"Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone," wrote John Donne in the 17th century, grappling with a world shattered by the bubonic plague ravaging London and beyond. As Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Donne struggled to find meaning in this broken world while working tirelessly to save lives.
Coherence. I have been giving some thought to this word lately as I began to wonder what it means to live a coherent and seamless life—a life that truly makes sense of who we are and why we are in our world that is today which seems to be fragmented and broken, much like the world of John Donne.
Last year, while visiting Barcelona, Spain, Esther and I had a chance to visit Montserrat Abbey, home to the Order of Saint Benedict. The monastery, with its stunning architecture, perches atop a mountain, surrounded by the remarkable natural beauty overlooking the region of Catalonia. I always find myself drawn to the Benedictine community's motto of life, "ora et labora," meaning "pray and work," which is built into the Benedictine monastic practice of daily rhythms of liturgy and labors interwoven into the very fabric of their lives.
As Esther and I savored the beauty of the Abbey and its surroundings that afternoon, we rode the funicular—one of the world's steepest—to the mountaintop. There, we were awestruck by the breathtaking panorama. Gazing at the world below, I pondered: Could the coherent and seamless rhythm of life—work and worship—practiced by the Benedictine community extend beyond the monastery walls to the world beyond?
A few weeks ago, while writing a sermon at JJ Bean—one of Vancouver's largest local coffee retailers—I explored the idea of serving the world with vocations of our lives. My thoughts turned to the creation story of the world meant and ought to be. The story reveals our world as a place of temple-cosmos, the Sanctuary of the world, where all creation joyfully sings to the glory of the Lord.
In this world, we're called to join the beautiful choruses of the creation choir through the vocations of our lives, given to us in the beautiful Hebrew word for work and worship, "Avodah," which miraculously and mysteriously interweaves and intertwines our work of stewarding and caring for creation with our worship of the Lord into one coherent life of seamlessness.
At this moment, the question that I had on the top of the Benedictine monastery came to my memory. Could the coherent and seamless rhythm of life—work and worship, liturgy and labor—practiced by the Benedictine community extend beyond the monastery walls to the world beyond?
As I penned these thoughts on work and worship, the coherent and seamless life, I was struck by a message on my coffee cup from which I was drinking. It was written right in the middle of the plastic cup: "Honoring people through really, really good coffee." I could tell from these words, and also from hearing a little bit about the history of JJ Bean, that the vocation of avodah was seamlessly integrated and embedded into the hearts of JJ Bean's operations of coffee-making and serving in care for creation and for community of people and places.
That day, in Barcelona, we descended the mountain to attend the scheduled performance of the Escolania de Montserrat, a boys' choir at the Benedictine abbey. As we entered the sanctuary, we were overwhelmed by its celestial structure and interior. After a profound moment of deep silence, the choir began to sing. Their voices filled the air with beautiful harmonies, enveloping the entire sanctuary. In their seamless, sacramental chorus, I began to imagine whether this could be a small microcosm of what the seamless life of "ora et labora" is meant to embody—a life where worship and work, life of liturgy and labor, are deeply and beautifully interwoven and intertwined into the life of seamlessness and coherence, expressed through a joyful harmony of voices and vocations of our lives filling the Sanctuary of the whole world to the glory of the Lord.
To this day, the choir's voices still echo in my ears. They evoke in me a longing for coherence in our fragmented world—a yearning for the day when true cosmic harmony will reign, the day when heaven and earth will be fully reconciled, the work that has already begun with the cosmic coming of our Lord and continues through the vocations of our lives, anywhere and everywhere in the world of now and not-yet-times.
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