First I took off the nozzle of the sprinkler and then motioned for him to turn it on. That didn’t work, so I next took off the whole sprinkler head. Still, no water came. We were kind of stumped. Then I got the idea to take the end cap off of the pipe. This time when Fr. Joseph turned it on, a whole bunch of wet straw and weeds came blowing out. Apparently a starling had tried building a nest in it in the early spring before we started using it. It was so far down the pipe that I hadn’t seen it the first time I hooked up the hose. Fr. Joseph and I were both quite pleased to have fixed the problem, and he turned to me and said, “It must have been the grace of office.”
I had heard that term used there before. It seemed like it was sort of a Trappist term. What he was saying was that along with being in charge of irrigation came special graces to help me fulfill that responsibility. Any officer in the community, or anyone in charge of something, wasn’t just left to his own devices but was given special graces by God to help carry out his task.
I think this is true outside the monastery too. It seems like mothers often have a heightened ability of intuition. That’s probably so they’re able to sense what is wrong with their little children when they’re ill and unable to speak. When I was growing up on the farm in California my father would make wine every year and sometimes beer. One time when one of my sisters was in high school she decided to sneak one of the bottles of wine into town to enjoy with her friends. Well, wouldn’t you know it . . . that just happened to be the morning when my dad got the inspiration to go looking around inside her car, and he found the bottle of wine under her seat! You can imagine the look on her face when my dad came walking into the house holding the bottle of wine in his hand and saying, “What’s this?” We still love to tease her about that.
Today we celebrate the feast of the Chair of St. Peter. In effect, we are celebrating the office of pope. All by himself, Peter was a weak man. But with God working in his life, he was able to say and do great things. As we heard in today’s gospel, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.”
In the last hundred years we have seen some really wonderful popes. Their task is such a momentous one. It’s hard to believe that all they’ve accomplished was done merely through their own natural ability. Along with the office, God gave them special graces to do a good job. But as we look back over the long line of popes, we see some who were self-seeking scoundrels. They, apparently, were not faithful to grace. Perhaps we could learn a lesson from them. How faithful to grace are we in carrying out our responsibilities?
In monastic life, and especially in the Benedictine tradition, obedience plays a very key role. It is one of our four vows, and, arguably, one of the most difficult. We have to follow the decisions of our superiors, our officers, and our heads of departments. We don’t always agree with their judgment on certain things. And, unlike with popes, we have no guarantee of infallibility. But it often happens that what we thought at the time to be a poor decision turns out to be the right one. Either they saw a bigger picture than we did, or, due to some unforeseeable circumstance in the future that neither one of us could see, God inspired them to make that seemingly foolish decision in order to avoid an even greater calamity.
When it comes to obedience, the safest path in the monastic life is to do what authority figures tell us. They have the grace of office, we don’t. Even if they’re wrong, we’re not wrong by carrying it out, if we’re doing it for spiritual reasons.
