Matthew the tax collector, and to Peter after his betrayal speaks of God’s enchantment with us. God's enchantment is rooted in his faith in our goodness and our capacity to realize this goodness both in our lives and in the lives of others.
And so, as my brothers and I go about creating our abode, I pray we will recognize in one another the totality of who we are, and celebrate this goodness we each bring to our new home.
Would this be your prayer too at home, in school or at work today?
artwork: solitude by emmanuel o’herlihy, osb cam
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