I am at a workshop this week addressing restorative justice and prison ministry. This workshop is a wonderful opportunity, since I have never been to a workshop or a conference addressing this ministry, and prison ministry is a major thrust of what I do as a priest. At the beginning of the workshop, we started with a mass and a time of prayer and reflection, which was important way for us to start our time together. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to discern God’s grace and to recognize it with all the noise and chatter surrounding us, with the busy schedule of our work lives and our. personal lives. Today is the feast day of St Hilarion, a man who went into the desert in the 4th century after being converted to the Way of Jesus in the midst of his studies in the ancient center of learning in Alexandria, Egypt. Taking only a humble set of clothing with him in the desert, he wove baskets and sold them to make a living. The cell where he lived in the desert later became a monastery by some of his followers. He was made famous in the writings of St Jerome. The example of St Hilarion and the other desert father paved the way for monasticism in the coming centuries, which would have a great effect on the Church and on civilization. One of my classmates at the conference is reading the book The Power of Silence by Cardinal Robert Sarah og Guinea, West Africa. I read that book myself several years ago. I thought of St Hilarion and the monastic movement in the quote from this book: “Monastic life, the life of men of solitude and silence, is an ascent toward the heights, not a rest on the heights. Monks climb higher every day because God is ceaselessly greater. On this earth, we will never be able to reach God. But nothing can accompany our earthly journey toward God better than solitude and silence.”As we commemorate St Hilarion today, may we open our minds and our hearts to God’s grace, to God’s silence, and to God’s word.
No comments:
Post a Comment