My Midnight Monastery

It never fails.

*Ding!*

My phone lights up and illuminates a once dark room. Sometimes I am up typing at 1:30 in the morning. Other times I am in bed at 11:30.

*Ding!*

But I recognize the bell.

Oh, it could be a page from a patient. Or it could be an emergency call. But, generally, it isn’t. That bell is my Midnight Monastery. Or, to be more precise, my Virtual Midnight Monastery (as dubbed by one of our creative members).

Oh, didn’t you know?

I am a member of an Order. A self-proclaimed group of five friends largely living in the Twin Cities (and one friend – the wise one – rooted in Connecticut). Some in this Order have known each other since birth, some since college, some since medical residency and some are close friends of more recent making. Collectively, we are the Virtual Midnight Monastery.

Now, don’t get upset that this is some form of heresy. Be cool. The title is tongue-in-cheek, but the spirit is sincere. Oh, we are a different type of Order. We are middle-aged (or bordering on it). We all have a variable degree of sleep issues (some afflicted, others recklessly self-imposed). We all have feet of clay. We prize humor. We all are hungry for Truth. And most of our exchanges happen in the evening or middle of the night. And the subject matter?

Anything and everything.

A daughter’s sublime violin solo recorded as she performed for a degree at a European conservatory. Scenes from a member’s book release. Personal pictures from the front lawn of the White House for Pope Francis’ reception. A sweet snapshot of a sleeping child. A YouTube video of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing “Girl From the North Country”. A baseball statistic. A Springsteen tidbit.

But this isn’t just a group with the sole common thread of friendship. No. It is so much more.

*Ding!*

Every morning around 5:30 without fail, our leader (puckishly dubbed, the Abbott) sends a daily message. The bell which even outpaces our alarm clock announces the arrival of a new day. With that new day comes a gentle verse from the Psalms, background, Lectio Divina, reflection and a wise (but brief) call to do, or rather, be a little better today. And then, chirping through the morning and scattered through the day comes a quote from Merton, a thought from Chesterton, a poignant line from Springsteen or Dylan, a uproarious self-effacing story. There is a willingness to simply be among each other, but not in a mealy, self-indulgent, affirmation-hungry Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley sort of way (“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me). Nor in the “strong silent type” 1950s-style of stoic male community. But rather, there is a genuine community that would be well understood by Hilaire Belloc’s Four Men or Thomas Merton and his fellow monks.

As Belloc noted in The Four Men about the road we find ourselves on and the joy of the company we keep,

“All companionship is good, but chance companionship is the best of all.”

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton notes with awe what monks become for one another.

“They share all their failings and their weaknesses and all their sicknesses of soul and body. Alter alterius opera portate: there are no people in the world who get to be such experts at bearing one another’s burdens as Cistercian monks. Watch a group of monks at work together and see with what efficiency they take care of one another’s blunders; if they are good monks, they will do so without a sign, without a change of expression, and so expeditiously that you will ask yourself if the mistake really happened after all.”

This Midnight Monastery, I have found, is a way of walking together down the long road of life. Of bearing one another’s burdens. You speak if you want to speak or be silent if you don’t. If so moved, you may add a story, quote, prayer or joke with no expectations or self-consciousness. Together you walk. Together you grow. But it is not an aimless direction or a purposeless growth. Not at all. There is a reason – a core – that unites this Virtual Midnight Monastery: the Permanent Things. The axis upon which this monastery turns, the central hub towards which its centripetal forces tend…is God. And it doesn’t matter if it is modern art, stories about truck-driving, a Richard Rohr insight, memories of college football games, the wisdom of Carl Jung, funny stories about kids saying the darndest things, statistics about Mike Trout, the Rule of St. Benedict, or the latest “rabbit hole” each of us have found ourselves it. And it doesn’t matter if it is about job changes, marriage or loss, house sales, faith or struggles with faith, soaring hope or aching melancholy. It doesn’t matter. It all – with only trivial degrees of separation – points to life, to the unbreakable thread connecting Dignity, Calling, Suffering, and Grace, to the True, the Good and the Beautiful. It all points to God.

My Midnight Monastery.

As the days become nights and the nights days, we walk forward. Together. And as life is fleeting, it is up to each of us to ask ourselves, “Have I found the ‘Thin Places’ – those people and places which reveal to me the deepest wells of God? Have I grasped life’s sacramental moments? And who has walked with me?”

My wife, my daughters, my family, my friends…and my Monastery. As Belloc understands in The Four Men,

“To us…, no one of whom could know the other, and who had met by I could not tell what chance, and would part very soon for ever, these things were given. All…of us together received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty, and we ourselves went in silence to receive it.”

And so off we should go…receiving the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty.