Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent,” writes Saint Benedict, the Patriarch of Western monasticism and Patron of Europe.  What characterizes the life of a monk?  The vows that a Benedictine monk or nun makes today go all the way back to Benedict’s Rule, composed around the year 540 A.D.  Rather than the later ‘traditional’ vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Benedictines vow obedience, stability and “conversatio morum.”  The latter phrase is notoriously difficult to render into English.  The contemporary Benedictine who makes this vow is saying, “I promise to live like a monk!”  “Conversatio” is an entire ‘way of life’, and Saint Paul says that for all Christians, our true conversatio is in heaven [Philippians 3: 20].

The Orthodox theologian John Behr has written that we live the faith going forward, but we understand it looking backward, as we see the mysterious working out of God’s grace in our lives and in the Church.

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

The Law of Moses prescribes that childbirth renders the mother ritually impure for a period of forty days after the birth of a male child and eighty days in the case of a female child [Leviticus 12: 1-5]. Thus it comes about that today’s feast, falling forty days after Christmas, was until recently referred to as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is this connection with Christmas that warrants our keeping the Christmas tree lit throughout this time. Tomorrow, we turn more purposely toward the penitential seasons of Septuagesima and Lent, and ultimately toward the Cross, foreshadowed in so many ways in our Lord’s first temple appearance today.