Monks: The Nerds of the Catholic Church

Today would have been my uncle's 71st birthday, had he not died three years ago. Instead of getting together on the 22nd of February to commemorate the day his life ended, my family decided to start gathering to celebrate the day he was born.

A fact about my uncle (which may not be surprising in light of knowledge of my parent's earlier vocations) is that he was a novice monk before he married my aunt and fathered my cousins and settled into a nice little suburban life. So, in observance of his birthday, we observed Mass at a monastery (below).

I suppose it should have been no surprise to me, that monks, cloistered as they are, often vowed to silence with nothing to do but farm and read stacks of books - religious and otherwise - would be rather nerdy. But when Father Kevin, a mid-thirties priest with chin length floppy hair and a subtly graying goatee, got up to say his homily, I thought I might be mishearing. Polysyllabic words tumbled over each other as allusions to activism, social justice, and civicism were bandied about. And I realized I'd never been part of a congregation and been spoken to like I was intelligent, like I was capable of understanding anything more than the simplest and starkest of religious ideals.

It is interesting to revisit the ritual of a religious practice having been raise in its midst yet having eliminated it from my daily life. There is a short of richness and warmth that inches from the repetition and the practice, the detached involvement. I felt a bit more like I was at a lecture than in place of worship, the slight difference being a feeling that all of us in that small chapel shared the same small secret.

I will say that I loved those monks - we went down to the basement of the abbey after mass for coffee and biscuits (the British kind) and a former Abbot (pictured above) shuffled around offering cookies and refusing declines. I talked for a bit about Thomas Merton with a priest wearing well worn Birkenstocks and black gold-toed dress stocks. I thought, as we left, how the Church as a whole could be getting it so wrong, when those 18 or so old men seemed to have gotten it so right. I suppose I am a little partial, they are nerds afterall.